Last month marked 10 years since the beginning of the Syrian uprising when peaceful protesters, galvanised by the Arab Spring, went out on to the streets demanding freedom from an authoritarian regime and were met with bullets.
President Bashar al-Assad vowed to crush dissent. In doing so, he set in motion a proxy war, creating what the UN’s human rights chief has called the “worst man-made disaster the world has seen since World War II”.
Countless studies have shown that women and girls are disproportionately affected by war – both during and after – as existing inequalities are amplified and there is heightened vulnerability to sexual violence and exploitation.
Design: Bronte Dow
Photo: Mondalawy/Wikimedia Commons
Ten years ago, a wave of popular uprisings erupted across the Middle East, threatening not only local monarchs and dictators but the strategic interests of the Western powers that backed them. In this series, David Wearing looks back on these events, their causes and consequences, and asks what they can teach us about the nature of imperialism in the twenty-first century.
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In a small, beleaguered pocket of north-western Syria, the aspirations of the original 2011 uprising somehow endure. Sarah Kasem was 12 years old when those first protests began, spending her teenage years living under indiscriminate regime bombardment in Homs. Her family finally escaped to Idlib, one of the few areas still outside of Bashar al-Assad’s control, where she is now a student. “My generation is still carrying the same hopes for justice and freedom”, she tells the Guardian. “We will not give up on what the older generation started.”
We won t give upâ: new generation of activists keep Syria s revolution alive
Sarah Kassem: âMy generation is still carrying the same hopes for justice and freedom.â Photograph: Mohamed Haj Mustafa
Sarah Kassem: âMy generation is still carrying the same hopes for justice and freedom.â Photograph: Mohamed Haj Mustafa In the few areas not retaken by Assadâs forces, people gather to reiterate the same demands protesters made a decade ago
Mon 15 Mar 2021 01.00 EDT
Last modified on Mon 15 Mar 2021 06.53 EDT
Sarah Kasem was 12 when Arab Spring protesters began to fill the streets and squares of Syria 10 years ago. She remembers the hope and excitement of that time vividly; it seems so divorced from the horrors that followed.