‘Your turn next, Doctor’: How a teen’s anti-Assad graffiti sparked Syrian civil

Syria Civil War: Mouawiya Syasneh was just 14 when he sprayed anti-government slogans on his school wall in Deraa, Syria. It was February 2011, and he could never have imagined that such a minor act would spark a full-blown civil war.
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“If we had known what would happen, we’d never have written that graffiti,” said Mouawiya Syasneh in The Boy Who Started The Syrian War, a Al Jazeera documentary that tells his story.
“We saw what was happening in Egypt and Tunisia,” he told Al Jazeera, referring to the Arab Spring. “So we got together at school, took some paint and sprayed the walls. We wrote on the school wall, ‘Your turn next, Doctor (Assad).’ A few days later the police saw what we’d written and rounded up the boys in the neighbourhood.”
Mouawiya’s three accomplices were arrested by the Syrian police, together with a dozen other suspects. Mouawiya was arrested at home at 4am and driven away in handcuffs. He was detained for 45 days and tortured.
“The electric shock treatment was the worst,” he told Al Jazeera. “They took me to the bathroom and it was really wet and they would turn on the shower. They ran the current through the water and onto my back. I felt the shock wherever the water went.”
When the fathers of the Syrian children tried to find out what had become of the boys, they were told, “Forget those children; go home and make some more. If you can’t manage, send us your women and we’ll make more for you.”
Fearing for the boys’ safety after a month in police custody, thousands began taking to the streets demanding their return.
When the Syrian peaceful protests were met with further violence, they spread. Soon this was no longer a protest over the arrest of some young boys; it had become an uprising.
More than half a million Syrian people have been killed since the start of the Syrian war. Mouawiya’s home city has been ravaged by street fighting, shelling and barrel bombing, writes Al Jazeera.
Now a young man fighting on the frontlines for the Free Syrian Army, Mouawiya told Al Jazeera that if he had known the consequences of his actions, he would never have provoked President Bashar al-Assad.
“When I got out, I was surprised by all the protests,”Al Jazeera quoted Mouawiya. “There were mass demonstrations. It was chaos. We went and joined in when we saw what was happening. We were happy. I suppose we felt all this support was for us. All these people were out on the street, for us. But we didn’t know that a crackdown was coming.”
Mouawiya’s life has been transformed by that adolescent prank. He has lost friends and relatives, including his father. And Syria has been changed for ever.
It all began in 2011, with peaceful protests in Daraa against former President Bashar al-Assad’s rule.
The Syrian government responded with a violent crackdown, and the unrest escalated into an armed insurgency, with various factions receiving international backing.
Key events included battles in Aleppo, chemical attacks in Eastern Ghouta, and the rise of ISIL (ISIS), which declared a caliphate in 2014.
Russia’s intervention in 2015 bolstered al-Assad’s regime, while Turkish, US and Kurdish forces took opposing actions. The prolonged war displaced millions and entrenched battle lines, ultimately ending in 2024 after a swift rebel offensive from Idlib toppled al-Assad’s rule.