The Syrian people did it. They proved wrong every expert who thought that the Syrian regime is more immune than other dictatorships in the region to the wave of popular uprisings. Yesterday the Syrians said no. They proved to the world that the Syrian people have what it takes to go to the streets for the first time in 48 years.

All the analyses and speculations of Syria being different from Tunisia or Egypt shattered at the doors of Deraa. The demonstrations started there last week and spread on Friday to other cities and towns all over the country.
Douma, a town close to Damascus, turned last night into another Daraa. The protestors decided to stay in the square until their demands are met. They slept there last night and will probably be followed by other cities and towns.

Although it is too early to tell how yesterday’s large-scale protests will develop, the pattern is the same. In Tunisia, Egypt and somehow in Libya, when the demonstrations started the regimes went through several phases: denial, launching a media war, accusing protestors of working with foreign agents, making small concessions and finally stepping down or losing. According to Syrian activists, the regime has quickly followed the same pattern and gotten to the concessions phase very fast.

Salma Dairi and Husam Al Katlaby, two Syrian activists working from outside Syria, told NOW Lebanon that the moment the regime decided to kill protestors in Daraa, it got to the point of no return. Every time a protestor is killed, his funeral brings in more people and it turns into another demonstration, where the regime commits more murders and massacres.

It is a vicious cycle that led to the large-scale protests on Friday, but it all started with one murder by the regime. Though this would have passed silently in the past, today it didn’t. Why? According to Dairi, Katlaby and other activists who preferred to stay anonymous, the domino effect of protests across the region made it possible for the Syrians to continue.

“What happened in Libya is crucial,” said one activist. “All the oppression tools that Qaddafi used against the protestors failed and led to the intervention of the international community.” This was apparently reassuring to the Syrians, who felt that no matter what their regime does, they wouldn’t be left alone. “It won’t be another Hama [massacre of 1982] because the regime cannot do it silently anymore.”

The question remains: Who are the protestors, and what do they want?
The activists interviewed by NOW Lebanon are all secular Syrians and said that the demonstrations were organized by young people inside and outside of Syria. “Of course the Islamic organizations will try to take advantage of the protests, but they are not as strong as they are in Egypt,” Katlabi said.
“In Egypt they were in parliament and had active NGOs, but not in Syria. They are very detached from the street,” he added.

And though the starting point of the protests is at mosques, for them this is not an indication of a religious orientation. “The regime managed to isolate the society from civil society organizations for 50 years. Mosques are just a natural meeting point and can function as a starting point. Many of our secular and atheist friends who had never been to a mosque before are going to the mosques for prayers and move from there for demonstrations. It’s the only choice,” one activist said.

They all mention Syrian activist Suhair Atassi, who was arrested last week during a demonstration in front of the Ministry of Interior to call for the release of political prisoners. They say she, along with the 32 protestors who were arrested, was the first spark of the demonstrations.

These people are not Islamists and are certainly not members of any political organizations. On the contrary, Atassi is a liberal intellectual with a genuine determination to bring freedom and reform to her country. That’s it.
 
Atassi was one of the first to call on her Facebook page for the uprising in Syria against the regime. She, along with many other liberal young people, was there from the beginning. Talk of the Muslim Brotherhood being behind the protests in Daraa and elsewhere do not make sense to anyone who has been following the development of this movement.

Of course, one should not turn a blind eye to the fact that a lot of Islamic and Sunni fundamentalist Facebook groups are emerging in an attempt to take advantage of the uprising, along with many pro-regime groups.
However, people like Suhair Atassi, who is still holding a hunger strike in jail along with other women arrested that day, cannot be shoved to the side of the revolution if it succeeds.

As to what the protestors want, their slogans vary from city to city and have developed as the violence escalated. At the beginning, it was just about simple reforms and the release of political prisoners. But after the regime started to kill protestors, these demands were not enough. Pictures of Bashar al-Assad were burned and a statue of former President Hafez al-Assad was demolished, something that was previously unimaginable in Syria.

Again, it is too early to say what will happen next, but it seems so far that the regime will not listen to its people, but prefers to silence them with force. At the same time, the protestors are determined to continue until they taste freedom.

The regime’s allies – Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza– will probably not sit aside and watch. They cannot afford to lose such a helpful ally. But this is another story. Today’s funerals of yesterday’s martyrs will say more about what’s next.

Hanin Ghaddar is managing editor of NOW Lebanon