The karate teacher who took the fight to Bashar al-Assad

Editor's note: This article is part of a series profiling Syrians to mark the fourth anniversary of the country's civil war. A different person will be profiled every day for four days.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Four years ago, a few hundred Syrians took to the streets in Damascus, Aleppo and Daraa in what was billed as a “Day of Rage” against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

Inspired by the Arab Spring protests that had erupted in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, they marched peacefully, and cautiously, fully aware that they lived in a place where such actions were not tolerated.

Few could have predicted the scale of the tragedy that would follow. After protests were brutally suppressed by the government, a peaceful movement transformed into an armed revolution, then an all-consuming civil war.

Countless lives have been lost between then and now. Families have been torn apart. Communities broken. Ancient archeological treasures felled. And a country destroyed.

Every Syrian can tell a story of how the war has changed their life forever. This is Abu Hamza's.

The fighter

Abu Hamza has always been a fighter, in one way or another.

Before the war he was a karate instructor. He lived in Qaboun, a poor suburb on the outskirts of Damascus, and taught classes in and around the capital.

One of the groups he taught was made up of the children of government workers.

“I enjoyed watching the children grow,” he says, speaking from Syria via Skype. “It wasn’t just about the karate, but helping these kids be better people. Seeing the change in them.”

When the revolt broke out, Abu Hamza became a different kind of fighter. Within a year he was commanding a rebel brigade fighting the Syrian army in Damascus. He remains there to this day.

His path to war was a slow one, as he tells it, with several stages between being shot at and finally shooting back. It began in the early days of the protests against the Assad government, in March 2011.

Once government security forced began killing protesters, he decided he would try to help the revolution in any small way he could. In order to protect his family, he came up with a story to tell them.

“I told my family I was travelling to Saudi Arabia, but I went to the suburbs of Damascus. I bought a Saudi sim card to call them so they would think I was there. I was also sending them money in Saudi rial.”

In reality, he and a few of his friends set up a field hospital to treat protesters injured in attacks by security forces.

“At the beginning it was just simple injuries — people suffering from beatings and so on. But then one day 14 young people were killed,” Abu Hamza, who is now 44, said.

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“So I realised that the situation was gonna get worse, and that you cannot talk to this regime. They would never understand what they were doing was wrong.”

As government forces killed more and more protesters, Abu Hamza and three others set up what he calls “civil brigades” — something halfway between a purely civilian group and an armed one.

They delivered aid to areas that needed it. They also gathered information about people who had been arrested for protesting, and offered protection to those who were wanted by the government.

As the death tolls grew, Abu Hamza and the civil brigades he had created began to morph into something different. They started acquiring weapons in order to defend themselves.

“We were not a militia. These weapons were just to protect us from the regime,” he said.

Then, as things deteriorated even further, Abu Hamza took more drastic action. In early 2012, he said the government removed all security forces from Qaboun “so there would be chaos.”

He created a police force to protect Qaboun from outside and within. They did not wear uniforms to avoid being targeted by the regime. At the same time, he also came up with a plan to create a small brigade of fighters. They did not act immediately — rather, they waited.

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Abu Hamza was preparing for something, but for exactly what was unclear at the time.

In May 2012, that question was answered, and Abu Hamza’s planning was put into action. According to his account, groups of shabiha — a word used to described thugs and militiamen on the payroll of the government — entered the city.

“When that happened, we took over,” he said “We took Qaboun, Barzeh and Tishreen.”

Abu Hamza says his brigades set up “something like a small government.”

“We controlled these three neighborhoods for a full year.”

Around this time, the various armed groups opposing Assad came together in a loose coalition that called itself the Free Syrian Army. There was little formal coordination between the groups, but the ideological differences that exist today between extremists, Islamists and seculars were less apparent.

“The strategy back then was to not go face-to-face with the regime army,” he said — taking a defensive posture instead.

But that changed in the summer of 2013 when the Syrian government launched an assault to take back Qaboun and the surrounding areas.

“When the army raided Daraya and killed so many civilians we knew that this was going to get out of control. We started building up our military sector in Barzeh and formed a brigade of 2,400 fighters.”

The 1st Brigade of Damascus, as they named it, was born.

As foreign fighters flooded the north of the country to join up with Jabhat al-Nusra (the group that would later spawn the Islamic State) and other Islamist groups battling the government, rebels in the south had to contend with Assad’s own foreign volunteers. Abu Hamza said they regularly heard fighters from Iraq and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah communicating on radios and coordinating the fight against them.

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The neighborhoods controlled by Abu Hamza’s brigades faced a fierce 11-month assault by the vastly better-armed Syrian army and its allies, but the 1st Brigade held out.

“The regime could not penetrate us. We still hold those neighborhoods today.”

Now, a fragile truce exists in Qaboun — one of many similar skin-deep arrangements across the country, borne out of stalemate and fatigue more than the discovery of common ground.

Abu Hamza emerged from the last few years as one of the most important commanders fighting in Damascus. Elsewhere in the country, the Free Syrian Army has all but disintegrated, but from the suburbs of southern Damascus and to the Jordanian border — a zone referred to as the Southern Front — it still retains influence.

“The FSA went through difficult times,” he said. He blames the rise of the Islamic State, which played a prominent role in dislodging the FSA from large parts of northern Syria, on the government.

“The regime set lots of those fanatic Muslims free from prison. Those cells had connections with cells outside Syria as well. They joined the FSA and formed Islamic brigades within it, then they brought it down from the inside.”

“They had strong media and were able to get money. They started to spread the word that the FSA is over and its only the black flags that are flying,” he said.

Abu Hamza says his brigade is focused on the battle in the south, a conscious decision to avoid fighting other rebel groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, “which is what the regime wants.”

But despite the setbacks, and the grim state of the revolution as it enters its fifth year, he is optimistic.

Who will emerge victorious in this war? “The revolution,” Abu Hamza said.

“We will not get everything we want, but whoever has a little bit of belief in God knows that he is just and he is on our side.”