A Syrian architect waits to return and rebuild her country

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 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 country 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 Bayan Ali's.

The protester

It began with a message from a friend.

It was mid-March, 2011. Two months had passed since dictators in Tunisia and Egypt had fallen, and revolutions were underway in both countries. Many Syrians — Bayan Ali among them — were hopeful that the time had come for them to shake off their own ruler, an optometrist who inherited power from his father, and had done little of note with it.

It was against this backdrop of anticipation that a group of boys from the town of Daraa took a can of spray paint and wrote a message to their country’s president on a school wall: “Your turn is coming, doctor.”

Fifteen boys from the school were arrested. Rare protests erupted in the city calling for their release, but the calls were ignored.

Then came the message from Bayan’s friend, on the "Day of Rage" — March 15. She was from Daraa. She had seen what had happened and had decided to attend a protest in Martyrs Square in Damascus. She asked Bayan to come.

“When I tried to go my mum wouldn’t let me go,” says Bayan, who was 24 at the time, living in the capital with her sister. “She said: ‘This is dangerous. This is not like Egypt or Tunisia.’”

But Bayan went anyway. Like many of her friends, she had become restless watching protests across the Arab world. She thought she had just as much cause to make her voice heard.

More from GlobalPost: How it all began 

“We knew for a long time that we didn’t really have any kind of freedom of speech in our country. I remember at school we tried to form a small group to improve the environment in our school, and we tried to start a magazine. But very soon, someone came to us and said we don’t think you should be doing this.”

By the time she reached the protest, it had already been shut down.

“The police were beating everyone. I think they took like 15 girls and some boys.”

One of those arrested was the friend who had invited her. She was held for 15 days in Douma prison, Bayan says. A boy who was taken on the same day was held for 29 days, during which time he was tortured by the authorities.

But despite the repression, people began to organize.

“We started to hear about more protests. Then we started to have Facebook groups where we communicated,” she says. “At first it was very small; you could only join if you knew two other people who would refer you and could vouch for you. But it kept growing and growing.” 

New freedoms

For Bayan and her friends, there was a sense that things were changing — and fast. The protesters were cautious not to let their hopes run away from them, but what they lacked in optimism they made up for in resolve.

“It started to feel like we could speak our mind, even though it was dangerous.”

What happened during these few short months, from the first protests of March 15, would set Syria on a spiral of destruction that shows no sign of slowing down.

As the protests grew, so did the ferocity of the government’s crackdown. An argument could be made that the first shots of the war were fired in Daraa on March 18, when four protesters were killed by security forces.

The demonstrations spread and the death tolls grew. On April 8, 22 people were killed in Daraa, according to rights groups. Two weeks later, on April 22, at least 100 protesters were gunned down.

Around this time, Bayan recalls the debate among protesters over the pros and cons of arming themselves. She saw a peaceful revolution being transformed into something else.

“There were fights in the organizing groups between people who say arming is the best solution and those who wanted to continue protest peacefully,” she says. “Some of them started to say ‘this is not working anymore. We should fight back. It’s about protecting ourselves.’”

“You could see the shift,” she says.

Bayan’s instincts told her that fighting violence with violence would not succeed. But in the face of growing oppression, she was conflicted.

“You see people being killed and cities invaded and these people have a right to defend themselves. At the same time, the people we were up against are more powerful than us and have so many weapons.”

Her instincts also told her to defend herself.

“We were in a demonstration and [the security forces] started to attack. I was running away to find a safe place. Eventually I ran into a mosque, and I found myself holding a stone. I didn't remember picking it up. It felt like I had this basic instinct to protect myself. It made me think about people in much worse situations,” who might decide to take up arms. 

She kept the stone, and still has it today to remind her of what happened. 

Arrest and flight

By January 2012, more than 3,000 protesters had been killed by security forces across Syria, according to the United Nations. Bayan continued to attend demonstrations despite the dangers. Then her luck ran out.

Bayan was arrested at a protest in the Al Baramkeh neighborhood of Damascus that same month. The protesters had devised a call, a slogan that one of them would shout to announce the beginning of a protest. That day, the police faked the start of the protest by shouting slogans, and a large number of people were arrested.

“They arrested 25 of us that day,” Bayan says. She was one of just three women detained.

On the way to the police station Bayan was hit repeatedly, she says. She was held for five days and interrogated.

“They mostly asked about who is organizing it. I kept denying that I knew anything, because my friend told me that once you say one thing they will keep pushing for more info. The less you say the better.”

“A lot of people were not released. You can hear all day and night the people screaming there. I couldn’t see anything because they blindfolded me when they moved me around the station. But you could hear, and those screams haunted me for months.”

More from GlobalPost: Surviving Aleppo

Bayan attended more protests after her release.

“I was at first more determined, because now I was really sure how bad they were. But at the same time, there was a lot of fear,” she says.

But things eventually got too dangerous. She left Syria, like so many others since, in September 2012. 

“I left my country on a Friday. I remember because on the Thursday I went to my last protest.”

She traveled first to Saudi Arabia, where her father worked.

“At first it was hard to accept I was not in Syria. I felt like we started this and we should finish it. I felt I had betrayed the people I was encouraging to protest. I felt guilty every day. I couldn’t watch the news anymore.”  

Helping from afar

Bayan left Syria with a postgraduate degree in architecture, but she decided that her career would have to take a back seat. She began doing all she could to support the revolution from abroad.

She worked for a number of civil groups, keeping in touch with people still in the country online. One organization that she worked at with her two sisters, called Missing Martyrs, helped people find missing family members. They would trawl through pictures of dead bodies and attempt to match them with photographs of missing people.

“When things start to be armed we started to see how we could help. We thought: If we are not going to protest and we are not going to be armed, what can we do? We started to take courses in medical aid and things like that.”

“You also feel like you need new skills to handle the new situation. So you are not standing by and watching.”

More from GlobalPost: Meet Syria's female rebel fighters 

Bayan’s journey over the next few years mirrored that of many other educated Syrians who had fled their homes. She searched for ways to help her country from afar, looking for a job that might allow her to do so full time. She traveled to Washington, DC, and took part in a program on peace building and leadership.

“This program was so important for me. It helped me to accept that although I’m not in Syria anymore but still there is so much that I can do,” she says of her time there.

After that, she worked for the Syrian Emergency Task Force — a nonprofit that supports humanitarian groups on the ground.

At the end of 2014, she returned to the subject that she had studied for so many years. She traveled to Brussels, and then Vienna, where enrolled in a masters degree program in urban studies.

“My thesis is going to be about how to rebuild a country after a war. I’ll look at how other countries have dealt with it — what was done right, and wrong.”

“I hope to learn about this in order to rebuild Syria. Inshallah, one day soon.”