Syria’s war has drastically changed the lives of millions. Here are just four of their stories

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. These are the stories of four lives — the protester, the fighter, the Assad supporter and the refugee — and four years.

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.

“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.” 

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.

More from GlobalPost: How it all began 

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. 

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.”

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.”  

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.” 

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.

“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.

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.

More from GlobalPost: Surviving Aleppo

“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.

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.

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“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.”

The Assad supporter

It took a while for a full picture of what was happening in Syria to filter through to Jawad al-Housh in Damascus. Protests were springing up across his country. But where demonstrators saw the beginnings of a revolution, he only saw chaos and disorder.

“It took me three months to know there was something happening. After that I started investigating and seeing interviews, seeing TV reports,” he said, speaking from Damascus via Skype.

“There was general disorder. It was out of the blue — as if it was planned from outside forces. The whole country turned upside down.”

Jawad, 34, is a civil servant — a translator working in information technology for the oil ministry — and describes himself as a supporter of Assad.

The Syrian revolt was born in the countryside, propelled for the most part by the country’s Sunni population, who were tired of corruption and the lack of freedom afforded to them by a government dominated by Assad’s Alawite sect. But as the country was convulsed by protests, large rallies were held in Damascus in support of Assad.

“Normal people didn’t want to have a so-called revolution. We didn’t want anything like that,” Jawad said.

Whether he wanted it or not, a large number of his fellow citizens were calling for change. The response of the Assad government was to brutally suppress protests. Large numbers of demonstrators were killed, leading to retaliatory attacks against government security forces.

Most of the violence was taking place in Homs, Daraa, Aleppo and the Damascus suburbs, but Jawad did not escape it.

“It was a totally painful experience from the start. Horrible scenes, horrible sights, inhuman actions taking place,” he said. A picture of Assad’s father and predecessor Hafez al-Assad hung on the wall behind him.

In 2012, the war came to Damascus. Bombings became commonplace and clashes occurred in places that had so far been immune to the conflict.

“There was so many random attacks of mortars and shells and bombs. There was a lot of pieces of bodies on the ground. It felt like a city of the dead.”

He recounts an incident in which he says rebels targeted the bus he was traveling on.

“We were on a bus driving along a street that we weren’t allowed to pass through, according to rebels. We were on a bus, they knew it was from the government, and it was shot 12 times. A friend of mine was shot in her ankle and I was shot in the hand,” he said.

When Jawad uses the word “rebel” or “revolution” it comes with the prefix, “so-called.” On the rare occasion he forgets to add it, he returns to the words: “… the revolution … the so-called revolution.”

His view is not uncommon among government supporters. There is a disconnect between Assad’s backers and those who rose up against him. Jawad struggles to understand why things developed as they did, and is distrustful of the revolution’s motives.

“We never had a complaint about our president. There might be some injustice somewhere because of poverty and lack of resources and bribery and so on. But generally speaking we were very comfortable, relaxed, at peace,” he said.

“It feels like there is a huge conspiracy. Big countries are playing cards under the table. They are making deals and selling weapons — this is the main purpose I guess. Getting rich and finding a solution to their problems by transferring it to our country.”

When asked how he feels about the huge damage done by Assad government’s forces — the huge loss of life and the destruction of entire cities — he contends that there was no other option.

“We are not totally blind to the truth,” he said of the news that comes in from across the country. “But sometimes when you are faced with criminals, people with no conscience trying to attack, to protest in ways that are not peaceful, the government has to do something. You don't have to sit down and watch, you sometimes respond with more.”

More from GlobalPost: Life and death in Aleppo 

“It’s not that we don’t feel sympathetic to people on the other side, but we have our problems and we are facing it. I witnessed the death of five of my friends. They were killed … in Idlib, Aleppo, other places like Homs. My neighbor was martyred.”

But in Damascus, some sense of normalcy has resumed. Things have improved in the capital as Assad’s government has had some success in retaking key areas in the suburbs.

“It’s like a routine daily life. Children go to school, officials go to their work and they return home. After that there is not much movement between areas.”

“We hear the fighting far away on a daily basis, but it’s been quiet for a while now. We’ve had some peace. People are suffering because of the lack of electricity, the high prices of everything and the gasoline price.”

As for the future, he says there is unlikely to be a solution until “one side crushes the other,” reserving particular disdain for the thousands of foreign fighters who have flooded into Syria.

“The foreign fighters have to be eliminated. On the other hand, the other sides have to come back and reconcile — dialogue is so important. We can talk things out and sort things out ourselves, inside our country.”

“It’s gonna be in stages. It’s not gonna be magic. It takes time.” 

The refugee

Ahmad was in the real estate business. He sold commercial and residential properties in his home city of Homs, and he did a good trade. He owned his own home, where he lived with his wife, two of his three daughters and two sons. He rented an office nearby, where he worked.

“Business was great,” he says. But in the space of four short years, he lost everything. He now lives in Lebanon, in a small town just south of Beirut, and he can barely afford to put a roof over his head.

Ahmad is one of four million Syrians who have become refugees since the war began in 2011. Like countless others, he swapped a perilous existence for a penniless one.

Sitting in a bare apartment on the side of a hill in the coastal town of Khaldeh, 13 kilometers south of Beirut, he recounts the confusion of the early days of the war.

“I tried to stay. I was running everywhere to stay out of trouble.”

Homs was among the first cities in the country to see large-scale protests against the government. It earned the title of “capital of the revolution” for its fierce opposition to Assad in the years to come. But when protests broke out, Ahmad’s first concern was keeping his family safe.

“I never joined the demonstrations. I wasn’t with or against anyone. I just wanted to keep to myself,” he says. “But when you live in a place like Homs, you have to take a side or run.”

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Ahmad and his family moved six times over the course of a year and a half. He reads off the names of the neighborhoods of Homs in which they stayed. Aside from the dangers they faced, the constant moving consumed all their savings. When they had nothing left, they decided it was time to leave.

“Every time we moved it cost us a lot of money. I couldn’t find the money to feed my children,” he says.

In March 2012, Ahmad’s family moved to Damascus, where they stayed for 10 days with relatives. From there, they set off for Lebanon.

“We left our house. We had nothing — no clothes, no money.”

As a refugee in Lebanon, Ahmad and his family would have access to some support from the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR). But as he discovered quickly after arriving, that support was not enough, and being a stranger in a country presented its own set of problems.

“Here is the hardest part. There are good people here, but I have starved. If you saw me two years ago you wouldn’t recognize me. I wasn’t this thin.”

Ahmad and his family get $95 week from the UNHCR. He says it rarely lasts a week.

“We buy wheat and rice, just the basics,” the concierge of the building brings me food sometimes. Concierges are some of the poorest people in Lebanon and he takes pity on me,” Ahmad said.

One of Ahmad’s sons managed to find work in the town as an electrician. His entire salary of $500 a month pays for the apartment in which the family live. While their financial situation is bleak, Ahmad considers himself lucky when compared to the tens of thousands of other Syrians in Lebanon.

Lebanon, with a population of four million, is now hosting more than 1.2 million Syrian refugees. That is just the number who have registered with the UNHCR, the actual number in the country is much higher.

Those who cannot afford to rent an apartment find shelter wherever they can. Thousands of informal settlements have sprung up all over the country. They can be seen by the side of the road, in patches of wasteland — anywhere there is space.

Some are made up of ramshackle structures built out of whatever material the new arrivals can get their hands on. Many are unsafe and fall down when the wind is strong. Abandoned buildings also serve as homes, with building owners taking hundreds of dollars for a bare concrete room.

Unlike other surrounding countries that have taken in large number of refugees, the Lebanese government does not allow formal camps. The government says it simply cannot afford to host such a large refugee community, and so does all it can to discourage more from coming.

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The influx has put a strain on the local population as they now have to compete for jobs and resources with a greater number of people. Some local authorities have imposed curfews for Syrians, while violence toward refugees has increased.

Aid agencies attempt to fill in the gaps, but the vast majority of Syrian refugees in Lebanon live in crippling poverty.

The little furniture Ahmad has in his apartment — a few mattresses, a rug and a small cooking stove which they use to cook all their food — was donated by other people.

Ahmad’s 10-year-old son Hamza plays with crayons while his father talks, drawing a picture of a house.

“I took him to one school and they asked for $100 for three months. Who can afford that?” Ahmad said. “My son sits on the balcony watching other kids go to school and asks why he can’t go.”

Ahmad flits between talking about his difficulties here in Lebanon and the life he had in Homs.

“Syria was the safest country ever before all this. We could walk anywhere we wanted at any time. I don’t think it will be like this again.”

“Maybe my son’s generation will see it, but not me.”

Editor's note: The names of some people quoted in these stories were changed to protect their identities.