The Syrian teenager who sprayed four words on a wall and started an uprising

After his father was killed by a rocket attack in 2013 as he walked to the mosque, Syasneh said he decided to pick up a weapon and fight with the Free Syrian Army, a loose coalition of rebel groups made up mainly of army deserters.

“I lost someone dear to me, my father, who became a martyr,” he said, adding that he wanted to “carry arms to defend my land, my country, and my honor.”

As time ticked by, the conflict became more complex as foreign powers like Russia and Iran offered support to Assad’s government, while the U.S., Arab Gulf countries and Turkey backed some of the rebel groups. The Kurds — a stateless ethnic group concentrated in Syria, Iran and Iraq — also intervened, while extremist groups like the Islamic State also started to grow in stature, weaving a web of warring parties.

The U.S. was among the countries to send troops to fight ISIS, which exploited the instability to expand its self-declared caliphate’s territory and also provided support to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in its battle against the militants.

In December, the Pentagon announced that roughly 2,000 troops were deployed to Syria, more than double the number the military had said for years, about 900.

Syasneh said that during his time as a rebel, they would capture soldiers or “they would turn themselves and their weapons over to us, and we would keep them with us.”

Until late last year, the conflict had seemingly frozen, with Assad in control of parts of the country and various factions ruling in other parts of the country.

But then it exploded back into action late last year when, in just under two weeks, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, known as HTS — along with an umbrella group of Turkish-backed militias — swept south through Syria before taking the capital, Damascus, and forcing the fall of the Assad government.

Since then, around 200,000 Syrian refugees have returned home from neighboring countries, according to the United Nations, but Syasneh said many are still afraid to come back.

“They want the situation to improve before coming back; they have no homes or anything else, so where would they return to?” he said, adding that he was hopeful that a new government, led by Syria’s de facto leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, will now begin the process of rebuilding a nation devastated by the war.

“We strive to form a state and to rebuild a new Syria, making it better than before,” he said. “We want to live in security and safety and to maintain our dignity; this is the most important thing for us,” he added.