10 years after Syrian uprising, boy who helped light war’s fuse doubts it was worth it – By Saphora Smith and Ammar Cheikh Omar (NBC News) / Mar 18 2021
“Who would have believed that the regime would kill its own people with chemicals and warplanes?” Bashir Abazayd asks, reflecting on a decade of conflict.
His arrest helped trigger the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s rule. But 10 years on, Bashir Abazayd wonders whether the revolt was worth it.
“I sacrificed everything,” he says softly, speaking by telephone.
In the past decade, Abazayd says, he has lost his brother to an airstrike, his father to a broken heart 10 days later and his mother and other siblings to Jordan. A conflict he unwittingly helped ignite swept away his home, his city, his friends and his youth — and inflamed the Middle East.
Abazayd, 25, was only a teenager when, he says, he was arrested and accused of scrawling anti-government graffiti on the walls of his school in the southwestern Syrian city of Daraa.
CONTINUE > https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/10-years-after-syrian-uprising-boy-who-helped-light-war-n1261309
