(Zaman Al Wasl)- Dozens of people went to streets in southern Daraa city commemorating the eighth anniversary of the Syrian revolution, local activists said Monday.
Demonstrators, who held up the three-star flag of the Syrian revolution, have renewed the 8-year-old demand to overthrow Bashar al-Assad and moving towards political transition.
Last July, armed opposition groups inin the cradle of Syrian revolution agreed to surrender and hand over heavy arms under a Russia-brokered deal.
Daraa, on the border with Jordan, was primarily agricultural, and the people lived well enough in a country where choices were restricted and the economy remained in the hands of a ruling party whose cohorts skimmed what they could to enrich themselves, according to CNN.
But Daraa, and the story of at least 15 teenage boys arrested because of graffiti spray-painted on a high school wall, became the epicenter of the Syrian war. The outrage over their confinement and mistreatment rippled across the country in March 2011 until it ruptured into the fragments that exist today.
In 2000, Hafez al-Assad, the iron-fisted ruler did finally release his grip on Syria, dying at the age of 69 after nearly 30 years in power. His son Bashar, 34, an ophthalmologist who'd made his life in London, quickly replaced him. With him came the hope that Syria, cut off from the rest of the world, would slowly reemerge from the shadows.
More than 560,000 people have been killed and millions displaced since the conflict erupted with the brutal repression of anti-regime protests in 2011.
Zaman Al Wasl
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