Syria in the Arab Spring
Witness History
BBC
4.4 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2021
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Protests erupted across the Arab world in 2011, people wanted change, an end to tyranny and dictatorship. But in Syria the unrest, and its put down by the authorities, led to civil war, years of violence and the survival of the Assad regime. One eye witness to events was Rami Jarrah, he was at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus when one of the first protests began in Syria. He told Rebecca Kesby how powerful it felt just to even shout the word "freedom" during the protests.
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
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| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. |
| 0:29.2 | Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service |
| 0:38.0 | with me Rebecca Keesby. In 2011, mass-popular uprisings took hold across the Middle East and North Africa. |
| 0:46.0 | Together, they'd come to be known as the Arab Spring. |
| 0:50.0 | In Syria, one of the most oppressive regimes in the region, it all began with a simple call for freedom. |
| 0:57.0 | In 2016, I spoke to someone who took part in one of the very first anti-government protests in the country. |
| 1:04.0 | I don't know how to convey this exactly, but for Syrians it was really a dream that we would ever see any |
| 1:11.3 | sort of change or anyone saying no to the government for anything. |
| 1:15.9 | The government could literally undergo any action it wanted, kidnap people, kill people, |
| 1:20.4 | torture people, and there was no one that could say not. |
| 1:23.0 | In the spring of 2011, Rami Jara lived with his wife and daughter in Central Damascus. |
| 1:31.0 | He was an import-export consultant for a distribution company. |
| 1:35.0 | In Syria life was very closed off and very isolated from the rest of the world. |
| 1:39.7 | There was this system that was on the surface that looked like it was all clean and |
| 1:43.2 | and legit but under that there was a tight grip from the intelligence people |
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