8 Introduction of Bashar al-Assad’s regime was murderous, and the imprisonment of children who had scrawled Arab Spring slogans in graffiti only stoked more outrage. While the growing protest movement initially called for reform, repression turned protesters into full-scale revolutionaries. Bashar al-Assad unleashed the full power of the military and loyalists against civilians according to the creed “Bashar, or we burn the country,” and revolutionaries were left with little choice but to defend themselves from being massacred. Facing barrel bombs, Scud missiles, and chemical weapons, entire towns and cities were decimated by Assad and his backers (including Hezbollah, Russia, and Iran) in the following months and years. The ensuing war also enabled foreign extremists, from Ahrar al-Sham to the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), to flood in from Iraq, which Assad used to further justify mass destruction. As hundreds of thousands were killed and millions fled, the violence produced the world’s worst refugee crisis since World War II. Ten years later, pockets of resistance remained active, but the regime’s allies had enabled its survival. However, it should not be forgotten that for a time, the Syrian people had brought it to the brink. More to the point: In the early days of the Arab Spring in 2011, the fate of these movements was far from certain; as spring turned into summer, people across the world tuned in day and night on their laptops and televisions to watch the uprisings unfold. Stomach-churning reports detailed the exceedingly high price that ordinary people in the region were paying for speaking out. Victims included defenseless youth in Yemen, mowed down by snipers; video footage displayed their lifeless bodies lying side by side, wrapped in white sheets stained with blood. Libya’s most beloved citizen-journalist with a kind smile, Mohammed Nabbous, was shot and killed in March during Gaddafi’s attack on Benghazi. In May, global audiences learned that a thirteen-year-old boy named Hamza al-Khateeb had been tortured to death by Syrian forces for smuggling food to protesters under siege. Nevertheless, the people persisted. Libyans rallied around the slogan “we win or we die” of famed freedom fighter Omar al-Mukhtar, a martyr of the resistance against Italian colonizers. Syrian men carried their children on their shoulders to the city of Homs’s iconic New Clock Tower to chant “al-shaʻab yurid isqat al-nitham!” (the people demand the fall of the regime!). Tens of thousands of Yemeni women and men occupied the highways of Sanaʻa, the sloping streets of Taʻiz, and the lowlands of Aden in the south to demand liberty, bread, and dignity. Further afield, other movements were crushed or quelled. Bahrain’s sit-in movement in Manama was swiftly suppressed under the weight of Saudi tanks, while protesters in Morocco and Jordan struck a tacit détente with their kings. Meanwhile, the masses in Libya, Syria, and Yemen faced prolonged and bloody standoffs over the course of 2011 and beyond that would forever change the region. It would also have an indelible impact on anti-regime diasporas across the world. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press