Sara, a Syrian revolutionary wrote this article for Al Thawra, a Brazilian newsletter supporting the revolutions in the Arab world and Free Palestine.
When the Syrian revolution erupted, everything changed. In March 2011, in the southern city of Daraa, people took to the streets after 14 children were arrested and tortured for writing on the walls of their schools the slogan of the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt: “The people want the downfall of the regime.”
Women join the revolution
Razan Zaitouneh, a human rights lawyer who formed what is right now called the Local Coordination Committees (LCC), archives regime violations against citizens and disseminates the most dependable information to the world. She is now in hiding in Syria, having been accused of being a foreign agent.
Some women have become iconic to revolutionaries, such as Muntaha Sultan al-Atrash, a human rights activist and grand-daughter of the Syrian hero Sultan Basha al-Atrash, a commander of the Syrian revolt against the French between 1925 and 1927. To her goes the credit of being one of the first to publicly proclaim that the regime had to be toppled.
Marwa Ghamyan, a young woman who helped organize one of the first protests in the city of Damascus, long before most of the city joined the revolution. It was symbolic precisely because Damascus was not at that time in the revolutionary camp. She was arrested and detained several times, and now lives in exile.
Thwaiba Kanafani, an engineer by training, left her family in Canada, and joined the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to help in tactical and strategic plans of strikes.
Lubna al Merhi, an Alawite, the religious group Assad belongs to, was active in the revolution from day one until an arrest warrant was issued in her name and she fled to Turkey, in an escape arranged by the FSA. After she appeared in a televised interview, her mother was arrested as a way of pressuring her to return to Syria.
Hanadi Zahlouta, poet and engineer, was arbitrarily detained and attacked by regime lawyers in court, both physically and verbally. Hanadi was charged with violating three articles from the Syrian penal code: establishing an organisation that aims to change the social and economic character entity of the state, weakening the national identity and awakening sectarian and ethnic tension, and spreading false news that weakened the soul of the nation. She was sentenced for fifteen years in jail, without a fair trial.
The fight for a space
Traditionally, funeral processions are exclusively male. After the revolution, they often turn into anti-regime demonstrations where women are present. Women are, exercising a right that is being destroyed by military force, and in resisting they are developing the seeds of a new social order.
