Your turn has come, O Doctor
Your turn has come, O Doctor (Arabic: أجاك الدور يا دكتور, romanized: Ajāk al-Dawr yā Duktūr) also translated to as Your turn next, Doctor or simply Your turn, Doctor, is an Arabic slogan used that was graffitied by Mouawiya Syasneh in February 2011 in response to the Arab Spring and the Assad regime's rule.[1]
Graffiti
[edit]Syasneh heard news about Egypt and Tunisia during the Arab spring with the Tunisian revolution and the Egyptian revolution where he wanted the same for Syria against Bashar al-Assad, so after a school day in Daraa, Syasneh and his acquaintances bought spray canisters and vandalized a wall with the words Your turn has come, O Doctor.[2] The term "doctor" that is used for Bashar al-Assad is in reference to him becoming an ophthalmologist in London after studying at the Damascus University.[3] The graffiti was also inspired by other graffiti made in December 2003 after the capture of Saddam Hussein during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.[4]
Aftermath
[edit]After people started noticing the graffiti on the wall, it was alerted to the local police chief and mukhabarat of Daraa, Atef Najib, where they then investigated who vandalized the wall, but due to the fact that no one took responsibility, they arrested people whose names were written on the wall years earlier and everyone who was under the age of 20 years old, where 15 teenagers that were arrested were held in the custody of the police force where they were tortured for weeks and went through beatings and fingernail removal.[5] Parents of the teenagers that were being held requested that their children be released they were told "Forget your children. If you want children, make more children. If you don’t know how, bring us your women and we will make them for you".[6] Many parents and other civilians in Daraa protested for their release in the streets, but a lot of times were forced to disperse through the police shooting tear gas and shooting bullets at protestors, though after 26 days of the teenagers being held they were released due to the backlash and no evidence of wrongdoing.[7]
As the protests continued due to the arrests even happening, people graffitied other phrases and tell-tale slogans on walls in Daraa which prompted Syrian police to arrest every graffiti artist known in the region of Daraa.[8] One of these protests was at the 8th century-old mosque, the Al-Omari Mosque, in Bosra which was set up as a makeshift medical clinic for those affected by gunfire or tear gas, but at 2 AM on March 23, 2011, Syrian security forces stormed the mosque and killed 15 protestors after shutting down the city, after, they severed all landline and cellular phone connections in order to stop the spreading of information but later, the government released a press statement where they blamed "armed gangs" in relation to weapons and militant stockpiling in the mosque where then state-owned television in Syria broadcast pictures of a so-called cache of weapons found in the mosque and claimed that the armed gang used kidnapped children as human shields, stating that armed Islamists took over protests, shifting blame from the Syrian government to Sunni Muslims.[9]
Other variations
[edit]In response to the early Syrian uprising, another slogan was created by pro-Assad militants, Syrian state-funded Shabiha, that stated "Assad or we burn the country" that was graffitied on walls in similar fashion to the slogan created by Syasneh.[10]
During other protests in February, the slogan ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam (the people want to topple the regime) began being graffitied onto walls with the term your turn, doctor in Arabic.[11]
References
[edit]- ^ Evans, Dominic; Al-Khalidi, Suleiman (2013-03-17). "From teenage graffiti to a country in ruins: Syria's two years of rebellion". Reuters. Retrieved 2025-01-28.
- ^ "'Your turn next, Doctor': How teen Mouawiya Syasneh's anti-Assad graffiti sparked Syrian civil war in 2011". Mint. 2024-12-09. Retrieved 2025-01-27.
- ^ Srivastava, Ranjana (2017-04-18). "Bashar al-Assad trained as a doctor. How did he become a mass murderer?". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. OCLC 60623878. Retrieved 2025-01-27.
- ^ Proudfoot, Philip (2022). Rebel populism: Revolution and loss among Syrian labourers in Beirut. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-1-5261-5810-9.
- ^ Tarabay, Jamie (2018-03-15). "For many Syrians, the story of the war began with graffiti in Dara'a". CNN. Retrieved 2025-01-27.
- ^ Malek, Alia (2017). The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria Hardcover. New York, NY: Nation Books. ISBN 978-1-56858-532-1.
- ^ Mishra, Samiran (2024-12-08). "How A Syrian Teen Triggered Al-Assad's Fall With Graffiti 13 Years Ago". NDTV. Retrieved 2025-01-27.
- ^ McEvers, Kelly (2012-03-16). "Revisiting The Spark That Kindled The Syrian Uprising". NPR. Retrieved 2025-01-27.
- ^ Provence, Michael (2012-12-01). "Unraveling the Syrian revolution". Regions and Cohesion. 2 (3): 153–165. doi:10.3167/reco.2012.020309. ISSN 2152-906X.
- ^ Al-Ghazal, Zaki Kaf (2019-05-21). "The Syrian regime's slogan 'Assad or we burn the country' must not become reality". Middle East Monitor. Retrieved 2025-01-27.
- ^ Ilyas, Uwais (2018-05-17). "The Conflict in Syria: A Bloody Timeline of Events | The Common Sense Network". Common Sense. TCS Network. Retrieved 2025-01-27.