Daraa, the cradle of the Syrian revolution... meets the advance of the north

The Syrian opposition factions announced, at dawn on Saturday, their control over the city of Daraa in the south of the country, after reaching an agreement with the Syrian army to secure its withdrawal in an organized manner, while a statement by this army said that its forces operating in Daraa and Sweida carried out a redeployment operation in the two governorates.

According to opposition sources, senior regime security and military officials who were serving in the city of Daraa were granted safe passage to the capital Damascus as part of the agreement, in coordination with the “Deterrence of Aggression” operation that was launched more than a week ago by opposition factions in northern Syria, and reached the outskirts of the city of Homs, in the center of the country.

Daraa Governorate is considered the cradle of the revolution against the Syrian regime, where protests began in March 2011, following similar popular protests in Tunisia and Egypt. After anti-regime slogans appeared on the walls of schools in the Daraa al-Balad area, the regime’s security services arrested and tortured many children, causing an explosion of popular anger that would chart a new course for all of Syria.

The Omari Mosque in Daraa al-Balad was the destination of the protesters, who were confronted by security forces with live ammunition. After that, demonstrations spread to all the cities and towns of the province, before these demonstrations turned into armed clashes with the regime forces and its security services, extending for several years, during which the opposition factions operating in the south, supported by the "MOC" operations room in Jordan, led by the United States, were able to control most of the province's areas and threaten the capital, Damascus, before the regime, with Russian support, launched a military operation in mid-2018, and was able, through military confrontations and "settlement" agreements, to re-impose its control over the province.

However, this control was not complete and real, as the settlement agreements sponsored by Russia stipulated that local fighters in many areas retain their weapons, while regime forces were prevented from entering their areas, and were content with setting up checkpoints at their entrances. In its attempts to subject Daraa Governorate to its full control, the regime has worked over the past years to spread security chaos in the governorate, through organized assassinations and kidnappings, attributed to unknown persons, while in reality, local groups formed by the regime to work in its service stand behind them.

Here, the head of the Military Security Branch in the province, Brigadier General Louay Al-Ali, played a major role. He was able to leave the province yesterday, Friday, with a group of officers working with him, while the regime elements were left alone in the province. The local groups announced that they had secured their defection from the regime, after disarming them, thus ending a bloody era in the history of the province, which, according to statements from local activists, resulted in the killing and wounding of thousands of people, in addition to the regime authorities’ deliberate spread of all forms of crime in the province, especially drug use, after they turned Daraa into a passage for smuggling them to Jordan, and from there to the Arab Gulf states.

Daraa Governorate enjoys a strategic location in southern Syria, on a wide plain interspersed with several highlands. It extends over an area of 3,730 square kilometers from the Jordanian border to the Damascus countryside, and from Quneitra and the Golan to Sweida. Its population reached 1.127 million people in 2014, of whom about 600,000 remained in Syria, while more than half a million left the country according to various estimates.