The Syrian Uprising Began 15 Years Ago. Then Came the Regime’s Deadly Crackdown.

In early March 2011, after popular uprisings swept Tunisia and Egypt, a group of boys in the small Syrian farming town of Deraa, 60 miles south of Damascus, painted messages opposing then-President Bashar al-Assad on a school wall.

“Freedom, freedom and freedom, only,” read one phrase. “Down with the corrupt Assad,” read another.

The 2011 FRONTLINE documentary The Regime chronicled what happened next: The boys were rounded up by the government’s secret police and reportedly beaten and tortured — sparking outrage against the Assad regime that would help to fuel the Syrian uprising.

As Syrians took to the streets to protest and to call for more freedoms, the swift and brutal response by Assad’s security forces followed a playbook for crushing dissent that his family had honed over 40 years in power, The Regime reported.

“This is how the Assads, both father and son, deal with domestic threats,” Assad biographer David Lesch said in the documentary. “There’s this convulsive reaction to put down any sort of domestic threats, and to put them down ruthlessly.”

With this week marking the 15th anniversary of the uprising, FRONTLINE is releasing The Regime on YouTube for the first time. Produced by Marcela Gaviria and with reporting from the late Anthony Shadid, the short film is a powerful examination of how the Assad family, part of Syria’s Alawite minority, came to and maintained power, how the Syrian rebellion began, and how Bashar al-Assad leaned on his father’s example as he moved to crush it.

“The regime has a playbook,” said Syrian scholar Amr Al Azm. “You have an uprising. You suppress it. The playbook does not say negotiate with the protesters, so there’s no negotiation.”

The film also explored the broader implications of the 2011 uprising and Assad’s escalating crackdown, with still-resonant insights from Shadid, then a New York Times foreign correspondent.

“Syria is so embedded in the relationships in the region: its longstanding alliance with Iran, its longstanding alliance with Hezbollah,” Shadid said in the film. “The border it shares with Israel, the border it shares with Turkey and Iraq.”

Civil war in Syria, Shadid warned at the time, “would have reverberations immediately in the rest of the region. And I think everyone’s bracing themselves for that.”

Watch The Regime on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel now.