Documentary Revisits Origins of Syrian Uprising Through Fighter’s Story

Overview

In 2017 Al Jazeera broadcast a Clover Films documentary that challenged the prevailing account of how Syria’s conflict began. The film, The Boy Who Started the Syrian War, sought to restore attention to the uprising’s grassroots origins at a time when international sympathy had dwindled and Western media increasingly portrayed the revolt as dominated from the start by extremist groups such as the al-Nusra Front and, later, ISIL — which did not exist when the uprising began.

With the later collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, its army and the Shabiha militias, filmmakers returned to the surviving figures from the original film to revisit those early stories. Among them is Mouawiya Syasneh, who abandoned his school satchel to join the Free Syrian Army; the renewed interviews aim to trace how peaceful protests transformed into armed resistance and to reframe the human narrative behind the conflict, as reported by Al Jazeera