March 18, 2011 marks the day Syria’s uprising became a national revolution. In the southern city of Daraa, the arrest and torture of schoolchildren for anti regime graffiti pushed families and neighbors into the streets, carrying the same demand spreading across the Arab Spring: dignity. After Friday prayers, demonstrators gathered near the Omari Mosque, chanting “Peaceful, peaceful” and insisting they posed no threat. The state answered with live fire. The killings in Daraa did not silence Syrians. They clarified the truth of what people were facing, and they turned scattered calls for reform into a nationwide movement that spread from city to city, carried by ordinary people who refused to accept fear as the price of living in their own country.