He began as a local hero on the soccer field, playing for the most popular team in his native city of Homs and rising to national stardom across Syria. Yet when the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad began, Abdelbaset Sarout left it all behind to rally thousands to demand that al-Assad step down.
More than three years later, the former goalkeeper is an armed fighter who has become a charismatic icon of the Syrian rebellion after surviving two-and-a-half years under the suffocating siege of Homs carried out by al-Assad’s forces.
Thin and hollow-eyed from the ordeal, he emerged from the ruins of his home city earlier this month — one of hundreds of rebel fighters evacuated from there under a ceasefire struck with government forces — and vowed to continue fighting.
The 22-year-old Sarout’s path traces the arc of Syria’s conflict, which began in March 2011 as joyous, Arab Spring-inspired marches aimed at deposing what many view as an authoritarian ruler. Yet when the opposition demonstrators were repressed with a bloody government crackdown, many took up arms.
Damascus denies that it is facing dissent and has said from the start of the crisis that the army is fighting “terrorists,” who are part of a West-Arab Gulf plot to destroy Syria.
Since then, the conflict has spiraled into an all-out civil war that has laid waste to large parts of the country, killed more than 150,000 and displaced more than one-third of the population from their homes.
“He is one of the true revolutionaries who never strayed from the goal of this uprising, which is bringing down this [al-Assad] regime,” said Yisser, an opposition activist and Homs native who has supported the rebels from Turkey and asked to be identified by her first name only for security reasons.
“Every step he took, as a fighter, a hero and a soccer player, was for the people and their struggle against a dictator that is that man: Bashar al-Assad,” she said by telephone.
Despite repeated requests for interview, The Associated Press could not reach Sarout, who left Homs for rebel-held areas further north after the evacuation. The news agency spoke to several opposition activists and friends close to him who said he is unable to talk to foreign media.
Sarout elevated himself from poverty to hometown celebrity by playing for Homs-based club al-Karamah. Tall with thick, curly hair, he had an upbeat personality that made him a natural team leader, friends say. Fans in Homs expected him to rise to national prominence after he was picked for Syria’s youth team in 2007 and 2009, but after the first protests erupted in 2011, Sarout was on the streets.
His fame as a soccer player quickly made him a leader in the opposition movement and he appeared in protest videos activists posted online to spread word of the uprising.
One of these shows him standing on a lamppost near Homs’ landmark Clock Square, leading tens of thousands of protesters singing and chanting: “Homs is the mother of the Arab nation. Despite difficulties, we will remain.”
Another shows Sarout — who like most of the opposition is a Sunni Muslim — at another protest lifting a prominent actress from Syria’s minority Alawite sect onto the stage to chant alongside him in a show of the movement’s inclusiveness. Alawites are typically the strongest supporters of al-Assad, who belongs to the offshoot of Shiite Islam.
Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, was one of the first to join the uprising, earning it the nickname the “capital of the revolution.” It was hit by a punishing crackdown, with mass arrests of protesters and artillery barrages and airstrikes on opposition-dominated districts that killed hundreds.
In late 2011, a bombardment attack leveled Sarout’s house in Homs’ impoverished Bayada District, killing his brother and uncle. Days later, Sarout was shot in the leg as he headed for a demonstration.
“I never imagined that any of this would happen to us, or that a guy like Abdelbaset, a poor guy, would become a symbol of the revolution,” said a Homs opposition activist who goes by the name of Thaer Khaldiyeh and is Sarout’s childhood friend.
As he rose to prominence in the rebel ranks, Damascus declared Sarout a traitor, banning him from soccer and offering a reward for information leading to his arrest.
Sarout “contributed to destroying his homeland and conspired against his country like other traitors,” General Mowaffak Joumaa, the head of Syria’s General Sports Federation, said in an interview, while Syrian Football Federation president Toufiq Sarhan said Sarout was not just a “simple opposition figure, he is a terrorist and a killer.”
In 2012, as more opposition supporters took up arms and Syrian army defectors joined the uprising, Sarout joined the Western-backed Free Syrian Army movement. He rose to command a Homs brigade that bears his name and for the next two years, fought the government forces constricting rebel strongholds in and around Homs’ historic Old City, trying to starve out the fighters amid relentless bombardment.
Rebels and hundreds of trapped civilians survived on meager rations, taking desperate measures such as eating grass and moving in tunnels under the Old City.
Throughout the siege, Sarout posted dozens of videos online in which he vowed to fight to the death. In one, he is seen with more than a dozen other rebels in a house, leading them in singing nationalist songs to keep up morale.
As the siege tightened, he began pleading for food and ammunition in the videos. In one posted last month, he stands on a bombed-out street, denouncing the international community and exiled opposition leaders for abandoning the Syrian people. The videos appear genuine and correspond with the Associated Press’ reporting on the siege.
“They have all let us down,” he says in the clip. “All we have left is you, Syrians. God is asking you to rise and avenge the blood of the martyrs.”
The siege brought Sarout into close contact with hard-line Islamic rebels who have also gained prominence in the movement. In Homs, hardliners were among the last holdouts and included fighters from al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate al-Nusra Front, all of whom weathered the ordeal alongside Sarout’s brigade.
In his early days as a protest leader, Sarout stuck to a nationalist line without Islamist rhetoric, but under the siege, religious references started appearing in his videos. In a speech he gave in a February video clip, Sarout talked of the solidarity among the fighters, including al-Nusra militants, saying: “the knife is on all of us, all of us are one.”
Yisser said Sarout had become more religious, “like people do when they are in these horrible situations of war,” but stressed that “he’s not an Islamic radical.”
Islamic groups’ increasing role in the conflict worries many observers. Hazem al-Amin, a pro-opposition columnist for Arab newspaper al-Hayat, warned that if Sarout follows that trend, the international community is to blame for failing to back moderate nationalists.
“If Abdelbaset Sarout reaches Aleppo and Idlib [rebel-held areas north of Homs] and joins the [al-]Nusra Front, we must remember the man was a Homsi fighter for two-and-a-half years, and before that he was a [revolutionary] singer — and the entire world abandoned him,” al-Amin wrote.
On May 8, Sarout and the other fighters were bused from Homs, surrendering the city to al-Assad in return for safe passage. In an activist video of the scene, he flashed a victory sign as he arrived in a rebel-held town further north to chants of: “God protect you, Abdelbaset.”
He appeared skeletal, his eyes sunken, but struck a defiant tone, saying: “After we get back on our feet, see our families, get food and nutrition and the heavy weapons we need, we will go back to fight.”
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