What’s happened to Syria’s protesters?There is an untruth that has been running round the world for a couple of years ago, that there was a good peaceful uprising in Syria in 2011, but all those people have been displaced by Islamic jihadis. See the phrase 'rebel-held areas'. Those are the places where Assad has been forced out by force of arms, and will only stay that way if the rebels get some fraction of the support Assad gets from Russia and Iran.
"Although they are almost invisible to most of us outside of Syria, they continue to oppose the government – and extremist Islamist militia groups who now control parts of the country – and they want a part in leading the country once the fighting is over, she told me while on a recent visit to London.
Since those days on the streets, the same protesters have been running local services in rebel-held areas. They have kept the schools open, organised health care, distributed water, resettled hundreds of thousands of displaced people, run bakeries, collected garbage."