The article that Iains has provided the link for seems highly implausible and is undoubtedly biased.

Unrest in Syria has always boiled away just below the surface, the secular Ba'athist regime in Syria run by the minority Alawites ruled the country by fear and repression in exactly the same way that the Ba'athist regime did in Iraq before the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

It was an unprovoked assault by a police officer on a man in January 2011 that sparked off unrest and civil disobedience in Syria. The Daraa raid was a raid by the Syrian police to arrest 15 children who were suspected of daubing walls with anti-government/anti-Assad slogans. The first deaths were the result of police officers firing on a civilian crowd of demonstrators from inside ambulances. I wonder why Jad Nasr and Ms Kortwright found it essential to omit that part of the tragedy from their article.