WHEN Syrian teenager Basheer Abazed was arrested a decade ago for scrawling anti-government graffiti on his school wall, he never imagined an uprising would flare that would devastate his country. Now, he mourns the terrible human cost of the revolt. 

“The war…broke a lot of things in our lives, it took away our childhood and joy, it made us grow up before our time,” Abazed, now 25, said by phone from Turkey where now lives, exiled far from his hometown of Deraa in southwestern Syria.

Deraa became the cradle of the uprising and later insurgency against President Bashar al-Assad after two dozen teenagers including Abazed were rounded up and tortured by secret police for writing slogans against the Syrian autocrat.

The youths’ act of defiance emulated the start of other “Arab Spring” uprisings that overthrew dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, and their brutal treatment in detention brought long