Mr. Farouq Al Habib:

People like myself, of the younger generation, realise that the problems in Syria started a very long time ago. Syria was not okay ten or 15 years ago. There was continuous killing and assassination, but the world was not aware of it. For 50 years, the same party - the Ba'ath Party - ruled Syria, including 44 years under the rule of the Assad family. During those decades, there were always assassinations of political figures. Leaders of Syrian society were arrested and imprisoned, some of them for ten, 20 or 28 years, like Riad al-Turk, a leader of the Syrian Communist Party. The suffering continued but people did not dare to speak out about the atrocities. There was no Internet in Syria, no foreign media and no free press. People did not have a chance to pass the message on.

Syrian society was boiling in silence until the Arab Spring arrived. When we saw how the regime was changed in Tunisia in three days and in Egypt in three weeks, we thought we would have the same experience, that through peaceful protests we would be able to create a new destiny for our country. We started peacefully - indeed, Bashar al-Assad himself admitted in one interview that the protests were unarmed for six months before the militarisation of the opposition. Even now, there is still a moderate movement on the ground, on the civilian side and the miliary side. Of course, it is not well organised because of the continuous killing and the catastrophic conditions. One cannot imagine how difficult it is to arrange a meeting inside Syria. How can one build a national institution under daily bombardment?

ISIS is, of course, an enemy for the Syrian people and for people like me. I am wanted by ISIS and al-Qaeda, accused of being an agent for the West because I manage the funds we receive from Western governments. If they arrest me, they will kill me. Likewise, if members of Assad's security arrest me, they will kill me. I was arrested and detained for two and a half months in Syria by Assad's security department. I was detained in a branch called the "Palestine branch" in Damascus, because the regime accuses the opposition of being agents of Israel and all these conspiracy theories. I was not released until my friends paid almost $20,000 as a bribe to the security officers. Otherwise, I would not be sitting here today.

Assad is an enemy and ISIS is an enemy. The important point, however, is that extremism in Syria is a symptom and it did not start with the revolution. Assad released al-Qaeda detainees who were in Sednaya Prison in July or August 2011. Now we see them as heads of armed groups. They include, for example, Zahran Alloush, head of Jaysh al-Islam, the previous head of Ahrar ash-Sham, and most of the leaders of ISIS and the al-Nusra Front. These people were detained in Assad's prisons when the revolution started. He then released them, however, and by way of the continuous killing, he pushed the people to carry arms.