Imagine a family living on a city block that is controlled by a local gangster. Their life is not as good as they would like it to be, but it is not as bad as it could be. The parents are working, the children are going to school; their basic needs are covered. They have to be careful not to offend the local gangster, and they have to pay some of their income to his thugs every month. He owns the groceries and most of the other shops in the neighborhood, overcharges for goods and extorts money from other shop owners.
One of the sons of this family is tired of living like this, and gets an idea for how to help his family move to a better place. He takes a loan from a rival gangster from another neighborhood, and uses that money to gamble at a betting parlor owned by the gangster from his block; dreaming that he will use his winnings to buy his family a big house in a better neighborhood. However, he loses everything, and ends up owing money to the local gangster, and cannot repay his debt to the rival gangster. Thugs from both mafias converge on his family’s home. They kill his father, rape his mother, torture and cripple his brothers and force his sisters into prostitution to pay back what he lost, and of course, he himself is tortured and killed and the family home is burned down.
That is the story of the Syrian revolution in miniature