T HE FILM was blurry, and no wonder. Raed Fares had shot it on his Nokia phone, holding it over the gathering of men in the main street of Kafranbel on April 1st 2011. It was the day they broke through the barrier of fear. He could see a few small flags raised, very tentatively, above head-height. They were not the official Syrian flag of red, white and black with two green stars, but green, white and black, with three red stars. The flag of the Syrian revolution. There was anti-Assad chanting going on. Several men were still glancing over their shoulders, jumpily, in case the security forces turned up. It felt unreal; they had not dared to chant in the street for 40 years. A few years later, though, Huriyah (Freedom) Square was hosting crammed, colourful, noisy demonstrations under rivers of the red-starred flag. And this was largely his doing.

Kafranbel did not look like a hotbed of revolt, just a dozy country town in Idlib province, in north-western Syria near the Turkish border. It sat among dusty olive groves and brown hills. But it contained enough people who thought the town of Daraa, where the Syrian revolution had started, should not be left to fight alone. And it also contained him, a bulky, hearty guy in jeans and leather jacket, with a big boxer’s nose, a liking for boiled potatoes witholive oil, a sharp sense of fun and a way of calling everyone arsa (“pimp”). He could get anything going.

The Assads, both father and son, had terrorised Kafranbel as long as he could recall. As a child of seven, he had seen security forces kill a neighbour and throw him into a car. At ten, he met refugees from the massacre at Hama straggling into town. Under Bashar’s despotism his house had been raided by security men. He’d had enough. So after the Free Syrian Army, in 2012, took the town, he set up in a small concrete office his grandly named Union of Revolutionary Bureaus ( URB ). From there he organised demonstrations, campaigned for clean water, ran a health centre with a mobile clinic (he had started to study medicine at university, but became an estate agent to support his parents), set up a fund to assist survivors and helped women and children get education. He built a mini civil society, the only way out of war.

The URB also monitored the regime’s raids, killings and bombings. Since Western powers seemed not to care, he sent them videos, shot when the ground was still rocking and the air full of dust. He recorded the revolution’s martyrs, people he knew, friends, sprawled in their gaping houses, or lying in pieces among the ruins of their market stalls. Uploading 2 MB videos to social media could take half an hour with Syria’s crawling internet. That infuriated him, as did the fact that he couldn’t send Westerners the smell of death: burnt blood and burnt vegetables, corpses and heavy weaponry. That might have made them notice.

Yet what they seemed to notice most were the big political banners he posted on Facebook. Each Thursday evening he and two dozen others would meet at the URB with a giant cotton sheet and a wooden frame. He took charge of the whole thing, from brooding over the week’s slogan to painting the Roman letters the West could read. He made them big, black and in capitals, calling for Assad to go and counting up his victims. There were cartoons too, of Assad and Barack Obama dancing, or of Assad killing innocents on “Terrorists Got Talent”. The little band, often with him in the middle, would pose in front of some shelled place, and the last red-painted line of their banner proclaimed who and where they were: SYRIAN REVOLUTION—KAFRANBEL . As the posts went viral, his town became famous worldwide as the revolution’s beating heart.

It went on beating even as government forces, helped by Russia, took back the country. It held out and still holds out to this day, though battered and with far fewer people. The banners helped. So did Mr Fares’s chief pride and joy, Radio Fresh. He started the station in 2013, the first to broadcast from opposition-held territory, sending out news and music from an abandoned government building. For once, Westerners helped and he got funding, though American money dried up last May. He employed 82 people, including women, and trained up hundreds of citizen-journalists.

All this was bound to cause trouble, but that came from an unexpected source, for by then Kafranbel was being squeezed between two sorts of terrorism. On one side, the Assad regime went on killing; on the other a brutal clutch of Islamist groups had taken over the town. These, with their long lists of sharia rules, unleashed his most sarcastic streak. They banned music, which he loved—he was a good oud-player among friends—so he broadcast Big Ben’s bongs, sirens, ticking clocks and loud farm animals. (For didn’t war-criminal Assad think Syrians were animals anyway, even insects, to be killed with chemical sprays?) They forbade him to use women as announcers, so he ran their voices through a computer program that made them sound like robots, or men. Radio Fresh was declared haram, raided, closed, had all its equipment seized, but kept bouncing back.