"We're cornered and the entire country has been handed over. We can't do anything any more despite having weapons. [The rebel leaders] took the pay cheque," Syasneh, 23, said, accusing the FSA of selling out the revolution. It all began when he and his classmates were arrested for spraying the graffiti. “Ejak el door, ya doctor” or “It’s your turn, doctor [Bashar al-Assad],” the black scrawlings read. It was not long before the Mukhabarat - the secret police - came knocking at his door.

After Syasneh and his classmates were arrested the people of Daraa took to the streets in a rare show of defiance to demand their release. They marched every day until they were returned to their parents 26 days later - beaten and bruised. The sight of the tortured boys only incited the demonstrators, whose peaceful protests were answered with bullets and tear gas. On March 15, cities across the country, including Damascus and Aleppo, joined them for what was dubbed the “day of rage”, and the small anti-government movement turned into a full-scale revolt. The teenagers' prank and the protests set in motion the chain of events in Syria that continue to rock the world to this day. A convoy of Syrian military vehicles after its troops captured the Naseeb border crossing last week. Credit:Syrian Military/AP The civil war, now in its seventh year, has claimed killed more than 500,000 people and left many thousands more maimed and injured. Whole cities have been flattened and more than a quarter of the country’s 21 million have fled, sparking the biggest humanitarian crisis of our era.

Omar, another boy from the graffiti group, told Vice News last year he also escaped the police and was one of the first to join the protests. "I thought the people in the neighborhood would be against us, and think we were just stupid kids," Omar remembered. "In the end, writing on that wall was viewed as something heroic and courageous." So the defeat in their hometown marks the end of a long battle for the boys and for Syasneh, one that has cost him just about everything but his life. He left school at 15 to become an activist as the uprising grew, but did not pick up a gun until his father, a retired architectural engineer, was killed by a mortar on his way to a mosque in the northern summer of 2013. He decided that day to join the FSA, an anti-government militia formed of mostly rank-and-file army defectors.

Many of his friends have been killed in fighting or tortured to death in Assad's prisons. Others fled abroad. People who fled Daraa in their won vehicles gathering near the Syria-Jordan border. Credit:Nabaa/AP Syasneh could have left with them but said he felt it would have been a betrayal of his country's struggle. "I've known nothing but war. At the beginning I was proud to fight in it for the cause, now it is hard to feel that way," he said. Until this week he thought he would fight to the last. "I'd prefer death to reconciliation," he said previously. But his commanders - driven by pragmatism in the face of the Assad regime's unstoppable forces - wrote him a different ending. Jordanian troops patrol at the Jordanian side of Naseeb border crossing into Syria. Credit:AP

They agreed to a deal which sees the rebels hand over their weapons and submit to government control. As part of that deal, fighters unwilling to make peace were to be allowed to evacuate to opposition-held areas in northern Syria. But Syasneh fears that he is wanted by the government and will not be able to take that option. "I am a special case because I am a child of the revolution. I am sure the Russians will hand me over to the regime," he said. "My fate is unknown now, I don't know what to do. I need to leave Syria because they won't leave me alive." He knows what is to come for Daraa - once the country's breadbasket but which now lies largely in ruin. The city will come under the control of the Russian military police, who will hand it over to a newly formed local force made up of former FSA fighters. "There is a lot of fear about the fate that awaits us. We do not trust the Russians or the regime," said Abu Shaima, an opposition spokesman in Daraa.

The terms of the so-called reconciliation deals are not always the same, but a demand in previous deals for Aleppo and Homs was for men of military age to enlist in the army. The hundreds of thousands of civilians who fled in recent weeks towards the closed borders with Jordan and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights will now have to decide whether to come back into the government's fold, or live in exile. The defeat of Daraa sounds the death knell of the revolution. The only remaining opposition stronghold is Idlib in the north, controlled by a patchwork of competing Islamist groups. More than 60,000 Syrians are said to have left Daraa for Jordan last week. Credit:Michael Fitzjames

For the more moderate fighters from Daraa - the majority of whom have never lived outside the province - the prospect of joining them is not a palatable one. Not only do the people of Daraa feel abandoned by their leaders, but by their once-loyal international backers. The US and UK had for years supported the rebels in the south. But Washington decided not to intervene when the Syrian government began its offensive last month, calculating that the risk of confronting Moscow outweighed any possible reward. "We have no friends any more," said Syasneh, resigned. "This is where it all ends."

Telegraph, London