"The people want the fall of the regime," the youths wrote on walls, echoing similar sentiments elsewhere in what was becoming known as the Arab Spring.
President Bashar al-Assad's regime reacted forcefully, and people began to die.
Protests spread, and as they did, the response was more force aimed at drowning out calls for change.
Friday after Friday of demonstrations that followed weekly Muslim prayers were met with violence, and the popular mood hardened.
Civilians took up arms, soldiers began to desert and an insurgency became full-scale civil war after the regime bombed the central city of Homs in February 2012.
Two years after that, the war appears to have reached stalemate, with some pessimists saying it could last another 10 or 15 years.
Rebels, now fighting among themselves as Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists muscled in on them, control large swathes of Syria.
But the government holds the more densely populated regions, and Assad's strategy is to protect "useful Syria" -- the coast, major towns in the north and south and key roads.
In Aleppo, once Syria's commercial capital, the regime has retained the city's west, while advancing around the outskirts of the rebel-held east and securing and reopening the nearby airport.
Syria's mostly exiled political opposition, recognised by Western powers who hope for a negotiated end to the war, is largely ignored by rebels on the ground.
Despite such divisions, the entire opposition insists that any political solution exclude Assad, but that came up against a stone wall earlier this year when the two sides met in Geneva under pressure from their respective foreign allies and got nowhere.
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