-In 2011, protesters from North Africa
to the Persian Gulf took to the streets
in demonstrations few thought possible.
They stood up against cruel dictators and autocrats
and railed against government corruption and mismanagement
that had mired much of the Arab world in poverty for decades.
Liz Sly, the Washington Post's Beirut bureau chief,
covered the Arab Spring from the beginning.
-People thought that they would get new freedoms,
there would be democracy, new prosperity would come --
there was hope, there was anger,
but above all, at the very beginning, there was hope.
Of course, it all went horribly wrong.
-Out of the cauldron of the Arab Spring,
only Tunisia would lurch toward democracy.
Bahrain's government continues to crack down on dissidents,
journalists, and human-rights activists.
Libya and Yemen descended into chaos.
[explosions] And Syria descended into hell.
-President Bashar al-Assad revealed himself
to be prepared to use any kind of force,
up to and including the use of chemical weapons,
to stay in power.
And if there's one lesson from this Arab Spring
that we can learn, it is that a dictator
who is prepared to use brute force
will be able to hold onto power,
no matter how much people how you have,
no matter how many demonstrations you have.
-And in Egypt today, many say that President Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi is even more authoritarian
than the man ousted 10 years ago, Hosni Mubarak.
But it was here, in the Arab world's most populous country,
that demonstrators and counterdemonstrators
became one of the most indelible symbols of the Arab Spring,
centered in Cairo's Tahrir Square.
Griff Witte was the Washington Post's
deputy foreign editor at the time.
-The Mubarak regime began to bus in people from the countryside
who were supporters to challenge the protesters in the square
and to fight with the protesters in the square.
And what had been a standoff between protesters
and the police quickly became an all-out civil conflict
between supporters of the Mubarak regime and opponents.
-The Washington Post's Will Englund
was dispatched from his bureau in Moscow
to help cover one of the biggest stories of the year.
-Probably the day that stands out the most is the day
that there was the camel charge.
Some supporters of Hosni Mubarak
had organized these camel drivers
to charge the square, and it was unbelievable.
It was a ridiculous stunt.
You know, they created a ruckus,
and then they left, and that was it.
-I mean, looking back on it all now,
it's actually very hard to remember
the hope that was experienced at that time.
-Over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of people died
and millions became refugees.
A bloody and costly uprising, but that doesn't mean it's over.
What was started a decade ago
may have just been the beginning.
-It isn't over because the past few years
have seen new Arab Springs, if you like --
some people call it a Second Arab Spring,
when we had a toppling of the president in Sudan,
in Algeria, small protests in Jordan,
and Lebanon and Iraq have had huge --
what they call revolutions.
They haven't revolutionized anything yet,
but they're not over, either.
They are ongoing.
So, yes, a lot of people think that this is a rolling
and long-term form of change
that could take many different forms in the years to come,
but that it will come eventually.