Getty Images
Syrians may be celebrating the fall of Assad, but the country’s future is uncertain
In the end the Assad regime was so hollow, corrupt and decayed that it collapsed in less than a fortnight.
No one I have spoken to has been anything other than astonished by the speed with which the regime turned to dust.
In the spring of 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, it was different, when Syrians tried to grab some of the revolutionary magic that had swept away the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt and was threatening the veteran strongmen of Libya and Yemen.
By 2011, the regime created by Hafez al-Assad and passed to his son Bashar on his death in 2000 was already corrupt and decadent.
But the system that Hafez built still had much of the brutal, ruthless strength that he believed was necessary to control Syria. Assad senior had seized power in a country that was prone to coups and delivered it to his son and heir without a significant challenge.
Bashar al-Assad went back to his father’s playbook in 2011.
It is hard to imagine now, but back then he had more legitimacy among some of Syria’s population than the old dictators swept away by crowds chanting the slogan of that year – “The people want the fall of the regime”.
Bashar al-Assad was a vocal supporter of the Palestinians and of Hezbollah during its successful fight against Israel in the 2006 Lebanon war. He was younger than the ex and soon to be former Arab leaders.
Since his father’s death he had been promising reform. Some Syrians still wanted to believe him in 2011, hoping demonstrations were the spur he needed for the change that he had promised, until he ordered his men to shoot peaceful demonstrators dead in the streets.
A British ambassador in Syria once told me that the way to understand the Assad regime was to watch Mafia films like The Godfather. The obedient could be rewarded.
Anyone who went against the head of the family or his closest lieutenants would be eliminated. In Syria’s case that could mean the gallows, or a firing squad, or indefinite incarceration in some underground cell.
We’re seeing them now, emaciated and pale, blinking into the light, filmed on the mobiles of the rebel fighters who have freed thousands of them from years behind bars.
Reuters
The weakness of the regime, to the point that it collapsed like a soggy paper bag, was disguised by the fearsome and repressive gulag it still maintained.
The international consensus was that Bashar al-Assad was weak, dependent on Russia and Iran, and presiding over a country he had fractured to preserve his family’s rule – but still strong enough to be regarded as a fact of Middle Eastern life, who could even be useful.
In the last days before rebels burst out of Idlib, it was widely reported that the US, Israel and the United Arab Emirates were trying to detach Assad’s Syria from Iran.
Read More