At this stage, it doesn´t really matter what [Syrian President Bashar] Assad says. The regime has fallen in a sense. The revolution has succeeded in that sense. It is true Assad is still there. But now he´s no longer there as president of a country or a viable entity. He is in charge of some sectarian militias acting on a sectarian agenda [the Assad family is Alawite, a religious/ethnic minority] that fulfills Iranian aspirations, Russian aspirations, aspirations of small segments of people inside Syria. But he can no longer really speak in the name of all Syrians.
He lost control of major chunks of territory on the ground. He cannot get these territories back. People would not allow it. He controls the skies via MiGs [Russian-made fighter jet]. But he is rapidly losing control over the ground in so many places. So Assad is now a militia leader. And the rest of the country is ruled also by militias that support the rebellion. Either they´re Islamists, or they´re more pragmatist groups.
The country is effectively a failed state. And it´s all about trying to put the pieces together at one point. For that, we do need still, if we want to make that process viable and not to have it drag for long and not to have the instability right now in Syria spill into Iraq and Lebanon and Jordan and Turkey and even Israel. Because we´ve seen, over the last few months, clashes in Lebanon between pro- and anti-Assad forces.
We have seen in Iraq basically a political struggle between the Sunni [the largest branch of Islam] tribes who supported rebellion and the [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri] Maliki government who supports Assad, you know, and act out an Iranian agenda. We have seen clashes between the Syrian army and Jordanian army. We´ve seen clashes between the Syrian army and the Turks.
So we really are seeing a lot of potential for spillover. And we´ve seen the beginning of that. So unless there is some kind of intervention soon to contain the situation and to try to re-stabilize the different part of Syria and put the pieces together under a new system we could see a regional meltdown.
Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian human rights activist who in 2003 founded the Tharwa Foundation, a grassroots organization that enlists local activists and citizen journalists to document conditions in Syria. In response to his activities, the Syrian government subjected Abdulhamid to repeat interrogation and threats. In September 2005, he and his family were forced into exile in the United States. From his home in Maryland, Abdulhamid remains one of the leading bloggers and commentators on events in Syria through the Syrian Revolution Digest.
Follow Ammar Ahbdulhamid on Twitter @Tharwacolamus and on his blog, Syrian Revolution Digest.
The Syrian Arab Republic originated as a secular, socialist state dominated by the Ba’ath party, an Arab nationalist movement. The state has since evolved into an autocracy headed by a single family and dominated by members of the minority Alawite sect, a branch of Shia Islam.
The Ba’ath Party took power in Syria in a series of coups d’état in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the leaders of those coups, Hafez al-Assad, became president in 1971 and led the country until his death in 2000. Under Assad, Alawites assumed control over the state security forces. In 1982, Assad’s forces stormed the city of Hama to brutally suppress a Sunni rebellion, killing thousands of civilians.
Following the death of Hafez al-Assad, his son, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president by a referendum in which he ran unopposed, officially garnering 97 percent of the vote. He was reelected in 2007, again with 97 percent of the vote.
The Syrian government is one of the world’s most brutal and restrictive. From 1963 to 2011, the government operated under an “Emergency Law,” which suspended many constitutional protections of civil liberties. The government continues to use arbitrary detention and torture against political opponents, and operates through an extensive internal security apparatus, including secret police. The government controls most of the country’s media outlets, and access to the Internet is permitted only through state-operated servers. The minority Kurdish population has been continually discriminated against and repressed.
Influenced by movements in Egypt and Tunisia, large opposition protests took place across Syria in 2011. The government responded with a harsh crackdown. Security forces fired on protestors, killing thousands. The crackdown led the Arab League to suspend Syria’s membership. The Assad regime attempted to appease dissenters through a series of low-level and largely inconsequential reforms in 2011 and 2012. However, the conflict has escalated into full-fledged civil war with both liberal and Islamic militias being formed to fight against the Assad regime. The Assad regime has continued to attempt to defeat the opposition using air strikes and heavy artillery to attack rebel-held neighborhoods. Freedoms of association, assembly, and the press were restricted even further as the government attempted to quell the uprising. Over a million people have been either internally displaced or fled the country as refugees.
In the summer of 2013, it was confirmed that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons to attack civilians. Over 600 people were killed in one such attack in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus using a nerve agent confirmed to be sarin. The Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons drew international attention and resulted in a renewed international focus on the nation and its civil conflict.
Freedom House rates Syria as “not free” noting that conditions even prior to the 2011 uprising and subsequent civil war were, at best, abysmal. It earned the worst possible ratings of seven in both the political rights and civil liberties categories. Conditions since the 2011 uprising have only deteriorated, and civil freedoms are restricted under the fear of violence. Freedom House has also expressed concern over rising sectarian tensions and massive displacement.