Notes

5 W Main: Assad or We Burn the Country. Damascus has fallen. Bashar al-Assad has fled Syria. Within the space of two weeks, the Syrian opposition has captured a series of cities—Aleppo, Hama, Homs—routing government forces with little resistance. Assad’s torture chambers have been thrown open by rebel forces, including the notorious Sednaya prison.

So far, though, reactions in capitals in the region and the rest of the world have been relatively muted. The most prominent rebel faction, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is considered a terrorist entity by the United States and several European countries.

The speed of the regime’s collapse surprised many who’d seen it as having strengthened its position recently. Last year, neighboring states readmitted Syria to the Arab League. Before the current rebel offensive, some European countries were considering normalizing their relations with it. And just last week, the United Arab Emirates made overtures to Assad.

So, why has his regime crumbled so fast?

While it may have seemed stable, corruption had spread to practically every part of it, and it offered the people of Syria very little materially. Last year, the United Nations reported that nine out of ten Syrians live in poverty. That’s increasingly included the military itself, which had turned to selling narcotics. Running drugs might have made the military a lot of money, but it didn’t make it an effective fighting force.

What’s more, Assad’s allies were preoccupied elsewhere. Iran has been under pressure from both Israel and the United States over the last year. Russia has had to focus on its war with Ukraine. And Hezbollah has had to pull its fighters back to Lebanon when several high-ranking commanders were killed in Israeli strikes. In the end, they seem to have concluded that if he couldn’t save himself, they wouldn’t either.

Earlier this year, Turkey reportedly objected to the offensive Syria’s rebels were planning and tried to negotiate. But Assad remained intransigent.

That intransigence is one of the themes of Sam Dagher’s Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria. Dagher chronicles the Assad family’s bloody rise to the pinnacle of Syrian politics and the crimes they committed to remain there. The book takes its title from a slogan used by Assad loyalists, capturing the mentality of a man who used to say the only way he’d rule Syria was “with the shoe over people’s heads”—that is, with the chronic threat of violence and humiliation.

—Gustav Jönsson