Assad or We Burn the Country by Sam Dagher

Author:Sam Dagher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

Along with the regime’s brutality, struggles over leadership and ideology among Bashar’s opponents, fueled by the competing agendas of regional powers like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and others, had an equally poisonous and destructive impact on people’s quest for liberation from the Assads. It was a contest for the revolution’s heart and soul and Syria’s shape and direction after the Assads.

The sources of friction among Bashar’s opponents included money and access to funds, the role and place of Islam, the stance toward the country’s minorities (particularly Bashar’s Alawite community), and deepening schisms between urban and rural communities as well as between those committed to peaceful resistance and those embracing armed rebellion.

More fundamentally, this was a generational struggle. Youthful and idealistic activists like Mazen Darwish sparred with a cadre of older opposition leaders, who to the young seemed like a by-product of the very regime they wanted to topple—plagued by the same closedmindedness, selfishness, and tyrannical ways.

These clashing dynamics were on display in Homs when Mazen secretly visited the city in late 2011.9

Tensions flared among activists when armed men from Baba Amr started coming to an adjacent, largely bourgeois neighborhood called Insha’at to offer protection from regime attacks on protesters. Some Insha’at activists associated with Mazen felt that this marred the peacefulness of their cause. Mazen also learned that Muslim clerics in several rebellious Homs neighborhoods were handing out monthly salaries, food, and other assistance to families of protesters detained by the regime. “At a time when people like us were distributing slogans, they were giving out money and food,” said Mazen.

Money, arms, and regional agendas worked to co-opt or sideline those like Mazen who were insisting on a peaceful struggle against the regime. The group with the deepest pockets was the Muslim Brotherhood. The organization had been shattered after Hafez’s massacre in Hama in 1982, and many Syrians believed that its leaders had abandoned the city to its tragic fate. Its exiled chiefs saw the Arab Spring and Syria’s revolution in 2011 as a historic chance for a comeback and, more important, for power. Still, the group seemed sensitive to the stigma associated with its name inside Syria and went out of its way to be collaborative and build partnerships across the spectrum of Syrian opposition, and it even conceded a visible leadership role in the first Syrian National Council in which Mazen’s Local Coordination Committees (LCCs) were represented. Brotherhood representatives inside Syria enthusiastically reached out to Mazen, seeking cooperation.10

But on the side, Brotherhood-affiliated charities channeled generous aid to rebellious communities, especially in cities like Homs, in order to buy loyalty and a following. Funds came from Qatar and Turkey, two countries embracing the Brotherhood region-wide and shaping political transitions in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia to favor the movement.

The Brotherhood and its patrons were among the first to support militarization in Syria under the pretext of protecting civilians. “We had doubts from the start that civil protests could compel Bashar to abandon power,” said Brotherhood leader Mohammad Farouk Tayfour.11

In the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.