‘Assad or we burn the country: how one

family’s lust for power destroyed Syria’

This piece was initially​ ​published on LSE Middle East Blogs​ on October 16th, 2019.

‘Assad or we burn the country’ has become the most notorious slogan associated with the
Assad regime and its supporters in Syria. It’s been chanted by jubilant soldiers and militiamen,
graffitied at the entrance of besieged towns, and posted by both bots and humans on social
media accounts of activists and refugees. It is therefore no surprise that Sam Dagher, who was
based in Damascus between 2012 and 2014 before Assad’s henchmen detained him in an
underground prison and deported him from the country, chose it as the title of his book. Nor is it
surprising, though no less shocking, that this is the second major book on Syria with the word
‘burn’ in the title (after Leila Al Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab’s ​Burning Country: Syrians in
Revolution and War​).

The subtitle of Dagher’s ​Assad or we Burn the Country frames our expectations: ​How One
Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria​. The book takes us through the history of the family
and the country they’ve destroyed. It is a deeply disturbing history, with implications for both
Syrians and non-Syrians, and with lessons for both tyrants and those resisting them. Perhaps
more than most other regimes, Assad’s is one which has learned how to create new realities, on
the ground through extermination, and online through the Putinist motto (and the title of ​Peter
Pomerantsev’s excellent book​) ‘Nothing is true and everything is possible.’ Syria’s story is a tale
of destruction and creation, of horrors and ​awe-inspiring resistance​. Most importantly, what it
shows is that the contradictions generated by brutal suppression cannot be contained within the
borders of one nation. Assad’s pyrrhic victory could not have been possible without his main
backers – Russia, Iran and Iran’s sectarian proxies, most notably Lebanon’s Hezbollah – or
indeed without his supposed enemies (Turkey, Western governments and the Gulf monarchies)
and their own priorities.

But speaking of geopolitical causes and effects risks obscuring the dynamics that have
dominated Syrian life since Hafez Assad rose to power in a coup just three years after losing the
Golan Heights to the Israelis in 1967. Dagher thus dedicates the bulk of his book trying to
explain these very Syrian dynamics. From how the regime chose to brutally respond to peaceful
protests in 2011 to the mass defections in response, passing by the lessons Bashar learned
from his father’s slaughters in Hama and Aleppo (and Baniyas, Homs and Latakia) in the early
1980s or those Iran learned from its own repression against protesters, ​Assad or we Burn the
Country ​chronicles a tortured country while avoiding teleological interpretations. Nothing is
written in stone, Dagher shows. Rather, the burning of Syria was and is the result of political
decisions made at the very top of the Syrian hierarchy with the help of regional and global allies
and the choices of regional and global enemies.

Reading ​Assad or we Burn the Country makes one want to reach out to the characters in the
book and save them, or at least warn them. Syrians of previous generations couldn’t help but
think of the 1982 Hama massacre when they saw the mostly young crowd gathering on the
streets of Aleppo, Daraa, Homs, Damascus, Hama, Daraya, Lattakia or Douma. One activist
even told Dagher that the Local Coordination Committees, or LCCs, those grassroots groups
set up to coordinate between rebellious towns and villages, were infiltrated by the ​mukhabarat​,
or secret services. Among those within the LCCs who ‘were arguing the hardest for armed
resistance’, activists would later learn, were the ​mukhabarat​. One of the lessons for both tyrants
and those resisting them, it would seem, is that tyrants love armed resistance. It allows them to
portray the state’s fight as one against armed extremists, which of course is precisely what the
Syrian state did. In hindsight, this was entirely predictable. In the early days of the revolution,
there were even rumours, entirely believable, that the ​mukhabarat were smuggling weapons
into rebellious areas to facilitate armed confrontations.

But the cruelty of hindsight is the helplessness it can generate. Facilitated or not, the arming of
the revolution was inevitable. Syrians could not tolerate the sheer scale of Bashar’s repression
against peaceful protesters. Syrians of all ages and of all backgrounds, no matter how young or
old, no matter the sect, were being rounded up, detained, tortured and killed. Even children
were being tortured to death, their bodies mutilated and returned to their parents. The most
notorious case in 2011 was that of Hamza Al-Khatib, a 13-year-old boy from Daraa. Al-Khatib
was kidnapped by regime forces, brutally murdered and then had his corpse mutilated before it
was returned to his family. The widely distributed photos and videos of his body helped add fuel
to the flames of the revolution. And true to form, the Assad regime responded with
disinformation: pro-regime media outlets were instructed to say that Hamza was either tortured
by terrorists or not tortured at all; Bashar himself told the Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt
that Hamza was not tortured; and Fawaz Akhras, Bashar’s father-in-law, based in London, ​told
the Syrian leader​ to dismiss the video of Hamza’s body as British propaganda.

The Hama Doctrine

This was by no means a coincidence. As he was crushing the Palestinian/Leftist/Nationalist

resistance in Lebanon in 1979, Hafez turned his rage to the rebellious parts of Syria that never
fully submitted to his rule, particularly Hama. In Hama, Hafez went after the secularists and
community leaders first. Omar al-Shishakli, for example, was an influential local leader and
president of the Arab Ophthalmological Association and the Hama Medical Association. Part of
his role was to mediate between local Muslim Brotherhood leaders, who were encouraging
defiance, and the Assad regime. In the spring of 1980, al-Shishakli was summoned by Mustafa
Tlass, the then-governor of Hama (and father of Manaf Tlass, a close family friend of Bashar’s,
who defected in 2012 and went into exile), supposedly to discuss de-escalation. Instead,
al-Shishakli was tortured to death and his body dumped on the streets of the city. The regime
would do the same with many other professionals and prominent figures. The message was
simple: all those who peacefully protested, whether through labour strikes or other forms of civil
disobedience, were to be crushed.

This was the Hama Doctrine or, as Dagher’s chapter calls it, the Hama Manual: terrorise and
murder peaceful and secular opposition first, thereby crushing any notion of a multi-confessional
and peaceful alternative. When left with the Islamists (or perceived Islamists), use the War on
Terror rhetoric to inflame sectarian tensions. When the Muslim Brotherhood, particularly its
hard-line section the ​Tali’a al-Muwatila (Fighting Vanguard), started attacking minorities,
especially members of the Alawite sect Hafez belonged to, this allowed him to declare a war
against religious extremism. He then proceeded to use that war to crush all remaining
opposition. When the Islamist militants were defeated, Hafez’s forces started their ‘cleansing’
operations: they repeatedly raped girls and women of all ages; set people on fire or hacked
them to death; led people to mosques, shot them and then dynamited the mosques; looted
everything; and raised entire neighbourhoods to the ground. In February of 1982, tens of
thousands of people were killed by the Assad regime in Hama. His forces even graffitied the
shahada (the statement that ‘there is no God but God, and Muhammad is His messenger’), one
of the five pillars of Islam, on the walls of the conservative city, but replaced ‘God’ and
‘Muhammad’ with ‘Homeland’ and ‘the Baath’ respectively. This wasn’t over. When the surviving
members of the al-Khani family went back to Hama in the fall of 1982, they were forced to
attend pro-regime rallies. It wasn’t enough to know that their loved ones were killed. They were
also forced to endure this most gruesome of gaslighting manipulations and had no other choice
but to declare that it was not the regime, but ‘terrorists’, who killed their parents. In Dagher’s
words: ‘Children whose fathers had been executed by the regime grew up singing the glories of
Hafez.’

Sound familiar? In August of 2016, after four years of siege, the town of Daraya, a suburb of
Damascus, ​was emptied of its remaining people after a truce was reached between the regime
and local rebel groups. Shortly after being forced to pay their respects to friends and loved ones
killed by snipers, barrel bombs or starvation and leave their homes, the people of Daraya had to
endure ​the sight of Bashar himself praying in one of their mosques. To his left was Mufti
Hassoun, whose nickname ‘the Mufti of Barrel Bombs’ needs no explanation. Less than a year
later, we learned that the Mufti was among those ​who approved the hanging of up to 13,000
people between 2011 and 2015 in the notorious Saydnaya prison, a mere 35km (21 miles) or so
from Daraya. Similar scenarios would play out elsewhere as the Assad regime’s military
machine, heavily backed by Russia, Iran and Iranian-backed sectarian groups like Hezbollah,
retook liberated towns. And just as Hafez’s forces declared the regime to be quasi-divine, so
would Bashar’s: In 2011, two days after hundreds of Syrians took to the streets in Hama,
Bashar’s forces brutally crushed the protests, killing hundreds in the process. On the same city
walls, Bashar’s forces sprayed the words: ‘There is no God but Bashar’.

How long will it take for the seeds to grow?

The sheer horror faced by Syrians is more than enough reason to be cynical about the country’s
(and the world’s) future. But while hindsight can feel helpless, hope for the future does not. One
thing that Bashar has not been able to do is crush the extraordinary waves of creative defiance
that sprung out of the Syrian revolution, and Syrian activists know that. Dagher ends the book
with a quote by a woman named Sally, living in Germany where she sought refuge with her
husband. As the city of Daraa, the so-called cradle of the revolution, was being retaken by the
regime in July 2018, Sally told Dagher that: ‘they are trying to bury us, but they do not know
we’re the seeds of a revolution’.

Forty-nine years have passed since Hafez’s coup, nineteen years since Bashar took power, and
eight years since the Syrian revolution started. In those eight years, multiple media outlets
organically grew out of the wreckage and artists grabbed their brushes and musical instruments.
The Syrian Prints Archive alone ​counts over 300 newspapers​, the vast majority of which were
created in 2011 or since. They seemed to have responded to a calling they did not know they
had, a calling that was only whispered before 2011. ‘I know that I lost a lot, but at the same time,
I gained a lot’. So goes the song ‘​People’s Revolution​‘ by the Syrian rap group-in-exile
Refugees of Rap in 2015. The lessons learned in mass-organising and resistance under
extreme duress will stay with them for the rest of their lives. Their own children might soon learn
of the tactical mistakes made while also appreciating the many successes that the ​impossible
revolution achieved. How long will it take for those seeds to grow? Don’t write Syrians off just
yet.