In March, as revolution swirled through the Middle East, Bashar al-Assad made a counter-intuitive move he thought would protect fortress Syria from approaching upheaval.
The autocratic president freed up access to social networking sites that had long been blocked in Syria, where they were viewed as subversive threats. Assad’s intended message was simple: Syria had nothing to hide. But within days, the ploy had backfired: as soon as Facebook, Twitter and other networking sites had been freed up in Syria their immense reach rapidly became apparent.
And so did their ability to organize – more effectively than any other tool in the armoury of the dissident old-guard, which had lived in exile, or in terrified silence inside Syria for at least the last 30 years.
“What they did with their internet and email in a few days was more than we could have dreamed to do in a lifetime,” says Ahmed al-Sharif, a native of the Syrian city of Hama, which was flattened by Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad in 1982 after the last organized bid to challenge the regime’s absolute power.
Assad inherited his father’s ruthless police state in 2000 and was well-schooled in how to safeguard it. But his gamble with the internet was not in the dictator’s playbook. And nor is much of what he has done since, in the face of the most serious threat either father or son have faced in the four decades the family has been in power in Damascus.
According to figures released by the United Nations on September 9, more than 2,600 citizens have been killed nationwide in a rolling series of protests and crackdowns that started in the southern city of Deraa in March, and show no sign of abating.
Following Assad’s ill-fated attempt at transparency, he has been anything but transparent: foreign media have been almost completely kept out of Syria, making scrutiny of the regime and its actions difficult.
Filling that vacuum – more so than anywhere else in the Arab Spring uprisings – has been social media. The open access that Assad pledged back in March has long been stopped, but a vigorous and committed underground network has made sure that mobile phone videos of protests and attacks by security forces have made their way onto the internet – often on the same day the events took place.
The footage has appalled much of the international community, but also exposed its inability – or unwillingness – to do much aside from imposing sanctions aimed at pressuring regime leaders. As the body count has mounted throughout the year, Europe, the UN and the US have done little besides pleading from the sidelines for Assad to stop shooting demonstrators. Meanwhile appeals from Syrian citizens for a Libya-style foreign intervention are unlikely to be heeded even after the success of the six-month Nato campaign, which saw Gaddafi’s family finally flee Tripoli in late-August.
STRATEGIC STRENGTH
“The stakes are far higher in Syria,” says a leading Lebanese politician on condition of anonymity. “And it is a totally different scenario there. There is no strategic significance to Libya, whereas there is an enormous strategic stake in Syria.”
For the past 10 years, Assad had positioned his regime as a champion of resistance causes, which he has used to try to re-assert Syria’s historical role as a regional power. He has hosted Hamas politburo chief, Khaled Meshal, supported Hezbollah and both Shia and Sunni groups who have taken on the US military in Iraq. His alliance with Iran has remained strong and been instrumental in Tehran securing the strategic foothold it now enjoys in central Arabia.
Central to Assad’s appeal among constituents, both inside and outside of Syria, has been his claim on defying Israel. It is a card he regularly plays, often as a convenient distraction for his regime’s shortcomings, and which had won him broad favour – until recently.
But there is a mounting sense that the sustained brutality being carried out in Assad’s name is weakening him – and steadily exposing as hollow the pillars of his regime.
After six months of people power, Syria is no longer an impregnable fort, and for the first time in more than 40 years, the Assad clan, which has run the country like a mafia, now faces a serious struggle to hang on. “For a long time nobody wanted to talk about what came after Assadbecause that was too frightening to contemplate,” says the Lebanese politician. “We have now reached a point where ‘what next?’ could be a reality.”
Such a scenario, unthinkable when the regional turmoil began, says much about the demonstrators’ commitment, in the face of overwhelming violence. “And it also says we have come too far now to stop,” says a Syrian activist, Mithal Aumran. “If we were to just go back to our homes now, the vengeance would be terrible. They would see this as a big victory.”
Even Iran now appears to sense something irreversible may be under way in Syria. In early September, Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, invited Syria’s leaders and opposition activists to Tehran to try to sort things out. He needn’t book a conference hall – neither side will be taking up his offer. However, the intervention inescapably marks Ahmadinejad’s growing concern that things are changing inside Syria. And without Assad, or the Allawite regime that has formed the family’s power base for the past 40 years, Iran’s capacity to influence affairs in the Levant and beyond could be imperilled.
With Assad now weakened by months of a relentless revolutionary current and the wavering will of some of his allies, Syrian opposition figures have reached a decisive moment. Their earlier will to organize as a coherent body with one voice has not so far led to political advances, or anything like an alternative administration. Momentum is instead still coming from the people Assad unwittingly empowered – those who take to the streets daily.
“There is no doubt that these videos that we are posting online are a powerful tool,” says one Istanbul-based member of the Local Coordination Committees, an umbrella organization of opposition activists from across the country. “They expose the regime for what it is and also show to soldiers what their colleagues are doing elsewhere in the country. It is a force for recruitment to our side.”
NEW BRIGADE
Indeed, the numbers of military defections do appear to be on the increase inside Syria –though not in numbers that yet pose a threat to the regime.
Those who are defecting hail mostly from small units, and their numbers are impossible to gauge accurately. However, one armed and organized unit, the Brigade of Free Officers, is trying to assert itself as a protector of demonstrators and also of defecting soldiers who are being hunted down by their former units.
This nascent brigade is presenting itself as an alternative to Assad’s military, if or when Damascus falls. But its numbers and deeds remain opaque, even if some of its members claim to have been involved in attacks on regular Syrian units in recent months.
In an interview in August with the website Now Lebanon, one ranking member of the Brigade said: “When the regime falls, the national Syrian army at large will align itself with the Brigade of Free Officers and will fall under its leadership. “[It] is not posing as an alternative to the regime or a party for the western world to negotiate with; its aim is to see the success of the revolution and to protect those taking part.”
As Syria’s Arab Spring approaches a potentially harsh winter, a reality is dawning that the worst is likely yet to come. The state has been constructed to avoid steady erosion from within, making the role of the demonstrators in driving the uprising onwards both critically important and very difficult.
“We know there is only one way to get this over the line and that is if the military splits and large numbers join us,” says the opposition leader in Istanbul. “I can’t be seen to be advocating that, because it would undeniably mean civil war. But to get to where Libya is now, we need something similar. The people can only take things so far.”