Forever is Over
On the Fall of Bashar Al-Assad
Upon entering Syria you are ‘welcomed’ with one of the most recognisable sentences associated with the Assad regime: “our leader forever, Hafez al-Assad.”1
This politics of eternity was an inherent component of the Assad dynasty, which ruled over Syria for over five decades - until yesterday. Eternity, it turns out, isn't so eternal.
The Assads, first father and then son, heavily invested in projecting an image of eternity. It was to make it virtually impossible to even conceive of a Syria without them. As far as they were concerned, Syria starts and ends with Assad. This is why his shabbiha loyalists would graffity “Assad or we burn the country”2 on the walls of besieged cities. It was a particularly odd phrase because they never made the distinction between Assad and Syria in the first place. ‘The country’ here is the projected one, the one that revolutionaries, protesters and armed rebels alike were fighting for.
To the Assadists, those other people were not fighting for Syria. How could they be? To them, Assad is Syria.
Sorry, was.
They were wrong, and here's the thing: dictators and their apologists actually have something in common with most of us, which is that they are terrible at predicting the future. Hitler's thousand year reich lasted 12 years. The Assads were apparently trying to be more ambitious so they aimed for.. eternity.
How did the Assad regime plan for eternity? Surely, one would imagine, they had a long term plan. Forget Soviet planning here. Those were for five years at a time.3 The Assads said forever. The year 2318? Yes we're still here. 3225? Naturally. We present to you Bashar Hafez Assad the 42nd, or something.
They were wrong. Bashar did not even last as long as his father, (yel3an roo7ak ya) Hafez, and he's now hiding in Moscow like the coward that he is. The kids who graffitied the sentence ‘your turn is next, doctor’4 on the walls of Daraa in 2011 got it right.
Objectively, we can now say that these kids were better at predicting the future of Syria than the country's dictator. In response, Assad ordered the mass-arrest and mass-torture of 23 schoolboys - but he still got it wrong.
So what did Bashar get wrong? In 2011 he made a decision. He decided to use maximum force to crush the peaceful uprising against his regime, an uprising that wasn't even always calling for revolution at first. Assad decided to torture a 13 year old boy, Hamza Al-Khateeb, and return his mutilated body to his family to send a message. The message was received, but instead of the regime forcing them into silence, Syrians revolted in even greater numbers.
Assad proceeded to do the same on an industrial scale. The number of Syrians murdered by the Assad regime is unknown, but it is likely in the upper hundreds of thousands. It may be over a million. The United Nations stopped counting in 2014, when the death toll was over 100,000. In 2021, they estimated that the numbers are over 300,000. We just don't know, but consider that in a single prison, Saydnaya, an estimated 13,000 people were hanged between 2011 and 2015 alone. That was 8 years ago, and we are still discovering corpses of Syrians killed in Saydnaya as I'm writing these words.
So this was Bashar's plan. It was a simple one. Kill, torture, exile and forcibly disappear as many people as possible. He could have stepped down in 2011 and used his billions to live out his life on some island somewhere, or in the UAE. But no, he unleashed the army and his shabbiha on children, men and women and built an extensive prison apparatus to process those his state forcibly disappeared. His brother, Maher Assad, had a gigantic bunker built. The bunker was evidently for him to survive almost anything including (I'm guessing) a nuclear apocalypse - and yet it took some 10 days for rebels to reach Damascus and for Maher to escape in the same cowardly manner as his brother Bashar.
It's worth pointing out that Bashar's plan failed from the start. He very quickly needed Hezbollah's help alongside Iran itself, and even that wasn't enough. That's why Russia intervened in 2015. From the very beginning, and despite having complete air supremacy, Assad was unable to defeat a loosely organised group of rebels mostly armed with older weaponry (including weapons stolen from the regime itself.) He was unable to because he simply did not have enough legitimacy to persuade more men to die for him, which also meant that he did not have enough men at all. Those numbers were dwarfed by the number of people fleeing Syria. In other words, there were very few men, relatively speaking, who were actually willing to die for Bashar.
Contrast the speedy collapse of his army with the bravery required to be unarmed protesters revolting while being aware of what the regime does.
I think a lot about a short film that Bassel Shehadeh shot on Christmas 20115 where he and his friends were taunting regime snipers with a popular chant at the time: “freedom forever, despite you Assad.”6 Here was another appeal to the temporality of eternity. The Syrian regime was telling them that Hafez is the eternal ruler, and they responded with a resounding No.
Here is that same chant in 2012:
I don't know if freedom is eternal, but what I can once again conclude is that these Syrians now have a better track record at being right than the Assad regime itself. The regime claimed that it would last forever. These Syrians declared that it won't. They were right, and the Assad regime was wrong.
On some level the regime probably also knew that, which is why it deployed more ‘conventional’ tools of state repression like the army and the prisons. It wasn't ‘just’ a matter of making sure that anyone who dared challenge the state's conception of time was punished, but also at time those who didn't. The regime did not just punish and kill those who resisted. It also punished and killed random civilians. Bashar, as with his father, needed to project an image of omnipotence: anyone, anywhere can be punished if I choose it. This was power as Assad viewed it, and it worked for two generations - until it didn't.
There is something profoundly hopeful in the fact that those in power are themselves terrible at predicting the future, including their own survival. This is why they deploy so many resources to seek to control the past and future, and why the alternative green-white-black flag was always so dangerous to the Assad regime: it is the flag of independence, used in Syria prior to the Baathist regime takeover. With time, it no longer came to symbolize a flag of the past. It became the flag of the present. People were creating community gardens and soup kitchens, mutually-owned libraries and free first aid clinics while using that flag to signal to others that here is a place you can feel safe, a place you can find community in.7
Compare that with what the Assadist flag was used for. Syrians did not put that flag above soup kitchens. It wasn't there to symbolize a place of meeting to discuss the future of Syria. It was there to remind anyone passing by that the state is present here, and that you must therefore lower your head and submit.
That flag is now history, just as the Assad regime itself, the ‘forever’ regime that lasted 54 years.
It rhymes in Arabic: Qa’id ila al-abad, al-amin Hafez al-Assad (قائد إلى الأبد، الأمين حافظ الأسد)
Also the title of a book by x which I've reviewed for Y
Kinda - Stalin was hoping for his own eternal rule
It's a reference to Assad being an ophtalmologist. No, I am not joking.
A deeper look into this film, Bassel and Homs is going to be the subject of the next pieve
This also rhymes in Arabic: Hurryeh lel'abad, ghasben 3annak ya Assad (حرية للأبد، غصبًا عنك يا أسد)
This isn't to say that nefarious actors don't also use the same flag, as the Turkish-backed SNA demonstrate today.
I can't help but see Syria's past as our future and wish we could simply skip to the part where we topple the fascists.