Hafez al-Assad, the Puppy Killer

That One Footage of the Syrian Army, And Why I Can't Get Over It

In Arabic, 'al-Assad’ literally means the lion. It was quite convenient. The Assad regime, after all, put a lot of efforts in projecting strength, invincibility even. At the various border entries into Syria, you'd be welcomed with the sentence qa’id ila al-abad, al-amin Hafez al-Assad. Our leader forever, Hafez al-Assad. The forever lion. Over half a century of totalitarian rule seemed so permanent that Syrian political culture had to various extent internalised the profound atomization required for such a regime to persist. No one could be trusted. ‘The walls have ears', they would say.

Of all the examples used to explain the level of moral depravity reached by that regime, there is one that, for some reason, always stood out to me. I'm not saying this was ‘worse’ than the ‘human slaughterhouse’ of Saydnaya or the barrel bombs or the chemical massacres, but it is the image that comes to my mind when I try and make sense of it all. I'll try and paint a scene, because I do not want t…