Assad or We Burn the Country

April 15, 2019
A harrowing, deeply researched look inside a country riven by a brutal, long-running dictatorship that would rather destroy the country and its people than relinquish power. To understand Bashar al-Assad's use of lies and terror to subjugate his people, journalist Dagher, who spent 15 years covering the Syrian civil war for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times (he was expelled from the country in 2014), looks first at the regime of his father, Hafez al-Assad, who established the violent playbook. Hafez and his right-hand man, Mustafa Tlass, seized power in 1963 and created a dreaded secret police force, brutally eliminating all opponents and inklings of opposition. Assad's second son, Bashar, who was enlisted as successor only when his "golden knight" older brother was killed in a car wreck, assumed power in 2000 upon his father's death. He was packaged as a "reform" leader, and he was courted by world leaders especially after 9/11 as the lynchpin in fighting Islamic terrorism in the Middle East. Meticulously and systematically, Dagher shows how the glamorous front concealed the truth: Assad was behind the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005; he was enjoying the full support of Hezbollah and Iran; and, when the Arab Spring erupted in 2011, he employed the murderous tactics of his father across the country. His support by Iran and ultimately Russia allowed him to remain in power by presenting the Syrian civil war as necessary in defeating the Islamic State. Dagher scored a highly valuable source for this work, Manaf Tlass, son of Mustafa, who was, as the familial roles played out, Bashar's own right arm in the early years of his rule (he defected to France in 2012). Besides insiders, the author interviewed numerous opposition leaders who endured terror and torture to challenge Assad's dictatorship yet "must surrender to the fact that there's nothing we can do if the entire world wants Bashar to stay." A riveting chronicle from a courageous journalist who was there to witness and report the truth. A book that should deservedly garner significant award attention.

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April 29, 2019
Dagher, one of the few Western journalists based in Syria for long stretches of its ongoing civil war, minutely chronicles the Syrian government’s fitful and avoidable descent into paranoia, repression, and nihilistic violence in response to the Arab Spring. He focuses on developments within the government, particularly on the relationship of president Bashar al-Assad with Manaf Tlass, a top military commander who initially argued for dialogue between the government and early protestors before realizing that “he had to become a killer or be killed” and becoming part of an elite circle of defectors to the opposition. Enduring images highlight some of the absurdity of modern Syria: Western-educated communications consultants carefully curated government social media feeds for external consumption, featuring “Syrian athletes, beauty queens, accomplished Syrians such as writers and filmmakers, soldiers fighting on the front, and volunteers painting a school,” while death squads, writing for a more domestic audience, plastered violent graffiti on the ruins of villages whose inhabitants have been massacred. A narrow focus to the exclusion of considering larger simultaneous developments (particularly regarding ISIS and the Kurds) will turn off readers looking for a comprehensive history of Syria during this period. But this is an impressive feat of journalism in a challenging situation; Dagher’s access to Tlass and other prominent defectors, and his painstaking reporting, make this an important record.

June 1, 2019
For decades, the images emerging from Syria have been ghastly, terrifying, heartbreaking, the violence wholly attributable to the father-and-son regimes of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad. Having clawed his way to power through a series of coups, Hafez ruled Syria by perpetuating a pervasive culture of fear and abject loyalty in order to legitimize his authoritarian mandate. In seeking his successor, Hafez first pinned his hopes on his eldest son, Bassel, but when he was killed in a car accident, the mantle fell to his younger son, Bashar, by all accounts a mild-mannered opthamologist living in London. Yet when Bashar returned to Syria, he more than made up for his lack of political or military experience, stepping into and exceeding the role of cruel and bloodthirsty despot his father bequeathed. Parsing the long-standing Syrian nightmare in dizzying detail with the help of Assad insider Manaf Tlass, veteran Middle East journalist Dagher dissects the myriad competing sectarian and geopolitical influences that have culminated in one of the worst humanitarian crisis of our time, providing readers with a deep look at a horrific civil war.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2018

Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Dagher has lasered in on the war in Syria since 2012 and for a time was one of few Western reporters and the only American based full-time in Damascus. So look to this account of President Bashar al-Assad's determined destruction of his country and his people.

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