Assad or We Burn the Country

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.