To them, you have become a demon. Assad has managed to classify all of the protestors, despite the sheer folly of this and the erroneous nature of this classification, as jihadists, even though many of them are secular. And you can see that I´m one of the rebels. I´m outside the country, but I´m one of those who supported it. And we´re secular.
There are a lot of people like me who are in the street and who are on TV and who are clearly a very secular face to this revolution. And yet, he succeeded in demonizing us all and portraying us as potential jihadists. And as such, the minority groups inside Syria, especially the Alawites [a religious sect with roots in Shia Islam] and to some extent, the Christians as well, felt that there will be future retribution against them, that their rights will be violated, that they will be trod upon so and marginalized and mistreated. And for this reason, they decided to prevent that.
So the crackdown and the repression and the bloodshed that took part by pro-[President Bashar] Assad militias was meant as a preventative tactic. They didn´t see our humanity. They saw only what potentially could happen if change is allowed to take place. So the nonviolent ethos that we´ve tried to use in the beginning failed because of this combination of demonization and a part of the Assad regime, of the protest movement, and the indifference by the international community towards the protest movement.
And that allowed step by step, for the people who are calling for armed struggle rather than nonviolent struggle to be heeded and to prevail and to unfortunately bring about a situation where we now have a civil war. And people feel that, on a moral level, they´re not sympathetic anymore to the revolution. We are even though there were the “crimes,” quote unquote, that could be attributed to the rebels are nothing in comparison to what the pro-Assad militias have done. But nonetheless, somehow, we ended up on the same moral plane in fact equally condemned in the eyes of the international community.
People are not saying, “We need to end violence,” as if, you know the rebels are as equally responsible for it as Assad. So unfortunately, in that sense, the revolution has failed. We toppled the regime, but we became equal militias just like the regime is all militias. The country is fragmented. And now we need to find a way to put things back together again. The international community has a role to play here. Without mediation between the different groups, there is no way this can be done with our own resources.
These kind of internal conflicts always require a mediation process. And that mediation process is complex. Part of it is political. Part of it is picking up a side and also empowerment so they can at least reach parity, so that, you know, they can sit down at a table. Because if one side feels that they are so dominant then they will never sit down at a negotiating table to talk about anything. That is what many rebels and many activists are trying to say to the international community. “Help us neutralize Assad´s air power at least, before you even tell us about political solutions.”
Because as long as Assad feels he can pound his way out of this, he can bombard his way out of this, he´s not going to even listen to the possibility of a political solution, or allow for a possibility for a political solution. So there are still a lot of things that need to be done by the international community to help us rise out of this quagmire into which we were allowed to fall.
Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian human rights activist who in 2003 founded the Tharwa Foundation, a grassroots organization that enlists local activists and citizen journalists to document conditions in Syria. In response to his activities, the Syrian government subjected Abdulhamid to repeat interrogation and threats. In September 2005, he and his family were forced into exile in the United States. From his home in Maryland, Abdulhamid remains one of the leading bloggers and commentators on events in Syria through the Syrian Revolution Digest.
Follow Ammar Ahbdulhamid on Twitter @Tharwacolamus and on his blog, Syrian Revolution Digest.
The Syrian Arab Republic originated as a secular, socialist state dominated by the Ba’ath party, an Arab nationalist movement. The state has since evolved into an autocracy headed by a single family and dominated by members of the minority Alawite sect, a branch of Shia Islam.
The Ba’ath Party took power in Syria in a series of coups d’état in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the leaders of those coups, Hafez al-Assad, became president in 1971 and led the country until his death in 2000. Under Assad, Alawites assumed control over the state security forces. In 1982, Assad’s forces stormed the city of Hama to brutally suppress a Sunni rebellion, killing thousands of civilians.
Following the death of Hafez al-Assad, his son, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president by a referendum in which he ran unopposed, officially garnering 97 percent of the vote. He was reelected in 2007, again with 97 percent of the vote.
The Syrian government is one of the world’s most brutal and restrictive. From 1963 to 2011, the government operated under an “Emergency Law,” which suspended many constitutional protections of civil liberties. The government continues to use arbitrary detention and torture against political opponents, and operates through an extensive internal security apparatus, including secret police. The government controls most of the country’s media outlets, and access to the Internet is permitted only through state-operated servers. The minority Kurdish population has been continually discriminated against and repressed.
Influenced by movements in Egypt and Tunisia, large opposition protests took place across Syria in 2011. The government responded with a harsh crackdown. Security forces fired on protestors, killing thousands. The crackdown led the Arab League to suspend Syria’s membership. The Assad regime attempted to appease dissenters through a series of low-level and largely inconsequential reforms in 2011 and 2012. However, the conflict has escalated into full-fledged civil war with both liberal and Islamic militias being formed to fight against the Assad regime. The Assad regime has continued to attempt to defeat the opposition using air strikes and heavy artillery to attack rebel-held neighborhoods. Freedoms of association, assembly, and the press were restricted even further as the government attempted to quell the uprising. Over a million people have been either internally displaced or fled the country as refugees.
In the summer of 2013, it was confirmed that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons to attack civilians. Over 600 people were killed in one such attack in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus using a nerve agent confirmed to be sarin. The Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons drew international attention and resulted in a renewed international focus on the nation and its civil conflict.
Freedom House rates Syria as “not free” noting that conditions even prior to the 2011 uprising and subsequent civil war were, at best, abysmal. It earned the worst possible ratings of seven in both the political rights and civil liberties categories. Conditions since the 2011 uprising have only deteriorated, and civil freedoms are restricted under the fear of violence. Freedom House has also expressed concern over rising sectarian tensions and massive displacement.