Against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, world powers hesitated for more than a decade

On March 15, 2011, a few dozen demonstrators stormed through the Hamidiyeh souk in Damascus, chanting slogans hostile to the regime. In these alleys, where the portraits of the Assad trinity have long hung – Hafez, the father, who died in 2000; Bassel, the son promised to succeed him, who died in a car accident on route to the Syrian capital’s airport in 1994; and Bashar, his brother who became president – a revolution had just begun. It came to an end 13 years later, when Bashar took this same road for the last time, on Saturday night, December 7, fleeing the lightning rebel advance that had started less than 10 days earlier in the north of the country.

In 2011, this nascent revolution took the world powers by surprise, as they believed that the Syrian dynasty was better equipped to resist the wave of the “Arab Spring” than the potentates it had already swept away: Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January, and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak the following month.

After all, Bashar al-Assad had “only” been president for a decade. At just 45 years old, he was still considered capable of gauging the anger being expressed across an entire region. Against the “securitocracies” that have made the region their home, as Syrian political scientist Basma Kodmani put it. Against the capture of national resources for their own benefit, as embodied in Damascus by the disturbing opulence of the president’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf.

A month earlier, in February 2011, Vogue published an article entitled “A rose in the desert” about Asma al-Assad, wife of the master of Damascus. In December 2010, Paris Match glossy magazine ran the headline “Deux amoureux à Paris” (“Two lovers in Paris”) to mark a visit to the French capital by the dictator and his wife. In 2008, at former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s invitation, Assad had the honor of attending the Bastille Day parade from the presidential rostrum, on the sidelines of a Mediterranean summit.

It was a spectacular rehabilitation, just three years after France, alongside other countries, had accused Damascus of being involved in the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut in February 2005. The killing was the prelude to the departure of Syrian troops from Lebanon, which had been divided up since the end of the civil war in 1990.

Like its Tunisian and Egyptian predecessors, the Syrian revolution was in search of a dignity that had been trampled underfoot for decades. In 2011, the movement was not content to simply gather in ever-increasing numbers in the country’s main cities. It also took to social media, showing determined but peaceful crowds, a generation speaking the now-universal language of Facebook and YouTube. Destabilized, the Syrian regime responded with the only lexicon it mastered: that of violence. This violence constitutes the identity of the Syrian “state of barbarism,” in the words of sociologist and Arabist Michel Seurat, a French hostage who was captured in Lebanon and died in captivity in 1986.

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