A seven-year civil war, over half a million citizens killed (although he U.N. has stopped counting), and 12 million people, or half the country’s population, displaced from their homes. That is the current situation in Syria. The 2011 Arab Spring that took down leaders such as Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya also sprung up in Syria that year. Yet, Bashar al-Assad is still in power. How is this possible that a dictator as brutal as Assad is still in power? We are going to take a look at how we’ve gotten to this point, and how Syria differs from these other places and situations.

In 2011 the protests started out peaceful, and very localized. Poorer rural citizens were suffering economically, and wanted many corrupt local leaders removed. That all changed when a few teenage boys spray painted some anti-Assad graffiti on the wall of their school in the city of Deraa. The boys were arrested, and their families were not notified where they were taken. When the boys were finally released weeks later, one 13-year old boy had been tortured and beaten so badly that he died.

For those few weeks, protestors in the city gathered together to demand release of the boys. Each protest was met with violence from security officials, and a few deaths of protestors. Each funeral for a protestor killed or someone tortured and killed led to larger and larger protests, and more and more killings by the regime. Finally, protests grew so large in Deraa that Assad sent tanks into the city, and the Syrian government killed hundreds of citizens. But many of those in the city fought back. And a good portion of soldiers who didn’t agree with the regime defected from the army. These groups formed what is known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA), and thus the seven-year Syrian Civil War began.

As brutal a leader as Assad is now known, he wasn’t destined to be this way, or even be in this position in the first place. But the brutality was in his blood. His father Hafez al-Assad and his Baath Party came to power in 1982 after helping to stage a coup against the previous government. When the Muslim Brotherhood protested his government, he ordered his military to kill over 10,000 of the Sunni Muslims and flattened much of the city of Hama. Hafez then brought many of his Alawite sect, a minority Shia Muslim group, into power and leadership positions within the government.

At this point it should be noted that Syria is a majority Sunni Muslim country, as most Middle Eastern countries are. Although as previously stated, Assad and his top officials are Alawites, a Shia sect. So, a leader with minority religious beliefs is in power and has been for decades. That is an important aspect to keep in mind when looking at the Civil War.

Once Hafez’s Alawite minority sect took over power, his oldest son Bassel, not Bashar, was heir apparent to take over power in Syria as the next great Shia leader of the country. This threw Bashar on a wildly different career path from a young age when his father took over when he was just 5 years old. Bashar decided to become a doctor. In fact, an eye doctor, an ophthalmologist. Bashar would graduate from Syria’s University of Damascus in 1988, and then moved to London to pursue an advanced ophthalmology degree.

Bashar al-Assad was still living in London in 1994 when he received the news that his brother Bassel, the future leader of Syria, had been killed in a car crash. This forced Bashar to return to Syria immediately, where he would instantly take on the role of heir to the presidency. His father Hafez knew he would need political and military experience to be deemed a credible president by members of his Baath Party and the citizens themselves. Therefore, he started working with government leaders, and became a military doctor in the Syrian Army. After having spent 30 years as the leader of Syria, Hafez passed away in 2000. Upon changing the presidency age limits from 40 down to 34 (to fit Bashar’s age), he was elected president of Syria, continuing the decades old Assad rule of the country.

Fast forward to 2011 and the rising Arab Spring, and Assad is the ruler of a country that is experiencing a fierce drought, an economy that is down 62%, and cities that are vastly overcrowded due to rural farmer migration to the metropolitan areas. Syria is the type of country that provides all basic needs to their citizens, but when the population doubled under Bashar’s rule, the poorer government could no longer take care of the welfare state they had created. This led to further unrest among the population and continued to stoke the flames of the civil war.

Even up until this point, Assad was not seen as your typical Arab dictator, such as Hussein or Gaddafi with AK47 pointed upward firing rounds into the sky. He was still that sheepish shy eye doctor, who never really wanted in politics in the first place. Yet here he was, and the civil war would reach it’s turning point in 2013. By 2013 Assad had lost some major cities to the rebels such as Aleppo (Syria’s most populous city), and areas around the capital. This led to him implementing extreme measures. On August 21st, 2013 Assad’s regime fired sarin-filled rockets into a rebel held area around the capital of Damascus called Eastern Ghouta. The chemical weapons killed more than 1,400 civilians, making it the worst chemical attack in decades.

So why after two full years of civil war, and leaders in other countries being disposed of much more quickly, and horrific killings and poverty, was Assad still in power? The primary reason was the foreign backing that Assad enjoyed. He had two of the major world powers in his corner, Russia and Iran. Russia supports him for various regional strategic reason that I have discussed in a past article, such as military bases in the country. Iran supports him predominantly because they are the largest Shia Islamic Republic in the world, and they would love to keep in power one of only two Shia leaders in the entire Middle East (and a few other reasons that we will explore in future articles).

In 2012, as stated previously, the rebels had taken over large portions of land and cities. Iran then provided Shia militias to enter Syria, which consisted of tens of thousands of soldiers. Assad’s army was almost devastated in 2012, and the Iranian military commanders and foot soldiers changed the tide of the war. In 2015 Russia started using airstrikes on rebel strongholds, again turning major victories to Assad as the rebels did not possess air power. Due to Russian and Iranian interference, the rebels have virtually been decimated at this point in time.

In fact, the rebels themselves helped Assad stay in power. When the Free Syrian Army formed, it consisted of loosely held militias from all over the country. In-fighting between groups for foreign funding and leadership roles, went a long way in creating a downfall for the rebel groups. With the rise of ISIS as a major player in 2014, the rebels were then fighting a two-front war. They did not have the resources to fight the Assad regime and the Islamic State.

When international focus shifted to ISIS, the “Redline” that Obama had issued to Assad was not a top priority. Assad was now seen internationally as the “lesser evil”. Three years of attention from 2014 until 2017 was spent with military operations fighting ISIS. The CIA even started a $500 million training program to assist some of the Free Syrian Army groups. Only 60 trained individuals would end up graduating from this $500 million program, or $8.3 million per person. Therefore, with the U.S. focusing on the Islamic State threat, and Sunni Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, and Qatar opposing Assad but never taking any action, the international stance against Assad in effect helped keep him in power.

Finally, one major difference between Assad’s Syria and other countries, lay in his internal support. With decades of government creation, Syrian leadership benefitted financially while other citizens suffered. Assad’s leadership was dominated by his Baath party and members of his Alawite sect. Industries within the country such as energy, telecommunications, and construction were consolidated under just a few families. In fact, at one point during this time Assad’s cousin owned 60% of their national economy. So as you can see, the government and business leaders had no reason to remove Bashar, in fact it would actually hurt them if he left power.

This scenario of internal support held true for the Syrian military too. The military leaders and many of the soldiers were all Shia. Whereas the overwhelming majority of the population and rebels were Sunni. That is not so in other countries who changed leadership during the Arab Spring. In Egypt and Libya, you had Sunni military fighting against Sunni protestors and rebels. When a leader such as Gaddafi ordered his military to kill and fight protestors, they were faced with the tough decision to follow their leader’s orders and kill their religious brethren. And often the military turned on the leader and helped take over the country. The military leaders in Syria did not face that dilemma, as they were not religious supporters of those they were fighting against. Which leads us to over 500,000 Syrians now dead and over half of the country displaced, causing one of the largest refugee crises the world has ever seen.

As you can see, several circumstances led to Assad taking over power in Syria, as well as helping him remain in power. There is much more brutality that could be written about in Syria, and I do not believe the country will recover while Bashar al-Assad remains in power. And even should someone else step into the leadership role, it will take years and trillions of dollars to restore a country who has had entire cities leveled to dust. It is important for us to monitor events in Syria, because the U.S. will have a long-term interest in Syria whether it’s having troops on the ground, extinguishing ISIS, fighting Assad for chemical attacks, stopping Russian and Iranian influence, or helping with the rebuilding and recovery of the country. Unfortunately, this will not be a quick process, and the citizens of Syria will continue to suffer. But in my opinion, little progress will occur as long as the current leadership in Syria remains in place.

Sources:
Al Jazeera, “Syria’s Civil War explained from the beginning”, 4-14-18
Al Jazeera, “Why is Bashar al-Assad still in power?”, 10-04-16
Al Jazeera, “Why is Bashar al-Assad still in power?”, 4-14-18
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Cordesman, Anthony, “Assad: the real “Butcher’s Bill” in Syria”, CSIS.org, 4-06-17
De Haldevang, Max, “The enigma of Assad: How a painfully shy eye doctor turned into a murderous tyrant”, qz.com
Jamieson, Alastair, “How Syria’s ‘Geeky’ President Assad Went From Doctor to Dictator”, NBCNews
Soufan, Ali, “Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of Bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State”, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2017
Tabler, Andrew, “How Syria Came to This”, theatlantic.com, 4-15-18
Weiss, Michael; Hassan, Hassan, “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror”, Regan Arts, 2015