Tyrant now a pariah

Deir Ezzor, a city in an oil producing region in the east of Syria, was preparing for a stormy Ramadan. For weeks, the protest movement led by students had been staging mass demonstrations in a locality known for its defiance. The youths were determined to step up their campaign during the holy month, taking advantage of the potential of greater numbers flocking to mosques for evening prayers to swell the crowds.

At the weekend, however, the regime of Bashar al-Assad launched a pre-emptive strike. The army entered with tanks from all sides, arrested protest organisers and shot randomly in the streets, report activists. “There is no household that has escaped this attack,” says Adnan Othman, a Deir Ezzor protest organiser who is now in the capital, Damascus. Some were killed in the rubble of their homes, he says; others were shot on the streets or defending the entrances to their neighbourhoods.

The assault followed the storming of Hama, a conservative Sunni city in the west, on the eve of Ramadan. As in Deir Ezzor, protests in Hama – site of a 1982 massacre by Hafez al-Assad, the current president’s father and predecessor, then fighting the Muslim Brotherhood – had swelled beyond what security forces would tolerate.

But in deciding to ratchet up the violence to crush a five-month uprising, the 45-year-old Syrian ruler, an eye doctor who inherited the presidency in 2000 on the death of his father, Hafez, overlooked one crucial element: how it would play with his neighbours.

A largely Sunni Muslim Arab world watched with horror as an army dominated by officers from the Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shia Islam, intensified its attacks on Sunni protesters. While Arab governments had stayed on the sidelines as one of the most bloody episodes of the regional uprisings unfolded, they suddenly cried out: enough. From Egypt to the Gulf, voices rose in unison to demand an end to Mr Assad’s violence. The harshest words were delivered by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, who denounced the “killing machine” that has by now left an estimated 1,600 dead and thousands in custody. “The numbers of those killed or injured or detained are simply horrific. The king could not ignore this any more,” says Hussein Shobokshi, a Saudi columnist.

Arab states will be treading carefully, however, taking into account the factors that kept them silent for months with an eye on the fragile status quo of a strategically important neighbour. Syria remains in a state of war with Israel, which occupied Syria’s Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war. It has significant influence over Lebanon, a divided country that fears chaos in Syria could spill over to its territory. It also has a tight friendship with Iran, a leading regional power with nuclear ambitions that considers Syria its gateway to the Arab world.

Long before the Arabs spoke out, the US had decided that Mr Assad had lost legitimacy. Turkey, which had developed a close relationship with the Syrian leader in recent years, is losing patience with him, too, and now says it is waiting for immediate concrete measures that stop the killings and allow a peaceful democratic transition.

“We are now entering a process of the gradual delegitimisation of the regime,” says Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Centre, a think-tank. “I have no doubt the regime will continue killing and that will force the international community into a reaction.”

No one is considering a Libya-style military intervention. But analysts say Damascus could be suspended from the Arab League and that Gulf states could join the US and European Union in imposing economic sanctions. This would come at a time when the economy has already suffered a massive blow. The tourism industry, one of the main sources of foreign currency, has been shattered, trade severely disrupted and foreign investment halted.

Source: FT.com