The Assad’s family rule has come to an end as rebels in Syria stormed Damascus and quickly took control of the city after the Syrian Army and security forces laid down their weapons. Syria’s President and dictator for twenty-four years, Bashar al-Assad fled the city and is known to be missing. Earlier reports claimed he was aboard a plane that crashed west of Homs. While the crash did occur, Arabic news sources report that Bashar al-Assad was not on the plane and remains missing.
The Assad family ruled Syria with an iron fist and turned the country into a North Korea of the Arab world for more than fifty years. Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad took power with a coup in 1970 and became President in 1970. He was a member of the Ba’ath Party which propagated Arabic nationalism with a mix of socialism, but instead of developing the country, Hafez al-Assad created a despotic, and classist society where high-ranking Party members enriched themselves. Following an uprising against the government in the late 1970s and also a failed assassination attempt against his life, Hafez al-Assad, proceeded to bomb and destroy the city of Hama for supporting the uprising and killed more than 40,000 civilians. This was the massacre of Hama in 1982.
His son, Bashar al-Assad, took power following his father’s death in 2000 and followed his example at dealing with uprisings by shooting at protestors in 2011. Syria was the place where the Arab Spring ended in massacres and bloodshed as Bashar al-Assad’s fired on peaceful demonstrators in Damascus, Homs and Hama and other cities. The brutal repression against peaceful demonstrators lead to many Syrian soldiers defecting from the army to join the secular and multi-ethnic Free Syrian Army which kickstarted an armed uprising. Bashar al-Assad responded to the uprising as his father did and defeated the Free Syrian Army by obliterating whole cities and massacring civilians. A wave of Islamic militants took over the militant opposition after the defeat of the Free Syrian Army.
More than 12 million Syrians left the country during the war and up to 600,000 people were killed mostly by government forces. The Syrian Army also used chemical weapons on civilians in Ghouta and Douma for which Bashar al-Assad has an arrest warrant against him by France. The government of Bashar al-Assad survived thanks to the help of Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah forces that fought off Syrian rebels. Syrian rebels took advantage of Hezbollah’s withdrawal from Syria and to mount a successful counter-offensive that ended to oust the Assad family from power.
Attention to the Syrian conflict will now focus to the north-western coastal enclave of Tartus and Latakia which is still under control of Assad’s forces and the north-east of Syria which is controlled by the Kurds.
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