Professor at the American University of Paris, author of Dans la tête de Bachar al-Assad (with Subhi Hadidi and Farouk Mardam Bey, Actes Sud, 2018) and Syria: La révolution orpheline (Actes Sud, 2014), Ziad Majed evokes the situation in Syria and within the regime circles and networks.
An interview published (originally in French) in Moyen-Orient, April 2021.
Between 2011 and
2021, the regime of Bashar Al-Assad (in power since 2000) went from threatened
and moribund to strengthened and durable. How did he manage to adapt in a time
of war?
There are several factors
that have allowed Bashar Al-Assad to maintain himself in Damascus and to
survive the revolution and then the war, which he himself initiated against a
large part of the Syrian society.
The first is violence, which has been his only policy since the first day of the popular uprising and long before its militarization. It became unprecedentedly intense from the summer of 2012 onwards when he started his aerial bombing campaigns, the systematic destruction of hospitals, schools and infrastructure in the areas that escaped his control, the sieges he imposed on several localities, and the torture on an industrial scale in his jails. He has thus reproduced a scenario similar to the one reserved for the city of Hamah in February 1982 (which, under his father Hafez, had suffered a siege, destruction and massacres killing and injuring tens of thousands of civilians under the pretext of facing a rebellion of the Muslim brothers). Except that this time the scenario was extended to the national scale.
