14 Cards
EDITED BY Zack Beauchamp
2015-09-16 10:06:42 -0400
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The best way to see Syria's civil war isn't as something that started, out of nowhere, in 2011. Rather, think of it as a resumption of what Robinson calls "the first round" of Syria's civil war — which began in 1976, and ended with a shockingly brutal massacre in the city of Hama.
That year, Hafez al-Assad had Syrian forces intervene in Lebanon's civil war, on behalf of Lebanese Christian groups who were fighting Muslim groups. The Muslim Brotherhood and many other Syrian Sunnis saw this as heresy, proof that the Assad regime needed to go. They launched a low-intensity civil war, which went on for six years. To counter them, the Alawite regime courted allies among privileged Sunnis and the Christian minority.
Assad finally ended the war in a particularly brutal fashion: In 1982, he nearly leveled the city of Hama, where the opposition was strongest, slaughtering thousands of civilians in an indiscriminate barrage. The regime learned from this experience that mass violence was the smart response to unrest — a lesson that was applied particularly brutally in 2011.
But that was the wrong conclusion to take. Hama didn't solve the real causes of Syria's strife: authoritarianism, a fundamentally unequal balance of power, and threats between demographic groups. It merely put off a reckoning.
"The root issues and the competing sides have been the same" in both 1976 and 2011, Robinson writes. "A minority based regime, allied with other minorities along with privileged elements from the majority population, ruling over a poor and often dysfunctional state that does not tolerate dissenters."
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