Middle East
Syria: Assad regime near end amid rising violence
[Click HERE for more analysis of the situation in Syria.]
By Tony Iltis
August 12, 2012 -- Green Left Weekly -- The 50-year rule of the Ba’ath Party in Syria looks to be effectively over. In the past month armed clashes have spread to the Syrian capital, Damascus, and the largest city, Aleppo. Armed opposition forces have taken control of several border points. On August 6, Prime Minister Riad Hijab defected to the opposition.
The regime of Bashar al-Assad — who inherited the presidency in 2000 from his father, Hafez al-Assad, who seized power in a 1970 military coup — no longer controls the country.
However, an end to the violence, which has claimed 20,000 lives since the uprising that broke out in March last year against Assad, looks far away. So, too, does the realisation of the uprising’s original aims: democratic rights and economic justice.
The regime has indicated it will cling to whatever power it can with counter-offensives in Damascus and Aleppo. Western demands that Assad face an international war crimes trial, and the nastier fate of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi who was brutally murdered after his overthrow and capture by NATO-led forces, has given Assad no incentive to compromise.
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Syria: Marxist intellectual arrested -- Free Salameh Kaileh!
By Omar S. Dahi and Vijay Prashad
April 26, 2012 --Jadaliyya -- At 2 am on Tuesday, April 24, 2012, the Palestinian-Syrian intellectual and activist Salameh Kaileh was arrested from his home “without explanation”, as his lawyer Anwar Bunni of the Syrian Centre for Legal Studies and Research put it. This is not Salameh Kaileh’s first time in a Syrian prison. He was a guest of the Assad family in its several jails for eight years and 11 days in the 1990s.