\u201cOur leader forever\u201d was a slogan one often saw in Syria during the era of President Hafez al-Assad, father of today\u2019s Syrian president.
\nkra19.at
\nThe prospect that the dour, stern Syrian leader would live forever was a source of dark humor for many of my Syrian friends when I lived and worked in Aleppo in the late 1980s and early 1990s. <\/p>\n
Hafez al-Assad died in June 2000. He wasn\u2019t immortal after all.
\nkra19.at
\nhttps:\/\/at-kra19.cc
\nHis regime, however, lives on under the leadership of his son Bashar al-Assad. <\/p>\n
There were moments when the Bashar regime\u2019s survival looked in doubt. When the so-called Arab Spring rolled across the region in 2011, toppling autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, and mass protests broke out in Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, some began to write epitaphs for the Assad dynasty. <\/p>\n
But Syria\u2019s allies \u2013 Iran, Lebanon\u2019s Hezbollah and Russia \u2013 came to the rescue. For the past few years the struggle in Syria between a corrupt, brutal regime in Damascus and a divided, often extreme opposition seemed frozen in place. <\/p>\n
Once shunned by his fellow Arab autocrats, Bashar al-Assad was gradually regaining the dubious respectability Arab regimes afford one another.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cOur leader forever\u201d was a slogan one often saw in Syria during the era of President Hafez al-Assad, father of today\u2019s Syrian president. kra19.at The prospect that the dour, stern Syrian leader would live forever was a source of dark humor for many of my Syrian friends when I lived and worked in Aleppo in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[980,905],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amcred.co.ua\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13064"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amcred.co.ua\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amcred.co.ua\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amcred.co.ua\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amcred.co.ua\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13064\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amcred.co.ua\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amcred.co.ua\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amcred.co.ua\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}