SYRIA : Another Arab Country under turmoil
One of the last remaining bastions of quiet in the Middle East, Syria has been struck by a wave of protests over the past week in Damascus and other cities. But observers say the turmoil is still on a small scale and well within the power of President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime to contain.
A series of increasingly larger demonstrations met with more increasingly lethal force was capped on Friday by the deaths of at least five people in the southern city of Deraa.
The demonstrations were sparked by the arrest earlier this month of 15 children aged 10 to 15 in the southern city of Deraa after being caught spraying anti-regime graffiti. The children came from a powerful and important tribe, which helped mobilize masses of people for protests demanding their release.
But their arrests struck a nerve with many Syrians, who resent the intrusion of the state security services, popularly know as the mukhabarat in their lives.
“However hard you try to avoid getting into politics, they still interfere with your life. They get involved with every small thing – even with something non political. They will call you in and humiliate and torture you. I doubt there is a Syrian who wasn’t affected personally,” Malik Al-Abdeh, who runs the Syria in Transition blog, told The Media Line. “It’s an anti-mukhabarat uprising.”
Turmoil in Syria has implications for the regional power struggle between Iran and the West. Assad is Iran’s most important ally in the Arab world, helping it influence events in neighboring Lebanon and serving as a base and arms depot for the Islamic Hamas and Hizbullah movements.
Observers said the protests over the past week are the biggest Syria has witnessed in two or three decades, but it is by no means certain that they will evolve into the mass demonstrations that have brought down leaders in Tunisia and Egypt and threaten a host of others in the region.
“It shows you how worried the government is that demonstrations might spread across the country,” Zisser said. “They understand that using power brutally is not the only way to deal with unrest. If it comes to a situation like in Libya, that might change, but right now it’s carrot and stick.”
A series of increasingly larger demonstrations met with more increasingly lethal force was capped on Friday by the deaths of at least five people in the southern city of Deraa.
The demonstrations were sparked by the arrest earlier this month of 15 children aged 10 to 15 in the southern city of Deraa after being caught spraying anti-regime graffiti. The children came from a powerful and important tribe, which helped mobilize masses of people for protests demanding their release.
But their arrests struck a nerve with many Syrians, who resent the intrusion of the state security services, popularly know as the mukhabarat in their lives.
“However hard you try to avoid getting into politics, they still interfere with your life. They get involved with every small thing – even with something non political. They will call you in and humiliate and torture you. I doubt there is a Syrian who wasn’t affected personally,” Malik Al-Abdeh, who runs the Syria in Transition blog, told The Media Line. “It’s an anti-mukhabarat uprising.”
Turmoil in Syria has implications for the regional power struggle between Iran and the West. Assad is Iran’s most important ally in the Arab world, helping it influence events in neighboring Lebanon and serving as a base and arms depot for the Islamic Hamas and Hizbullah movements.
Observers said the protests over the past week are the biggest Syria has witnessed in two or three decades, but it is by no means certain that they will evolve into the mass demonstrations that have brought down leaders in Tunisia and Egypt and threaten a host of others in the region.
“It shows you how worried the government is that demonstrations might spread across the country,” Zisser said. “They understand that using power brutally is not the only way to deal with unrest. If it comes to a situation like in Libya, that might change, but right now it’s carrot and stick.”
