Assad or We Burn the Country
How One Family's Lust for Power Destroyed Syria
-
- 129,00 kr
-
- 129,00 kr
Publisher Description
From a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist specializing in the Middle East, this groundbreaking account of the Syrian Civil War reveals the never-before-published true story of a 21st-century humanitarian disaster.
In spring 2011, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad turned to his friend and army commander, Manaf Tlass, for advice about how to respond to Arab Spring-inspired protests. Tlass pushed for conciliation but Assad decided to crush the uprising -- an act which would catapult the country into an eight-year long war, killing almost half a million and fueling terrorism and a global refugee crisis.
Assad or We Burn the Country examines Syria's tragedy through the generational saga of the Assad and Tlass families, once deeply intertwined and now estranged in Bashar's bloody quest to preserve his father's inheritance. By drawing on his own reporting experience in Damascus and exclusive interviews with Tlass, Dagher takes readers within palace walls to reveal the family behind the destruction of a country and the chaos of an entire region.
Dagher shows how one of the world's most vicious police states came to be and explains how a regional conflict extended globally, engulfing the Middle East and pitting the United States and Russia against one another. Timely, propulsive, and expertly reported, Assad or We Burn the Country is the definitive account of this global crisis, going far beyond the news story that has dominated headlines for years.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dagher, one of the few Western journalists based in Syria for long stretches of its ongoing civil war, minutely chronicles the Syrian government's fitful and avoidable descent into paranoia, repression, and nihilistic violence in response to the Arab Spring. He focuses on developments within the government, particularly on the relationship of president Bashar al-Assad with Manaf Tlass, a top military commander who initially argued for dialogue between the government and early protestors before realizing that "he had to become a killer or be killed" and becoming part of an elite circle of defectors to the opposition. Enduring images highlight some of the absurdity of modern Syria: Western-educated communications consultants carefully curated government social media feeds for external consumption, featuring "Syrian athletes, beauty queens, accomplished Syrians such as writers and filmmakers, soldiers fighting on the front, and volunteers painting a school," while death squads, writing for a more domestic audience, plastered violent graffiti on the ruins of villages whose inhabitants have been massacred. A narrow focus to the exclusion of considering larger simultaneous developments (particularly regarding ISIS and the Kurds) will turn off readers looking for a comprehensive history of Syria during this period. But this is an impressive feat of journalism in a challenging situation; Dagher's access to Tlass and other prominent defectors, and his painstaking reporting, make this an important record.