In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [114]
And they did. On March 15, a small antiregime protest broke out in front of Damascus University, followed by unrest in the southern Syrian city of Der’a, the capital of the southern Houran region of Syria from which my business partner, Leila Hourani, and her family hail. The protests were instigated when security officials arrested a group of children aged ten to fourteen for scrawling on a wall, “The people want the fall of the regime”—a slogan seen widely in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. After failing to convince the regime to release the children, their families flooded the streets of Der’a to demand their release. The regime responded with force on March 18, killing six and injuring scores of others.
On March 21, the regime sent a delegation of high-level officials native to Der’a, including deputy foreign minister Faisal Mekdad, to engage with local tribal leaders and quell the violence. The children were released and the governor of Der’a was sacked, but the regime continued to use force to disperse demonstrators on March 22, killing another six. While the protests were non-Islamic in nature, on March 23 the protestors also chanted “No to Iran, no to Hizballah!” and “We want a leader who fears God!” The latter of these slogans constitutes a reference to the Assad family’s roots in the Alawite faith, the heterodox offshoot of Shiite Islam that dominates the Syrian regime.
Perhaps more notable than the scale of the protests was the protestors’ demographic base. The tribal Sunni population of the Houran region has played a key role in stabilizing the Assad regime. For hundreds of years, tensions had flared between Syria’s Alawite community and its Sunni majority. The flash point for this simmering conflict had last occurred in February 1982, when the Sunni-based Muslim Brotherhood threw Hafez al-Assad’s security forces out of the northern Syrian city of Hama. The regime responded by shelling the city, killing an estimated thirty thousand people, and arresting thousands of suspected Muslim Brotherhood supporters all across Syria, many of whose whereabouts remain unknown to this day. To stabilize the regime, Hafez gave it a veneer of Sunni legitimacy by co-opting tribal Sunnis from the Houran region and the Jazeera region of eastern Syria—as well as the Sunni Damascene and Aleppine merchant trading families—to join the regime’s core of Alawites, Druze, Ismailis, and Christians. The protests in Der’a began to crack and break away that Sunni veneer.
In response to the 2011 uprisings, Assad delivered a speech before the Syrian parliament on March 30, 2011. Despite multiple reports that Assad would announce sweeping reforms, the president instead gave a defiant speech with no specific details. Nearly two dozen times, Assad blamed the protests on a vague conspiracy of some type coming from the United States and Israel, and he dismissed the notion that an “old guard” or other hard-line faction was holding him back from launching domestic reforms. The protests quickly spread to other Sunni areas and cities, including Homs, Latakia, and Banias on the Syrian coast. The regime reacted with lethal fire as well as the deploying of Shabbiha (Ghosts), bands of Alawite thugs and militia that threatened and terrorized Sunni communities. Sectarian tensions increased, and Sunni refugees from the village of Tal Khalak, which is surrounded by a constellation of Alawite villages located along the Lebanese frontier southwest of Homs, fled into Lebanon. By late April, around one thousand Syrians had perished, and the regime had arrested another ten thousand in what had quickly become its biggest crackdown under Bashar al-Assad, dwarfing its arrests following the 2000 to 2001 Damascus Spring and the 2005 Damascus Declaration.
The unrest created a problem for the Obama administration in terms of how to punish the Assad regime for the crackdown. The Bush administration, for all its emphasis on democracy promotion, had