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By Root 510 0

angered diplomats and journalists in Damascus. In the year leading up to them, the Syrian regime had virtually paraded the dissidents before foreign diplomats attending their trials in the Old Justice Palace next to the Souk al-Hamidiyya, the main market in Damascus’s Old City. I had attended Kilo’s last trial earlier that spring. After making a mix of journalists and diplomats wait for over three hours, courtroom officials opened the doors—specifically for foreigners only. Inside, Kilo was kept in a large cage in front of the judge. After a few minutes of deliberation, the judge announced that the case could not be tried in that court and referred the case to another judge. As the doors to the courtroom swung open again and we were escorted out by uniformed security officers, each of us shook Kilo’s hand through the bars of the cage. Kilo, who had grown a thick mustache since I had last interviewed him a month before his arrest, smiled widely and thanked us. We never met again.

With President Assad’s opponents in jail and the United States once again engaging Damascus, the way was clear for the regime to prepare for Assad’s reelection to a second seven-year term as president. Syria’s constitution stated that parliament must approve a candidate for president, who then in turn must be approved in a national referendum. In the last referendum in July 2000—a year after the death of his father, Hafez—Bashar had won the referendum with an approval rate of more than 97 percent of ballots cast.

In the weeks leading up to the new referendum, scheduled for May 27, posters with a stylized black-and-white photo of Assad began appearing on bus stops and billboards throughout the Syrian capital. The poster’s background featured a thumbprint—the mark that voters had to make on each ballot in the “Yes” or “No” box. The thumbprint’s ink was red, white, and black and adorned with two green stars—a replica of the Syrian flag. Below the image, in big red Arabic script, read the word “Mnhibak,” which roughly translates from the Syrian Arabic dialect as “You are our beloved.” As the posters multiplied, my Syrian friends mentioned under their breath that Iraqi refugees in Syria found the posters confusing, as “Mnhibak” in Iraqi dialect means “We don’t like you.”

I headed from my apartment down Shahbandar Street to an Assad rally in front of the Central Bank on Damascus’s central Sabeh Bahrat (Seven Seas) Square; “Mnhibak” posters were taped to nearly every tree and signpost. Russian-made Syrian military helicopters, with missiles attached and towing streamers reading “Mnhibak,” circled over the square. A hot-air balloon hovered over the square, also carrying a giant “Mnhibak” poster. Everywhere thousands of Syrians with “Mnhibak” T-shirts, baseball caps, and signs filled the streets. Everything was regimented—young boys and men stood in lines facing rows of girls and women.

As I passed by, I could tell from their appearance and dialects that they were from eastern Syria—the part of Syria’s Sunni community that Bashar’s father had co-opted by bringing them to the Syrian capital to work in the regime’s bureaucracy. As I walked along, groups of young Druze from the southern Syrian town of Swaida and Alawites from the Syrian coast clustered around the square’s central fountain. These young Druze and Alawite men carried posters showing photos of President Assad with logos of Syriatel, the cell-phone provider owned by Assad’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf. A few of the women wore Islamic veils, but most were dressed in tight-fitting jeans and paraphernalia, like biker chicks. On a terrace above the columns at the front of the Central Bank stood all the regime’s main players—Bashar, his wife, Assad family members, ministers—who waved to the crowd below. If anyone needed a snapshot of Bashar’s minority-dominated regime and its pecking order, this was it.

Taking out my notebook and speaking in Arabic with a few of the attendees caused scores of people to flock around. One man from Damascus said they supported Bashar because he was “open-minded and just—everything