Inside Syria’s failed rebellion

Thick black lines had been scored over the graffiti under the cherubic image of President Bashar al-Assad that guards the road into Hama{minute}a. The military’s clean-up squad had been less than diligent though: the word kalib, dog, survived the paint-brush censorship, and the soldiers had forgotten to have the President’s gouged-out eyes repainted.Inside the city, the rebels had left behind evidence no amount of paint could obscure: the burned-down military officers’ mess on the Ard al-Khadra street, which mobs stormed in the hope of seizing weapons; the gutted office block which housed the justice department; the charred walls of the al-Hadr police station, pockmarked with machine-gun fire, where 17 police officers were lynched, before their mutilated bodies were thrown into a nearby canal.Behind the justice ministry’s office, a small group of young men described what happened when the military moved in on July 31, three months after rebel groups, armed with guns, knives and petrol bombs, seized control of much of the town. ???They used snipers to shoot at us,??? one says, and ???more than a dozen people were killed.??? The army, he claims, then tied the hands of local residents and forced them to roll on the street, all the while beating them with rifle butts.Ever since the spring uprising in Syria, the most serious challenge to the regime since it took power in 1970, commentators had been predicting that President al-Assad’s regime was on the edge of collapse. In spite of an energetic western media campaign, largely based on overblown accounts provided by exiled opposition groups, it is in fact becoming clear that the rebellion has all but collapsed: Damascus, for example, is more alive with everyday civic life than New Delhi.But there is no disputing that Syria’s government is far from slaying the three-headed dragon which threatens its future: a threat from the West; an economic crisis engendered by neoliberal economic reform; and a mounting Islamist threat.T