In the previous thirteen chapters of this series we remembered the circumstances leading to the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War; the course of the war itself; the breakdown in Iraq’s relations with its coalition allies and with the United States in the war’s aftermath; the chain of events leading to the Gulf War; the start of the Gulf War itself; Saddam Hussein’s desperate efforts to maintain power as his military forces disintegrated in the face of coalition military pressure during Desert Storm; the ultimate collapse of his regime in the final days of the war; the manhunt for the fallen tyrant; Saddam’s trial and eventual execution; the political and social problems that confronted Iran’s people in the early years of the post-Gulf War era; the Islamic Revival Party’s controversial stance towards Iran’s ethnic minorities during the late 1990s: and the Mousavi government’s role in providing sanctuary for thousands of political refugees during the “Syrian Spring” of the year 2000. In this installment we’ll look at the collapse of Syria’s Baathist regime and the capture of Syrian dictator Hafez el-Assad.

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By mid-June of 2000 the Baathist dictatorship in Damascus, which had once seemed as unshakable and imposing as the Wailing Wall just across the Israeli border in Jerusalem, was coming apart like a worn-out dishrag. The tent city protest in the Syrian capital was growing in both scope and strength, and in other parts of Syria the movement for greater political freedom was building up momentum every day; even the previously rock-solid loyalty of the Syrian military to the Assad regime was starting to come into question as soldiers began either refusing orders to shoot the protestors or joining the protest movement outright.  One Syrian army major, a decorated veteran of the 1982 Syrian-Israeli conflict over Lebanon, chose to defect to Jordan rather than comply with the army high command’s directive to attack a crowd of women demonstrating in the streets of Aleppo. Another major chose to throw in his lot with the dissident movement, offering them his services as an advisor on combat tactics should the dissidents seek to mount an armed uprising against the Baathists.

And it wasn’t just Syrians whose voices were being heard in the tent city demonstrations. A large contingent of young Lebanese, hoping a change in governments in Damascus might finally end Lebanon’s status as a vassal of Syria, were pouring across the Syria-Lebanon border and joining the Syrian pro-democracy protestors in calling for the ouster of the Assad regime. There were also a number of demonstrators coming in from Europe and the United States, many of them children of Syrian emigrants who’d been forced to flee the country years earlier because of the Baathists’ repressive policies. The protests even saw a handful of Egyptian Coptics, fed up with the religious persecution they were enduring in their own country, make a brief visit to Damascus’ Tahrir Square in a bid to publicize their plight to the outside world. Across the Syria-Iraq border, Iraqi intelligence personnel kept a very close eye on the tent city rallies looking for clues as to exactly how deep internal discontents in Syria actually ran; this data was critical to the Baghdad government in gauging what the rallies meant as far as the national security interests of Iraq were concerned.

Across the Syrian-Israeli border, communications analysts from Israel’s Shin Bet defense intelligence service were picking up a surge in chatter between Hafez el-Assad’s presidential palace and the Syrian secret police headquarters. This surge, combined with the transcripts of the conversations Shin Bet was secretly recording, led the Israeli senior diplomatic and political leadership to conclude that the Syrian Spring movement was doing more damage to Assad’s power base than had been previously expected.

Middle East specialists at the U.S. State Department were coming to a similar conclusion, albeit by different means. Diplomats at the U.S. embassies in Beirut and Amman were sending eyewitness reports to Washington suggesting there was an increasingly strained tone in the official Syrian state TV’s news coverage of the protests in Damascus. That strain, one of the reports suggested, was a clear sign that the tent city protests were having an effect despite Assad’s declarations to the contrary.

On July 3rd, as the staff at the American embassy in Damascus was getting ready to celebrate Independence Day, the Tahrir Square rallies began taking on a new more poignant tone. That afternoon the families of twenty young men and women killed in the Ramadan Massacre showed up unannounced and began holding up photographs of their loved ones while a banner was unfurled bearing the simple inscription “Shame, Assad!” The tent city residents quickly took up the chant, and within minutes it was loud enough to be heard in the U.S. ambassador’s office several blocks away. Baathist security forces tried their best to silence it, but their efforts were to no avail-- in fact some veterans of the tent city protest have since suggested the security agents’ actions at that moment may well have been counterproductive.

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Over the next few weeks, the “Shame, Assad!” banner became a key icon of the Syrian Spring movement. Copies of the banner began to turn up in other Syrian cities, then at pro-Syrian Spring demonstrations in Europe and Canada; by the end of July, anti-Assad protestors in Great Britain were waving it in front of the gates of the Syrian embassy in London and their peers in the United States were chanting those words outside the Syrian U.N. mission in New York City as well as the Syrian consulate in Detroit. The Syrian embassy in Washington, meanwhile, had become ground zero for one of the largest ongoing human rights rallies the American capital had seen since the anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s. People had been steadily demonstrating outside the Washington embassy practically from the minute the first shots were fired in the Ramadan Massacre, but once the Syrian Spring movement kicked into high gear these demonstrations swelled exponentially; by the first week of August they constituted the largest anti-Assad protests being held in any city in the world outside of Damascus. Later some of the Damascus protestors themselves would credit the Washington embassy rallies with boosting American public and government support for the Syrian Spring movement at a critical moment in the movement’s history.

 It was in early September of 2000 that the political situation in Syria finally reached its ultimate tipping point. Fed up with the tent city demonstrations, the Assad government decided it was time to clear out the demonstrators once and for all and ordered the Syrian army to move against the tent city at first light on September 5th. To Assad’s shock, the commanding generals of the units to which he issued their orders refused to comply. Instead they urged the Syrian president to resign from office for the good of the country. This triggered a split in the Syrian military high command which proved to be irreparable: by 1:00 PM Damascus time on the afternoon of September 5th the chiefs of staff of the Syrian army, navy, and air force had all resigned their posts and the head of the Syrian Military Intelligence Directorate had been hurriedly pressed into service to take over as acting minister of defense for the Assad government.

   For the next seventy-two hours the situation in Damascus was in a state of flux bordering on anarchy. Bashir Assad and what remained of his inner circle were holed up within Assad’s presidential palace like soldiers inside a besieged fort while those troops still loyal to him became locked in a Mexican standoff with units which had gone over to the Tahrir Square demonstrators. Syrian air force jets hovered above a capital city that after weeks of angry shouts and fervent chanting had suddenly gone as quiet as a church mouse. Even the usually vocal tent city demonstrators were conspicuously silent as they waited along with everyone else for the endgame to finish playing out.

 The deciding move in that endgame was made in mid-afternoon on September 8th when army units siding with the dissidents broke through the cordon of security personnel surrounding the presidential palace and arrested Assad as well as most of his cabinet; the rest of the cabinet fled the country to seek asylum in Libya, while Assad’s son Bashir was captured that evening in the city of Homs while attempting to reach the Lebanese border. News of the Assads’ arrest sparked a wave of celebrations throughout Syria and a special session of the Israel prime minister’s cabinet in Tel Aviv to assess the potential impact of the Baathist regime’s collapse on the thorny long-standing dispute between Israel and Syria over possession of the Golan Heights territories Israeli forces had captured from the Syrians during the 1967 Six-Day War.

 On September 10th, two days after the Baathist regime was toppled, the Tahrir Square demonstrators finally began striking their tents and knuckling down to the business of organizing an effective post- Assad government for Syria. The desire of secular political groups for a liberal democracy was now in direct competition with that of Islamic factions for a Sharia-based theocracy; this competition was going to seriously complicate international politics over the next decade....

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