History will mention the Assad family as having destroyed Syria twice: the first time politically, economically and morally, when it worked, throughout the time of its reign of terror, to stifle opposition of any kind, to dismantle the social fabric of Syria and to reshape it to be entirely at the service of a security regime, with segments of society following it and connected to its survival that benefit from it in terms of influence and money, at the expense of the impoverishment and marginalization of the majority of the people; and the second time materially, when it did not refrain from actually destroying cities, villages and neighborhood that had risen up against its power, by using the armed forces it has diligently been grooming for over forty years for such a task, paying no heed to the catastrophic results of this for the country's present and for its future. During the year and a half of the uprising, the violence of the Damascus regime has escalated, and its traveling massacres have progressed, to reach currently an average of one massacre each day, with the air force and armored divisions participating in carrying them out. The number of casualties has increased over the past two months to such an extent as no other country has known, even among those that have witnessed the fiercest civil wars. And in spite of this, the matter in the opinion of Syria's National Reconciliation Minister does not depart from being a “misunderstanding between the people and the government". The horrific scenes of destruction caused by air raids in the city of Kfar Nebel in Daraa two days ago, as well as the images of the killing of the inhabitants of Daraya in the countryside of Damascus, offer an example of the extent reached by the brutality of the regime in responding to the movement demanding that it leave – an extent that suggests its readiness to make use of other more lethal means as the opposition closes in on it, which has led world leaders to warn it against the consequences of resorting to banned weapons. Bashar Al-Assad took over, after his father's passing, a corrupt police state by all standards, in which the obsession with security prevails, in the sense of defending the regime above all else, and of the intelligence apparatus permeating its every level and controlling every detail of the daily lives of citizens, of whom thousands have been killed or have disappeared, without trial or even a charge, in detention centers that form corridors of slow death, under the weight of torture and disease. The promises with which he tried to bribe his country's citizens, so that they may overlook such blatant inheritance of power in a country that claims to have elections, state institutions and political parties, quickly evaporated – knowing that such promises had only been directed at the outside, as the interior did not enter much into the considerations of the ruling apparatus. The son quickly proved to be more tyrannical than the father, and took to “tormenting" Lebanon and its leaders as a means to maintain the state of fright that dominated the Syrian people and to prevent them from forgetting “the lesson of Hama". Yet the people, who had been waiting for the right time to express their desire to free themselves from this fraudulent regime bearing down on them, have proven that the likelihood of jail, torture and death no longer frightened them. Faced with such resolve for change, Assad, who asserted yesterday that he “needs time to win", found only obstinacy and the rejection of initiatives that called for a transitional period, as well as the adoption of gradual escalation of violence – first by dragging more armed forces into military operations that have come to include nearly all of Syria, then by clearing the path for additional Iranian interference through weapons and “volunteers", and finally by involving the air force in the confrontation against its own citizens. He perhaps has no choice left, before resorting to chemical and biological weapons, but to make use of his strategic arsenal of missiles to bomb the cities over which he has lost control. Will he do this then? We shall soon know the answer.
