Bashaar al-Assad was a long way from perfect, but odds are he was a lot better than what replaced him. From Lorenzo Maria Pacini at strategic-culture.org:
This is the testimony of a Syrian who fought for his country and his people and who now suffers the most terrible defeat in life.
This article stems from a conversation I had with an old friend who was a commander of the Syrian Armed Forces, whose courage was appreciated and recognised throughout the Middle East. A true socialist from another era, who was never afraid to speak his mind and who, despite contradictions and different political views, never betrayed his country and support for his government.
As he has no pleasure in revealing his name, as he is still engaged in institutional activities abroad, we will call him by his fictional name Ram. Whether one agrees with his words or not, this is the testimony of a Syrian who fought for his country and his people and who now suffers the most terrible defeat in life.
The reunion with Ram
In Ram’s private study there is an air of life lived to the full. Hanging on the walls are various paintings of Syrian landscapes, along with some Koranic invocations and terracottas commemorating the battles he took part in. A few old books in Arabic can be glimpsed on the bookshelf, along with many posters of documents in various languages. Here and there are now faded photographs of men in camouflage uniforms in the desert. Looking towards the entrance, a Syrian flag with Bashar al-Assad’s face still full of dust, dirt and a few rips, as if it had been taken from the battlefield and immediately put on the flagpole. In the centre, a photo of his father, a wise and good-looking Arab man, with a black mourning keffiyeh on top.
We had known each other for years: I was a kid who read the classics of geopolitics and looked at the world with the desire to understand it, he was a fighter who had lived through incredible situations and retired to private life, continuing to work for his country in other ways, out of the spotlight. I loved listening to the anecdotes he would pull out of his memory each time, it was like plunging into a different world, almost improbable for how ‘other’ it was from the West. Above all, a world in which the war, the struggle for freedom and a different political situation were not something decades away, but fresh events whose scars were still open and bleeding.
