Syria: Assad must go!!! Now...

Bashar al-Assad of Syria has been using armoured columns against peaceful protests, tanks against hospitals, machine guns in mosques, and, reserving a special place for himself in hell, targeting children for torture and murder as a way of intimidating protesters.


The case of 13-year-old Hamza Ali al-Khatib, whose corpse was returned to his family smashed, burned, bullet-riddled and with his penis torn off, for the crime of having attended a protest march with his father, drew special revulsion in Syria and abroad.

But the people of Syria have shown a bravery and a fierce thirst for liberty that Assad could not have expected. An estimated 2000 people have been killed in the uprising to date. Protesters have started an ad hoc renaming of the streets of Syria's cities, with paper signs giving thoroughfares the names of "martyrs", demonstrators who have been killed by Assad's forces. There are many new street names appearing.

Violent repression is all Assad knows. He pretends to hold office through elections and, indeed, has won two of them with apparently remarkable support rates of 97 per cent of the vote. But he allows no one to run against him. He could never have won a real election. He is a member of the Alawite sect. This is an offshoot of Shia Islam, and a minority that makes up only about 7 per cent of the population. Three quarters of Syrians are Sunni Muslims.

Assad's father seized power in a coup in 1970. He was a ruthless dictator and is estimated to have killed some 20,000 Syrians in a bloodbath in the city of Hama when it resisted his rule. Bashar took over from his father in 2000 and is proving every bit as ruthless. But this time, it is not only one city rising up against the Assad dynasty. It is spreading to every city.

But as long as NATO was preoccupied with Gaddafi, Assad was able to operate with much less international scrutiny and pressure. That is about to change. "Assad has a very narrow window of time," wrote Jacques Neriah, former foreign policy adviser to Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. "This window is more or less equal to the time in which Muammar Gaddafi remains in power. The moment Gaddafi steps down, Syria will experience all the attention of the Western powers, especially if the turmoil and armed suppression persist."

Assad deserves a great deal more attention, and not only because of his criminal brutality. The fall of Assad would be a great strategic prize. Assad's Syria is the only country in the Middle East that is a close ally of Iran. As the power of the US has waned in the Middle East, Iran has risen, a theocratic power with nuclear ambitions and thoughts of regional hegemony.

Syria is crucial to Iran's ambitions. Under Assad, Syria has helped Iran project power. It supports Iran's international militant network, Hezbollah, and has helped it to intimidate and influence Lebanon, which has become a client.

When Lebanon's plucky prime minister Rafiq Hariri stood up to Syrian interference through Syria's proxy, the president, Emile Lahoud, Assad allegedly threatened Hariri: "Lahoud is me. If you want me out of Lebanon, I will break Lebanon." Four months later, a massive car bomb killed Hariri and 21 others in central Beirut.

And Syria under Assad also supports the militant Hamas, whose political wing controls the Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip. Like Hezbollah, Hamas also operates a terrorist arm. Syria supplies military training, arms and money.

So even though Syria under Assad's Baath Party is a secular regime, it is nonetheless a linchpin of Shiite Islamist power and aggression throughout the Middle East.

To remove Assad would be to weaken Iran and to crimp its ambitions. It would also undermine its political and terrorist proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.