The Rubble-Strewn Road to Damascus
After independence from France, following the Second World War, the country went through twenty coups in twenty-one years—some successful, some not—until Hafez al-Assad, a former Air Force general, seized power, in 1970. He was initially embraced, at home and abroad.
.. Neither peace nor war has ever had a chance in the Middle East without Syria’s participation.
.. Meanwhile, the destruction mounts, thanks to the weaponry of the Assad government, an array of jihadi extremists, and more than a thousand militias, ..
.. Last year, I watched from a hillside overlooking the town of Kobani, on the Turkish border, as American warplanes dumped tens of millions of dollars of bombs to support a Kurdish militia fighting ISIS. The Kurds took the town back in January. It was the Islamic State’s first big defeat in Syria. But Kobani was left in ruins. Today, it still doesn’t have electricity; its economy is dead. The price tag just to rebuild the town is estimated at six billion dollars, the Washington Post reported this month. Many of its forty thousand residents, now refugees elsewhere, refuse to return.
.. There is no clear end to the fighting in sight, and estimates of the cost of national reconstruction are already nearing three hundred billion dollars—roughly eight times what the United States committed to help reconstruct Iraq. Even if that money is spent, the larger question remains: Can a population so divided ever forge a stable political system that doesn’t entail a dictatorship?