Assad, from firelighter to firefighter

He will go down in history as the one who, in order to retain power, offered to quench the jihadi fire he had himself helped kindle.

In September of this year Bashar al Assad turned fifty: he had become President of the Syrian Arab Republic in July 2000. Since the spring of 2011, however, his authority in many areas of the country has been challenged forcefully and in unprecedented ways. Today his rule bears a likeness to that of his father Hafez al Assad, who for 30 years was the authoritarian father and master of Syria and head of the longest enduring system of clan politics in all of the Arab Middle East.

Shortly after the Paris attacks on 13 November Assad was quick to repeat his refrain of “I told you so”. In the autumn of 2012, when the popular anti-government revolution had become militarized and radicalized in an Islamic sense, Assad declared that those trying to destabilize his grip on power would transform the country into a new Afghanistan. Since 2013, when the Islamic State (ISIS) made its official entry into the North and East of Syria, there has been talk that Syria could go the way of Afghanistan or Somalia, becoming a country that is increasingly fragmented on a territorial level and divided into zones of influence managed by warlords affiliated to regional powers.

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