In the summer of 2012, news broke that Manaf Tlass, a general in Syria's elite Republican Guard and a confidante of Bashar al-Assad, had defected and was en route to exile in France. Tlass was not just the tennis partner of the shy ophthalmologist who was presiding over the greatest crisis of the Arab spring; they were close, indeed intimate, family friends.
Tlass had been alarmed by Assad's brutal crackdown since protests erupted in the southern city of Daraa in March 2011: young people inspired by the historic changes taking place in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya called for dignity, freedom and the overthrow of their own oppressive regime. Syria, however, seemed destined from the start to be a different story – and a far bloodier one.
Sam Dagher's grim and impressively detailed account of the destruction of a country rests on two closely related factors: first, he was the only journalist for a major western newspaper based permanently in Damascus from 2012-2014, before being detained and thrown out. Second, his work is impeccably sourced – his access to Tlass and others provides rich insights into Assad and his inner circle, as well as into leading opposition activists.
Dagher's sympathies are clear from his title (though he missed a trick by not explaining that the menacing slogan, daubed on walls, rhymes neatly in Arabic) and from his even more explicit subtitle (How One Family's Lust for Power Destroyed Syria). “There is no way to govern our society except with the shoe over people's heads,” he quotes the Syrian leader as saying both before and after the unrest began.
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