📝 Description
Sam Dagher delivers a deeply reported, character‑driven investigation into the Assad family’s project of power—from Hafez al‑Assad’s coup‑forged state to Bashar al‑Assad’s wartime calculus. Based on interviews with defectors, regime insiders, diplomats, and survivors, the book shows how institutions were engineered to concentrate loyalty, control information, and criminalize dissent. Dagher resists the lure of caricature; he details the regime’s social contracts, selective co‑optation, and use of sectarian fear as political technology. The narrative moves through pivotal episodes—the Hama massacre’s long shadow, the security state’s omnivorous reach, the early protests, the militarization of confrontation, and the descent into mass atrocities. By foregrounding human choices, Dagher demonstrates that catastrophe was not inevitable but repeatedly chosen when accommodation threatened dynastic survival. Richly sourced yet paced like a thriller, the book also scrutinizes foreign patrons and rivals whose interventions made the battleground more lethal. Beyond Syria, it reads as a case study in authoritarian adaptation and the costs borne by ordinary citizens when a regime fuses national identity to a ruling family. For readers seeking to understand why compromise failed and why brutality persisted, Dagher offers both documentation and moral clarity. The result is a definitive portrait of power’s corrosion—and the courage of those who confronted it despite the odds.