Like Father, Like Son

 Hama, Syria, 1982 

"The mukhabarrat (intelligence service) appeared to be everywhere, even beside the tank crews, watching them, looking across the river in a harsh, unnerving way. Behind us, a group of women in black robes, several in veils, stood looking at the smoke. A little tongue of flame crept over a roof and then died away in the city. One of the security men began to look at us suspiciously. The driver and I made a great show of shaking hands with the soldiers again and one of them talked to the mukhabarrat man, hopefully telling him that we had been innocently brought into the city to give the soldiers a lift.
"'We've got to go -- now', the driver said. He was a Christian from Damascus and he had developed an acute sense of danger over the past day and  a half. He did not like the special interest that the mukhabarrat man was showing in us. 'Hala -- now, we go!' he said again urgently. We climbed into the car and drove up from the river bank as another tank fired. A policeman begged a ride and the driver took him aboard. Then a girl in her twenties ran into the road in front of us, a blue scarf protecting her round, peasant face. Her hands were pressed tightly together in appeal. 'Take me out, take me out'. She climbed in the back seat beside me. 'I went to look for my brother', she said quietly. 'His house was on fire. He was not there. I went to the cemetery. There were more than a hundred bodies laid out but I could not find his. God be merciful.'
"There was another rumbling explosion across the ghost-like city followed by a peppering of rifle shots that sounded thin and unreal down one of the streets, as if someone had dropped a pack of cards on a wooden table. Smoke had begun to blossom out of the buildings now, drifting down the streets in a brown mist. Another mosque, this time with a silver dome, its thin eggshell exterior smashed by another artillery round that had left a thick black stain on the tiles. Another woman in black in front of the car, this time carrying a child. 'In God's mercy', she pleaded.
"She sat in the back between me and the young woman, holding her little boy, crying and dirty, on her knees. The child and the woman stank as if they had not bathed for a week. 'I have been here days, I have been to the cemeteries for my family. They have laid out the bodies, and they watch us to see if we claim a body that they say is a mujahed (jihadist). I have not eaten'. I remembered that I had in my pocket a Mars bar that I had bought the previous day in Damascus and I gave it to the little boy. His mother snatched it from him, tore off the paper and began to eat it herself, ravenously, terrified that her son might snatch it back. The child began to scream."

Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation -- The Abduction of Lebanon

Back then it was Hafez al-Assad who was president of Syria, head of the Baathist Alawite (Shia) regime putting down the political brushfires of disaffected majority Sunni Syrians and Syrian Kurds never permitted citizenship under his humanely beneficent rule. It was Hafez's brother Rifaat, whose deadly battalions were setting Syrian cities on fire to teach a lesson to the 'infidels' who dared strike at the regime. Back then, during the attacks a soldier, horrified at the carnage he had witnessed said: 'Those fanatics are fighting us in cellars with rockets and yesterday we found an underground hospital. There are girls fighting with the ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood). One of them was wounde4d last night and when we went to capture her, she set off a grenade against her stomach and killed twenty of my friends.' (Robert Fisk)

We are now in the year 2013. Syria has been at war with itself once again for two and a half years. Bashar al-Assad has outdistanced his father in brutality, vengeance, uninhibited rage at his own people's temerity in presuming to feel that they are entitled as citizens of the country to any semblance of equality. The death toll he has exacted exceeds his father's by 400%. His refusal to entertain that protested request and his contempt of those who asked for liberty and equality was reflected in the torture of schoolboys whose mangled bodies were returned to their aghast families with instructions to bury them, quietly.

In 2013 it is now Bashar al-Assad's brother Maher al-Assad and his 5th Infantry that represents the dread iron fist of the regime in defence of the Alawite government. The very worst of the atrocities, the shelling, the firing of artillery, the blanket bombing of Sunni Syrian towns and villages are attributable to the excesses that Maher al-Assad mounts to inform the ''terrorists', 'Islamists', 'al-Qaeda elements', 'jihadists' that Allah is firmly behind the Shia, not the heretic Sunnis, insulting to the name of Islam.

Now, in 2013 the news is different yet quite the same as it was almost forty years ago: 

"Syrian state television says a car bomb has killed the governor of the central province of Hama.
State TV says Anas Abdul Razaak Naem was assassinated Sunday in the Jarajima neighborhood of the city of Hama, the provincial capital. No further details were immediately available.
Assassinations of politicians, army officers and journalists who support President Bashar Assad's regime are common in Syria's civil war.
Syria reached an agreement with the United Nations on Sunday to allow a team of international experts to visit the site of alleged chemical weapons attacks last week outside Damascus, state media and the U.N. said.
A statement on Syrian state television said Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem and U.N. disarmament chief Angela Kane struck the deal during talks in Damascus, and that the two sides are working to finalize the date and time of the visit.
The world body said that a team of U.N. experts already in Syria has been instructed to focus on investigating the purported attack on Wednesday. The mission "is preparing to conduct on-site fact-finding activities'" on Monday, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said in a statement.
Anti-government activists and Doctors Without Borders say that more than 300 people were killed in the alleged toxic gas attack on the eastern suburbs of the Syrian capital. Images purporting to show the aftermath of the attack are filled with people gasping for breath and dead children unmarked by any wounds.