Syria's year of protest and insurrection

It is a year since President Bashar al-Assad's men responded to peaceful demonstrations in the southern Syrian town of Deraa with automatic weapons.

A few weeks before he had blithely told a reporter from the Wall Street Journal that Syria would not catch the virus of revolution that was tearing through the Arab world.

The reason, he said, was that the president shared an ideology with the people, which would give Syria immunity.

The irony of the last 12 months is that Mr Assad was not wrong about the genuine legitimacy he had among much of the population. Many of those who did not like the repressive Syrian system listened to his promises of reform and hoped he would keep them.

Syrians liked the way that he stood up to Israel and the West. He had considerable reflected glory from his support of the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, who was the rock star of Arab politics after he took on Israel in 2006.

But that did not mean that large sections of the population would accept his explanation for what was happening, as demonstrations spread after the first killings of unarmed protesters in Deraa a year ago...

@BBC

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