While the storyline in the Middle East is still developing the plot centers around the sustainment of government protests by oppressed citizens that has captured the world’s attention.
In recent years it has been the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that dominated the headlines, but something has changed, the people have risen up, ousted brutal dictators and they’ve done it with the help of social media- not military invasions.
There is no question the Internet has sustained these revolutions and provided a podium for oppressed peoples to question authority and change their destinies.
Protesters in countries like Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Egypt have demanded their authoritarian leaders step aside and give the people a say in their own government. Even the lukewarm reception from the Obama Administration hasn’t stopped these young people from risking their lives in order to enact change.
The latest, and perhaps most surprising country to stir the caldron, is Syria.
It’s been subjected to nearly 50 years of brutal and barbaric rule by the Ba’ath Party and the Assad dynasty. Perhaps more astonishing is the fact that the ruling Assad party makes up less than 10 percent of the country’s total population.
“The Syrian people are ready to reclaim their country,” says Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, the founder of American Islamic Forum for Democracy.
Syria fell into dictatorship 1970, when Hafez Assad swept the thriving European-style country into a vacuum and begin a powerful totalitarian regime that remains in power today. Under the Assad rule, Syrians that speak out in opposition to the ruling party are subject to torture and death.
Dr. Jasser, whose family hails from Syria, contends that the country “has been tragically immune to the world attention, opinion and pressures.”
“The time is now for America to act. Syria is a republic of fear. The dissenters in the streets have now begun to breach the divide of its own government’s terror.”
Like many of the regions’ dictatorships, President Bashar Assad has promised the western world change and said the regime would lift the 40-year emergency rule and acknowledged that the Syrian people have “legitimate grievances.”