Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family's Lust for Power Destroyed Syria

Sam Dagher (journalist)

Abstract

This ground-breaking account of the Syrian Civil War reveals the never-before-published true story of a 21st-century humanitarian disaster from a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist specializing in the Middle East.

In spring 2011, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad turned to his friend and army commander, Manaf Tlass, for advice about how to respond to Arab Spring-inspired protests. Tlass pushed for conciliation but Assad decided to crush the uprising — an act which would catapult the country into an eight-year-long war, killing almost half a million and fueling terrorism and a global refugee crisis.

Assad or We Burn the Country examines Syria’s tragedy through the generational saga of the Assad and Tlass families, once deeply intertwined and now estranged in Bashar’s bloody quest to preserve his father’s inheritance. By drawing on his own reporting experience in Damascus and exclusive interviews with Tlass, journalist Sam Dagher takes readers within palace walls to reveal the family behind the destruction of a country and the chaos of an entire region.

Dagher shows how one of the world’s most vicious police states came to be and explains how a regional conflict extended globally, engulfing the Middle East and pitting the United States and Russia against one another. Timely, propulsive, and expertly reported, Assad or We Burn the Country is the definitive account of this global crisis, going far beyond the news story that has dominated headlines for years.

Biography

Sam Dagher has reported in the Middle East for more than fifteen years. He lived and worked in Damascus from 2012 to 2014. He has worked for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and Agence France Presse, and has covered the conflict in Iraq, the Arab Spring uprisings, and Libya. The Wall Street Journal submitted Dagher’s work from Syria for the Pulitzer Prize and other journalism awards.

Chair: Professor Gilbert Achcar (SOAS)

Organiser: SOAS Middle East Institute and the SOAS Syria Society

Contact email: lmei@soas.ac.uk