“Bashar Al-Assad has fallen but the real revolution of the Syrians has only just begun”

Lhe dictator has fallen, the man who murdered his people and sold out the country is gone, he fled cowardly, leaving immeasurable destruction behind him. As I write these lines, the question remains alive in me: are we truly free from the influence of the Al-Assad clan?

I was born in 1970, the year Hafez Al-Assad carried out his military coup, and since then I have known no power other than that of the Al-Assad clan, from the ranks of the army. More than half a century spent under the rule of a mafia family, responsible for inflicting on Syrians a life of humiliation and slavery on this large agricultural farm which is called “Syria of Al-Assad” .

I remember that, already in the early 1980s, the outfit we were forced to wear to school was a military uniform, with its khaki-brown fabric and beret! Every morning before lessons started, we spent a few minutes standing in the courtyard singing the national anthem. Each class of girls lined up like a column of soldiers, then we raised our hands forward, our arms tilted slightly upwards in a gesture that looked a bit like a Hitler salute. Then, one of us, who had been previously designated by the military education professor, exclaimed: “Who is our commander for eternity? »and, in a voice full of fervor, we answered him in chorus: “It’s President Hafez Al-Assad!” » This scene was reproduced for years, spent repeating this formula daily: “Our commander for eternity is President Al-Assad. »

Ambivalent joy

One day, I found myself, for some reason since forgotten, exhausted with fatigue and, therefore, unable to recite the formula with the desired power, and to raise my arms high enough. I just stammered the words, hoping that no one would notice me among all those rows of schoolgirls. At the end of the anthem, the military education teacher came up to me and screamed in my face, accusing me of deliberately not doing so. My punishment was to crawl back and forth across the schoolyard five times. I was only allowed to use my elbows and knees.

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