What We Ignore, We Empower: Five Decades of Despair Under the Assad Regime

Spring 2021

Also published in Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy
About the Authors
Oula Alrifai
Oula A. Alrifai

Oula A. Alrifai was a senior fellow in The Washington Institute's Geduld Program on Arab Politics.

Articles & Testimony

A Syrian scholar and expatriate lays out the legacy of terror under the Assads and urges the Biden administration to prioritize the country’s sundry crises.

While March 12th marks fifty years of dictatorship and terror in Syria since Hafez al-Assad’s infamous coup d’etat, March 15th is the 10th anniversary of the Syrian revolution against the Assad regime. For most Syrians, since at least 2011, the very idea of home is shifting beneath their feet. A whole nation has gone forcibly homeless during the past ten years. Having fled my hometown, Damascus, in 2005 as a result of direct death threats from Bashar al-Assad, my family and I still continue to struggle to make sense of the idea of home...

Read the full article on the JMEPP website.

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