THE WAR IN SYRIA HAS LONG NEEDED A good book to explain what and why it is happening. Few events in recent history have been subjected to so much inadequate and partial reporting and there are few writers who have the perception and experience to illuminate this terrible tragedy. Charles Glass is one of them: he knows Syria, Lebanon and the region extremely well and has been an eyewitness to its crises and wars since the 1970s. He has essential recent experience gained through his travels to Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and other parts of Syria since the conflict started in 2011 and a popular revolt rapidly transformed into a sectarian civil war.
It is difficult to write sensibly and with balance about a struggle in which all sides, including much of the media, is so partisan. From the early days of the Arab Spring, not just in Syria but in other countries caught up in these complex developments, journalists often crudely demonized one side and portrayed the other as unblemished democrats. Obvious contradictions were ignored: how, for instance, could the Syrian rebels be the secular democrats they purported to be when their most important supporters and financiers were Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the oil-states of the Gulf, whose rulers are the last theocratic absolute monarchies left on earth?
The media was not alone in its self-deception. Leaders in the US, Europe and the region assumed that President Bashar al-Assad would fall in 2011 or early 2012 because they had just seen Muammar Gaddafi overthrown and killed. This was despite the fact that, at his weakest, Assad controlled thirteen out of fourteen of Syria’s provincial capitals. Only full scale US intervention, more along the lines of Iraq in 2003 than Libya in 2011, would have overthrown him. Rebels pretended that all they needed was some heavy weaponry and a few US air strikes to win, but this was never the case.
The Syrian war is today frequently compared to the Thirty Years War in Germany in the seventeenth century and, unlike many such historic analogies, this one reveals an important truth. As in Germany four hundred years ago, there are now so many players with divergent interests in Syria that the conflict is becoming impossible to end. Syrians have less and less influence over the fate of their country. To understand all this is not easy, and anybody who tries to do so must combine deep understanding of the region with up-to-date knowledge at ground level from one of the most dangerous places on earth. In this study, Charles Glass tells us more about the reality of Syria and its future than could be gained from any other single source.
— Patrick Cockburn