Life footage Syria the killing of Moath by Assad soldiers

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Uploaded by TheNewsflashchannel on Aug 17, 2011

shocking Syria the killing of Moath by Assad soldiers
The wave of Arab unrest that started with the Tunisian revolution of January 2011 reached Syria in mid-March, when residents of a small southern city took to the streets to protest the torture of students who had put up anti-government graffiti.

President Bashar al-Assad, who inherited Syria's harsh dictatorship from his father, Hafez al-Assad, at first wavered between force and hints of reform. But in April, just days after lifting the country's decades-old state of emergency, he launched the first of what became a series of withering crackdowns, sending tanks into restive cities as security forces opened fire on demonstrators.

Neither the violence nor Mr. Assad's offers of political reform — rejected as shams by protest leaders — brought an end to the unrest. Similarly, the protesters have not been able to withstand direct assault by the military's armored forces.

The conflict is complicated by Syria's ethnic divisions. The Assads and much of the nation's elite, especially the military, belong to the Alawite sect, a small minority in a mostly Sunni country.

Syria's crackdown has been condemned internationally, as has President Assad, a British-trained doctor who many had hoped would soften his father's iron-handed regime. But no direct intervention has been proposed, and support for protesters has been balanced against fears of instability in a country at the heart of so many conflicts in the world's most volatile region.

In July, the Obama administration, in a shift that was weeks in the making, turned against Mr. Assad but stopped short of demanding that he step down. By early August, the American ambassador was talking of a "post-Assad" Syria.

By that time, a massive crackdown on the restive city of Hama — involving bombs, tanks, artillery and snipers — and elsewhere drove the tally of estimated deaths kept by human rights groups over 1,700, mostly protesters, and well over 10,000 people were reported to be in custody or missing. The country's economy was headed toward the point of collapse, as tourism in particular withered.

As the assaults on restive cities continued, cracks emerged in a tight-knit leadership that has until now rallied its base of support and maintained a unified front. Though there are no signs of an imminent collapse, flagging support of the business elite in Damascus, divisions among senior officials and even moves by former government stalwarts to distance themselves from the leadership come at a time when Syria also faces what may be its greatest isolation in more than four decades of rule by the Assad family.
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