...Capital of the last remaining Baathist regime in the world...
-- there are rumours that President Assad's whereabouts are not known. There is no doubt the 17-month-old uprising has now turned into a ferocious civil war, with the opposition claiming 17,000 fatalities. After Libya, this is the highest corpse count for an 'Arab spring' country.
President Assad missed the bus in April when he accepted Kofi Annan
...Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh and so far the worst Secretary-General of the UN. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize for something or other that probably sounded good at the time. In December 2004, reports surfaced that Kofi's son Kojo received payments from the Swiss company Cotecna, which had won a lucrative contract under the UN Oil-for-Food Program. Kofi Annan called for an investigation to look into the allegations, which stirred up the expected cesspool but couldn't seem to come up with enough evidence to indict Kofi himself, or even Kojo...'s six-point plan only to renege on it. The plan had provided for a ceasefire and smooth transition to democracy. The caretaker cabinet proposal, too, is dead. Even Russia had agreed to a neutral cabinet in which there would be men from both sides. But President Assad's intransigence scuttled it when he insisted that he should be part of it. This was not acceptable to the opposition. Fissures in the security establishment have now been so widened and the loyalist ranks so weakened that Assad is pulling troops out of the Golan Heights to bolster security around him. The world has watched the fate of the four Arab dictators who have fallen. It is now for President Assad to decide whether he would choose to seek a Saleh-like amnesty and go abroad or suffer a worse fate. If his regime falls, there could be repercussions in the region. The causes of the uprising are not sectarian, but the fact that the Alawite minority has been ruling for four decades may give a sectarian touch to the aftermath. If there is a sectarian flare-up, there could be political fallout in neighbouring Leb. Iran would lose one of its allies and that would also affect Hezbollah and Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason,.