What proportion of the Syrian population is fully in support of the continued uprising against the country’s authoritarian leader, Bashar al-Assad? It is not a question I have heard addressed often — not by our journalists bravely reporting from beneath the Syrian army’s mortar attacks, nor indeed by those sitting at home writing for outraged liberal broadsheets, demanding we arm the rebels, or at least do something. Still less have I heard the issue addressed by the European Union and its odd new allies in this struggle — al-Qa’eda, Hamas and the notoriously democratic government of Saudi Arabia.
It is a complex question. News reports tend to focus on where the action is, where the atrocities are, where the good footage is, where there are outrageous stories to tell of violence and oppression, of blood and bandages and heroic doctors staunching raw cavernous wounds with curtain material. And so all we have seen on our screens these last few weeks have been appalling scenes of children dying and our own journalists being killed or maimed — and, naturally enough, our anger at the ghastly Assad is stoked up. He is plainly not, as was suggested at the time of his accession, a new voice of liberal decency and exquisite moderation in the Middle East, but apparently more of the same ol’ — a ruthless and bloody authoritarian.
We have seen, in short, what is going on in the city of Homs, once Emesa, an agreeable Roman city state. We have heard less from Syria’s two biggest cities, Aleppo and Damascus respectively. That is because there is no fighting whatsoever there, in these municipalities consisting of more than five million people, save for the occasional murderous al-Qa’eda (probably) suicide bomber or car bomb or, on one occasion, a mortar attack from the Free Syrian Army which left a score of civilians dead.
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