The Syrian Rebellion
by Fouad Ajami
Hoover Institution Press, 240 pp., $19.95
Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad
by David W. Lesch
Yale University Press, 262 pp., $28.00
A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution
by Samar Yazbek, translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss
Haus, 269 pp., $18.95 (paper)
In the face of the current uprising, now in its eighteenth bloody month, Bashar Assad has ordered a sustained use of heavy weaponry against his own people that may be unmatched by any state in modern times. The gory internecine wars in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka saw governments behave with similar savagery, but against what they claimed were separatist revolts. In trying to crush an inclusive, nationwide, and initially peaceful pro-democracy movement that from its inception was unquestionably backed by the vast majority of Syrians, the Assads’ army has wreaked devastation akin to that in Grozny or Jaffna or Sarajevo, only across swathes of a country with a far larger population, devastating scores of villages, dozens of towns, and all three of Syria’s biggest cities.
