For a man who has always insisted that he remained the president of all Syrians – even as those same Syrians were slaughtered by his security forces – Bashar Al Assad has rarely ventured beyond his stronghold of Damascus in recent years. There is a very obvious reason for that: a significant proportion of his own people see him as devoid of legitimacy. Many are trying to kill him.
That made his appearance at Eid prayers in Hama this week politically intriguing. Clearly, Mr Al Assad was seeking to send a message. Hama was one of the cities that fought most strongly against the Assad regime after the revolution began. It was brutally put down and, especially after Russia intervened on the side of the regime two years ago, has been largely recaptured.
Symbolically, the retaking of Hama is significant. The city has a bloody past: it was there in 1982 that Al Assad’s father Hafez Al Assad put down another uprising, with the loss of uncounted thousands of lives. By appearing inside the city, Mr Al Assad was showing that normality is returning, a normality bought at the expense of an as yet unknown number of lives.
If anyone was in doubt at the violence that allowed Mr Al Assad to return to the city, the following day brought a reminder. The White House said it believed the regime was preparing to conduct a chemical weapons attack, and warned Mr Al Assad that his military would pay “a heavy price”. The fact is that chemical weapons are the least of the weapons that the regime has unleashed on its own people: barrel bombs, tanks, mass starvation, siege; all are tactics that the regime has used to pave the way for Mr Al Assad’s return to power across parts of Syria.
But returning to power does not confer legitimacy. Far from serving as a reminder that he is in control, the photographs from Hama remind us that it is Mr Al Assad himself who is the problem. Forsaken by his people, he relies on the military might of Russia and the militias of Iran to cling to power. There is no future for him in Syria, no matter how often he appears in the mosques of the people he has killed
