Will Syria Rise Again?

Syria Will Rise Again -- Radwan Ziadeh, Foreign Policy

On my first trip to my homeland in 5 years, I saw a lot of tragedy -- and a lot of hope.

Exactly five years after I was exiled from Syria, I was able to return to my homeland because of the Syrian revolution.

I left Syria in September 2007 after being directly threatened by Syria's General Intelligence Administration (Idarat al-Mukhabarat al-Amma). The agency, which has branches in every Syrian province and is responsible for monitoring dissidents, tapping phone lines, and censoring media, objected to my involvement with the Damascus Declaration in 2005. The agency not only issued an arrest warrant for me, but banned my entire family from traveling outside Syria. The travel ban weighed most heavily on my sister and her five children. My sister's husband lives in Saudi Arabia, and due to the ban, her children have been unable to see their father for four years -- solely because their mother is related to a human rights activist and political opposition figure.

Read more ....

My Comment: I am sure that Syria will "rise again" .... but not in the shape that Radwan Ziadeh would probably like to see. I have always been of the opinion that the Syrian civil war still has another year(+) to go, and that the real bloodshed is going to happen next year. I am using the Lebanese civil war as my reference point, a conflict that cost 120,000 lives ( 1,000,000 injured) in a population that is just a fraction of what is Syria's today. And like Lebanon .... my prediction is that when the Syrian conflict is finally over .... the country will be fractured along sectarian lines and tainted with a bitterness that is going to last for generations. In short .... from my vantage point there are no good endings for this conflict save one .... the eventual defeat of the Assad regime.