How the Syrian Revolution Became Militarized

 ' “The military power is so disproportionate, there was no way the revolt could have sustained itself and re-emerged time and again, despite the regime’s brutality, if it wasn’t for a vast network of support inside the country,” says Omar Dahi, a Syrian scholar at Hampshire College.

“We don’t say enough that the Syrian revolution is a revolution of first, the rural poor,” Traboulsi says. Over the past decade, under the rule of Bashar al-Assad, Syria entered into a “mitigated neoliberal experience which weakened the production and agricultural sectors and created a mafia-style new bourgeoisie that is very monopolistic and very rentier and services-based,” he says.'