![]() ![]() ![]() Cross-fertilization of host of other militant groups, former soldiers who had been fired from their jobs, unemployed local youths and those who had suffered the atrocities of authorities made a robust gang to overrun the existing government. It is in this background al Qaeda in Iraq spread its arm through Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria. ![]() The situation was ripening for the takeover of militants from whatever civil governance left with their leaders. The growing civil unrest and official atrocities in neighboring Iraq was further fueling the crisis in Syria. Assad succeeded in sticking to power but Syria entered into a spiral of civil violence. Assad’s employed virtually every conceivable fighter starting from frontline soldiers to cyber hackers to civil police and bureaucracy to crackdown protest against his power. Bashar al-Assad’s intricate schemes to subdue the impending ‘Arab Spring’ and remained to cling to power resulted in the deaths and destructions of immense proportion inside Syria. Syria’s complex internal conditions particularly since 2010 paved the way for civil war inside the country. In particular, this paper suggests that the US-led Western response to the post Arab-Spring conflicts was not one of 'Responsibility to Protect' (R2P) to protect civilians, but Distancing (or Dissociation) to Protect (D2P) the regimes themselves. Building on the works of Eva Bellin and Ian Lustick, this paper argues that the failure of the post-Arab Spring transitions could be put down to a pattern of consistent foreign intervention, which have tipped the scales in favour of the ancien regimes and the emergence of 'new-old' authoritarianisms. After a brief period where these analyses were widely argued to have been disproved, the destructive aftermaths of the uprisings in the years since - from the wars in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen, to the return of authoritarianism in Egypt - has seen a resurgence of narratives that cite the turmoil as vindication for theories that the region is 'exceptional' in its failure to democratise. After long being seen as a region resistant to democratisation, the uprisings seemed to rebuke the culturalist and orientalist analyses that argued that the populations of the region were intrinsically prone to authoritarianism and uninterested in and unsuited to democratic governance. The 2011 Arab Spring uprisings represented a watershed in Middle Eastern history. ![]()
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