Is Regime Collapse on Syria's Horizon? Evaluating Assad's Grip on Power

Special Introduction by Joel Rayburn, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Levant Affairs and Special Envoy for Syria.

In recent weeks, the Syrian pound hit a record low, Moscow visibly signaled its displeasure with Damascus, and Bashar al-Assad was caught up in a public spat with his tycoon cousin Rami Makhlouf. Meanwhile, the government continues to fall short in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, parts of the country are seeing renewed protests, the regime offensive to retake Idlib is ramping up again, and a new round of U.S.-led sanctions will soon take effect. Do these developments suggest that Assad's hold on power is increasingly tenuous? Or perhaps even that the regime is collapsing on itself?

Sam Dagher is an American-Lebanese journalist and a nonresident fellow at the Middle East Institute. As the only foreigner openly reporting from Damascus for a major Western media outlet in 2012-2014, he was briefly detained in an underground regime prison and later expelled from the country. His book Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family's Lust for Power Destroyed Syria was picked as one of the best of 2019 by multiple outlets.

Oula Alrifai is a fellow in The Washington Institute's Geduld Program on Arab Politics and a former political asylee from Syria. Her master's thesis at Harvard University, The Self-Flagellation of a Nation, focused on regime survival and the development of Iranian-Syrian relations in the 1970s and 1980s. She is also the executive producer of an award-winning documentary on Syrian refugees, Tomorrow's Children.