Assad or we burn the country : how one family's lust for power destroyed Syria / Sam Dagher.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 469-536) and index.

You're next, Doctor -- Embracing the clouds -- Creation and punishment -- Golden knight -- To whom the horses after you, Bassel? -- New king and early spring -- Hit them where it hurts -- Precious interlocutor and unavoidable player -- No more fear after today -- The conspiracy -- Make peace -- You're too soft -- The Hama manual -- Yalla Erbal Ya, Bashar! (Come on, Bashar, leave!) -- Don't stay with the butcher -- Blood on my hands -- We have to win! -- Exiting -- No role for you -- Holy War: at your service, O Bashar! -- The clan's knights and soothsayers -- Macabre coronation -- A game of nations -- Abu Ali Putin -- Daesh or Bashar? -- Dictators strike back - but hope endures.

A Pulitzer Prize-nominated reporter and former prisoner of the pro Assad militia presents a revisionist account of the Syrian Civil War that incorporates previously unpublished details about the origins and persistence of its human atrocities. In spring 2011, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad turned to his friend and army commander, Manaf Tlass, for advice about how to respond to Arab Spring-inspired protests. Tlass pushed for conciliation but Assad decided to crush the uprising -- an act which would catapult the country into an eight-year long war, killing almost half a million and fueling terrorism and a global refugee crisis. Assad or We Burn the Country examines Syria's tragedy through the generational saga of the Assad and Tlass families, once deeply intertwined and now estranged in Bashar's bloody quest to preserve his father's inheritance. By drawing on his own reporting experience in Damascus and exclusive interviews with Tlass, Dagher takes readers within palace walls to reveal the family behind the destruction of a country and the chaos of an entire region. Dagher shows how one of the world's most vicious police states came to be and explains how a regional conflict extended globally, engulfing the Middle East and pitting the United States and Russia against one another. Timely, propulsive, and expertly reported, Assad or We Burn the Country is the definitive account of this global crisis, going far beyond the news story that has dominated headlines for years.