Reuters

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad

Damascus - With the enemy at the gates, Bashar al-Assad was dining out.

The sound of gunfire and explosions carried to central Damascus as his troops clashed in the suburbs last Saturday with rebels who had seized towns near the capital. Masked gunmen erected checkpoints on the city outskirts.

But Syria's 46-year-old president, outwardly unfazed, put on a show of business as usual for fellow patrons of the smart downtown restaurant where he spent the weekend evening.

“He hasn't changed his lifestyle,” said a politician from neighbouring Lebanon, a regular visitor to Syria, who has met Assad several times since the Syrian uprising began last March.

“He spent the evening at a Damascus restaurant,” he added, speaking privately to Reuters about the president's movements on Jan. 28, when the appearance of forces flying flags of the Free Syrian Army at the very edge of the capital had some, excitable, observers reckoning Assad's life expectancy in just weeks.

Memories of the late Muammar Gaddafi were quick to surface.

Yet there was more to his projection of insouciance than the bravado of madness or despair. Others, too, have described to Reuters a Syrian head of state fully abreast of events on the ground - not the mere puppet of hardliners that some have portrayed - “relaxed and phlegmatic”, and determined to see off the challenge, offering some reforms, strictly on his own terms.

While few rate his long-term prospects highly, all is not lost, at least for now. Assad's troops swiftly drove back the more lightly armed rebels from the outskirts of Damascus and many foresee a long struggle yet for a country, at the heart of the Middle East, that is trapped in a “balance of weakness”.

Pockets of territory are in open revolt, the economy is choked by sanctions and fellow Arab leaders have joined the West in demanding he quit. Yet Assad retains considerable strengths: he has military reserves; allies that include Iran and Russia; grudging consent from millions afraid of Iraq- or Lebanon-style chaos; and he can count on die-hard support within his Alawite religious minority, who fear a sectarian bloodbath if he falls.

Since people in the city of Deraa first took to the streets nearly a year ago, inspired by Arab Spring risings elsewhere to demand freedoms, and were met with the ferocity that is the mark of four decades of rule by Assad and his father, Syria has been virtually closed to reporters from the outside world.

With the Arab League pressing for openness, Syrian officials have now given journalists limited access. Reporting last week, under surveillance, from Damascus, Deraa and the rebellious city of Homs, Reuters nonetheless found Syrians willing to evade, or defy, secret police minders and to condemn the Assad government.

There was a climate of fear and despair, as businesses suffer and people talk of mysterious disappearances, blamed on shadowy forces fighting both for and against the status quo.

An outwardly diffident ophthalmologist with a London-born wife, who was thrust to the fore only by the car crash that killed his elder brother, Assad has promised reforms to the Baathist one-party state developed over 30 years by his father Hafez. But he has insisted strictly on his own terms and rejects the demand last month of the Arab League that he step aside.

“No, no, no. Never,” his Lebanese acquaintance said. “He will not resign even if the war lasts 20 years.” Assad, he added, was fully engaged with “events on the ground”.

A Western diplomat quoted another recent visitor to the presidential palace as finding him “relaxed and phlegmatic”, busy on his iPad, asking about the prospects for an Israeli strike against Iran and apparently confident he could outlast his foreign critics, just as his father did for 30 years.

But unlike the elder Assad, who crushed an armed Islamist uprising in the city of Hama 30 years ago this week, killing many thousands, Bashar faces opponents who are entrenched across the country and hardened by a military crackdown on protests.

A visit by a group of foreign journalists to the eastern suburbs of Damascus last week highlighted how much Assad's authority has eroded since the protests started, despite the shooting of thousands of demonstrators, mass arrests, torture and killings in custody and open warfare on mutinous army units.

A year ago, it was unthinkable for Syrians to criticise their leader in public. But here now, just 15 minutes' drive from central Damascus, masked gunmen fighting to overthrow Assad were manning a checkpoint across the road and stopping cars.

The scene evoked another country - Iraq during the sectarian conflict which followed the U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, or Lebanon during its ruinous 1975-90 civil war.

The day after the journalists' visit, Assad sent more than 2,000 soldiers to seize back control from the rebels. The fighters were pushed back, but their defiance was infectious.

“There is no force on earth that will make me accept him as a president,” said Hend, a housewife in her late 40s who spoke to Reuters in Barzeh, a district on the outskirts of the capital. Like most of the people Reuters interviewed in Syria, she did not want to be identified for fear of reprisal.

“He's not my president and never was,” Hend added. “I just couldn't say so before.”

Assad, appointed in a quasi-monarchical dynastic succession when his father died in 2000, rules a country which has been controlled by a network of at least 13 official security bodies.

Most Syrians can relate horror stories of the powerful intelligence services that have detained many tens of thousands of people. Memories of their suffering endure, perpetuated through the years of repression in a population that numbers 23 million, double what it was a generation ago in the late 1980s.

In Deraa, where the uprising first erupted, near the southern border with Jordan, Assad's forces have reasserted control militarily. But there is little evidence they have won over the hearts of the people.

Teenage girls leaving school shouted “Freedom! Freedom!” as journalists passed by. Many local people cast openly angry looks at security men who were accompanying the reporters. Graffiti calling on Assad to go was still visible, despite obvious attempts to paint over it.

The security detail in plain clothes appeared uncomfortable escorting visitors up to the Omari mosque, focal point of the Deraa revolt, and most hung back and watched from a distance.

The message from Deraa seems clear: a military offensive can silence people but it will not dampen their anger. Rather the reverse, in a town where it was the arrest of schoolchildren who daubed slogans inspired by Egypt's uprising that sparked revolt.

“When the dust of battle clears, the blood spilt on the streets will make it difficult for Assad to rule as he did before,” said a Syrian opposition figure during a secret conversation with Reuters in Damascus.

“Those who are against him now will always be against him.”

Another opposition activist said Assad, who he described as wary of triggering tougher international action against him or of giving too much power to his army commanders, had held back so far from using the overwhelming force at his disposal.

“The regime could finish things off militarily,” he said. “But it doesn't want to pay the political price.

“Eighty percent of the army is still in the barracks. He doesn't want to give the army command greater powers.”

Ever since the long-overlooked second son took on his late father's mantle, there has been persistent speculation about the balance of power within the secretive ruling family and its entourage and over whether Bashar had liberal leanings that were held in check by the likes of his feared younger brother Maher. - Reuters