
Assad or We Burn the Country
How One Family's Lust for Power Destroyed Syria
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Narrated by:
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Gary Tiedemann
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By:
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Sam Dagher
About this listen
From a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist specializing in the Middle East, this groundbreaking account of the Syrian Civil War reveals the never-before-published true story of a 21st-century humanitarian disaster.
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 listeners 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.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019 Sam Dagher (P)2019 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"A moving and insightful account of the Syrian civil war." (Yuval Noah Harari, The Guardian)
"A riveting chronicle from a courageous journalist who was there to witness and report the truth. A book that should deservedly garner significant award attention." (Kirkus, starred review)
"He was briefly held by pro-regime militiamen in an underground prison and was summarily expelled by the Mukhabarat in 2014. This gives his description of events a credibility lacking in many other accounts." (Patrick Cockburn, New York Times Book Review)
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Mapping the Deep
- Innovation, Exploration, and the Dive of a Lifetime
- By: Dawn J. Wright, Kathryn D. Sullivan - foreword
- Narrated by: Gwen Steel, Dawn J. Wright
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Oceanographer Dawn Wright made history in 2022 when she became the first Black person to visit Challenger Deep, the deepest and most unexplored place on Earth—a trip that took her over 10,000 meters beneath the Pacific Ocean’s surface. We know less about the ocean floor than we do about the surface of the moon. To date, barely one-fifth of the seabed has been mapped in high resolution. As an ocean scientist and explorer, Dawn has made it her mission to change that.
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Narrator sounds like AI
- By Kindle Customer on 02-16-25
By: Dawn J. Wright, and others
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The King's Assassin
- The Secret Plot to Murder King James I
- By: Benjamin Woolley
- Narrated by: David Timson
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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An absorbing account of the conspiracy to kill King James I by his handsome lover, the duke of Buckingham, a historical crime that has remained hidden for 400 years....
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Wonderful read!
- By LaDonna on 10-26-24
By: Benjamin Woolley
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American Exception
- Empire and the Deep State
- By: Aaron Good
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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To trace the evolution of the American state, Aaron Good takes a deep-politics approach. The term “deep state” was badly misappropriated during the Trump era. In the simplest sense, it here refers to all those institutions that collectively exercise undemocratic power over state and society. To trace how we arrived at this point, American Exception explores various deep state institutions and history-making interventions.
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I buy the premises, but not the conclusions...
- By Clark on 01-05-23
By: Aaron Good
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Resistance
- The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945
- By: Halik Kochanski
- Narrated by: Jennifer M. Dixon
- Length: 46 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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It's almost shocking to think that now, more than seventy years after the Nazi surrender in 1945, there is not a single volume that has attempted to unify the resistance movements that convulsed Europe during the brutal years of occupation. In her extraordinary work, Resistance, Halik Kochanski does just that, creating a prodigiously researched account that becomes the first to bring these disparate histories into a single narrative.
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Uneven in quality of depiction of various areas
- By K. T. Jukic on 05-17-23
By: Halik Kochanski
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Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them
- A Cosmic Quest from Zero to Infinity
- By: Antonio Padilla
- Narrated by: Antonio Padilla
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists like James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac, or Albert Einstein, the search for mathematical truths led to strange new understandings of the ultimate nature of reality. But what are these truths? What are the mysterious numbers that explain the universe? In Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, the leading theoretical physicist and YouTube star Antonio Padilla takes us on an irreverent cosmic tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics, offering a startling picture of how the universe works.
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Exciting, Strange, Difficult = Meh
- By Michael on 05-23-23
By: Antonio Padilla
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God Save Benedict Arnold
- The True Story of America's Most Hated Man
- By: Jack Kelly
- Narrated by: Jim Seybert
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Benedict Arnold committed treason—for more than two centuries, that's all that most Americans have known about him. Yet Arnold was much more than a turncoat—his achievements during the early years of the Revolutionary War defined him as the most successful soldier of the era. God Save Benedict Arnold tells the gripping story of Arnold's rush of audacious feats—his capture of Fort Ticonderoga, his Maine mountain expedition to attack Quebec, the famous artillery brawl at Valcour Island, the turning-point battle at Saratoga—that laid the groundwork for our independence.
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Missing the Whole Story
- By Derek L. on 08-14-24
By: Jack Kelly
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A Woman in Berlin
- Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary
- By: Anonymous, Philip Boehm - translator
- Narrated by: Isabel Keating
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. The anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex World War II relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject—the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.
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Interesting
- By northwoods woman on 06-25-20
By: Anonymous, and others
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Accessory to War
- The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
- By: Avis Lang, Neil deGrasse Tyson
- Narrated by: Courtney B. Vance, Neil deGrasse Tyson - introduction
- Length: 18 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In this fascinating foray into the centuries-old relationship between science and military power, acclaimed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and writer-researcher Avis Lang examine how the methods and tools of astrophysics have been enlisted in the service of war. "The overlap is strong, and the knowledge flows in both directions," say the authors, because astrophysicists and military planners care about many of the same things: multi-spectral detection, ranging, tracking, imaging, high ground, nuclear fusion, and access to space. Tyson and Lang call it a "curiously complicit" alliance.
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Inspiring, educational, patriotic.
- By Kevin on 09-17-18
By: Avis Lang, and others
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City of Fortune
- How Venice Rule the Seas
- By: Roger Crowley
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The rise and fall of the Venetian empire stands unrivaled for drama, intrigue, and sheer opulent majesty. In City of Fortune, Roger Crowley, acclaimed historian and New York Times bestselling author of Empires of the Sea, applies his narrative skill to chronicling the astounding five-hundred-year voyage of Venice to the pinnacle of power.
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A Wonderful Listen
- By Scot on 06-12-14
By: Roger Crowley
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Eagle Against the Sun
- The American War With Japan
- By: Ronald H. Spector
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 23 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Spector reassesses US and Japanese strategy and offers some provocative interpretations. He shows that the dual advance across the Pacific by MacArthur and Nimitz was less a product of strategic calculation and more a pragmatic solution to bureaucratic, doctrinal, and public relations problems facing the Army and Navy. He also argues that Japan made its fatal error not in the Midway campaign but in abandoning its offensive strategy after that defeat and allowing itself to be drawn into a war of attrition.
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OK as an overview, but too little detail
- By Mike From Mesa on 03-21-22
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Slaves in the Family
- By: Edward Ball
- Narrated by: Edward Ball
- Length: 20 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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The Ball family hails from South Carolina - Charleston and thereabouts. Their plantations were among the oldest and longest-standing plantations in the South. Between 1698 and 1865, close to 4,000 Black people were born into slavery under the Balls or were bought by them. In Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves.
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Gives a good insight for moving forward today
- By Wendy Wood on 05-05-19
By: Edward Ball
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Hitler
- A Global Biography
- By: Brendan Simms
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 29 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Hitler offers a deeply learned and radically revisionist biography, arguing that the dictator's main strategic enemy, from the start of his political career in the 1920s, was not communism or the Soviet Union, but capitalism and the United States. Whereas most historians have argued that Hitler underestimated the American threat, Simms shows that Hitler embarked on a preemptive war with the United States precisely because he considered it such a potent adversary.
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A good biography with a different viewpoint
- By Timothy on 10-10-19
By: Brendan Simms
What listeners say about Assad or We Burn the Country
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Malek
- 09-04-20
Excellent book
This is an excellent recount of what has been happening in Syria in the past 50 years. The book is fair and based on facts and kept me intrigued.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-19-21
The Gangsters of Russia, Iran & Syria
Any person with a sliver of compassion will be sickened with this work, which exposes an axis of evil, that Adolph Hitler would be proud of. There is a special place in hell for the men who organized these crimes against humanity.
I highly recommend this work….
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- michael churchill
- 11-13-20
Good primer on Syria today (2020)
This is a great overview of the Syrian revolution from an anti-Assad perspective. Detailed in just the right parts to give an understanding of the situation in Syria post Arab Spring, without bogging itself down with an expanded explanation of the conflicts in South Western Asia. Pro-Assad listeners will find support for claims limited to mostly western sources.
Personally I would’ve preferred more about the involvement of the people of Kurdistan and Rojava, but that’s not what the book claims to be so it’s not something I can fault it for. Overall good book, and I recommend it before you have any sort of conversation of Syria, Assad, or civil strife.
Be safe, take care of yourself.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Brazilona
- 03-08-22
Excellent review of the worst 21st genocide
Sam performed a thorough dissection study for the factors that led to the quagmire called the Syrian crisis.
For anyone who is interested to know what happened there, this book is the Bible that you should look for.
Thank you Sam!
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- GH
- 08-01-21
Eye opening insight
A little long winded and winding at times, but truly an eye opening look into one of the worlds most interesting regions and modern dictatorships
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- Miasma
- 05-07-21
insider account of Syrian civil war
This is the best journalist account of the Syrian civil war, although very dependent on the perspective of defector Manaf Tlas.
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- Mitchell
- 09-20-19
"Assad or Nobody. Assad or We Burn the Country."
Great Narration. Hafez-era to Bashar-era. Necessary Reading on Syria. Highly Recommended. Excellent work by Sam.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Kindle Customer
- 07-17-20
the telling of Syrian story as truly happened
one of the few honest objective description of what happened in Syria and why it happened and how it happened
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1 person found this helpful
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- Jeffrey
- 07-28-23
Magnificent story of the Assad family’s rise to power
Latter parts of the book dive into the war and lots of resemblance and history for how putin’s relationship with Assad play into current war in Ukraine.
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-19-20
Good listen
Although I had to cringe when the author attributed the motivation for the Benghazi attack on the infamous YouTube video.
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5 people found this helpful