New Look For Syria as Presidential Campaign Starts

Hersh, Joshua. "It's Presidential Campaign Season In Syria. This Is What It Looks Like." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 07 Mar. 2014. Web. 07 Mar. 2014.

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It is the beginning of the presidential campaign in Syria and Damascus’s commercial pathways are starting to be repainted again, the usual color of red, white, and black with two green stars and face of current president, Bashar al-Assad. By the end of the week almost every store front was painted the exact same, turning the dull colors of Syrian streets to colors of national pride. As one shopkeeper said “We did it because we are all with the government. We are all together as one. No one asked us to do this.” But as another reporter found out, people were being forced to repaint their store fronts or they would be fined or imprisoned. From what I’ve learned from World War II this has reoccurred many times from dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin as they have forced people to support them or they will face consequences, which usually ended up in death. The new elected president of Syria will be very important because whoever is elected has the big responsibility of bouncing Syria back from it’s downfall, so in the next couple months this presidential election will determine Syria’s fate for the next couple years.