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Syria's War Hits the House of Assad
(Wall Street Journal) Fouad Ajami - With Wednesday's rebel bomb attack on a meeting of Bashar al-Assad's top lieutenants, killing at least three, the war has come to the House of Assad itself. Asef Shawkat, the ruler's brother-in-law and deputy chief of staff of the armed forces, was a big player in the regime. The Assads took the Alawites - a historically despised community - from destitution and gave them a dominion of four decades. The edifice was unnatural, a majority Sunni society with pride as to its place in Islamic history submitting to the rule of a "godless" bunch of schismatics. The writer is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.