DAMASCUS, Syria — As the Arab Spring claimed its first dead dictator, the spotlight swung to the other revolts still simmering across the region, in Yemen and, perhaps the most intractable struggle of all, in Syria.
Moammar Gaddafi was the third of the region’s leaders to be ousted by his own people in nine months but the first to meet a bloody end.
WARNING: graphic video. Al-Jazeera TV showed footage of a man resembling Moammar Gaddafi lying dead or severely wounded. The video comes as Libyan leaders have informed the U.S. that Gaddafi is dead. (Oct. 20)
Timeline: Gaddafi’s 41-year-long rule
His death, coming two months after rebels drove his forces from Tripoli and began setting up a new government, was in some ways a footnote to an already tumultuous year.
But the scenes of his corpse being dragged through the streets of his home town of Sirte inevitably rekindled revolutionary sentiments across the region, along with hopes that his violent demise will give pause to the despots who remain.
In the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, thousands of people swarmed into Change Square to celebrate and to call for the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. In the Tunisian capital, Tunis, where it all began in January with the flight of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, young men took to the streets wrapped in Libyan flags and drivers honked their horns into the night in celebration.
“Now all these tyrants who thought they would rule forever are trembling,” Khelil Ezzaouia, a leader of the secularist Ettakatol party, said at a town hall meeting in a glitzy mall in Tunis as campaigning accelerated ahead of the Arab Spring’s first free election on Sunday.
But it was the implications of Gaddafi’s fate for Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, who is showing no signs of faltering despite nearly eight months of protests against his rule, that most seemed to capture the imagination of commentators across the region.
“Ben Ali fled. Mubarak is on trial. Gaddafi was killed. The greater the tyrant’s resistance to his people the worse his punishment,” tweeted Essam al-Zamel, a writer at the Saudi newspaper al-Yawm, referring also to Egypt’s deposed President Hosni Mubarak. “It seems that Bashar will be crucified to death in the center of Damascus.”
Syrian demonstrators took to the streets in several towns and cities across the north and south, and in the eastern city of Deir al-Zour, to cheer Gaddafi’s demise.
Activists said they hoped it would reinvigorate a protest movement that has shown signs of withering in recent weeks in the face of the sustained severity of the government’s crackdown.
Some also expressed hope that the effective end of the NATO bombing campaign in Libya would free up Western forces to come to the aid of Syrian protesters, who have been calling for a no-fly zone, like the one that facilitated the Libyan revolution, since Gaddafi was toppled in August.
“Maybe NATO will be free now to involve themselves in Syria. At least we hope so,” said Omar al-Muqdad, an activist from the southern town of Daraa who fled to Turkey in the early months of the uprising. “And maybe the regime will get this message, that NATO is free now to attack them.”
There still seems little prospect of that, however. President Obama, speaking in Washington, issued a warning to Arab dictators but did not suggest that the United States would step up efforts to remove them.
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