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Tails from the Arab Spring.

Written and presented by the BBC's Middle East Editor, Jeremy Bowen.

He's isolated now and serious future isn't just looking uncertain, looking dangerous.

By the 11th of February 2011, the day the President Mubarak of Egypt was overthrown,

Arab protesters believed they'd found the way to rid themselves of a dictator.

Organize, use social media to the maximum.

Occupy, head for the main avenues and squares of the capital city, then spread the action through strikes and demonstrations.

But other authoritarian Arab regimes seem to come to a very different conclusion about keeping power.

Force works as long as you use enough of it.

It was time for the counter-revolution and they tried it in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria.

The Syrian regime's response has been brutal.

Over more than 40 years, the ruling Assad family have become experts at using force.

In 1982, President Hafez al-Assad crushed an uprising led by the Muslim Brotherhood in Hamar.

The operation supervised by his younger brother killed at least 10,000 and quite lightly more.

President Assad's senior was the kind of man for whom the words ruthless, calculating and dominant were invented.

Ruling Syria is a family business, the current Syrian President Bashar al-Assad inherited the job when his father died in 2000.

His closest advisors include his younger brother, his sister and her husband and his mother.

I found President Bashar, amiable, polite and charming, as well as self-confident and well-informed.

In a guesthouse at the presidential palace in Damascus, he told me last year that he was a pragmatist, who'd always do his best for Syria.

I don't buy the line put forward by some, that he's not responsible for what the regime's been doing.

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