Bashar al-Assad Says Outsiders Feed Unrest in Syria Damascus residents watched President Bashar al-Assad gave a live broadcast address, his fourth speech since the uprising in Syria began 10 months ago. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria on Tuesday said the 10-month uprising in his country was the work of what he called "outsiders," "terrorists," the international news media and the Arab League, stressing that he would use an "an iron hand" against his foreign enemies. "Those who stand in the middle are traitors," he told a cheering crowd in a speech at Damascus University that was broadcast live. There is no alternative. But to many Syrians, longtime allies and even his few remaining supporters, the problem increasingly is Mr. Assad himself. Trained as an ophthalmologist, Mr. Assad came to power 11 years ago with the promise of leading Syria into a new era of economic and political opening. But when he stepped to the lectern for only the fourth national address since the uprising started, he instead appeared a shallow image of his father, Hafez al-Assad, relying exclusively on his repressive and violent security forces to stay in power. But those tactics have proved ineffective, and increasingly, as his isolation at home and abroad intensifies, many are predicting it is only a matter of time before his government falls. "The father's playbook says "shoot," so they keep doing that," said Amr al-Azm, a Syrian-born history professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio. Mr. Assad denied that his government ordered security forces to shoot anyone, despite a death toll that the United Nations says has spiraled beyond 5,000 since mid-March in a relentless crackdown. And he promised a referendum on a new constitution in March, a step that seemed pale before the scale of the crisis, which has emerged as one of the bloodiest of the uprisings that began in the Arab world a year ago. But he never once deviated from the notion that he remains popular, a victim of a conspiracy financed by outsiders - offering the same kind of logic that was heard in Libya and Egypt before uprisings brought down longtime autocrats. "When I rule, I rule because that it is the people's will, and when I leave office, I leave because it is the people's will," Mr. Assad said in his first speech since June. Standing behind a wooden lectern , the Syrian leader left the impression that he is still scrambling to find a solution to the turmoil that is undermining his grip on power and slouching toward sectarian civil war. But he appeared empty-handed, lacking any new strategies. In the weeks after protests erupted in the southern town of Dara'a last March, Mr. Assad seemed to strike a conciliatory note, offering reheated promises of political reform. But those who met with him privately in those early months said he soon moved from even a pretense of compromise to confrontation. Right after the initial protests, a group of elders from Dara'a visited Mr. Assad, and as a show of respect they doffed their igals, the black braided ropes that Arabs used to keep their headclothes in place, said Charles Ayoub, editor of Ad Diyar, a newspaper in Lebanon. They said they would publicly pledge allegiance as long as he addressed the town's concerns, which were aroused when local children, mostly adolescents, had been imprisoned for writing antigovernment slogans on the walls. The president assured the elders that he would address their grievance. Instead he deployed his tanks there almost immediately, Mr. Ayoub said. It was from that point that management of the crisis began to run off the rails, analysts said, leading to a continuous cycle of protest, arrest, torture - leavened with the occasional and dubious announcements of an amnesty for prisoners. As the demonstrations in Dara'a continued, Hamza Khatib, 13, was arrested and returned to his parents castrated and bearing marks of torture. Mr. Assad promised an investigation, including whether a cousin Atif Najib, had any role as the head of security there. Though Mr. Najib was removed, the investigation never materialized. Instead an entirely different narrative emerged, one that defied the evidence. The marks on the boy's body were the result of decay in the morgue, not torture, Mr. Assad told visitors. He echoed that line with ABC News last month. Anthony Shadid contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.