The Ba'athist old guard still hold sway in Damascus, cracking down with martial law. Yet younger Syrians see Bashar al-Assad as their best guarantee of reform and new freedoms.

“George Wassouf used to be good, but now he sounds like a cow. I blame drugs,” Ahmad quips, and puffs on his nargilee pipe. When he jokes about the Syrian music scene, the 26 year-old student is animated. But when politics are discussed his voice becomes a low and measured whisper.

As you sit, drinking tea on a warm evening in Damascus, it is easy to forget that you're in a state under unending martial law, a state where students are imprisoned for calling for democracy. But complacency can be dangerous. “I cannot talk about this, it's not at all safe here,” Ahmad says moments later in response to a question about the president's Alawi background. Holding his palms aloft, he cautions: “a few years ago it would be too dangerous to have had most of this conversation.”

Syria is a strange kind of dictatorship. It would be wrong to imagine that Bashar al-Assad inspires widespread personal vitriol among reformers, or that he is regarded as the personal embodiment of repression. The portraits of his thin, thoughtful face that hang beside those his late father, Hafiz, evoke something quite different from the former president's stern paternalism. Neither terrifying nor charming, he is not one of nature's born tyrants.

Hafiz's elder son, the athletic Basil, was groomed as the natural heir to his father, but died in a road accident in 1994 - though Ahmad darkly suggests that this version of events is questionable. “I know many people who doubt that it was an accident,” he says, “but Syria really benefited – because Bashar is a more modern man”.

With the death of the heir, the burden fell upon the spare – the younger son. Bashar had been working as an optometrist in London, something that remains source of pride to some cosmopolitan Syrians. Despite reservations among some of Hafiz's deputies, he inherited the presidency in 2001.

Unlike his father, Bashar is widely considered an instinctive reformer whose continued rule is both hampered by and conditional upon the ageing Ba'ath Party cabal which, under his father extinguished all opposition. It was the party that flexed its muscle to bring “Damascus Spring,” the brief period of more open public discourse that followed Hafez's death to an end.

Although fear of reprisals over careless cafe chat has diminished a little under Bashar, the position of journalists remains hopeless. Harsh punishments for any perceived slight on the state in the overwhelmingly nationalised press are proscribed by the infamous Legislative Decree No 50/2001. As one Syrian student told me: “There simply are no media worth reading here”. Yet the internet has provided an outlet for free news and discussion – and young Damascenes like Ahmad have eagerly taken up the cudgel.

Attitudes towards the internet betray the quiet tension between the president and those who maintain him. Bashar was an enthusiastic advocate of web access in Syria. Yet the sites that allow young Syrians to communicate with one another, notably Hotmail and Facebook, are banned. But ingenuity flourishes under repression– and in practice readers can gain access to these sites without undue difficulty, rendering censorship an ineffectual symbol of a regime struggling to limit the potential for dissent.

But while bypassing online restrictions is possible, sharing ideas is not without danger - not least for those who have found themselves facing charges before the Supreme State Security Court, an institution condemned by Amnesty International for failing to respect international standards for fair trials. Among them is Karim 'Arbaji, a forum moderator, who was arrested in June 2007 and charged with “weakening national sentiment”. It is alleged that he was tortured while in detention. In May 2008 the blogger Tarek Biasi was jailed for three years on the same charge and for "insulting security services".

Away from the internet, even in private discussion, allegory remains the safest way of approaching politics. “If I want to discuss an issue with a tutor who I am not sure of, I will relate it to something from literature,” another student tells me. “The other way is to say something more bold. If he frowns then you immediately laugh – just pretend it was a joke. It's riskier though.”

“Many of us believe that Bashar could change the country – modernise it. Maybe one day, bring democracy,” Ahmad says hopefully. Yet it is difficult to escape the sense that those who stand behind the president will always regard him as rather too green, in need of both propping up and reining in. And Bashar knows that he is no position to break from those who might covet his position.

Four years on from the Cedar Revolution in Beirut, the abject failure of pro-Syrian candidates in Lebanon's
7 June elections has further undermined the regional prestige of Damascus and Syria's traction on its neighbour– which does little to strengthen Bashar's hand. While the president's modest efforts to promote private enterprise have struggled, the old guard wrestle with preserving a status quo that still rests on a decades-old declaration of emergency law. And so, pragmatic and reform-minded young people like Ahmad are pushed into the most bizarre of situations: covertly discussing politics online while pinning their hopes of a freer future on a dictator.

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