At least at first glance, the Bashar al-Assad of 2002 presented a very different figure from the brutal autocrat he would become, presiding over a fragile state based on torture, imprisonment and murder on industrial scale.
He had only been president for two years, succeeding his father, Hafez, whose name had become synonymous with brutality.
For a time, the bumbling exophthalmologist, who had studied medicine in London and married a British-Syrian woman, Asma, an investment banker at JP Morgan, wanted to show the world that Syria, under his leadership, could follow a different path. .
Reaching out to the West, he ran a public relations campaign to show the young Assad family as an ordinary family despite the palaces and the ever-visible apparatus of repression.
That same year I visited Damascus ahead of Bashar’s state visit to the UK, organized by then Prime Minister Tony Blair – the high point of that engagement – and was invited to have a private coffee with Assad, who was sitting in a white sofa with a very expensive tailored suit.
Conveying some uncertainty, Asad Jr. was curious about how Syria was viewed in the world, raising possibilities for change, including a reset of the relationship between Damascus and Israel.
It was a fabricated new version of the Assads – highlighting Asma’s much-vaunted “charitable” works and Bashar’s brief embrace of the West – that pointed to an ambition to transform Hafez’s Syria into something more like a version of the paternalistic family. royal jordan More careful. Without a doubt, more skilled in public relations. But a dictatorship after all.
However, in the middle of the conversation, Bashar uttered a chilling and almost throwaway phrase when reflecting on the previous year’s September 11 attack against the United States perpetrated by Al Qaeda and the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan.
The world should know, Bashar insisted, that his father had been “right” all along to brutally crush the Islamist insurgents.
Dictatorship
Twenty-two years later, Bashar is gone, swept from power by a branch of Al Qaeda. With the dramatic end to Assad’s half-century of rule, a key section of the map of the Middle East has been completely redrawn.
But even in the days before the ‘Arab Spring’ that would challenge and define his government, the reality of Bashar al Assad’s Syria – like Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya – was a country in which a vast security apparatus was in place. always present, with agents keeping watch in markets, at taxi stops and on street corners.
Rejecting the model of democracy as appropriate for Syria, Bashar’s initial reform offer was to promise economic change rather than political transformation, replacing unpopular state monopolies with a free market, but one that ultimately benefited a crony elite. .
His political doctrine, as would later be demonstrated, was no different from that of his father – a highly personalistic dictatorship with power concentrated in the armed forces, including the air force and intelligence agencies.
Although Bashar freed several political prisoners in 2001 – mainly communists – in a presidential amnesty as part of his campaign to show the West that Syria was changing, it was always a façade. In reality, the arrests had never stopped. Everything remained the same.
Under the threat of the 2011 Syrian uprising, the last pretense would fade, showing a regime willing to industrialize detention, torture and murder in enormous numbers – including up to 13,000 deaths between 2011 and 2015 in the Sednaya prison, known as the “ Human Slaughterhouse”–.
And despite attempts to glorify the Assads – which continued until late 2011 – with a glowing profile of Asma in Vogue as the supposed “Desert Rose”, Bashar’s government would be even more horrible than his father’s. .
If it was Hafez, an air force officer, who first participated as a conspirator in the 1963 military coup that brought the Syrian branch of the Baath party to power and who first framed the values of the Assad family, his son Bashar was the one who took them to their logical conclusion.
Already in 1996, during the Hama uprising, Hafez adopted a vision that would become the Assad family creed and a chilling precursor to the massacres that were to come under his and his son’s rule: any and all opposition would be crushed with violence.
For Hafez, this would find its greatest expression in the brutal repression following a Muslim Brotherhood uprising against his rule that began in the mid-1970s and culminated in the Hama massacre of 1982. Hafez established the Alawite minority as the center of his police state.
The regime murdered prisoners en masse. Muslim Brotherhood figures and their families were murdered. In February 1982, Hama was subject to a scorched earth ground and air assault that left thousands dead. It was the manual that Bashar and his brother Maher would later adopt with equal vigor.
The Arab Spring
If Bashar initially seemed different, perhaps it was because he was not originally intended to be Hafez’s successor, a role assigned to his brother Bassel before his death in a car accident in 1994. Later, Bashar, little interested in politics before returning to Syria from London, he would receive personal instructions from Hafez on the exercise of power.
In 2011 and with the onset of the Arab Spring, the carefully constructed image of Bashar and his family as a healthier version of the Hafez era – with his weekends spent watching screenings of Western films with friends in his private cinema and meals in Damascus restaurants – had evaporated.
The movement, which began with sporadic demonstrations against the Assad government, caught fire in March and became a revolution. The response was brutal. Security forces under Maher fired on protesters as part of official policy, while heavily armed pro-regime militias known as shabiha emerged to operate as death squads.
Over the years, Bashar would return to the same justification used in 2002 in defense of his father: all the bloodshed was in service of a “war on terror,” at one point going so far as to describe the victims of their own security forces as a necessary sacrifice.
A year later, in 2012, WikiLeaks’ leak of thousands of emails related to Bashar and his family and their contacts across the region provided a hidden glimpse into the Assads’ deliberations and life inside Damascus: Asma commissioning expensive jewelry in Paris; and public relations advisors advising how to appear reform while pursuing violent repression.
One of the main revelations of that year, even as the first Russian military advisers began to arrive to reinforce the regime, was Bashar’s personal involvement in approving and signing daily orders for the violence to continue, even as a war spread. sense of unreality that led Asma’s British-based father to question the propriety of the couple’s planned New Year’s Eve party while Syrians were being massacred.
But if Bashar’s control seemed tenuous in that period – with international calls for him to resign – other factors would intervene to make a 180-degree turn as the country suffered long years of atomizing civil war that has killed 500,000 people and displaced the half of the population.
One such factor would be the emergence of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate, centered in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa in 2013, whose horrific abuses eclipsed even those of Bashar’s forces, diverting international attention from the Assad regime even as Damascus began to using chemical weapons in attacks against rebel centers, most notably against Khan al-Assal and Ghouta that year.
Although there has continued to be debate over the years, based on intelligence interceptions, whether Assad personally ordered the attacks, a statement by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, published last year on the 10th anniversary of the two attacks of Ghouta, left no room for doubt, insisting that the less consequential attacks had had his personal approval and that they constituted regime policy.
Becoming a supposed test of the international community’s resolve, the “red line” set by then-US President Barack Obama against Syria’s use of chemical weapons passed without significant repercussions, although other forces took advantage of that. empty.
The first was Vladimir Putin’s decision to deploy Russian forces to support Assad in a cynical move designed to bolster Moscow’s claim to substantial influence in the Middle East.
Iran also acted decisively to protect its investment in Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon, sending advisors and supporting the deployment of Hezbollah fighters on behalf of the Assad regime, consolidating its power in areas it controlled.
Never abandoning his taste for the performative, Bashar organized false elections in 2014 in the areas he controlled under the banner of sawa, “unity.” A year later, his forces only controlled 25% of Syria.
Despite everything, Bashar al-Assad survived, even when Donald Trump, in his first presidency, ordered an attack on a Syrian air base in 2017 for another chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun.
What sustained Bashar during those years would be his undoing: an essentially failed state highly dependent on external actors and vulnerable to events, not to mention Moscow’s distraction in Ukraine and the decline of Tehran’s axis of resistance in the recent weakening of Hezbollah. for Israel.
“Assad collapsed not only because of a well-planned jihadist campaign,” wrote Hassan Hassan, editor-in-chief of New Lines and a leading expert on Syria, “but because 13 years of civil war have left his army in a shell and his soldiers demoralized.” ”.
“[Siria] The nation was balkanized by competing and contradictory protectorates of Turkey and the United States in the north and east of the country, and elsewhere mortgaged to Iran and Russia, which did the heavy lifting to recapture Aleppo and defeat Western-backed rebels in southern Syria.
In his final days in power, Bashar continued to talk the talk, vowing to crush the rebels even as they raced toward Damascus. In the end, 50 years of Assad family rule were undone in the blink of an eye.
Translation of Javier Biosca
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