On the face of it at the least, the Bashar al-Assad of 2002 introduced a starkly completely different determine from the brutal autocrat he would change into, presiding over a fragile state based on torture, imprisonment and industrial homicide.
He had been president then for simply two years, succeeding his father, Hafez, whose personal identify was a byword for brutality.
For some time the gawky former ophthalmologist, who had studied medication in London and later married a British-Syrian spouse, Asma, an funding banker at JP Morgan, was eager to point out the world that Syria, underneath his management, may comply with a distinct path.
Reaching out to the west, he pursued a public relations marketing campaign to point out the younger Assad household as one way or the other bizarre regardless of the palaces and the ever seen equipment of repression.
Visiting Damascus that 12 months earlier than Bashar’s state go to to the UK, organized by the then prime minister, Tony Blair – the excessive level of that engagement – I used to be invited for a non-public espresso with Assad, who sat on a white couch in an expensively tailor-made go well with.
Suggesting some uncertainty, he was interested in how Syria was seen on this planet, floating potentialities for a change, together with a reset within the relationship between Damascus and Israel.
It was a constructed iteration of the Assads – highlighting Asma’s much-vaunted “charitable” works and Bashar’s transient embrace by the west – that nodded to an ambition to rework Hafez’s Syria into one thing extra like a model of Jordan’s paternalistic royal household. More manicured. Certainly extra PR-savvy. A dictatorship all the identical.
In the midst of the dialog, nevertheless, Bashar proffered a chilling and virtually throwaway line as he mirrored on the earlier 12 months’s 9/11 assault on the US by al-Qaida and the following American invasion of Afghanistan.
The world ought to know, Bashar insisted, that his father had been “proper” all alongside in his brutal crushing of Islamist insurgents.
Dictatorship
Twenty-two years later Bashar is gone, swept out of energy by an offshoot of al-Qaida. And with the dramatic ending of the half-century of Assad rule, a key part of the map of the Middle East has been totally redrawn.
But even within the pre-Arab spring days that might problem and outline his rule, the fact of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria – like Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya – was a rustic wherein an unlimited safety equipment was ever-present, brokers watching in market locations, at taxi ranks and on avenue corners.
Rejecting the mannequin of democracy as applicable for Syria, Bashar’s preliminary provide of reform was to vow financial change forward of political transformation, changing unpopular state monopolies with a free market, however which finally benefited a crony elite.
His political doctrine, as it could emerge, was no completely different from his father’s – a extremely personalised dictatorship with energy concentrated within the armed forces, together with the air drive, and intelligence businesses.
If one nameless European diplomat would enterprise early on to query his actual authoritarian chops, describing Syria as a “dictatorship and not using a dictator”, there would quickly be no query what he represented. A dictator he would change into.
While Bashar launched a variety of political prisoners in 2001 – primarily communists – in a presidential amnesty as a part of his marketing campaign to exhibit to the west that Syria was altering, it was all the time window dressing. The arrests had actually by no means stopped. It was enterprise as normal.
Under the menace from the Syrian rebellion of 2011 the final pretence would slip, displaying a regime prepared to industrialise the detention, torture and homicide of big numbers – together with as much as 13,000 killed between 2011 and 2015 at Sednaya jail, referred to as the “Human Slaughterhouse”.
And regardless of makes an attempt to burnish the Assads that might proceed till as late as 2011 – with a shiny profile of Asma in Vogue because the purported “Rose within the Desert”, Bashar’s rule would change into much more horrific than his father’s.
It was Hafez, an air drive officer and Ba’athist organiser, who first participated as a plotter within the 1963 army coup that introduced the Syrian department of the Ba’ath celebration to energy, who first framed the Assad household values. Bashar introduced them to their logical conclusion.
As early as 1966, throughout the so-called Hama riot, Hafez endorsed a view that might change into the Assad credo and a chilling precursor of the slaughters to come back underneath his rule and that of his son: any and all opposition needs to be violently crushed.
For Hafez that might discover its fullest expression within the interval after his seizure of full energy for himself in one other coup, regularly establishing his personal Alawite minority because the centre of an all-encompassing police state, with the brutal repression of an rebellion by the Muslim Brotherhood in opposition to his rule that started within the mid-Nineteen Seventies and culminating within the Hama bloodbath of 1982.
Prisoners had been murdered en masse. Muslim Brotherhood figures and their households had been assassinated. In February 1982 Hama was subjected to a scorched-earth land and aerial assault, killing hundreds. It was a playbook that might be embraced simply as energetically by Bashar and his brother Maher.
The Arab spring
If Bashar initially appeared completely different, it was, maybe, as a result of he was not at first supposed as Hafez’s successor, a job earmarked for his brother Bassel earlier than his demise in a automotive crash in 1994. In the aftermath Bashar, beforehand little occupied with politics earlier than his recall to Syria from London, was personally coached by Hafez on the train of energy.
By 2011 and the onset of the Arab spring, the fastidiously curated picture of Bashar and his household as a extra healthful model of the Hafez period – with its weekends spent watching screenings of western movies with buddies of their personal cinema and meals in Damascus eating places – had evaporated.
Beginning with sporadic demonstrations in opposition to the rule of the Assads, by March the motion had caught fireplace, turning into revolution. The response was brutal. Security forces underneath the command of Maher fired on demonstrators as a part of an official coverage whereas closely armed pro-regime militias referred to as shabiha emerged to function as demise squads.
And by way of the years Bashar would return to the identical justification deployed in 2002 in defence of his father – that each one the bloodshed was in service to a “warfare on terror” – at one level describing victims of his personal safety forces as a obligatory sacrifice.
A 12 months later, in 2012, leaks of hundreds of hacked emails by WikiLeaks regarding Bashar and his household and their contacts throughout the area supplied a uncommon perception into the deliberations and lifetime of the Assads inside Damascus: Asma ordering costly jewelry in Paris; the inevitable PR consultants advising easy methods to seem like reforming whereas pursuing a violent crackdown.
Key among the many revelations that 12 months, whilst the primary Russian army advisers started arriving to bolster the regime, was Bashar’s private involvement in signing off on every day orders for the persevering with violence whilst a way of unreality pervaded, prompting Asma’s British-based father to query the knowledge of the timing of a New Year’s Eve celebration deliberate by the couple as Syrians had been being slaughtered.
But if Bashar’s grip appeared tenuous in that interval, with worldwide requires him to step down, different components intervened to supply a keep of execution, as Syria drifted into lengthy years of atomising civil warfare that might kill 500,000 and displace half the inhabitants.
One issue was the emergence of Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate, centred within the northern Syrian metropolis of Raqqa in 2013, whose horrific abuses eclipsed that of even Bashar’s forces, diverting worldwide consideration from the Assad regime whilst Damascus started utilizing chemical weapons in assaults in opposition to insurgent centres, most notoriously in opposition to Khan al-Assal and Ghouta in that 12 months.
Arguments have continued over time, primarily based on intelligence intercepts, as as to whether Assad personally ordered the assaults. However, a press release by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, launched final 12 months for the tenth anniversary of the 2 Ghouta assaults, was in little question, insisting that much less momentous assaults had had his private approval and that it constituted regime coverage.
Becoming a purported check of worldwide resolve, the “pink line” set in opposition to using chemical weapons by Syria by the then US president, Barack Obama, handed with out vital repercussion, whilst different forces moved into the vacuum.
First was the choice by Vladimir Putin to deploy Russian forces to maintain Assad, in a cynical manoeuvre designed to bolster Moscow’s declare to substantive affect within the wider Middle East.
Iran, too, moved forcefully to guard its funding in Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon, sending advisers and backing the deployment of Hezbollah fighters on behalf of the Assad regime, stabilising rule within the areas it managed.
Never abandoning his style for the performative, Bashar organised sham elections in areas he managed in 2014 underneath the banner of sawa – “unity”. A 12 months later his forces managed simply 25% of Syria.
Through all of it, improbably, Bashar al-Assad survived, whilst Donald Trump in his first presidency ordered a strike on a Syrian airbase in 2017 for yet one more chemical weapons assault on Khan Sheikhoun.
What sustained Bashar by way of these years can be his undoing: an primarily failed state closely depending on exterior actors and weak to occasions, not least Moscow’s distraction in Ukraine and the diminishing of Tehran’s axis of resistance within the latest decimation of Hezbollah by Israel.
“Assad crumbled not simply due to a well-planned jihadist marketing campaign,” wrote Hassan Hassan, the editor-in-chief of New Lines and a number one knowledgeable on Syria, “however as a result of 13 years of civil warfare have left his military a husk, and his troopers demoralised.
“[Syria] the nation was Balkanised by aggressive and contradictory Turkish and American protectorates within the north and east of the nation and elsewhere mortgaged to Iran and Russia, which did the heavy lifting in retaking Aleppo and defeating western-backed rebels in southern Syria.”
In his final days in energy, Bashar continued to speak the discuss, vowing to crush the rebels whilst they sped in the direction of Damascus. In the tip, 50 years of Assad rule unravelled within the blinking of a watch.
