Is the world really ready to rehabilitate Bashar al-Assad?

Con Coughlin: 'The only way both Assad and Asma could survive the horrors of civil war was to live in a parallel universe& #39;

Since Bashar al-Assad came to power, Syria has experienced more than a decade of civil war, tyrannical suppression and the killing of its people. However, recent initiatives suggest a sudden shift in the attitude of the international community towards the dictator.

When I first started writing about the Middle East for The Daily Telegraph in the early 1980s, I experienced not so much a baptism of fire as being under fire in every sense.

There were no dangerous environment courses back then that there are now foreign correspondents pass before going abroad. The only requirements for covering war zones were basic reporting skills and a sense of adventure.

Prior to arriving in war-torn Beirut in 1983, in the midst of the country's brutal civil war, my only previous experience of unrest was covering the 1981 Brixton riots, which, while violent, hardly counted as military action.

Just before flying to shabby Beirut airport, I wrote for weeks about America's military invasion of the glorious Caribbean island of Grenada.

During my three-week stay in St. George's, the capital, the only danger to my well-being was the large clouds of marijuana smoke that accompanied Hunter S. Thompson, the high priest of gonzo journalism who covered Playboy magazine. /p>

Beirut was a very different proposal. I was 28 years old and had a burning desire to prove myself by doing frontline missions in some of the world's toughest war zones. The Lebanese civil war that began in 1975 was a perfect match for these requirements.

A US Marine unit that invaded Grenada was sent to assist a US Marine unit in Beirut that had just lost 241 killed and hundreds more wounded after their barracks were blown up by a new Lebanese militia called Hezbollah.

Telegraph journalist Con Coughlin has an abiding interest in the menacing shadow the Assad regime in Syria is casting over the region. Photo: Getty

Since I had already met the Marines in Grenada, my superiors at the Telegraph decided it made sense for me to accompany them to Lebanon. Thus began my long association with the region, where over the next decade I was repeatedly criticized and narrowly avoided being kidnapped by Islamic militants.

To say that I was not prepared to face such danger is an understatement. On one of my first nights in Beirut, I traveled to the southern suburbs to investigate reports of a tank battle between rival militias, only to find myself caught up in the fighting and forced to run for cover. In those days, foreign correspondents could not afford the luxury of body armor and protective helmets: you literally had to survive on your mind.

Gradually I became more street. When the shelling around my hotel was especially intense, I began to sleep in the bath to protect myself from shrapnel. And when the police started kidnapping British journalists like my colleague John McCarthy, I hurriedly escaped, hiding under a blanket in the back seat of a taxi to Beirut airport, where I managed to catch one of the last flights to Cyprus. and security.

It was during this turbulent period of my four-decade career at the Telegraph that I developed an abiding interest in the Middle East, and especially in the menacing shadow that the Assad regime in Syria is casting over the region. since the late President Hafez al-Assad seized power in a coup in 1970.

As a close ally of Iran, Assad took an active part in the Lebanese civil war: Syrian intelligence was involved in the 1983 bombing of the US embassy and marine installations. ally in Lebanon.

The late President Hafez al-Assad (father of Bashar al-Assad), who seized power in a coup in 1970, pictured in 1974 with his wife Anisa Makhlouf and children (from left to right): Basel, Bushra, Maher, Majd and Bashar. Photo: Getty

As a consequence, I soon discovered that not only was I banned from traveling to Syria; my name was added to the list of Hezbollah targets in the West.

After Syria became the last repressive Arab state to fall victim to a brutal civil war in 2011, my attention shifted to the role of Bashar al-Assad. in conflict. Having inherited the residence from his father, the shy and reclusive Bashar has managed to turn into one of the most hated dictators of our time.

Throughout the Syrian conflict, Bashar could be found at the center of his regime's bloody attacks on the Syrian people, whether it was leading massacres at rebel strongholds or using chemical weapons against his own people.

Bashar's ability, despite his egregious personal failings, surviving this most brutal of conflicts — that is what motivated me to write a book in which I sought to explore the complex and contradictory nature of the Syrian leader, as well as the key factors that kept him in power. .

For a man who was not born to be a dictator, Bashar al-Assad did a pretty good job of brutalizing his people. Nearly 500,000 Syrians died before his eyes, and millions more were forced to flee their homes. In March of this year, 12 years after the conflict began, the UN estimated that 15.3 million Syrians were in need of humanitarian assistance.

It shouldn't have been like that. Bashar al-Assad was never meant to be the leader of Syria. The role of heir went to his older brother Bassel. He was a playboy portrayed by the ruling Ba'ath Party as the «Golden Knight» who lived up to his image by becoming the darling of Beirut's bustling nightclub scene.

However, Bassel is hopeful that Bassel will succeed his father. , ended in January 1994 when he was involved in a fatal car accident on the way to Damascus airport shortly before his 32nd birthday.

At the time of his brother's death, Bashar, then aged 28, was leading a quiet and relatively obscure life in London as a medical student. Shy, speaking with a slight lisp, he lived in a townhouse apartment in Belgravia, with two Syrian guards on duty at all times. He rarely socialized and listened to Phil Collins and Whitney Houston to relax.

When he first announced his desire to complete his studies in London with an M.D. Assad clan in the capital.

< img src="/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/9e03f21987b45fd4a7a794808556bd6b.jpg" />Syrian President Bachar al-Assad at the Elysee Palace in Paris in 2001. Photo: Getty

The UK has a strained relationship with Damascus, dating back to a failed Syrian intelligence attempt to blow up an Israeli passenger plane at Heathrow in 1986. However, an acquaintance of the family who was on good terms with Downing Street offered to intervene on Bashar's behalf and he was offered a place to study ophthalmology at the Western Eye Hospital.

The young Assad showed great interest in technology, especially computers. When he went out, he often used a pseudonym, especially when interacting with London's vibrant Arab community. Despite his hard work, his supervisors did not consider him a particularly impressive student.

«He was diligent — a pleasure to work with — but rather mediocre,» recalled the former tutor who supervised his training during Bashar's 18 months in London. As the tutor recalls: “One day a big black limousine appeared and took him away so that no one else would see him.”

A private plane landed in London, ready to return the second son to his homeland, where he succeeded Bassel as the heir to the president . At his father's behest, Bashar took a crash course in the political and diplomatic skills needed to govern a troubled state like Syria, a position for which he was not temperamentally suited. As his father remarked to a close acquaintance at the time: “Syria is a jungle, and Bashar is not yet a wolf.”

When he first became president in the summer of 2000, Bashar was welcomed as a refreshing change. Syria has endured decades of repressive rule during his father's 30 years of dictatorship.

Syrians wave national flags and take pictures of their young President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus in 2005. Photo: Getty

The image of Bashar presented to the outside world in the early years was that of a well-educated and dynamic person to modernize the country through radical political and economic reforms.

In his first address as president, he spoke passionately about making the economy and education is the center of its ambitious reform program. «I consider it very important to invite every citizen to take part in the path of development and modernization, if we are really sincere and serious about achieving the desired results in the shortest possible time.»

During the repressive rule of Hafez, any hint of political opposition was immediately crushed and the economy was controlled by a corrupt cabal of Ba'athists. Bashar sought to portray himself as the exact opposite of his father.

He not only received a Western education, but also got a charming wife, 25-year-old Asma al-Ahras, the daughter of a London-based Syrian cardiologist, whom he met during his studies< /p>

Asma, known as Emma to her British friends, graduated from King's College London with a degree in computer science. “She was very polite,” recalls a childhood acquaintance who lived on the same street as Al-Ahras, in the unremarkable western London suburb of Acton.

Marriage to Asma has certainly made Assad more attractive to the outside world. When Tony Blair arranged for the couple to meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace in December 2002 as part of a campaign of diplomatic charm to get Damascus to support the invasion of Iraq, brilliant profiles of the Middle Eastern couple appeared in the British press. called an «icon».

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma pose during a visit to Athens in 2003. Credit: Getty

Behind the scenes, however, Assad was riddled with self-doubt and—perhaps because of this—already revealed his authoritarian nature. “Bashar always had the feeling that he was trying to be two people at the same time,” a close family friend told me. “One half of him tried to be his father, the other half tried to be Bassel.”

“Bashar was always in the shadow of his father and in the shadow of his older brother,” recalled another contemporary. «He hated being underestimated.»

In this way he cracked down on the nascent reform groups that had arisen after his father's death, sidelined those deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about his accession to the throne, and promoted key allies to key positions in the Baathist regime. His younger brother Maher was given command of the elite 4th Armored Division of the Syrian armed forces.

However, the world turned a blind eye to this. Even when clouds of popular unrest began to gather in the early days of the Arab Spring in early 2011, American Vogue published a profile of Asma called «Rose in the Desert».

It described the Assads as «wildly democratic,» a married couple who vacationed in Europe, preached Christianity, was at ease with American celebrities, and whose only goal was to make their beloved country «the safest in the Middle East.» '.

The mask of respectability that the Assads have acquired through their carefully planned public relations campaign evaporated as the regime was threatened by the anti-government protests that erupted during the Arab Spring.

Political unrest has ended simmers beneath the surface Damascus ever since Assad came to power, and the political and economic reforms he promised have not taken place.

Days after the first Syrian protests in Deraa in the south of the country in March 2011, Bashar showed pathological brutality. Under his command, a new security apparatus was created, ominously named the Central Crisis Management Cell (CCMC). Its main task was to identify the main centers of the uprising and target them with massacres of peaceful protesters on an industrial scale.

In one notorious incident in the suburb of Tadamon in Damascus in April 2013, Syrian troops dug a large trench on one of the main streets, after which more than 280 people were executed, whose bodies were thrown into a mass grave.

The CMMC also set up a nationwide network of detention centers where suspected opposition to the regime were subjected to horrendous abuse on the direct orders of the president: they were held for long periods of time during which they were subjected to intimidation, physical abuse and torture. Sexual abuse, including rape, was common, involving women, men, and even children.

Over the next two years, thousands of prisoners died in detention in Damascus, and when photographs of the dead were smuggled out of the country by a defector from the Syrian army, their injuries were comparable to torture, starvation and suffocation. They were, he later said, «painful to kill.»

So how did this meek ophthalmologist and his suburban British wife become one of the world's most prolific killers?

>Assad himself was not a born military leader: indecision-ridden close aides complained that he could change his mind 20 times in one day, making it impossible for commanders to give clear instructions.

Hundreds of Bashar al-Assad supporters at a rally in Sabi Bahrat Square in 2012. Photo: Carol Alfara/Yevin

On the one hand, he promised reforms and at the same time personally led the brutal repression. This has made it extremely difficult for officials to identify the president's primary goals, which has only exacerbated the sense of confusion underlying the regime's response.

Robert Ford, who initially served as the US ambassador to the Damascus conflict, never questioned who was ultimately responsible for the brutality of the Syrian regime. «I never saw the slightest evidence that Bashar was trying to rein them in [the hardliners],» he recalled.

“He was not in control of day-to-day tactics: he simply told his senior security personnel to keep going. He told his advisers, «You know what you need to do.» We never understood that he was calling for restraint.”

Despite this, Assad and, to a lesser extent, Asma, seemed to consistently deny their role in the violence. Later in the conflict, when Assad was confronted with an Amnesty International report detailing the regime's appalling abuses, Assad nonchalantly dismissed the findings.

“You can fake anything these days,” he remarked in a rare interview with The Wall Street Journal. “We live in an age of fake news,” he continued, saying that photographs of the corpses of prisoners piled up in a Damascus hospital were “photoshopped together”.

In public, Assad tried to maintain the image of a tough guy, constantly against enemies who tried to overthrow his regime. But his lack of effective leadership came to light as Iran became more involved in the conflict.

After Tehran agreed to respond to Assad's plea for help after an influx of thousands of Islamist militants to the rebel side from neighboring Iraq, Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran's Quds Force, effectively assumed personal control. “It got to the point where Soleimani went to Assad to politely tell him what was going on,” the former senior US intelligence official explained.

Assad's involvement in his own war was further reduced after Soleimani convinced Vladimir Putin to join the war. “From the moment they arrived, the Russians dictated their terms… The Russian commanders were not interested in informing Assad about what was happening,” recalls the former Syrian officer.

Bashar al-Assad in the Kremlin with Vladimir Putin in March this year Photo: Getty

Meanwhile, Asma's efforts to distance herself from the regime's atrocities were somewhat undermined after the Metropolitan Police announced in 2021 that they were investigating her involvement in war crimes, which could eventually lead to her being tried and losing her British citizenship.

But somehow the Assads remain the leaders of Syria, and despite everything, the president and his wife are calmly going through a period of rehabilitation, at least in the Arab world.

The focus on more pressing issues, such as the war in Ukraine, has led a number of Arab countries to begin rebuilding diplomatic ties with Damascus — so much so that last month Syria was invited back into the Arab League and, most recently, the UAE invited Assad. attend the Cop28 global summit later this year.

The numerous interviews I did with survivors of the Syrian conflict for my book led me to conclude that the only way both Assad and Asma could survive the horrors of civil war is to live in a parallel universe where the narrative they have constructed for themselves depicts them as innocent victims of a violent uprising that forced them to defend their country and their people.

It remains to be seen whether Assad will eventually be able to escape justice for their part in the violent suppression of the Syrian people. Lawyers and activists around the world have already amassed compelling evidence of numerous war crimes; Now that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, many Syrians believe it's just a matter of time before Assad suffers the same fate.

Of course, until the Assads are held fully accountable for their crimes, this will simply be a case for the Syrian people where justice delayed means justice denied.

Assad: Triumph of Tyranny published by Picador at the price of 25 pounds. . To order a copy for £19.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books

Read an exclusive excerpt from Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny

On June 10, 2000, Bashar al-Assad made his usual morning visit to the Presidential Palace to check on his father's health. He knew that the ailing dictator was nearing the end of his life, but nevertheless he was shocked when he entered the bedroom to find his father's lifeless body lying peacefully in his bed. Hafez was only a few months away from his seventieth birthday. The rest of the house was still asleep, and Bashar, who had been waiting weeks for this moment, knew he needed to act quickly to secure the succession. He may have been chosen by his father as the next president of the Syrian Arab Republic, but his appointment was by no means a foregone conclusion.

Bashar's first impulse was to make sure that none of the family members knew that Hafez had died during the night. After respectfully taking care of the body of his dead father, he left the room and quietly locked the door, putting the key in his pocket. He then went into the next room where his mother Anisa was staying and informed her that her husband was resting after a hard night and should not be disturbed. After assuring her that he would return later that morning to check on his father's health, he hurried to his office in the presidential complex to begin an elaborate plan to ensure his succession.

One of his first calls was to Mustafa Tlass, the longtime commander in chief of the Syrian military and a veteran Ba'athist associate of his father. Tlass was one of a select group of trusted Ba'athists who were made responsible for carrying out Hafez's dying wish for Bashar to take control; he did not hesitate to carry out a well-rehearsed plan to secure a peaceful transfer of power. Within hours of the news of Hafez's death, Tlass organized three army divisions to deploy tanks and armored units at key points around Damascus. Just in case, Bashar's younger brother Maher, the senior commander of the Republican Guard, also called in his elite forces. Only after these vital measures had been taken to protect the regime, Bashar returned to his father's quarters to inform his mother and the rest of the family that Hafez had died in his sleep.

Taking precautions to prevent a major disruption of the status quo, Bashar spent the next few days dealing with other key issues that needed to be resolved before he could take over as president. The first hurdle was amending the Syrian constitution, which made the minimum age for an elected president 40 years old. Bashar was only thirty-four years old. The meeting of the People's Assembly, the regime's formal parliament, was hastily organized and, perhaps unsurprisingly, voted unanimously to amend Article 83 of the constitution. From now on, the minimum age of the elected president of Syria will be thirty-four years.

Over the next few days, Bashar's candidacy for the post of general secretary of the Ba'ath Party was approved, as was his promotion to the country's highest military rank, farik, or commander of the armed forces. A few days after his father's death, Bashar succeeded in becoming the next dictator of Syria. The unwavering confidence and efficiency that Bashar displayed in seeking to secure his dynastic legacy shortly after the loss of his father took many by surprise, not least those who questioned whether he possessed the charisma and strength of character necessary to lead a capricious and complex country. . like Syria.

The self-confidence that Bashar showed in the first days after his father's death was, of course, unexpected for those who did not know him well. Gone was the shy medical student; instead, foreign dignitaries who paid their respects to the Assad family were surprised by Bashar's composure. One of the first visitors to the Presidential Palace, a close friend of the family, recalled how relaxed the heir seemed. Far from being stunned by the loss of the man who dominated Syria for almost three decades, Bashar went out of his way to reassure his guest that he had everything under control. When a friend asked the young president to «reassure me that you have done everything that needs to be done to ensure regime change,» he was taken aback by the audacity of the response. “You see those hands,” Bashar replied, raising both hands. “When people look at my hands, they think they are soft, like I'm wearing velvet gloves. But they are very wrong. For if I take them off, you will see an iron fist.”