Bashar al-Assad: a brutal dictator full of assertiveness who scorched Syria

He used chemical weapons against his own people. He had his opponents tortured to death. He bombed schools and hospitals. And he deliberately turned a peaceful uprising against his regime into a war that devastated a country, displaced more than 12 million people and killed hundreds of thousands.

But now, almost fourteen years after Syrians plucked up the courage to rise up against him in the spring of 2011, the end has come. Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s executioner, has been overthrown.

Assad is said to have fled to an as yet unknown location, news agencies reported on Sunday morning. Meanwhile, rebels take the capital Damascus after regime troops laid down their arms without much of a fight. Across the country, statues of members of the Assad family are being toppled, the doors of torture prisons are flying open and Syrians are taking to the streets to celebrate. After an eleven-day rebel offensive, a more than fifty-year-old regime appears to be coming to an end.

That regime was founded by Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, who took all power after a series of coups in 1971. The Assad family belongs to the historically marginalized Alawite minority, and Hafez ensured that virtually all officers in his all-powerful security services (the infamous mukhabarat) were Alawites. In a short time he established a police state in which the walls had ears and opponents disappeared into torture prisons. Anyone who rebelled would pay for it with death, as became clear when Hafez massacred tens of thousands of people in the so-called Hama massacre in 1982.

Ophthalmologist

Son Bashar was sixteen at the time. The shy and socially awkward teenager was in the shadow of his father and dominant brothers. After studying medicine, he moved to London in the early 1990s, where he started working as an ophthalmologist and met his future wife Asma. Bashar had no political ambitions at the time, after all, everyone in the family knew that his older macho brother and father’s favorite son Bassel would take over from Hafez.

But when Bassel died in a car accident in 1994, Hafez brought his second son back to Syria to send him into the army and prepare him for the succession. In 2000 the time had come: Hafez died and 34-year-old Bashar became president of Syria. Expectations within the regime were low. If only Bassel were still alive, everyone thought. Bashar came to power with an enormous drive for assertiveness that helped shape his brutal rule.

Assad presented himself to the West as someone you could do business with

Initially, the new president Assad tried to present himself as a reformer. Immediately after he took office in 2000, the so-called Damascus Spring began, a short period in which dissidents were given space to talk about political change. It was short-lived: spring quickly turned to winter and the dissidents disappeared into torture prisons as usual.

The liberalization that Assad said he favored turned out to be only economic in nature. For example, he broke up many government services with far-reaching privatizations and other neoliberal reforms. This rapidly increased economic inequality in Syria and led to the rise of a new business elite around the palace that excelled even more than before in corruption and self-enrichment. The great dissatisfaction about this would contribute to the 2011 uprising.

Wife without headscarf

Meanwhile, Assad presented himself to the West as a type with whom you could do business: secular, economically liberal and also accompanied by a beautiful wife without a headscarf and with a British accent. But in the background, Assad also went against Western interests. For example, after the American invasion of Iraq, he allowed many young radicalized Syrians to travel to the neighboring country to fight against the US. One of them is the former al-Qaeda fighter and current rebel leader whose lightning offensive has now toppled Assad: Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.

When the so-called Arab Spring reached Syria in March 2011 and hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to demand the fall of the regime, Assad felt the shadow of his deceased father and eldest brother passing over him again. He had to show that he could be just as tough as them and decided, against the advice of some figures within the regime, to use large-scale violence against the rebels and thus provoke a military conflict.

In the war that followed, Bashar even surpassed his murderous father in cruelty. He repeatedly used chemical weapons against civilians, carried out ethnic cleansing in mainly Sunni civilian neighborhoods, invited the Russians and Iranians to help him bomb Syrian cities and allowed more than a hundred thousand people to languish in the infamous torture prisons.

Meanwhile, Assad deliberately stoked sectarian tensions and his regime released prominent jihadists from prison. In doing so, the regime contributed to the radicalization of the battlefield and the rise of groups such as Islamic State. That was not without reason: Assad knew that attention in the West would soon focus more on the jihadist danger than on his own atrocities. Yet the regime and its allies are responsible for about 90 percent of civilian deaths in Syria, according to calculations by several human rights organizations.

Reconquest

With Western attention diverted and rebel groups fighting each other, Assad began a reconquest of lost territories. He received support from the Iranians and especially the Russians, who bombed the city of Aleppo in 2015 and 2016. By 2018, Assad had regained control of large parts of the country and most rebels had been driven out to the northwestern province of Idlib.

But the regime was hollowed out from within. During the war, Assad loosened the reins on his security services and various militias to take advantage of a war economy that revolved around extortion, plunder and drug trafficking. After the war, Assad never managed to defuse this chaos. There was little left of government services and civilians in regime areas were in many ways even worse off than in rebel areas. While an authoritarian regime usually provides stability in exchange for a surrender of political freedoms, Assad offered neither.

This partly explains why the house of cards has now collapsed so quickly. Even within Assad’s own supporters, there had been great dissatisfaction for years. Alawites and other loyalists who sacrificed their sons to save the regime do not see what the war has given them and feel abandoned. Morale within the regime army, which largely consists of underpaid conscripts, was extremely low.

Even within Assad’s own supporters, there had been great dissatisfaction for years

In contrast, there was an extremely tightly organized rebel army that advanced at lightning speed. Moreover, leader Jolani continued to reiterate that he is not seeking revenge, made contact with prominent figures within the regime and promised soldiers who laid down their arms a safe retreat. That contributed to the rapid implosion of the regime army. Many soldiers simply thought: why should we even fight for Assad?

Military support

The same thought must have occurred in Moscow and Tehran. Iran promised to send military support, but did not have the capacity to turn the tide due to more than a year of Israeli attacks on Hezbollah and other pro-Iranian militias in Syria. Russia bombed a hospital in rebel-held Aleppo last week, as usual, but has its hands full in Ukraine and refrained from serious intervention. The only question now is which of the two allies, or which other country, will offer Assad a bed – if it is indeed true that he has fled.

The measly retreat of this dictator full of assertiveness is in stark contrast to the scale of the suffering and destruction he has caused. “Assad, or we will burn the country,” was the slogan with which the regime threatened peaceful rebels in 2011. Indeed, Assad burned the country and scorched the lives of millions of Syrians. But he never built anything new from the devastation. In this way, Assad contributed to his own downfall.

To share





Email the editor