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wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 91 | https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Hafez_al-Assad | en | Category:Hafez al | [
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Pages in category "Hafez al-Assad"
This category contains only the following page. | ||||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 88 | https://www.firstpost.com/world/france-plans-to-strip-syrian-president-bashar-al-assad-of-his-legion-dhonneur-days-after-airstrikes-4435339.html | en | France plans to strip Syrian president Bashar al-Assad of his Legion d'Honneur days after airstrikes | [
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] | 2018-04-17T16:33:40+05:30 | The French government plans to strip Syrian President Bashar as-Assad of his Legion d'Honneur, France's most prestigious award, days after participating in airstrikes against suspected chemical weapons sites in Syria. | en | https://images.firstpost.com/dlxczavtqcctuei/news18/static/images/fp/favicon.ico | Firstpost | https://www.firstpost.com/world/france-plans-to-strip-syrian-president-bashar-al-assad-of-his-legion-dhonneur-days-after-airstrikes-4435339.html | Paris: The French government plans to strip Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of his Legion d’Honneur, France’s most prestigious award, days after participating in airstrikes against suspected chemical weapons sites in Syria.
“The Elysee confirms that a disciplinary procedure for withdrawing the Legion d’Honneur (Legion of Honour) is underway,” Macron’s office said on Monday. Assad was decorated with the Legion’s highest rank of Grand Croix (Great Cross) by former president Jacques Chirac in 2001, shortly after taking power following the death of his father Hafez al-Assad.
Only a French president, who by tradition is the top-ranking Legion member, can decide to withdraw the distinction from a foreigner. About 3,000 people are granted the distinction each year, including 400 foreigners recognised for their “services rendered to France” or for defending human rights, press freedom or other causes, according to the Legion’s website.
Assad has been accused of a series of chemical attacks on his own people during the brutal civil war which has torn Syria apart since 2011. He has become a pariah for Western powers while maintaining the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose military intervention in the conflict gave Assad the upper hand against rebel Opposition groups.
Putin himself is also a recipient of the Legion’s Grand Croix, decorated by Chirac in 2006.
It is not the first time President Emmanuel Macron has stripped a foreigner of France’s highest honour, having moved to withdraw the award from Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein after a series of accusations of sexual harassment and rape. Macron had already signalled he planned to crack down on Legion d’Honneur handouts, surprising many in July by awarding just 101 to mark Bastille Day instead of the customary 500-600.
Former president Francois Hollande drew critics’ ire by granting the honour to Saudi Arabia’s previous crown prince Mohammed bin Nayef in 2016 despite a sharp increase in death sentences by Saudi courts, a punishment France has long deemed inhumane.
In 2010, France made it easier to take back the award, created by Napoleon, from foreigners who have committed “dishonourable acts”. Lance Armstrong lost his after the seven-time Tour de France winner was found to have used performance-enhancing drugs, and fashion designer John Galliano’s was pulled in the wake of an alcohol-fuelled volley of anti-Semitic slurs.
French citizens are automatically stripped of the Legion of Honour if convicted of crimes leading to prison sentences of at least one year. | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 93 | https://magazine.zenith.me/en/culture/feras-fayyad-director-oscar-nominated-documentary-cave | en | ‘Every bomb in Syria falls on my heart’ | [
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] | null | [] | 2020-02-05T11:55:12+01:00 | Feras Fayyad, the director of the Oscar-nominated documentary, ‘The Cave’, speaks to zenith about seeing the future of Syria in his female protagonist, surviving torture in Assad’s cells, and facing discrimination in the USA and Denmark. | en | null | Nominated in the Best Documentary Feature category at the Academy Awards, ‘The Cave’ is a joint Syrian-Danish production directed by Syrian-born Feras Fayyad. It premiered in at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, where it was awarded the People’s Choice Award for Documentaries. The film follows the struggles of Syrian paediatrician, Dr. Amani Ballour, as she tends to patients in an underground hospital in Eastern Ghouta under siege. The Cave comes after Fayyad’s 2017 documentary, Last Men in Aleppo, which covers the work of the White Helmets during the Assad regime’s bombardment of the city.
zenith: Why make a film like ‘The Cave’ now?
Feras Fayyad: Making this film was the only way that I could do something for the people around me. I’m a person who tells stories that immerse the audience in people’s lives. I try to show that, despite the barbaric war and the confusion that surround it, there are still those who believe in change. It’s important for me as a Syrian to depict the better side of humanity. We started the revolution in Syria because of the values we believed in: democracy, human dignity, and a change in the system for the better. We never expected a war like this. But we thought it would be difficult to remove a brutal regime which controlled every single aspect of our lives. This film is proof that we are still breathing, and we still retain our individuality despite Assad’s picture being plastered along every single street.
What was personal to you about this project?
I was jailed and tortured by the regime in 2011 because was I was making a documentary about the beginning of the uprising in Syria. As I was close to losing my life, I heard women being tortured in the prison, just because they were women. The guard who was interrogating me kept threatening to bring in my mum or my sisters. They wanted to know why I was filming the truth with my camera. For them, I was insulting the nation. Freedom of expression is an insult to the nation. For us as Syrians, freedom of expression is the only way that we can express our nature and our identity, but also our history. Syria is home to two of the oldest cities in the world, Aleppo and Damascus. There’s also theatrical heritage in Palmyra, musical heritage in Ugarit, as well as the roots of human language itself. For us, it’s part of our blood.
How do you deal with being a Syrian filmmaker based in Europe?
I’m physically here, but mentally and psychologically I’m still in Syria. Every bomb in Syria falls on my heart and my body. I feel responsible because of my position as a filmmaker to help these people somehow. I think that I will have a heart attack every day when I hear about a bomb here, a death there. I’m always worrying about my family.
‘Medical care is the most important thing for people to believe that their country functions’
Why did you choose to focus your film on an underground hospital in Eastern Ghouta?
I wanted to discover the new culture that was established during the war. Underground hospitals were a response to heavy attacks from the Russians and the Syrian regime. They were attacking facilities of hope, because medical care is the most important thing for people to believe that their country functions. From getting sick, to babies being born, the hospital represents the circle of life. When people save lives, it ends at the hospital. I was interested in filming people, not action. I wanted to depict personal stories of people with their faces, their trauma, their reaction, their behaviour, and how it’s changed. To show the conflict between the best and worst sides of humanity. I didn’t know where the story was going to end or where it would be set, until I decided that I wanted to show experiences in an underground hospital. Syria’s last beacon of hope. Through the eyes of a female leading people in a struggle to survive.
When did it become clear that Dr. Amani would be your protagonist?
When we started shooting, we didn’t know who our main character would be because we didn’t know who would survive, even if we would survive. We had two teams, I was with one in Idlib and one was in Eastern Ghouta. And it was there where we came across Dr. Amani Ballour. She’s a very special, unique person. The sort of person you will meet once in your life. She is committed to doing her very important work, for her community, for women, and for teenage girls. I discovered that she was the first woman in the history of Syria to manage an hospital with 140 medical staff. She’s been twice elected to lead this hospital, all the other hospitals are run by men. And she’s doing all this during the longest-running siege in modern history, with barbaric attacks all around, including the use of chemical weapons. I asked the cinematographer in Eastern Ghouta to focus on Dr. Amani. So we followed her story until when she was evacuated to Idlib and then Turkey.
‘The Cave’ depicts women in a double bind, trapped between war and sexism.
I grew up surrounded by women. I was the eldest of ten, seven sisters and two brothers. As a member of the younger generation in Syria, I grew up thinking there was no difference between any of the genders. But you can’t close your eyes to how much the culture results from the patriarchy system that Assad, father and son, established in Syria. When you walk the streets of the country, you see a male image everywhere, and no women. This firmly establishes a patriarchal system in the minds of the people. Every single family starts to say: If our president is like this why can’t we be like this? When Hafez Al-Assad visited North Korea in 1974, he was strongly influenced by the North Korean president, Kim Il-Sung. He returned to Syria and tried to copy the North Korean father-of-the-nation model. This patriarchal system entered every household in the country and affected the behaviour of every Syrian man. This is what Dr. Amani is up against. The controlling behaviour of men who don’t see women as equals, who don’t believe women can be smart. Although, when a man came to say that Dr. Amani should be beaten and kicked out, one of her male colleagues stepped in to support her. It doesn’t make you any less male if you support the revolution of the women that is happening there. It shows you that the political system built on patriarchy is starting to be kicked out, it’s not part of our future.
‘In the hospital, the only markers of time were the bombs and the injured coming in’
Did you always want to be a filmmaker?
Growing up, I lived between Idlib and Aleppo. That’s where I took my first picture with my father’s camera. I watched black-and-white films there with my father. I grew up on the films of Youssef Chahine and Alfred Hitchcock. My father loved French New Wave cinema, whereas I fell in love with Di Seca’s ‘The Bicycle Thieves’. He filmed it with non-professional actors, using simple tools to document the history around them. Telling the story of post-war Italy under threat of economic collapse, about the big thief who has stolen the country, and humans surviving in between. My father also introduced me to Claude Lanzemann’s ‘Shoah’, which was very scary for me as a child, but it also established inside me the idea of surviving. Survival was always a topic of conversation between my mum and dad. My mother is an immigrant to Syria who always struggled with her identity. My father was a political researcher who could never publish any of his work because he wasn’t a member of the Baath party. If my father had expressed his opinions freely, he would’ve been killed. Many of my uncles were jailed and killed for doing the same.
‘The Cave’ has been described elsewhere as breaking stereotypes. Was this your intention?
There’s so much stereotyping about Syria. When you mention Syria, most people will say Middle East. This shows you the lack of knowledge. They put the entire heritage of a country in one box, together with other different countries, which have different heritages, ways of life and cultures. Even within my family itself, there is great diversity. I actually filmed the opening sequence of ‘The Cave’ with the same camera they used to film ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. A wide shot in 70mm, zooming out. You hear a female voice, then it cuts to a woman. That immediately challenged the audience’s expectations.
Why is Dr. Amani not a stereotypical female lead?
In Henrik Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’, Nora, the protagonist, is a woman who moves from the hand of her father to the hand of her husband. Nothing seemed to change for her. So she revolted against it and left. Dr. Amani is like Nora, she’s independent. She trusts herself. She has to have the confidence to fight for her identity. Dr. Amani is not a wife or lover. She’s not the stereotypical female protagonist. Cinema normally wants to tell an easy story, a love story between men and women. A woman gets married and the love story survives through the war. It’s a story we’ve been hearing for years and years. There’s that scene in the new ‘Little Women’, when the publisher says to the main character that she should make sure that the woman in her story gets married by the end of the book. She supports her fellow women. You can’t say she’s not feminist just because she wears a hijab, which a lot of people criticises her for. She doesn’t care, she just ignores it.
What were the challenges of filming in a subterranean environment?
I wanted to show the hell on earth underground. I couldn’t walk the streets easily. And if there was one day without a bomb, we were more scared because we expected they were preparing something bigger, like a chemical attack. Time was changing outside, but the team didn’t feel it. They were stuck in a time loop, like a science fiction film. When I was filming in a different underground hospital in Idlib, I didn’t notice the difference between day and night. Just like I didn’t know the difference when I was in an intelligence prison. I was there twice for a total period of 18 months. I never knew how much time had passed, days or years. Are we in winter or summer? I never knew. But in the hospital, the only markers of time were the bombs and the injured coming in. Dr. Amani has an emotional connection to this environment, the cave. She is hypersensitive to it and feeling the psychological damage of the bombs. This is why she wants to protect it and takes great care to fortify it, because she wants to protect herself.
‘My torturers, some of whom remain in Syria, told me that I would never see this life again’
Samaher’s character seems to provide the emotional heart of the film. Was it important to provide the Dr. Amani with a foil?
When I was discussing this with my co-writer, Alisar Hasan, we felt that feminism does not look a certain way. You can be emotional and be a feminist, no problem. Samaher is a nurse who takes care of cooking for her colleagues. Nobody told her to cook. She decides what food to prepare. And she says: If you don’t like my food, go and make some yourself. She is fighting trauma, and the food gives her stability. She wants to cook food even when the bombs are falling around her. She wants to make the food and make people happy around her. There’s also a political aspect to the food. There was only Chinese salt, no Swiss salt, available at the markets. European food wasn’t there because it was too expensive. So they just had expired Indian rice. Even the food they were eating wasn’t good for them.
Why does one of the surgeons listen to music?
While he operates on his patients, Dr. Salim listens to Shostakovich and sometimes watches the work of the ballet choreographer Leonid Yakobson. Both of whom were persecuted by Stalin. Here the music has a story to tell. Dr. Salim listens to Shostakovich and Yakobson as a form of freedom of expression while their compatriots bomb his hospital.
Is it significant that two films about Syria have been nominated for an Academy Award?
‘For Sama’, Waad Al-Kateab’s personal story, is an important film. It explores what it means to raise a child in a warzone and be a wife to a doctor working in the most horrific circumstances. It was co-directed by a British filmmaker, Edward Watts, so it wasn’t only Syrians who made the decisions about how to tell the story, but also a white European male. Choosing only non-English language films in the documentary category is significant because it acknowledges that the world around us is burning. And also, I think they are making a political statement because Trump tried to cut the country off from the world. It’s important that two Syrian films have been nominated because its shows you that the story of bombing hospitals is not just constructed on lies. But all politicians have closed their eyes and ears to this, despite there being a lot of evidence that Russia has committed crimes against humanity.
Do you think a nomination like this can make a change?
I never considered myself a person that is trying to establish a career by being nominated for an Academy Award. It’s hard for me to sit and watch the death of my people every day. The nomination gives me one of the only opportunities I have to say something as a Syrian. To say that we have to stop this war. We have to support the process of justice in Syria. We need a better future for Syria. We need to save people’s lives. We need to build justice to move on for the future. All the war criminals have no future in Syria.
And what does it mean to you personally?
It’s very important to stand on that stage because now one of those who tortured me, Anwar Raslan, was arrested in Germany in February 2019 and was charged with crimes against humanity in October. My torturers, some of whom remain in Syria, told me that I would never see this life again. Nobody would hear about me. That I was nothing. So I want to tell them that I still exist. I survived. I’m there. I also have the responsibility if I stand on that stage to tell the messages of those still in jail who were fighting for human dignity and freedom of expression.
‘I survived prison, the war, crossing the Mediterranean. And now I’m surviving against racism’
How do you feel about being banned from entering the USA to attend the award ceremony?
I start to believe that as a Syrian, I have to live with this situation. Sometimes even thinking about is painful. I’m not a person of anger, but it fills my body with all the feelings of injustice and severe depression. I believe that what I have done with ‘Last Men in Aleppo’ and ‘The Cave’ can speak for itself. History will remember people like Donald Trump who use racism and nationalism to ban artists from showing their work.
What problems have you faced in Denmark?
I’ve been beaten by Danish police on 17 January. My hands still hurt because they twisted them and pushed me up against the wall. All because of my Syrian passport. I have a German travel document which allows me to travel to a lot of places, but I can’t go everywhere with it, so I show my passport as well. Danish police threatened to cancel my asylum and report me to the German police. I know the laws and they had no right to say any of this. But being Syrian and having a Syrian passport means being confronted with this discrimination and injustice. I live in Denmark and I love Denmark. It gave me the feeling of feeling safe again. But I don’t like how the system works. I won’t allow anyone to threaten my safety because I’m working as a filmmaker. What I do is for them as well as me. I make people less racist, less angry and less nationalistic, and I encourage understanding. I’m representing the many diverse artistic voices in Denmark as well with this film. So you’re beating a person who is representing you at the Academy Awards? Just being a Syrian is a threat. That’s racism.
Why did you decide to end the film with a shoot of submerged wreckage?
I believe that even small problems affect the whole world and therefore there should be international responsibility. People drowning in the Mediterranean is scary for our attitude to the future. The politicians should realise they’ve done something really wrong, but instead they put the responsibility on the shoulders of the next generation of European leaders. Why don’t we give them a hopeful example to follow in the future? This was the main message of the film’s last scene, which we shot in Turkey with a Norwegian crew. There is a plane underwater from the First World War, and a ship and a tank from the Second World War, which refugees pass over. The current crisis crosses over the old crisis, and people die in the middle of that. It shows the failure of our civilisation. We have used all our intellectuality to kill each other.
Who bears responsibility for the current crisis?
I’m not putting the film in front of people and slapping them in the face with it. I’m holding up a mirror of the current situation of people trying to survive. This is what’s happening from crime to crime. From death to death. We have to think about that. Russians have a responsibility for what’s happening in Syria, and so do many regimes throughout the Arab world, Europeans, and Americans, all over them. They’re responsible for the deaths of the refugees in the Mediterranean. I could have been one of them. But I survived. I survived prison, the war, crossing the Mediterranean. And now I’m surviving against racism. | ||||||
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] | 2020-06-21T16:25:39 | AMMAN — On Wednesday, June 17, a French court sentenced Rifaat al-Assad, brother of the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, to four years in prison and ordered the seizure of his London mansion and French properties—valued at $133.6 million—on the charges of embezzling $300 million from Syrian state funds. | en | Syria Direct | https://syriadirect.org/rifaat-al-assad-from-the-butcher-of-hama-to-aspiring-opposition-leader/ | AMMAN — On Wednesday, June 17, a French court sentenced Rifaat al-Assad, brother of the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, to four years in prison and ordered the seizure of his London mansion and French properties—valued at $133.6 million—on the charges of embezzling $300 million from Syrian state funds.
His lawyers filed an appeal immediately after the ruling on Wednesday, which could take up to four years to settle, at which time al-Assad would be 86 years old. The trial started in 2014 when he was 76 years old and was initiated by the Paris-based, legal NGO Sherpa.
Already in poor health and bed-ridden in a London hospital, Rifaat is unlikely to serve any time in prison. However, his sentencing holds meaning for many Syrians, who see it as the first instance of accountability against a member of the Assad regime, though his charges are not related to his alleged crimes while a Major General in the Syrian Arab Army.
Who is the ‘Butcher of Hama?’
Born in the town of Qardaha in the countryside of Latkia province in 1937, Rifaat al-Assad is best known as the younger brother of Hafez al-Assad who brutally crushed the 1982 Hama uprising and later tried to overthrow Hafez in 1984, though his influence in Syria extends long before and after the coup attempt.
Not much is known about Rifaat until 1963, the year of Syria’s Baathist. He joined the military after the Baathist coup and then was made the commander of a special armed force which was key in helping Hafez al-Assad to consolidate power in 1970.
A year later in 1971, he became the head of the Defense Companies (Saraya al-Difa), a sort of Praetorian guard tasked with defending the Assad regime. The Defense Companies were later broken up into the Republican Guard—also tasked with defending the Assad regime—and the 569th division, the predecessor of the infamous 4th Armored Division now led by Maher al-Assad and widely considered to be one of the more effective units of the Syrian Arab Army.
Rifaat’s position in the military quickly translated into a wider role in Hafez al-Assad’s regime, and in 1975 he became president of the Constitutional Court (the highest court in Syria).
Similar to Maher al-Assad’s current role as the younger brother of Bashar al-Assad and head of the 4th Armored Division, Rifaat was to be the more brutal face of the Assad regime. In 1982, when unrest exploded into an outright uprising in the city of Hama led by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, as well as urban intelligentsia, Rifaat al-Assad was sent to crush the rebellion.
What followed was one of the bloodiest chapters of Syria’s modern history, as Rifaat commanded the Defense Companies to brutally put down the Muslim Brotherhood insurgency. Much of the historical parts of the city were razed to the ground and thousands of civilians were killed.
Death tolls of the event differ, ranging from 2,000 to 40,000 dead; however, 20,000 is a typically cited number of those killed. Rifaat’s brutal crackdown also displaced an unknown number of families who fled to neighboring countries to escape the Defense Companies’ offensive.
For his part, Rifaat denies he played a significant role in putting down the Hama uprising and claims that Hafez’s regime fabricated accounts of his involvement.
Rifaat al-Assad’s ambition soon outstripped his loyalty. In 1983, suffering from heart issues, Hafez al-Assad appointed a six-member committee to rule the country in his stead. Sensing weakness and possible imminent death of his brother, Rifaat mobilized the Defense Companies troops to occupy Damascus, quickly overwhelming the Republican Guard meant to be Hafez’s last line of defense against any insurrections in the country’s capital.
However, Hafez was able to successfully rally his loyalists in the army and confronted his brother before an outright conflict erupted between the two. In the end, Rifaat’s coup was stopped without a shot fired.
Following the coup attempt, Rifaat was stripped of his powers as a military general and appointed as the country’s vice president, a completely symbolic position. He was sent into virtual exile, first in the Soviet Union, then in France and Spain.
When he was exiled, he was gifted $300 million from Syrian state coffers at the direction of his brother, according to the Wednesday ruling of French courts. Rifaat maintains that the money was gifted to him by Saudi King Abdullah; Abdullah is married to the sister of one of Rifaat’s four wives.
In the 1980s, the CIA also speculated that Rifaat was in control of heroin smuggling networks in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon which exported to Europe and North America, though the veracity of these claims is unclear given that they have not received renewed attention in the 21st century.
Angling for a place in the Syrian opposition
Early on in the Syrian revolution, Rifaat was quick to urge his nephew, Bashar al-Assad, “to vacate his position,” as he told CNN in 2012. He then offered himself up as a sort of “transitional” candidate, claiming that he left Syria with “85%” of Syrians supporting him and that he maintains popularity within the army, as he “makes both the majority and the minority comfortable.”
The latter of his comments, a likely overture to the minority Alawite sect which suffered from much discrimination prior to the Assad’s ascent to in Syria, formed the backbone of Rifaat’s pitch to be considered as an alternative to his nephew. He enjoyed close ties to the political class in Europe and Saudi Arabia, and positioned himself as a ‘reasonable’ alternative to Bashar, who at the time, was increasingly seen as a dictator with blood on his hands, possibly on his way to being deposed.
In 2011, he organized a group of exiled political opposition, the Syrian National Democratic Council, as a sort of transitional body for Syria, though the group never gained much traction. In addition, he has run a satellite television station—the Arab News Network—focusing on the Middle East since the late 1990s.
For a time it seemed that Rifaat was taken seriously by at least Russia, who was exploring possible alternatives to Bashar al-Assad’s rule. In 2013, Rifaat met with Russian officials in Geneva to discuss the possible departure of Bashar and alternative leaders for the country.
However, even though Rifaat enjoyed “unique links to the regime’s inner core of Alawite military officers and the Assad-Makhlouf clan [made] him valuable both to the regime and to its enemies, his toxic reputation and overt ambitions for personal power have stood in the way of effective cooperation,” Aron Lund wrote in 2012, noting that “all mainstream opposition groups refuse to deal with him.”
In the end, Rifaat joined the numerous defected and former military officials of the Assad regime who began to tour European capitals in an effort to market themselves as credible alternatives to the increasingly brutal regime and extremist opposition. Like many of them, he found no buyers. | |||||
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] | null | [] | null | Posts about Hafez Al-Assad written by Diana Darke | en | https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/8d2463ae7b95c88d1171886e02a560f00b1caf67cba94a12fff1e55100fd72f6?s=32 | dianadarke | https://dianadarke.com/tag/hafez-al-assad/ | Bashar al-Assad’s Signature – a comparison of before and after the war and what it tells us
The principle of handwriting analysis
As fewer and fewer people write by hand, graphology, the analysis of handwriting, is something of a dying art. I qualified as a graphologist at the London-based British Academy of Graphologists in 2002 after a three year course and tough final written and oral examinations for which French examiners were flown over from Paris. The French have long been devotees and it is still widely used there in recruitment tests.
The key principle is that the unconscious elements in handwriting – spacing, continuity, flow, type of movement, pressure and stroke – come directly from the brain and therefore cannot lie or be disguised. That is why it gives such a useful insight into the true character of a person, his or her preoccupations, insecurities, drives and aspirations. People can superficially change their writing – as often happens in fraud cases – but a trained graphologist’s eye can spot the signs.
I have given Expert Witness statements on Arabic handwriting in a number of court cases in the UK and have also had extensive professional experience of Arabic handwritings while working in government and in commercial companies. Bashar al-Assad’s “lies” have been a recurring theme in media coverage of the Syrian crisis. It seems he took in the majority of the international community, presenting himself as a modern IT-savvy leader with an intelligent and beautiful British-born wife. Through clever use of PR firms, including the British Bell Pottinger, he cultivated the image of a reformer, keen to bring progress and liberalisation to his country.
But gradually, as people watched how violently the Assad regime handled the 2011 uprising from the start, year after year, many came to realise that this image was false.
The same conclusion was reached by the new three-hour BBC2 documentary series A Dangerous Dynasty: The House of Assad after months of detailed research by the production team, together with scores of interviews with key players who knew him.
Handwriting analysis provides a way to get closer to understanding the psychology of this enigmatic man, to know whether he is weak or strong, a manipulator or manipulated, and above all whether he has the stomach to fight on.
Before the War
In 2012 after months of searching, both online and by asking everyone I could think of who might conceivably be able to help, I finally tracked down a sample of Bashar Al-Assad’s handwriting. It was only his signature, as it appears on a legal document – Decree 49 dated 10/9/2008, a piece of legislation designed to make it impossible for Kurds in Syria’s northern border regions to buy or rent property, thereby aiming to drive them from their ancestral agricultural land.
But as a qualified graphologist with considerable experience of examining Arabic signatures, and also having come across some months earlier a sample of his father Hafez Al-Assad’s signature (from a book published in 1995), I was sure that I would be able to make a number of deductions and draw some potentially enlightening conclusions. A signature is the key to the writer’s inner life, showing his ability to realise his potential, his own evaluation of himself, his sincerity and the subconscious influences of his family background. I published an article comparing father and son in the May 2012 issue of the journal of the British Academy of Graphology:
The Father/Son Contrast
The contrast between the signatures of father and son was immediately striking. In fact the only area where they shared a similarity was in the horizontal space they took up on the page. The father’s was written with a bold strong stroke and a progressive, upwardly rising movement. It was the signature of a true visionary, imbued with self-belief, drive and dynamism – all the more remarkable given his humble village origins and basic schooling. The son’s much thinner, less confident stroke could hardly be more different. It starts by zigzagging back and forth almost on top of itself, wasting effort and energy, lacking in direction and focus, as if trying to make a strong statement while in effect almost cancelling itself out.
This is one of the many signs of insincerity in the writing, along with regressive slant, unnecessary dots and exaggerated ornamentations. The regressive and descending movements indicate stubbornness and a denial of the present, an attempt to avoid what is coming. The signature finishes by attempting an upward flourish to aggrandise itself. But this flourish turns into a regressive and protective upper zone loop that then plunges down into the lower zone. It then tries again, attempting another upward flourish that pierces the protective upper zone loop briefly before plunging down in a final and dramatic regressive stab straight through the middle of itself, like a huge sharp spike or dagger.
The son is evidently struggling to ‘big himself up’, to live up to his father’s expectations, but without the father’s drive, vision or strength, despite his educational advantages. A final centripetal stroke of this kind that cuts the rest of the signature in half is in graphological terms a very significant dominant. It shows great underlying tensions, a split between what he is trying outwardly to be and what he is at core. It is self-sabotaging and self-destructive, the mark of a man who would even be capable of committing suicide, something his father or, for that matter, Saddam Hussein, would never have contemplated. [In 2003 I wrote an analysis of Saddam’s handwriting for The Times newspaper based on several letters he wrote from hiding which were published in Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat Arabic daily newspaper. The analysis showed his level of self-belief was such that he would never have admitted defeat, a conclusion that was borne out when, after capture and trial, he went to his execution in 2006 still insisting he was president of Iraq.]
Appearance versus Substance
With his greater emphasis on the vertical axis than his father’s progressive horizontal sweep, Bashar is more preoccupied with how he appears to the world, while his father’s energies were focused on achieving his vision. Directly undermining his own attempts to project a dynamic front, Bashar ends by carefully placing the three individual dots of the ‘sh’ letter in the middle of his name within the protective loop of the upper zone, and then, as an even more cautious afterthought, adds a final full stop in the lower zone, which signals his mistrustful attitude towards the world. In his father’s confident and progressive signature, the two dots that should appear as part of his name are not bothered with at all. His flourish is real, not an act.
In today’s Syria it is always Bashar’s face you see on both the pro-regime and anti-regime banners to proclaim either their loyalty or their opposition to the Assad regime. “Tel pere, tel fils” some of the protesters’ placards used to announce. But what this analysis of their signatures shows is that while Bashar may be the face of the Assad regime, he is far from being its backbone. That is the preserve of the innermost Assad clan – his mother, his sister and brother Maher. He is locked inside it and cannot break out – he would never dare.
After the War
The final episode of the BBC2 documentary series on 23 October 2018 showed Arabic documents smuggled out of Syria, bearing Bashar’s signature, signing off on clampdown orders from his newly established Crisis Management Unit in Damascus. They date from early 2012, four years later than my original 2008 sample. A comparison of the 2008 and the 2012 signature shows three important changes. The 2012 signature can be viewed here, in episode 3, at 28.38 minutes in, as BBC licencing protocol does not permit the image to be reproduced from the programme.
Firstly, one year into the war, it shows a more squashed and flattened shape, as if weighed down by pressures from above. Graphologically this is significant as it shows the expectations from what is known in psychology terms as the ‘superego’ – namely the pressures from parents, from society at large, weighing on him more heavily than in 2008. Interviewee after interviewee in the BBC2 series talked about the power and influence of Bashar’s mother, urging him to act more decisively, to maintain what his father, who ruled Syria for 30 years from 1970-2000, had created.
Secondly, the initial fast zigzagging to and fro has lost its energy and intensity. In 2008 the signature began with at least four fast movements back and forth. In 2012 there are only two, much weaker, slower strokes.
Thirdly, the final flourish is much weaker, flabbier, with the final downward stroke more like a limp piece of string than the sharp spike of the 2008 signature. His choice of a thicker nib gives the appearance of a bolder stroke, but the final movement is still regressive rather than progressive, the three dots from the ‘sh’ of Bashar are still cowering at the back of the protective shield he builds round himself for security, and the final full stop is still placed even behind that (remembering that the movement in Arabic is right to left, so the full stop, if used at all, would normally appear to the left not the right of the signature).
Conclusion
All this adds up to a picture of a deeply troubled man, struggling to carry on. Syrian state media is projecting him as victorious, as having won the war against ‘the terrorists.’ But psychologically, this is the most dangerous time for him, when he may let his defences down a little. His mother died in February 2016 so her influence is over. Were his wife Asma to die – she is currently suffering from breast cancer and looks extremely thin and ill – would Bashar still have the appetite to continue as president of Syria? I wonder. Maybe he would take the early retirement he joked about when the French documentary maker in episode two of the BBC2 programme asked if he enjoyed being president. “Sometimes I get tired,” he said. And that was before the war.
Why Assad is still there
Complexity reigns in Syria, with multiple players still engaged on the world’s most chaotic battlefield. But three new books, despite their very different approaches, share a simple refrain – the ruling Assad regime sees no need to discuss a political solution. Thanks to the consistent military backing of its powerful allies Russia, Iran, and Lebanese Hezbollah, it is incrementally getting its own way.
Ghaith Armanazi’s The Story of Syria makes “no apology for a work I always intended to be a personal take on Syrian history.” Such a statement coming from a former diplomat often labelled an Assad apologist might put many a reader off. Yet Armanazi uses his position of particular privilege to provide not just an interesting collection of early photos (one of which shows Syrian women demonstrating in the 1950s) but a surprisingly candid account of how his country became ‘Assad’s Syria.’
The real meat comes halfway through, where he unravels the unique Hafez al-Assad methodology, essential to understanding how the Syrian state has survived nearly seven years of war. The detailed chapter on Assad senior’s thirty-year rule takes up a quarter of the book, explaining his trademark caution and how his 1970 coup was ‘the most understated in a long line of coups for the last twenty years’.
Armanazi charts how the rising trend of political Islamism from the 1970s onwards was driven by a flow of funds from a newly oil-rich Saudi Arabia, leading to feverish building of mosques and religious schools, and how this in turn led to the rising power of the Muslim Brotherhood, culminating in Assad’s revenge, now known as the 1982 Hama massacre.
From that point on, we learn, Hafez al-Assad styled himself ‘Commander for Eternity’ (Qaiduna ila al-Abad), following the useful models of Kim Il Sung in North Korea and Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania. Large public portraits and statues proliferated, a leadership cult which passed to his son Bashar, together with the bloated, inefficient government institutions, the corruption, the nepotism and the ‘shadowy security agencies… silencing all voices of dissent.’
The narrative peters out in a much shorter chapter on Bashar’s rule from 2000. It stops before the current war, as if fearful of saying too much, but the tone conveys Armanazi’s clear anger at the international community’s ‘frenetic mood of activity over Daesh’ while the root cause of Daesh is ignored. ‘The inescapable truth,’ he ends prophetically, ‘is that Daesh is a symptom and all efforts to deal with it independently of Syria’s sickness are doomed to failure.’
Nikolaos Van Dam’s short book Destroying a Nation is precisely that ‘product of meticulous and dry academic research’ which Armanazi’s is not. But after the excellence of Van Dam’s seminal earlier work The Struggle for Power in Syria, this new one disappoints. Focussing on what it calls ‘the civil war in Syria’, over a quarter is taken up with lengthy notes, bibliography and lists of abbreviations and factions together with an extensive 16-page index. One of its stranger entries is ‘Wishful thinking’, listed ten times, more entries than ‘Kurds’.
Van Dam was, like Armanazi, a career diplomat, and has been Dutch Special Envoy for Syria for the last two years, deeply engaged, with the support of an expert Dutch Syria team, in the Geneva and Riyadh peace talks. As a result this is a book for political analysts who are interested in the minutiae of the ever-shifting alliances, first within the ruling Ba’ath Party and now, within the opposition parties, which would be fine if the book were up to date. But it went to press before the 2017 Astana talks between Russia, Turkey and Iran – the vital trio with most at stake inside Syria – agreed on the current de-escalation zones, thereby rendering the previous processes immaterial.
What the book does succeed in illustrating however, only too clearly, through its depressing account of those convoluted processes thus far, are the gulfs in belief between all parties, the different versions of a future Syria which they hold, all shades of which are in any case irrelevant since the Assad regime ‘is not prepared to negotiate its own departure, downfall or death sentence.’
With its overlong paragraphs and ponderous style, the book claims to deal with prospects for a solution to the conflict, yet ducks the issue and simply ends with another inconclusive summary of the ‘Basic elements of the Syrian Conflict since the Revolution of 2011’. Other Western political analysts are quoted at length but the only Syrian voice to appear is that of Bashar al-Assad himself, declaring on the final page that he will remain president till at least 2021 when his third seven-year term ends, and that he will rule out any political changes before winning the war.
By contrast, Wendy Pearlman’s carefully crafted book We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled allows displaced Syrians to speak for themselves – 87 of them – men and women, young and old, ranging across students, mothers, doctors, poets, accountants, lawyers, beauticians, playwrights, musicians, barbers, computer programmers, engineers, business owners, teachers and finance managers. An American Arabic-speaking academic from Chicago’s Northwestern University, Pearlman conducted hundreds of interviews from 2012-16 with Syrians now living outside their country in Jordan, Turkey, Sweden, Denmark, the UAE, the USA, Lebanon and Germany, using a team of over twenty transcribers and translators to help her arrive at this selection.
Unencumbered by footnotes and other end material, its 292 pages can be easily read in a day. Pearlman’s introduction explains the book’s eight-part structure, offering a sensitive and compelling overview of the war to date. The voices then tell the story of Syria under the Assads, starting with Hafez’s rule, then Bashar’s, before passing through the phases of the war, from the early euphoria of the Revolution and its peaceful demonstrations, to the onset of disillusion and hopelessness, to their ultimate flight from the country as refugees. Imad, a student from Salamiyeh now in Berlin, explains their predicament: “Media has tied the revolution to terrorism,” so “it’s easier to say that you’re simply running away from war…not to mention the revolution, or even the regime.”
By selecting a particular group of voices there is always the problem that others will accuse you of skewing the narrative. But while Pearlman’s refugees necessarily reflect the anti-Assad views held by the majority of Syrian refugees, they also lend weight to the prevailing picture of what remains inside Syria today, chiming with much else that has emerged from other sources. What they confirm is that nothing has essentially changed since March 2011 when Abu Tha’ir, an aeronautical engineer from Daraa now in Jordan, witnessed regime soldiers storm the mosque, kill unarmed demonstrators, burn the holy books and scribble on the walls: “Do not kneel for God. Kneel for Assad.”
Nothing, that is, except the death of 500,000 people and the displacement of over half the population. Sham, a relief worker from Douma now in Sweden, is “disgusted by humanity. We’re basically the living dead.” He jokes sarcastically that all Syrians should all be killed: “Then we’ll all go to heaven and leave Bashar al-Assad to rule over an empty country.”
“One wonders,” Pearlman reflects, “what might have been different had we listened to Syrians’ voices earlier.”
This piece was originally published in Chatham House’s The World Today Oct/Nov 2017 issue:
https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/why-assad-still-there
#Syria – Sidon and Damascus, Theatre of the Absurd in a Tale of Two Cities
Marwan, my chain-smoking Syrian lawyer, has left his war-torn country for the day to meet me in the Lebanese port of Sidon. He wants to complete some paperwork and tell me news from Damascus.
The Syrian accents at the tables all around us suggest he is not the only visitor. We sit with a view of Sidon’s Crusader Sea Castle and try hard to strike a holiday mood. He has brought magnificent gifts of Damascene produce – dried apricots, almonds and seed-covered biscuits.
He refuses a meal, even though the journey has just taken him six hours thanks to overcrowding on the border. His only appetite is for tea and cigarettes.
“What news of Abu Khalil?” I ask. Last time it was he, my elderly caretaker, who came out to meet me, so proudly braving the checkpoints from his village east of Damascus. But that was where the massive chemical attack took place last summer.
“He’s been blockaded in his village since October,” says Marwan. “It’s easy to get money to him. We give it to someone going in on the special buses. But food is impossible. The soldiers search the buses and throw away whatever they find.”
We almost laugh at the absurdity, but more absurdity follows.
Marwan asks me to sign the rental contracts for the refugees living in my Damascus house. They pay no rent, but this is vital documentation they must show when regime soldiers call round unannounced. Without it, arrest and imprisonment will follow. Each street is cordoned off in turn, each person’s papers checked, each room searched for weapons.
I ask about the checkpoints inside the Old City. “Are the lijaan sha’bia (peoples’ committees) still guarding the neighbourhood?”
“Yes,” he replies, “but now they are all either very old or very young. The young ones are easily recruited because of the salary. Their families are desperate for the income, so they agree to it, thinking their sons will be just round the corner. But sometimes the boys are transferred with no warning to the frontline, lambs to the slaughter. They come back to their families in a body-bag labelled ‘shaheed’ (martyr) with a pittance as compensation, but no one dares say anything.”
We cannot laugh, but both of us sense more absurdity, not least because of where we’re sitting. Sidon is in some ways a mini Damascus-on-Sea, a tinderbox just 40 minutes’ drive south from Beirut. There are photos all over town of one of Sidon’s most famous sons, the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Al-Hariri, who was blown up on Valentine’s Day 2005. Sidon’s buildings bear the scars of Lebanon’s own 15-year-long civil war.
Like Damascus it has a Sunni Muslim majority, a sizeable Christian minority and Palestinian refugee camps incorporated in its suburbs. The same blend of church towers and minarets rises from its bustling bazaars. But it also shares the increasing sectarian flare-ups, like the arson attack on a Sidon mosque that happened the very next day. The highly combustible city is surrounded on all sides by Hizbullah, the well-disciplined Lebanese Shi’ite militia led by the cleric Hassan Nasrallah. We joke grimly about how in Damascus Hizbullah is considered not the enemy but the ally, openly fighting alongside President Bashar Al-Assad to keep him in power.
Marwan flicks his ash compulsively.
“God knows,” he says, “how Syria will ever get out of this swamp. Now the regime is preparing us for the June elections, being gentler with us at the checkpoints, announcing a policy of ‘musaalaha’ (reconciliation), freeing prisoners and doing deals to let people back into their homes in the suburbs. Their slogan is everywhere, ‘Bashar al-Assad ila al-Abad’ It’s a rhyme which means ‘Bashar al-Assad forever’.”
You realise,” Marwan continues, “that if he gets voted in a third time, like his father, the constitution says it is for life. Hafez Al-Assad was born in 1930 and ruled for 30 years; Qaddafi was born in 1942 and ruled for 42 years; Bashar was born in 1965 – so maybe he will rule for 65 years!”
We laugh uncontrollably.
“How do you feel about going back?” I ask, when I have recovered.
His laughter erupts again.
“I have the female Russian teachers to look forward to, now that Russian will become our first language. Farsi will soon become our second, there are so many Iranians on the streets. And Hassan Nasrallah is billed as our saviour, side by side with Bashar on the posters.
Damascus feels safer to me than Sidon!” Marwan insists. And he explains, “The regime’s control is so tight, nothing can happen there. Sidon might explode. Damascus cannot. The regime has taken out the fuse!”
First broadcast on Friday 28 March 2014:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01vzjqj/From_Our_Own_Correspondent_Cyprus_and_Lebanon/
Starts 4.12 mins in. Full text above. Identities changed.
As the #Syrian uprising enters its 4th year, some reflections
In a recent clear-out of my study I came across a Syria Today magazine with the cover feature “Unlocking Civil Society”, 15 pages of in-depth coverage of how civil society inside Syria could move forward. It was dated March 2010. Re-reading the feature now, after three years of devastating conflict, is especially poignant.
I was in Damascus during March 2011 when the first peaceful demonstrations took place. On 15 March I even tried to find them, but they were over so quickly I could not get there in time. The atmosphere inside the city was tense and the regime was very edgy, all too aware of what had just happened in Tunisia and in Egypt. Police and security officials were under instruction be to nicer to members of the public, not to do anything that might provoke a reaction. For a brief and wonderful interlude, drivers were waved on at red traffic lights, and government offices became places of politeness, joviality even.
Three days later, the instruction was broken. The over-zealous governor of Dera’a ordered troops to fire on a crowd of protesters whose children had been arrested for drawing graffiti, resulting in the first deaths of the revolution. The die was cast, and as protests quickly escalated all over the country in the following weeks, the government response switched to its default setting – violence.
The scale of what has happened since defies credulity – at least 140,000 dead, untold thousands injured, missing or imprisoned, 6.5 million internally displaced and 2.5 million forced to flee as refugees to neighbouring countries. Where is it all heading?
Every Syrian I have ever spoken to about what they want for the future of the country has always said the same thing, namely, that top levels in government, the police, the armed forces and the security services should leave the country, that the rest should stay, and that a transitional temporary government should be put in place till new elections. Thereafter the priority would have to be reconciliation. Those without blood on their hands would have to be forgiven and re-assimilated. Most Syrian people are proud of the diversity of their society and want to preserve it. Its loss makes them value it all the more and they want it restored as soon as possible. Syrians have a very distinctive character, even the poorest ones. They have a natural sense of dignity and identity, a strong sense of self. It must somehow be the legacy of their deep and rich Syrian history, absorbing the complexities of many cultures that have ruled the region over the centuries.
The timing of the country’s descent into war was particularly ironic in Damascus: the new EU-funded Modernisation of Administration Management (MAM) project had just come to fruition with a series of themed walks round historic Damascus; the new basalt paving in all the neighbourhoods of the Old City around Straight Street had just been completed; and Al-Jaza’iri’s famous 19th century house on the Barada River just north of the Old City had just been restored and was serving as a museum and regional centre for sustainable development.
The last time I was inside Syria in April 2012, Christian and Muslim friends alike agreed that the Ba’ath Party had destroyed the country. For over 40 years they destroyed the education system, with a kind of brainwashing of the young in state schools, a Bashar cult, making all children worship, obey and love him. Both Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar settled their fellow Alawis in the mountainous parts of Damascus like Mezzeh 86 close to the Presidential Palace. After the 2006 war in Lebanon between Israel and Hizbullah, Bashar was very influenced by and impressed by Hassan Nasrallah because of their success in bloodying Israel’s nose. He became closer to Iran and the Shi’a at that time. Lots of Sunnis were actually paid to become Shi’a, given salaries.
The last voting farce inside Syria was the February 2012 ‘referendum on the constitution’. Syrian friends living in the city told me no one went out to vote except those who had their IDs taken away at checkpoints and were therefore forced to go and vote in order to get them back again. Government employees were obliged to vote of course, but most ordinary people stayed at home and were very angry at the way the Syrian state TV then showed people queuing at voting booths, presenting it so misleadingly, as if 86% of people really went out. It made even the doubters realise what this regime would do to stay in power. In Damascus the streets in the Old City and elsewhere were full of banners for candidates, men in their 30s, 40s and 50s, with slogans below reading something like: ‘Your independent candidate for Damascus’. It was ridiculous and fooled no one. Not one of the men was ‘independent’ All were regime-sanctioned.
A similar farce awaits the country with the upcoming presidential elections in June. On 13 March 2014 the Syrian parliament unanimously approved a new election law permitting other candidates to run against Bashar al-Assad for the first time. Theoretically this is wonderful – in practice it will be the same as the constitution vote, entirely controlled from behind the scenes, with approved candidates notionally standing against the president. The constitution states that:
A candidate must be Muslim
A candidate must have the support of 35 members of the parliament
A candidate must be 40 years old or more
A candidate must have lived in Syria for 10 years before the election
A candidate must be Syrian by birth, of parents who are Syrians by birth
A candidate must not be married to a non-Syrian spouse
By these rules all external opposition figures are rendered ineligible.
Given that the ‘international community’ cannot agree on anything about Syria except that the statistics are terrible, Syrians are on their own. No one is coming to their rescue. The rich have mainly left to start new lives abroad. Those that are left behind will need to work overtime if Syrian civil society is ever to free itself from the 43-year stranglehold of Assad rule. Syria deserves to be rescued and needs all the help it can get. It will be a long struggle but I am certain it will eventually succeed.
Arming Syria’s opposition forces – to do or not to do
After more than two years of sitting on the fence, the West is being forced to decide. The trouble is the West is split, with some elements jumping off the fence on one side, and others jumping off on the other – and some are still clinging to the fence desperately trying to avoid having to make a decision at all. Countries are split, political parties are split, even families are split. There is no clear or easy option.
Islam’s greatest thinker, the medieval theologian Al-Ghazali, told the story of The Donkey Between Two Carrots. The donkey agonised over which carrot might be juicier or bigger for so long that it ended up dying of starvation in the middle. And the moral of the tale? Indecision is a form of decision and its consequences can be fatal.
But the Syrian tragedy is being prolonged not just by one but by two metaphorical donkeys. It is not just our indecision in the West. The indecision of Syria’s own population is also a big factor. The ‘greys’, ‘the silent majority,’ after living for so many decades under repressive Ba’athist rule, have been silenced by fear, fear of reprisals, arbitrary arrest, imprisonment or worse.
In terms of numbers ‘the silent majority’ makes up at least 70% of Syria’s 22 million population – in other words over 15 million people. How do I work that out? Because the people actively involved in the fighting are an absolute maximum of one million on either side, those employed by the regime in government, military or intelligence positions are a further 2 million maximum, so the remainder, leaving 2-3 million aside who are now refugees in neighbouring countries, are ‘undecided’.
It is easy for us in the West to blame this ‘silent majority’ for their apparent quiescence in the current situation. But we have not lived through what they have lived through, not come anywhere near experiencing the pervading culture of fear they have endured since the 1970s when the Ba’athists and Hafez Al-Assad came to power. We have not had family members abducted and threatened, or worse.
They need our help. They need our courage to liberate them. They cannot liberate themselves. The overwhelming majority of them are moderate Sunni Muslims with decent human values and principles who want nothing more than to earn their living and look after their family. Yet the media has got hold of the kind of sensationalist scare stories it so loves, so that we now imagine them to be ‘cannibals’ to use Putin’s words, or fanatical Al-Qa’ida types intent on terrorizing the West. How can we be so misled by the media?
Of the 100,000 or so fighters opposing the Assad regime, a maximum of 5,000 could perhaps be labelled ‘extremist’. Most are in the Aleppo and Idlib area, where there are certainly some extreme groups who have been able to thrive thanks to the power vacuum we have left through our inaction. In Homs there are less than 50 such fighters, and in Qusair there were none at all.
Instead of obsessing about this 5% of extremists, who are too small in numbers to have any real say in a post-Assad era, we should be focusing instead on the 95% who desperately need better arms to a
void being slaughtered by regime forces. If we do not, they, like Al-Ghazali’s donkey, will die a long slow death while we, like Al-Ghazali’s donkey, do nothing but agonise in the middle. | ||
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] | null | [] | null | /the-world-factbook/favicon-32x32.png?v=c3853bf09f084a8b1f66c6c2685054a1 | null | Background
After World War I, France acquired a mandate over the northern portion of the former Ottoman Empire province of Syria. The French administered the area until granting it independence in 1946. The new country lacked political stability and experienced a series of military coups. Syria united with Egypt in 1958 to form the United Arab Republic. In 1961, the two entities separated, and the Syrian Arab Republic was reestablished. In the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Syria lost control of the Golan Heights region to Israel. During the 1990s, Syria and Israel held occasional, albeit unsuccessful, peace talks over its return. In 1970, Hafiz al-ASAD, a member of the socialist Ba'ath Party and the minority Alawi sect, seized power in a bloodless coup and brought political stability to the country. Following the death of al-ASAD, his son, Bashar al-ASAD, was approved as president by popular referendum in 2000. Syrian troops that were stationed in Lebanon since 1976 in an ostensible peacekeeping role were withdrawn in 2005. During the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hizballah, Syria placed its military forces on alert but did not intervene directly on behalf of its ally Hizballah. In 2007, Bashar al-ASAD's second term as president was again approved in a referendum.
In the wake of major uprisings elsewhere in the region, antigovernment protests broke out in the southern province of Dar'a in 2011. Protesters called for the legalization of political parties, the removal of corrupt local officials, and the repeal of the restrictive Emergency Law allowing arrests without charge. Demonstrations and violent unrest spread across Syria, and the government responded with concessions, but also with military force and detentions that led to extended clashes and eventually civil war. International pressure on the Syrian Government intensified after 2011, as the Arab League, the EU, Turkey, and the US expanded economic sanctions against the ASAD regime and those entities that supported it. In 2012, more than 130 countries recognized the Syrian National Coalition as the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people. In 2015, Russia launched a military intervention on behalf of the ASAD regime, and domestic and foreign-government-aligned forces recaptured swaths of territory from opposition forces. With foreign support, the regime continued to periodically regain opposition-held territory until 2020, when Turkish firepower halted a regime advance and forced a stalemate between regime and opposition forces. The government lacks territorial control over much of the northeastern part of the country, which the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) hold, and a smaller area dominated by Turkey.
Since 2016, Turkey has conducted three large-scale military operations to capture territory along Syria's northern border. Some opposition forces organized under the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army and Turkish forces have maintained control of northwestern Syria along the Turkish border with the Afrin area of Aleppo Province since 2018. The violent extremist organization Hayâat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly the Nusrah Front) emerged in 2017 as the predominant opposition force in Idlib Province, and still dominates an area also hosting Turkish forces. Negotiations have failed to produce a resolution to the conflict, and the UN estimated in 2022 that at least 306,000 people have died during the civil war. Approximately 6.7 million Syrians were internally displaced as of 2022, and 14.6 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance across the country. An additional 5.6 million Syrians were registered refugees in Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and North Africa. The conflict in Syria remains one of the two largest displacement crises worldwide (the other is the full-scale invasion of Ukraine).
Telecommunication systems
general assessment: the years of civil war and destruction to infrastructure continue to have a toll on the telecoms sector in Syria; although over the years the major mobile service providers have endeavored to restore and rebuild damaged networks, the operating environment has been difficult; following disputed demands for back taxes, MTN Group in August 2021 exited the country, after its majority stake had been transferred to judicial guardianship; this effectively meant that the mobile market became a monopoly; in February 2022 the regulator awarded a third mobile license following a process which had been ongoing for many years; telecommunication services in Syria are highly regulated; although urban areas can make use of the network built and maintained by the government-owned incumbent, many under served remote areas in the countryside are obliged to rely on satellite communications; the domestic and international fixed-line markets in Syria remain the monopoly of the STE, despite several initiatives over the years aimed at liberalizing the market; mobile broadband penetration in Syria is still quite low, despite quite a high population coverage of 3G networks and some deployment of LTE infrastructure; this may provide potential opportunities for growth once infrastructure and economic reconstruction efforts make headway, and civil issues subside (2022)
domestic: the number of fixed-line connections is 13 per 100; mobile-cellular service is 80 per 100 persons (2021)
international: country code - 963; landing points for the Aletar, BERYTAR and UGART submarine cable connections to Egypt, Lebanon, and Cyprus; satellite earth stations - 1 Intelsat (Indian Ocean) and 1 Intersputnik (Atlantic Ocean region); coaxial cable and microwave radio relay to Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey; participant in Medarabtel (2019)
Military - note
the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) has operated in the Golan between Israel and Syria since 1974 to monitor the ceasefire following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and supervise the areas of separation between the two countries; UNDOF has about 1,000 personnelÂ
multiple actors are conducting military operations in Syria in support of the ASAD government or Syrian opposition forces, as well in pursuit of their own security goals, such as counterterrorism and border security; operations have included air strikes, direct ground combat, and sponsoring proxy forces, as well as providing non-lethal military support, including advisors, technicians, arms and equipment, funding, intelligence, and training:
pro-ASAD elements operating in Syria have included the Syrian Arab Army, Lebanese Hizbollah, Iranian, Iranian-backed Shia militia, and Russian forces; since early in the civil war, the ASAD government has relied on Lebanese Hizballah (see Appendix T for further information), as well as Iran and Iranian-backed irregular forces, for combat operations and to hold territory; since 2011, Iran has provided military advisors and combat troops from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (including the Qods Force; see Appendix T for further information), as well as intelligence, logistical, material, technical, and financial support; it has funded, trained, equipped, and led Shia militia/paramilitary units comprised of both Syrian and non-Syrian personnel, primarily from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan; Russia intervened at the request of the ASAD government in 2015 and has since provided air support, special operations forces, military advisors, private military contractors, training, arms, and equipment; Iranian and Russian support has also included assisting Syria in combating the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS; see Appendix T) terrorist group
Turkey has intervened militarily several times since 2016 to combat Kurdish militants and ISIS, support select Syrian opposition forces, and establish a buffer along portions of its border with Syria; Turkey continues to maintain a considerable military presence in northern Syria; it has armed and trained militia/proxy forces, such as the Syrian National Army, which was formed in late 2017 of Syrian Arab and Turkmen rebel factions in the Halab (Aleppo) province and northwestern Syria
the US and some regional and European states have at times backed Syrian opposition forces militarily and/or conducted military operations, primarily against ISIS; the US has operated in Syria since 2015 with ground forces and air strikes; the majority the US ground forces are deployed in the Eastern Syria Security Area (ESSA, which includes parts of Hasakah and Dayr az Zawr provinces east of the Euphrates River) in support of operations by the Syrian Democratic Forces against ISIS, while the remainder are in southeast Syria around At Tanf supporting counter-ISIS operations by the Syrian Free Army opposition force; the US has also conducted air strikes against Syrian military targets in response to Syrian Government use of chemical weapons against opposition forces and civilians; in addition, France, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UK have provided forms of military assistance to opposition forces and/or conducted operations against ISIS, including air strikes
Israel has conducted hundreds of military air strikes in Syria against Syrian military, Hizballah, Iranian, and/or Iranian-backed militia targets
the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a coalition of forces comprised primarily of Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Syriac Christian fighters; it is dominated and led by Kurdish forces, particularly the Peopleâs Protection Units (YPG) militia; the SDF began to receive US support in 2015 and as of 2023 was the main local US partner in its counter-ISIS campaign; the SDF has internal security, counterterrorism, and commando units; Turkey views the SDF as an extension of the Kurdistan Workersâ Party (PKK), a US-designated terrorist organization (see Appendix T)
the ISIS terrorist group (see Appendix T) lost its last territorial stronghold to SDF forces in 2019, but continues to maintain a low-level insurgency; in addition, the SDF holds about 10,000 captured suspected ISIS fighters in detention facilities across northern Syria, including 2,000 from countries other than Iraq and Syria
the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS; formerly known as al-Nusrah Front) terrorist organization (see Appendix T) is the dominant militant group in northwest Syria and has asserted considerable influence and control over the so-called Syrian Salvation Government in the Iblib de-escalation zone and the Aleppo province (2023) | |||||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 3 | 24 | https://www.dvidshub.net/image/8310892/soldier-named-ace-syria | en | Soldier Named 'Ace of Syria' | [
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] | null | [] | null | U.S. Army Gen. Michael Kurilla, commander of the U.S. Central Command, presents an Army Achievement Medal with “C” Device to Spc. Dylan A. Green, a forward area air defense and nighthawk operator with Combined Special Operations Joint Task Force – Levant, on Dec. 14, 2023 in northeastern Syria. Green was awarded the ARCAM for his service as a forward area air defense and nighthawk operator and shooting down six drones. (Photo by U.S. Army Reserve Jeffrey Daniel and caption by U.S. Army Reserve Sgt. Emma Scearce) | /favicon.ico | DVIDS | https://www.dvidshub.net/image/8310892/soldier-named-ace-syria | U.S. Army Gen. Michael Kurilla, commander of the U.S. Central Command, presents an Army Achievement Medal with “C” Device to Spc. Dylan A. Green, a forward area air defense and nighthawk operator with Combined Special Operations Joint Task Force – Levant, on Dec. 14, 2023 in northeastern Syria. Green was awarded the ARCAM for his service as a forward area air defense and nighthawk operator and shooting down six drones. (Photo by U.S. Army Reserve Jeffrey Daniel and caption by U.S. Army Reserve Sgt. Emma Scearce) | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 87 | https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/ | en | Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum | [
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] | null | [] | 2024-07-10T12:00:00+00:00 | en | /sites/default/files/apple-icon.png | https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/ | White House Tapes
We are digitizing all the Nixon tapes. Please feel free to explore our collection and check status.
The Richard Nixon Foundation
Click here to access the Nixon Resource Center and discover the life and legacy of Richard Nixon. | ||||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 11 | https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/elysee-confirms-al-assad-will-lose-legion-dhonneur/455383 | en | Elysée confirms al-Assad will lose Légion d’honneur | [
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] | 2018-04-17T08:31:00+00:00 | France has begun proceedings to retract the Légion d’honneur award from Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, the Elysée has confirmed. | en | /view-resources/dachser2/public/connexionfrance/favicon.ico | https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/elysee-confirms-al-assad-will-lose-legion-dhonneur/455383 | It comes three days after a coordinated air strike on Syrian chemical weapons centres by France, Britain and the United States, in response to reports of a chemical weapons attack in west Ghouta, near Damas.
Mr al-Assad is accused of using chemical weapons on his own people, and of allowing and aiding a secret chemicals weapons research programme to thrive in Syria.
Mr al-Assad was given the Légion d’honneur - the highest honour that France can give to a public figure, full name Médaille de Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur - in 2001 by then-President Jacques Chirac.
The award was given during an official visit to France, soon after Mr al-Assad succeeded his father Hafez al-Assad to become Syrian president.
Now, the Elysée has confirmed that “a disciplinary procedure of retraction” has begun, as the Syrian president has been found to have “committed acts that are contrary to” the award's principles.
Since 2010, measures have been in place that allow the Elysée to retract a Légion d’honneur more easily, if the holder is found to have committed such acts.
Other high-profile names to have been stripped of their honours include American cyclist Lance Armstrong, who was found to have lied about doping throughout his cycling career; and high-fashion designer John Galliano, who lost his award in 2011 after being found guilty of making anti-Semitic comments, which were caught on camera while Mr Galliano was drunk in a Parisien cafe in the Marais.
Ad
The designer later went on to be handed a suspended sentence, plus a fine of €6,000. He was also fired from his job as artistic director of fashion house Dior. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 52 | https://www.hrw.org/report/2010/07/16/wasted-decade/human-rights-syria-during-bashar-al-asads-first-ten-years-power | en | A Wasted Decade | https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/favicon.ico | https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/favicon.ico | [
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"Nadim Houry"
] | 2010-07-16T00:00:00 | This 35-page report reviews al-Asad's human rights record in five key areas: repression of political and human rights activism; restrictions on freedom of expression; torture; treatment of the Kurds; and Syria's legacy of enforced disappearances. The verdict is bleak. | en | /sites/default/files/favicon.ico | Human Rights Watch | https://www.hrw.org/report/2010/07/16/wasted-decade/human-rights-syria-during-bashar-al-asads-first-ten-years-power | Executive Summary
After Bashar al-Asad succeeded his father as president in July 2000, many people in Syria hoped that the human rights situation would improve. In his first inaugural speech on July 17, al-Asad spoke of the need for “creative thinking,” “the desperate need for constructive criticism,” “transparency,” and “democracy.”[1] A human rights lawyer summed up his initial feelings on the succession, reflecting the mood and aspirations of many others in the country: “Bashar’s inaugural speech provided a space for hope following the totalitarian years of President [Hafez] Asad. It was as if a nightmare was removed.”[2]
Ten years later, these initial hopes remain unfulfilled, and al-Asad’s words have not translated into any kind of government action to promote criticism, transparency, or democracy. This report reviews Syria’s human rights situation in five key areas and proposes concrete recommendations to the Syrian President that are essential to improving Syria’s human rights record.
The Damascus Spring that followed al-Asad’s ascent to power, during which a number of informal groups began meeting in private homes to discuss political reform, was a short-lived experiment; its highpoint was the shutting down of Mazzeh prison in November 2000 and the release of hundreds of political prisoners shortly thereafter. It came to an abrupt end in August 2001; Syria’s prisons are filled again with political prisoners, journalists, and human rights activists (Annex 1 lists 92 political and human rights activists detained since al-Asad’s ascent to power).
Syria’s opaque decision-making process and the lack of public information on policy debates within the regime make it very difficult to know the real reasons that drove Bashar al-Asad to loosen some of the existing restrictions early on, only to clamp down a few months later and to maintain a tight grip ever since. Was al-Asad a true reformer who did not have the capacity early in his reign to take on an entrenched “old guard” that refused any political opening? If so, why has he not implemented these reforms in the ensuing years after he had consolidated his power base and named his own people to key positions? Or was al-Asad’s talk of reform a mere opportunistic act to gain popularity and legitimacy that he never intended to translate into real changes?
There is not enough publicly available information to answer these questions definitively. However, it is clear that after a decade in power, Bashar al-Asad has not taken the steps necessary to truly improve his country’s human rights record. He has focused his efforts on opening up the economy without broadening public freedoms or establishing public institutions that are accountable for their actions. So while visitors to Damascus are likely to stay in smart boutique hotels and dine in shiny new restaurants, ordinary Syrians continue to risk jail merely for criticizing their president, starting a blog, or protesting government policies.
The state of emergency, enacted in 1963, remains in place, and the government continues to rule by emergency powers. Syria’s security agencies, the feared mukhabarat, continue to detain people without arrest warrants, frequently refuse to disclose their whereabouts for weeks and sometimes months, and regularly engage in torture. Special courts set up under Syria’s emergency laws, such as the Supreme State Security Court (SSSC), sentence people following unfair trials. Syria is still a de facto single-party state with only the Ba`ath Party holding effective power.
Bashar al-Asad has permitted Syrians to access the internet but his security services detain bloggers and censor popular websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Blogger (Google’s blogging engine). On September 22, 2001, one year after al-Asad assumed power, the Syrian government adopted a new Press Law (Decree No. 50/2001), which provided the government with sweeping controls over newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals, as well as virtually anything else printed in Syria, from books to pamphlets and posters.
Despite statements by First Lady Asma al-Asad in January 2010 that the government “wanted to open more space for civil society to work,” Syria’s security services continue to deny registration requests for independent non-governmental organizations and none of Syria’s human rights groups are licensed.
The Kurdish minority, estimated to be 10 percent of the population, is denied basic group rights, including the right to learn Kurdish in schools or celebrate Kurdish festivals, such as Nowruz (Kurdish New Year). Official repression of Kurds increased further after Syrian Kurds held large-scale demonstrations, some violent, throughout northern Syria in March 2004 in order to voice long-simmering grievances. Since then, security forces have dispersed Kurdish political and cultural gatherings, sometimes with lethal force, and have detained a number of leading Kurdish political activists, who they have referred to military courts or the SSSC for prosecution under charges of “inciting strife,” or “weakening national sentiment.” Despite repeated promises by al-Asad, an estimated 300,000 stateless Kurds are still waiting for the Syrian government to solve their predicament by granting them citizenship. Most of these had their Syrian citizenship stripped by the Syrian government after an exceptional census in 1962 or are their descendants.
Promises by al-Asad for new laws that would broaden political and civil society participation have not materialized. In March 2005 he promised while speaking to Spanish journalists that “the coming period will be one of freedom for political parties in Syria.”[4] In June 2005 the Ba`ath Party Congress recommended the establishment of a new political party law that would allow the creation of new non-ethnic and non-religious political parties.[5] To date, no new draft law has been officially introduced.
Repression in Syria today may be less severe than during Syria’s darks years in the early 1980s, when security forces carried out large-scale disappearances and extrajudicial killings. But that is hardly an achievement or measure of improvement given the different circumstances. As a prominent dissident told Human Rights Watch recently, “In the 1980s, we went to jail without trial. Now, we get a trial, but we still go to jail.”[6]
In public interviews and speeches, al-Asad has justified the lack of political reforms by either arguing that his priority is economic reform, or by stating that regional circumstances have interfered with his reform agenda. In his second inaugural speech in July 2007, following an endorsement for a second term with 97.6 percent of the vote, al-Asad noted that:
Numerous circumstances hindered some of the political developments which we wanted to achieve. Our supreme objective, amidst the chaos certain parties have been exporting to our region—and which surrounds us now—was to preserve the safety and security of our citizens and maintain the stability our people enjoys.[7]
While there is no doubt that Syria has faced numerous foreign policy challenges in the last decade, from the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 to Syria’s forced withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005 and its subsequent isolation by Western powers, these do not explain, let alone justify, the Syrian government’s repressive behavior toward its own citizens.
A review of Syria’s record shows a consistent policy of repressing dissent regardless of international or regional developments. Al-Asad’s crackdown on dissidents began in August 2001, before the United States invaded Iraq, and continued throughout the decade, irrespective of the state of Syria’s relations with the international community. Syria’s emergence from its Western-imposed isolation since 2007 has not improved the situation for Syria’s political and human rights activists.
In March 2007, the European Union reopened its dialogue with Damascus, after it had suspended talks on an EU association agreement in 2005 following the murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The US followed suit, with House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi meeting al-Asad in Damascus in April 2007, followed by a visit to Syria in May 2007 by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Yet, in May 2007, Syrian courts sentenced leading dissident Kamal Labwani and prominent political writer Michel Kilo to long jail terms for their peaceful activities, only weeks after jailing human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni.
More recently, Europe’s, and particularly France’s, extensive engagement with Syria following al-Asad’s visit to Paris in July 2008 has not eased Syria’s repression of human rights activism. On July 28, 2009, the government detained Muhanad al-Hasani, a human rights lawyer and the foremost monitor of the State Security Court. Three months later, on October 14, 2009, it detained Haytham al-Maleh, 78, a human rights lawyer who criticized the regime’s policies on an opposition TV station.
Writing ten years ago in June 2000, Riad al-Turk, a prominent Syrian opposition leader and the former secretary general of the Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau), asked in an article whether Syria will remain a “Kingdom of Silence”—a country where criticism of government policies is banned. His question still resonates today. Without reform in the five areas outlined in this report, al-Asad’s legacy will merely extend that of his father: government by repression.
I. Repression of Political and Human Rights Activism
In the early months of his rule, Bashar al-Asad emphasized the principle of openness. Sensing a possible opportunity, many political and human rights activists began to raise their voices to demand the introduction of greater freedoms and political reforms in Syria. A number of informal groups began meeting in private homes to discuss human rights and reform efforts. The authorities allowed these forums to take place, leading to a period of relative openness often referred to as the “Damascus Spring.” By early 2001, 21 such informal groups functioned across Syria.[8]
However, al-Asad’s brief promotion of tolerance came to an abrupt end. On January 29, 2001, Syrian Information Minister Adnan `Omran declared that civil society is an “American term” that had recently been given “additional meanings” by “groups that seek to become (political) parties.”[9] A month later, al-Asad repeated the warnings to the civil society movement:
When the consequences of an action affect the stability of the homeland, there are two possibilities: either the perpetrator is a foreign agent acting on behalf of an outside power, or else he is a simple person acting unintentionally. But in both cases a service is being done to the country’s enemies, and consequently both are dealt with in a similar fashion, irrespective of their intentions or motives.[10]
The crackdown began in August 2001. On August 9 the security services detained Ma’mun al-Homsi, a deputy in the People’s Assembly known for his criticism of the regime. Subsequent arrests of prominent political and rights activists soon followed, and within a month, Syrian authorities had arrested 10 opposition leaders, including two members of parliament, and cracked down on civil society advocacy groups. The two lawmakers, al-Homsi and Seif, were convicted of “attempting to change the constitution by illegal means” and “inciting racial and sectarian strife,” and sentenced by the Damascus Criminal Court to five years in jail. The other eight activists, Riad al-Turk, `Aref Dalilah, Walid al-Bunni, Kamal al-Labwani, Habib Salih, Hasan Sa`dun, Habib `Isa, and Fawwaz Tello, were referred to the Supreme State Security Court, which issued prison sentences of between two to ten years.[11]
There is virtually no information from Syria to explain why al-Asad initially promised an expansion of freedom only to subsequently reverse his policy. Al-Asad may have feared that what he had planned as a controlled and superficial opening would gain momentum and translate into a wider challenge to his regime. Some analysts argued that by demanding free elections, opposition members and civil society activists had directly challenged a yet-untested al-Asad which forced him to clamp down.[12] Other analysts focused on the role of the “old guard” that surrounded al-Asad, who never looked kindly on any political opening that could challenge their authority. In the words of Eyal Zisser, author of multiple books on Syria, “the old guard forced him [al-Asad] to reverse gears” and pushed him into “leading a counterattack against the supporters of reform.”[13] Regardless of the underlying reasons, the crackdown on the Damascus Spring in the absence of any real threat to the regime seems to indicate that al-Asad was not truly committed to political reforms.
Since then, the Syrian authorities have regularly detained political and human rights activists. Human Rights Watch has documented the arrest of at least 92 political and human rights activists since al-Asad came to power (See Annex 1). However, the actual number is likely much higher, given that it is hard to obtain information about the detention of less prominent political activists, especially Kurds and Islamists.
In detaining and prosecuting activists, Syrian authorities rely on the emergency law, which gives the security services broad powers of arrest, as well as broadly worded “security” provisions in Syria’s Penal Code, such as “issuing calls that weaken national sentiment or awaken racial or sectarian tensions while Syria is at war or is expecting a war” (Article 285 of Syrian Penal Code), “spreading false or exaggerated information that weakens national sentiment while Syria is at war or is expecting a war” (Article 286 of Syrian Penal Code), or undertaking “acts, writings or speech that incite sectarian, racial, or religious strife” (Article 307 of Syrian Penal Code).
Arrests and trials are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Syria’s harassment of dissidents. Syrian security services routinely prohibit or interrupt meetings and press conferences by political activists, civil society, and human rights groups.[16]
The Syrian Bar Association has also harassed human rights lawyers by initiating disciplinary measures to disbar lawyers who criticize the government or the president’s policies. On November 10, 2009, the bar association’s disciplinary tribunal issued a decision to permanently disbar Muhanad al-Hasani, President of the Syrian Human Rights Organization (Swasiah), because he “headed an unlicensed human rights organization without obtaining the prior approval of the bar association” and “attended sessions of the State Security Court to monitor its proceedings without being appointed as a defense lawyer by the accused.”[17]
Syrian authorities also use travel bans as punishment for activists and dissidents. The use of such bans has expanded dramatically since 2006. The Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, an unlicensed non-governmental organization (NGO), issued a report in February 2009 listing 417 political and human rights activists banned from traveling. In some cases, the ban extended to the families of the activists.[18] The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which Syria ratified in 1969, requires all states to ensure that everyone has the right to leave any country, including their own. The only permissible restrictions are those “provided by law” and that “are necessary to protect national security, public order (ordre public), public health or morals or the rights and freedoms of others, and are consistent with the other rights recognized in the present Covenant” (including the right to freedom of expression and association).[19] In this case, the bans imposed on these activists are tied simply to their political expression, and not based on any defined security interests.
Syrian authorities deny all requests by human rights groups to register, and accordingly none are officially authorized to exist. The main impediments to their registration is the 1958 Law on Associations and Private Societies (Law No. 93), which governs the establishment of any type of association or organization in Syria and authorizes the security services to refuse the registration request of these groups.[20] The systematic denial of registration of human rights groups has direct negative implications on their activities, allowing the government to arrest members for participation in an “illegal organization,” and to ban meetings or events. A human rights lawyer told Human Rights Watch that the “lack of registration is like a sword over our necks. The mukhabarat [secret services] can act on it whenever they want.”[21]
In 2005 the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, the ministry officially responsible for administering Law No. 93, said that it would review the law with an eye toward liberalizing its provisions.[22] However, the drive to reform the existing law came to a complete stop shortly thereafter, without any explanation. Were the Syrian authorities responding to outside pressure to open up, or were there elements inside the government pushing for reforms? Syria’s opaque politics and lack of public debate about policy choices make it impossible to really know what drove these decisions.
Five years later, First Lady Asma al-Asad opened a conference in Damascus in January 2010 by declaring that the state “wanted to open more space for civil society to work, develop and partner with the government and implement development-oriented policies.” She said, “We will learn from our mistakes and a law will be passed soon—after consultation with civil society—to provide non-governmental organizations (NGOs) the safeguards they need to operate effectively.”[23] However, no draft law has been made public, and it is not clear whether the Syrian authorities will allow independent and human rights NGOs to officially register or whether they will limit any easing of the law to NGOs that assist the government in its “development-oriented policies.”
The combination of these laws and practices has kept Syria’s human rights activists in constant fear of being detained. As one human rights lawyer told Human Rights Watch recently, “I cannot go on like this. I keep getting called in for interrogation. Every time I go, I don’t know if I will be detained or not.”[24]
Political activists in Syria are also still awaiting a new law for political parties following al-Asad’s March 2005 declaration to a group of Spanish journalists that “the coming period will be one of freedom for political parties” in Syria.”[25] In June 2005, the Ba`ath Party Congress recommended the passing of a new political party law that would allow the creation of non-ethnic and non-religious political parties.[26] However, to date, there is still no new draft law for the creation of political parties.
Accordingly, we urge President al-Asad to:
Lift the state of emergency and repeal Syria’s Emergency Law. The continued application of the Emergency Law since 1963 violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Syria is a party. The Syrian government has failed to show that the state of emergency is strictly necessary for its security. Release all individuals currently deprived of their liberty for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression, association, or assembly.
Order the security services to cease detaining activists and banning them from traveling abroad merely for exercising their legitimate right to freedom of expression and association.
Enact a political parties law in compliance with international human rights norms, and establish an independent electoral commission to register new political parties.
Amend the 1958 Law on Associations and Private Societies (Law No. 93) to ensure that groups formed for any legal purpose are allowed to acquire legal personality by making registration of associations automatic once these associations fulfill the formal requirements and by abolishing penalties for participation in unregistered associations if such associations are not otherwise breaking the law.
II. Restrictions on Freedom of Expression
The Ba`ath party banned all independent publications after it came to power in 1963, and for the following 40 years only three newspapers existed in Syria, all of which were affiliated with the party: al-Ba`ath (the party’s official mouthpiece since 1947), al-Thawra (a 1963 Ba`ath daily meaning “revolution”), and Tishreen (a 1973 Ba`ath daily).[27]
After Bashar al-Asad assumed power, he removed the outright ban on independent publications, but introduced a new Press Law (Decree No. 50/2001), promulgated on September 22, 2001, which provided the government with sweeping control over newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals, as well as virtually anything else printed in Syria, from books to pamphlets and posters. Provisions apply to publishers, editors, journalists, authors, printers, distributors, and bookstore owners, and subject them to imprisonment and steep fines for violations of the law.[28]
Initially, the authorities mostly granted licenses to economic and cultural publications, or to political newspapers issued by individuals or parties close to the Ba`ath party, such as the Communist Party which received a license to publish a weekly entitled Sawt al-Shaab (Voice of the People) in February 2001.[29] The most promising development was the granting that same month of a license to Addomari (the Lamp Lighter), a satirical publication published by renowned Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat. The newspaper was an instant success as it was the first Syrian newspaper in 40 years that printed something different from the views of the Ba`ath party or those of its close allies. With a circulation of 75,000, it sold many times more than the three “official” dailies, but the government closed it down in 2003 after officials told its founder, Ali Farzat, that he “went too far.”[30] His publication had criticized Saddam Hussein by showing him and his generals stuffing the Iraqi people as cannon fodder in the face of the impending US invasion, at a time when the Syrian government’s policy was to oppose the invasion of Iraq.[31]
Censorship remains widespread. The Arab Establishment for Distribution of Printed Products, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Information, vets all newspapers prior to distribution. Syria’s two private daily newspapers covering political topics that have succeeded in staying open are owned by businessmen closely tied to the regime: al-Watan, launched in November 2006, is a daily political newspaper widely reported to be published by President al-Asad’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf; Baladna, a social affairs newspaper, is published by Majd Suleiman, son of security chief General Bahjat Suleiman.[32]
On July 13, 2005, Nizar Mayhoob, a spokesman for the Syrian Ministry of Information, told Human Rights Watch that Syria would issue a new media law, “which will enhance the [press] law issued in 2001 by overcoming its inadequacies.” Al-Asad himself, in his second inaugural speech on July 18, 2007, noted that:
On the media law, the subject has been raised many times. There is a recent proposal by the Ministry of Information on the need to amend the media law. I heard many complaints from journalists and others that they are not happy with the existing law. There could be proposals from the Ministry of Information in this regard which could be studied by the People’s Assembly, and the law could be passed.[33]
As of July 6, 2010, no new law had been introduced and there is still no independent press in Syria.
Instead, the government has extended restrictions it imposes on print media to online outlets, reversing early hopes that al-Asad’s role as chairman of the Syrian Computer Society (SCS) prior to his appointment as president would make him more receptive to freedom of expression online. OpenNet Initiative, a partnership of four leading universities in the US, Canada, and the UK, which monitors government filtration and surveillance of the internet, says that filtering of political websites in Syria is “pervasive.” Internet censorship extends to popular websites such as Blogger (Google’s blogging engine), Facebook, and YouTube.[34]
The authorities have also prosecuted journalists, bloggers, and citizens who dare criticize the authorities or the president. The vast majority of journalists and bloggers have been tried before the State Security Court (SSSC), an exceptional court with almost no procedural guarantees. In 2009, the Committee to Protect Journalists named Syria number three on a list of the ten worst countries in which to be a blogger based on the arrests, harassments, and restrictions that online writers in Syria have faced.[35] Human Rights Watch found that between January 2007 and June 2008, the SSSC sentenced at least 10 writers and bloggers who had criticized the authorities, and that overall the court convicted 153 defendants on the basis of overbroad security provisions (described in Section 1 above) that violate basic rights to freedom of expression. In one case, the SSSC sentenced Muhamad Walid al-Husseini, 67, to three years in prison because a member of the security services overheard him insult the Syrian president and criticize the country’s corruption while sitting at a popular café in Syria.[36]
Table 1. Known Journalists and Bloggers Detained During Bashar al-Asad’s First Decade in Power[37]
Accordingly, we urge President Bashar al-Asad to:
Immediately and unconditionally release all those imprisoned or detained solely for exercising their right to free expression, online or otherwise.
Stop blocking websites for their content.
Introduce a new media law that would remove all prison penalties for defamation and libel; stop government censorship of local and foreign publications; and remove government control over newspapers and other publications.
Amend or abolish the vague provisions of the Syrian Penal Code that permit the authorities to arbitrarily suppress and punish individuals for peaceful expression, in breach of its international legal obligations, on grounds that “national security” is being endangered, including the following provisions: Article 278 (undertaking “acts, writings, or speech unauthorized by the government that expose Syria to the danger of belligerent acts or that disrupt Syria’s ties to foreign states”), Article 285 (“issuing calls that weaken national sentiment or awaken racial or sectarian tensions while Syria is at war or is expecting a war”), Article 286 (spreading “false or exaggerated information that weaken national sentiment while Syria is at war or is expecting a war”), Article 307 (undertaking “acts, writings or speech that incite sectarian, racial or religious strife”), and Article 376 (which imposes a sentence from one to three years on anyone who insults the president).
III. Torture, Ill-Treatment, and Enforced Disappearances
Bashar al-Asad raised hopes for change with respect to the treatment of detainees when he took two significant steps: closing the Mazzeh prison in November 2000, which held numerous political prisoners, and transferring approximately 500 political detainees during July-August 2001 from the notorious Tadmor prison, in Syria’s eastern desert, to Sednaya prison, north of Damascus, which was considered to offer better facilities.
Al-Asad never explained his decision to transfer political prisoners out of Tadmor, but Syrian activists saw the move as a hopeful sign given Tadmor’s association with government repression of the 1980s. Human Rights Watch has documented extensive human rights abuse, torture, and summary executions in Tadmor prison, a facility used to detain thousands of political prisoners in the 1980s; it was also the scene in June 1980 of the extrajudicial killings of an estimated 1,000 prisoners by commando units loyal to Rif`at al-Asad, Hafez al-Asad’s brother (see more on Tadmor prison massacre in Section 5).[38] Faraj Beraqdar, a Syrian poet and five-year inmate in Tadmor, described the prison as “the kingdom of death and madness.”[39]
But while closing Tadmor prison was a promising sign of detention reform, it has not led to other positive improvements. Bashar al-Asad has done nothing to get rid of the practices of incommunicado detention, ill-treatment, and torture during interrogation, which remain common in Syria’s detention facilities.
Syria’s security services regularly hold detainees incommunicado—cut off from all contact with family, a lawyer, or any other link with the outside world— for days, months, and in some cases, years. For example, in August 2008, Syrian security forces detained a group of 13 young men from the northeastern district of Deir al-Zor suspected of having ties to Islamists. To this day, the authorities have not disclosed where they are holding at least 10 of the men, why they arrested them, or whether they will charge them and put them on trial. Prison officials returned the body of one of those detained in Deir al-Zor, Muhammad Amin al-Shawa, 43, to his family on January 10, 2009, but they allowed them to see only his face before burying him. Three Syrian human rights activists told Human Rights Watch that they believe that al-Shawa died due to torture.[40]
Human Rights Watch and other human rights groups have also documented a frequent pattern of torture and other ill‐treatment by Syria’s security services of political and human rights detainees as well as criminal suspects.[41] Out of 30 former Kurdish detainees held after 2004 and interviewed by Human Rights Watch following their release, 12 said that security forces tortured them.[42] Human Rights Watch has also documented the torture of bloggers and beatings of prominent political activists by government security agents. For example, eight of the twelve detainees from the Damascus Declaration for Democratic Change, an umbrella group of opposition and pro-democracy groups, detained in December 2007, told their investigative judge that state security agents had beaten them during detention.[43]
The UN Committee against Torture, which is tasked with monitoring compliance with the Convention against Torture, said in May 2010 that it was “deeply concerned about numerous, ongoing and consistent allegations concerning the routine use of torture by law enforcement and investigative officials…”[44] An official Canadian Commission of Inquiry into the 2002 US deportation to Syria of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, concluded that “the SMI [Syrian Military Intelligence] tortured Mr. Arar while interrogating him during the period he was held incommunicado at the SMI’s Palestine Branch facility.”[45]
In an encouraging step in detainee practices, Bashar al-Asad’s government ratified the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment on July 1, 2004. However, it has not followed the ratification with concrete measures to end the practice of torture, such as investigations of allegations of torture or permission for independent observers to visit Syria’s prisons and detention facilities.
According to the Syrian submission to the Committee Against Torture (CAT), the Syrian Minister for Internal Affairs issued Circular No. 10 dated December 16, 2004, requesting members of the police to hold meetings to “familiarize themselves with the prohibitions on the use of violence against persons on remand and prisoners and to receive instructions on performing their duties in a responsible manner. Successful investigators can arrive at the desired result using proper scientific and technical methods to establish the facts of a case without needing to resort to illegal methods.”[46] In their submission, the Syrian delegation mentioned six cases where police were held liable for torturing people.[47]
However, such cases remain exceptions; they are limited to the police force and not the security services, which benefit from extensive legal immunity for acts of torture. Legislative Decree No. 14, of January 15, 1969, which established the General Intelligence Division (Idarat al-Mukhabaraat al-`Ama), one of Syria’s largest security apparatuses, provides that “no legal action may be taken against any employee of General Intelligence for crimes committed while carrying out their designated duties … except by an order issued by the Director.” To Human Rights Watch’s knowledge, the director of General Intelligence has issued no such order to date. On September 30, 2008, al-Asad issued Legislative Decree 69, which extended this immunity to members of other security forces, by requiring a decree from the General Command of the Army and Armed Forces to prosecute any member of the internal security forces, Political Security, and customs police.[48]
Syria’s courts continue to accept confessions obtained under torture. For example, Human Rights Watch’s review of trials in the SSSC in 2007 and 2008 revealed that 33 defendants alleged before the judge that they had been tortured and that the security services had extracted confessions from them by force, but in no case did the SSSC take any measure to open an investigation into these claims.[49]
When human rights lawyers allege that their clients have been tortured, they risk being prosecuted for “spreading false information,” a criminal charge. For example, on April 24, 2007, a Damascus criminal court sentenced human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni to five years in prison for alleging that a man had died in a Syrian jail because of its inhumane conditions.[50] More recently, on June 30, 2010, a Damascus criminal court sentenced another prominent human rights lawyer, Muhanad al-Hasani, to three years in prison because he publicly denounced the alleged death of a detainee under torture and criticized the SSSC.[51]
Syria’s prison facilities are still off-limits to independent observers, and Syrian authorities continue to impose a blackout on information concerning the deadly shooting of as many as 25 inmates by military police in Sednaya prison on July 5, 2008.
Accordingly, we urge President Bashar al-Asad to:
Order an independent investigation into torture allegations and make public the results of the investigation. Discipline or prosecute, as appropriate, officials responsible for the mistreatment of detainees, including those who gave orders or were otherwise complicit, and make public the results of the punishment.
Adopt effective measures to ensure that all detainees have prompt access to a lawyer and an independent medical examination.
Allow independent outside observers access to prisons and detention facilities.
Order an independent investigation into the deadly shooting of inmates by military police at Sednaya prison and make the findings public.
Ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT), and invite its Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture to visit and inspect Syria’s places of detention.
IV. Repression of Kurds
Kurds are the largest non-Arab ethnic minority in Syria; estimated at approximately 1.7 million, they make up roughly 10 percent of Syria’s population. Since the 1950s, successive Syrian governments have pursued a policy of repressing Kurdish identity because they perceived it to be a threat to the unity of an Arab Syria. Under Bashar al-Asad, Syrian authorities have continued to suppress the political and cultural rights of the Kurdish minority, including banning the teaching of Kurdish in schools and regularly disrupting gatherings to celebrate Kurdish festivals such as Nowruz (the Kurdish New Year).
Harassment of Syrian Kurds increased further after they held large-scale demonstrations, some violent, throughout northern Syria in March 2004 to voice long-simmering grievances. Syrian authorities reacted to the protests with lethal force, killing at least 36 people, injuring over 160, and detaining more than 2,000, amidst widespread reports of torture and ill-treatment of detainees. Most detainees were eventually released, including 312 who were freed under an amnesty announced by al-Asad on March 30, 2005. However, since then, the Syrian government has maintained a policy of banning Kurdish political and cultural gatherings. Human Rights Watch has documented the repression of at least 14 Kurdish political and cultural gatherings since 2005. The security forces also have detained a number of leading Kurdish political activists and referred them to military courts or the SSSC for prosecution under charges of “inciting strife” or “weakening national sentiment.”[53]
In addition, large numbers of Kurds are stateless and consequently face a range of difficulties, from getting jobs and registering weddings to obtaining state services. In 1962, an exceptional census stripped some 120,000 Syrian Kurds—20 percent of the Syrian Kurdish population—of their Syrian citizenship. By many accounts, the special census was carried out in an arbitrary manner. Brothers from the same family, born in the same Syrian village, were classified differently. Fathers became foreigners while their sons remained citizens. The number of stateless Kurds grew with time as descendants of those who lost citizenship in 1962 multiplied; as a result, their number is now estimated at 300,000.[54]
Al-Asad has repeatedly promised Kurdish leaders a solution to the plight of the stateless Kurds, but a decade later, they are still waiting. He first promised to tackle the issue when he visited the largely Kurdish-populated region of al-Hasaka on August 18, 2002, and met with a number of Kurdish leaders.[55] In his second inaugural speech on July 17, 2007, he mentioned the promise he made in 2002, but noted that political developments had prevented progress in this area:
I visited al-Hasaka governorate in August 2002 and met representatives of the community there. All of them without exception talked about this issue [the 1962 census]. I told them, “we have no problem, we will start working on it.” That was the time when the United States was preparing to invade Iraq.… We started moving slowly, the Iraq war happened, and there were different circumstances which stopped many things concerning internal reform. In 2004, the riots in al-Qamishli governorate happened, and we did not exactly know the background of the riots, because some people took advantage of the events for non-patriotic purposes.… We restarted the process last year on the government’s initiative since the events have gone and it was shown that there were no non-patriotic implications.[56]
Later in his speech, al-Asad referred to a draft law that would solve the problem for some stateless Kurds, namely those who became stateless even though other members of their family obtained citizenship.[57] He concluded by saying that “the consultations continue…and when we are done with those…the law is ready.” Three years later, and despite the fact that the political justifications for the delays have long ceased to exist, there is no new law, and no steps have been taken to address Kurdish grievances.
Accordingly, we urge President Bashar al-Asad to:
Set up a commission tasked with addressing the underlying grievances of the Kurdish minority in Syria and make public the results of its findings and recommendations. The commission should include members of Syria’s Kurdish political parties.
Redress the status of all Kurds who were born in Syria but are stateless by offering citizenship to any person with strong ties to Syria by reason of birth, marriage, or long residence in the country and who is not otherwise entitled to citizenship in another country.
Identify and remove discriminatory laws and policies on Kurds, including reviewing all government decrees and directives that apply uniquely to the Kurdish minority in Syria or have a disproportionate impact on them.
Ensure that Syria’s Kurds have the right to enjoy their own culture and use their own language; likewise, ensure freedom of expression, including the right to celebrate cultural holidays and learn Kurdish in schools.
Invite the UN Independent Expert on Minority Issues to visit Syria.
V. Legacy of Enforced Disappearances
Bashar al-Asad inherited a country with a legacy of abusive practices, but to date he has not taken any concrete steps to acknowledge and address these abuses or shed light on the fate of thousands of people who have disappeared since the 1980s.
Syria’s security forces were involved in gross human rights violations in the late 1970s and 1980s in an effort to quell opposition to Hafez al-Asad’s regime, including armed opposition by certain segments of the Muslim Brotherhood. The security forces detained and tortured thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, communist and other leftist parties, the Iraqi Ba`ath party, Nasserite parties, and different Palestinian groups—many of whom subsequently disappeared. While no exact figures exist, various researchers estimate the number of the disappeared to be 17,000 persons.[58] Syria’s armed forces and security services also detained and abducted Lebanese, Palestinians, and other Arab nationals during Syria’s military presence in Lebanon, hundreds of whom are still unaccounted for.
On June 27, 1980, commandos from the Defense Brigades under the command of Rif`at al-Asad, Hafez al-Asad’s brother, killed an estimated 1,000 unarmed inmates, mostly Islamists, at Tadmor military prison, in retaliation for a failed assassination attempt against Hafez al-Asad.[59] The names of those killed were never made public. Less than two years later, from February to March 1982, commandos from the Defense Brigades and units of the Special Forces circled the city of Hama, Syria’s fourth largest town and an opposition stronghold, and engaged in heavy fighting against Islamists opposed to the regime. The Syrian security troops committed large scale human rights violations during the fighting, including the killing of hundreds of people in a series of mass executions near the municipal stadium and other sites. While estimates of the number killed in Hama vary widely, the most credible reports put the number at between five and ten thousand people.[60]
Table 2. Major Incidents of Human Rights Violations in the early 1980s[61]
While many political detainees from the 1980s were released pursuant to various amnesties, some under Hafez al-Asad and others under Bashar, the fate of thousands of disappeared remains unknown, and it is still dangerous to raise these issues inside Syria.
Lebanese groups have lobbied hard to shed light on the fate of the disappeared from Lebanon. In May 2005, a joint Lebanese-Syrian committee was finally formed to address the issue. However, five years after beginning its work, it has yet to produce any concrete results or publish any findings.
Accordingly, we urge President Bashar al-Asad to:
Set up an independent national commission for truth and justice that includes representatives of the victims’ families, independent civil society activists, and international organizations with experience working on the issue of disappearances such as the ICRC. The commission’s mandate will be to resolve the issue of the missing and the disappeared in Syria, and those abducted from Lebanon and suspected of being detained in Syria.
Support the ratification of the United Nations Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances.
VI. Annex: List of Political and Human Rights Activists Detained during Bashar al-Asad’s First Decade in Power
(This is not an exhaustive list, but rather represents cases that Human Rights Watch was able to document) | ||
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Bashar al-Assad[a][b] (born 11 September 1965) is a Syrian politician who is the current and 19th president of Syria since 17 July 2000. In addition, he is the commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces and the secretary-general of the Central Command of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, which nominally espouses a neo-Ba'athist ideology. His father and predecessor was General Hafiz al-Assad, whose presidency in 1971–2000 marked the transfiguration of Syria from a republican state into a de facto dynastic dictatorship, tightly controlled by an Alawite-dominated elite composed of the armed forces and the Mukhabarat (secret services), who are loyal to the al-Assad family.
Born and raised in Damascus, Bashar graduated from the medical school of Damascus University in 1988 and began to work as a doctor in the Syrian Army. Four years later, he attended postgraduate studies at the Western Eye Hospital in London, specialising in ophthalmology. In 1994, after his elder brother Bassel died in a car accident, Bashar was recalled to Syria to take over Bassel's role as heir apparent. He entered the military academy, taking charge of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon in 1998. On 17 July 2000, Bashar al-Assad became president, succeeding his father Hafiz, who had died on 10 June 2000. A series of crackdowns in 2001–02 ended the Damascus Spring, a period of cultural and political activism marked by calls for transparency and democracy. Although Bashar inherited the power structures and personality cult nurtured by Hafiz al-Assad, he lacked the loyalty received by his father, which led to rising discontent against his rule. As result, many members of the Old Guard resigned or were purged; and the inner-circle were replaced by staunch loyalists from Alawite clans. Bashar al-Assad's early economic liberalisation programs worsened inequalities and centralized the socio-political power of the loyalist Damascene elite of the Assad family; alienating the Syrian rural population, urban working classes, businessmen, industrialists and people from once-traditional Ba'ath strongholds. The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in February 2005, triggered by the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, forced Bashar al-Assad to end Syrian occupation of Lebanon.
Assad's regime is a highly personalist dictatorship,[c] which governs Syria as a totalitarian police state.[d] Bashar al-Assad's reign has been characterised by numerous human rights violations and severe repression. While the Assad government describes itself as secular, various political scientists and observers note that his regime exploits sectarian tensions in the country. The first decade in power was marked by intense censorship, summary executions, forced disappearances, discrimination of ethnic minorities and extensive surveillance by the Ba'athist secret police. The United States, the European Union, and majority of the Arab League called for Assad's resignation from the presidency in 2011 after he ordered a violent crackdown on Arab Spring protesters during the events of the Syrian revolution, which led to the Syrian civil war. The civil war has killed around 580,000 people, of which a minimum of 306,000 deaths are non-combatant, with pro-Assad forces causing more than 90% of the civilian deaths.[7] The war has also forcibly displaced 14 million Syrians, with over 7 million refugees, causing the largest refugee crisis in the world. An additional 154,000 civilians have been forcibly disappeared or subject to arbitrary detentions; with over 135,000 individuals being tortured, imprisoned, or dead in government detention centres as of 2023.[e]
The Assad regime's perpetration of numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity during the civil war has led to international condemnation and isolation.[f] The Syrian military is estimated to have conducted over 300 chemical attacks, with UN investigations confirming at least nine chemical attacks conducted by pro-Assad forces.[13] The deadliest incident was a chemical attack in Ghouta on 21 August 2013, which caused the deaths of 1,100–1,500 civilians. In December 2013, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay stated that findings from an inquiry by the UN implicated Assad in war crimes. Investigations by the OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism and OPCW-UN IIT concluded that the Assad government was responsible for the 2017 Khan Shaykhun sarin attack and 2018 Douma chemical attack respectively.[g] In June 2014, the American Syrian Accountability Project included Assad on a list of war crimes indictments of government officials and sent it to the International Criminal Court. In 2023, Canada and the Netherlands filed a joint lawsuit at the International Court of Justice accusing the Assad government of infringing UN Convention Against Torture.[h] On 15 November 2023, France issued an arrest warrant against Assad over the use of banned chemical weapons against civilians in Syria.[14] Assad has categorically denied the allegations of these charges and has accused foreign countries, especially the American-led intervention in Syria, of purportedly attempting regime change.[15][16]
Early life, family and education
Further information: Al-Assad family
Bashar al-Assad was born in Damascus on 11 September 1965, as the second son and third child of Anisa Makhlouf and Hafiz al-Assad. "Al-Assad" in Arabic means "the lion". Assad's paternal grandfather, Ali Sulayman al-Assad, had managed to change his status from peasant to minor notable and, to reflect this, in 1927 he had changed the family name from "Wahsh" (meaning "Savage") to "Al-Assad".
Assad's father, Hafiz, was born to an impoverished rural family of Alawite background and rose through the Ba'ath Party ranks to take control of the Syrian branch of the Party in the Corrective Movement, culminating in his rise to the Syrian presidency. Hafiz promoted his supporters within the Ba'ath Party, many of whom were also of Alawite background.[20] After the revolution, Alawite strongmen were installed while Sunnis, Druze, and Ismailis were removed from the army and Ba'ath party. Hafiz al-Assad's 30-year military rule witnessed the transformation of Syria into a dynastic dictatorship. The new political system was led by the Ba'ath party elites dominated by the Alawites, who were fervently loyal to the Assad family and controlled the military, security forces and secret police.[22][23]
The younger Assad had five siblings, three of whom are deceased. A sister named Bushra died in infancy.[24] Assad's youngest brother, Majd, was not a public figure and little is known about him other than he was intellectually disabled,[25] and died in 2009 after a "long illness".[26]
Unlike his brothers Bassel and Maher, and second sister, also named Bushra, Bashar was quiet, reserved and lacked interest in politics or the military.[25][28] The Assad children reportedly rarely saw their father,[29] and Bashar later stated that he only entered his father's office once while he was president.[30] He was described as "soft-spoken",[31] and according to a university friend, he was timid, avoided eye contact and spoke in a low voice.[32]
Assad received his primary and secondary education in the Arab-French al-Hurriya School in Damascus. In 1982, he graduated from high school and then studied medicine at Damascus University.
Medical career and rise to power
In 1988, Assad graduated from medical school and began working as an army doctor at the Tishrin Military Hospital on the outskirts of Damascus.[34][35] Four years later, he settled in London to start postgraduate training in ophthalmology at the Western Eye Hospital. He was described as a "geeky I.T. guy" during his time in London.[37] Bashar had few political aspirations, and his father had been grooming Bashar's older brother Bassel as the future president. However, he died in a car accident in 1994 and Bashar was recalled to the Syrian Army shortly thereafter. State propaganda soon began elevating Bashar's public imagery as "the hope of the masses" to prepare him as the next patriarch in charge of Syria, to continue the rule of the Assad dynasty.[40][41]
Soon after the death of Bassel, Hafiz al-Assad decided to make Bashar the new heir apparent. Over the next six and a half years, until his death in 2000, Hafiz prepared Bashar for taking over power. General Bahjat Suleiman, an officer in the Defense Companies, was entrusted with overseeing preparations for a smooth transition,[43][29] which were made on three levels. First, support was built up for Bashar in the military and security apparatus. Second, Bashar's image was established with the public. And lastly, Bashar was familiarised with the mechanisms of running the country.
To establish his credentials in the military, Bashar entered the military academy at Homs in 1994 and was propelled through the ranks to become a colonel of the elite Syrian Republican Guard in January 1999.[34][46] To establish a power base for Bashar in the military, old divisional commanders were pushed into retirement, and new, young, Alawite officers with loyalties to him took their place.
In 1998, Bashar took charge of Syria's Lebanon file, which had since the 1970s been handled by Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam, who had until then been a potential contender for president. By taking charge of Syrian affairs in Lebanon, Bashar was able to push Khaddam aside and establish his own power base in Lebanon. In the same year, after minor consultation with Lebanese politicians, Bashar installed Emile Lahoud, a loyal ally of his, as the President of Lebanon and pushed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri aside, by not placing his political weight behind his nomination as prime minister. To further weaken the old Syrian order in Lebanon, Bashar replaced the long-serving de facto Syrian High Commissioner of Lebanon, Ghazi Kanaan, with Rustum Ghazaleh.
Parallel to his military career, Bashar was engaged in public affairs. He was granted wide powers and became head of the bureau to receive complaints and appeals of citizens, and led a campaign against corruption. As a result of this campaign, many of Bashar's potential rivals for president were put on trial for corruption.[34] Bashar also became the President of the Syrian Computer Society and helped to introduce the internet in Syria, which aided his image as a moderniser and reformer. Ba'athist loyalists in the party, military and the Alawite sect were supportive of Bashar al-Assad, enabling him to become his father's successor.[51]
Presidency
Before civil war: 2000–2011
After the death of Hafiz al-Assad on 10 June 2000, the Constitution of Syria was amended. The minimum age requirement for the presidency was lowered from 40 to 34, which was Bashar's age at the time.[52] Assad contested as the only candidate and subsequently confirmed president on 10 July 2000, with 97.29% support for his leadership.[53][54][55] In line with his role as President of Syria, he was also appointed the commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces and Regional Secretary of the Ba'ath Party.[51] A series of state elections have since been held regularly every seven years which Assad won with overwhelming majority of votes. The elections are unanimously regarded by independent observers as a sham process and boycotted by the opposition.[i][j] The last two elections - held in 2014 and 2021 - were conducted only in areas controlled by the Syrian government during the country's ongoing civil war and condemned by the United Nations.[65][66][67]
Damascus Spring
See also: Damascus Spring
Immediately after he took office, a reform movement known as Damascus Spring led by writers, intellectuals, dissidents, cultural activists, etc. made cautious advances, which led to the shut down of Mezzeh prison and the declaration of a wide-ranging amnesty releasing hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood affiliated political prisoners. However, security crackdowns commenced again within the year, turning it into the Damascus Winter.[69][70] Hundreds of intellectuals were arrested, targeted, exiled or sent to prison and the state of emergency was continued. The early concessions were rolled back to tighten authoritarian control, censorship was increased and the Damascus Spring movement was banned under the pretext of "national unity and stability". The regime's policy of a "social market economy" became a symbol of corruption, as Assad loyalists became its sole beneficiaries.[51][71][72][73] Several discussion forums were shut down and many intellectuals were abducted by the Mukhabarat to get tortured and killed. Many analysts believe that initial promises of opening up were part a government strategy to find out Syrians who were not supportive of the new leadership.[70]
During a state visit by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Syria in October 2001, Bashar publicly condemned the United States invasion of Afghanistan in a joint press conference, stating that "[w]e cannot accept what we see every day on our television screens - the killing of innocent civilians. There are hundreds dying every day." Assad also praised Palestinian militant groups as "freedom fighters" and criticised Israel and the Western world during the conference. British officials subsequently described Assad's political views as being more conciliatory in private, claiming that he criticized the September 11 attacks and accepted the legitimacy of the State of Israel.[74]
During the war on terror, Assad played realpolitik with the United States, at-times co-operating and other times clashing with the American government. Syria's prison networks were a major site of extraordinary rendition by the CIA of al-Qaeda suspects, who were interrogated in Syrian prisons.[75][76][77] Soon after Assad assumed power, he "made Syria's link with Hezbollah—and its patrons in Tehran—the central component of his security doctrine",[78] and in his foreign policy, Assad adopted a belligerent stance towards the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.[79] During the Iraqi insurgency against American occupation, Syrian intelligence trained Al-Qaeda militants, turning Syria into a transit hub for Jihadists travelling into Iraq. AQI would subsequently evolve into the Islamic State group, which sent its fighters from Iraq to join the Syrian Civil War.[80][81]
Killing of Rafic Hariri and Cedar Revolution
On 14 February 2005, Rafic Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon, was assassinated in a massive truck-bomb explosion in Beirut, killing 22 people. The Christian Science Monitor reported that "Syria was widely blamed for Hariri's murder. In the months leading to the assassination, relations between Hariri and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad plummeted amid an atmosphere of threats and intimidation."[83] Bashar promoted his brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, a key figure suspected of orchestrating the terrorist attack, as the chief of Syrian Military Intelligence Directorate immediately after Hariri's death.[84]
The killings caused massive uproar, triggering an intifada in Lebanon and hundreds of thousands of protestors poured on the streets to demand total withdrawal of Syrian military forces. After mounting international pressure that called Syria to implement the UNSC Resolution 1559, Bashar al-Assad declared on 5 March that he shall order the departure of Syrian soldiers. On 14 March 2005, more than a million Lebanese protestors - Muslims, Christians, Druze - demonstrated in Beirut, marking the monthly anniversary of Hariri's murder. UN Resolution 1595, adopted on 7 April, send an international commission to investigate the assassination of Hariri. By 5 May 2005, United Nations had officially confirmed the total departure of all Syrian soldiers, ending the 29-year old military occupation. The uprisings that occurred in these months came to be known as Lebanon's "independence intifada" or the "Cedar Revolution".[85]
UN investigation commission's report published on 20 October 2005 revealed that high-ranking members of Syrian intelligence and Assad family had directly supervised the killing.[86][87][88] The BBC reported in December 2005 that "Damascus has strongly denied involvement in the car bomb which killed Hariri in February".[89]
On 27 May 2007, Assad was approved for another seven-year term in a referendum on his presidency, with 97.6% of the votes supporting his continued leadership.[90][91][92] Opposition parties were not allowed in the country and Assad was the only candidate in the referendum.[55] Syria's opposition parties under the umbrella of Damascus Declaration denounced the elections as illegitimate and part of the regime's strategy to sustain the "totalitarian system".[93][94] Elections in Syria are officially designated as the event of "renewing the pledge of allegiance" to the Assads and voting is enforced as a compulsory duty on every citizen. Announcement of the results are followed by pro-government rallies conducted across the country extolling the regime, wherein citizens declare their "devotion" to the President and celebrate "the virtues" of the Assad dynasty.[95][96][97]
Syria began developing a covert nuclear weapons programme with assistance of North Korea during the 2000s, but its suspected nuclear reactor was destroyed by the Israeli Air Force during Operation Outside the Box in September 2007.[98][99][100]
During the Syrian civil war
2011–2015
Protests in Syria began on 26 January 2011 following the Arab Spring protests that called for political reforms and the reinstatement of civil rights, as well as an end to the state of emergency which had been in place since 1963.[101] One attempt at a "day of rage" was set for 4–5 February, though it ended uneventfully.[102] Protests on 18–19 March were the largest to take place in Syria for decades, and the Syrian authority responded with violence against its protesting citizens.[103] In his first public response to the protests delivered on 30 March 2011, Assad blamed the unrest on "conspiracies" and accused the Syrian opposition and protestors of seditious "fitna", toeing the party-line of framing the Ba'athist state as the victim of an international plot. He also derided the Arab Spring movement, and described those participating in the protests as "germs" and fifth-columnists.[104][105][106]
The U.S. imposed limited sanctions against the Assad government in April 2011, followed by Barack Obama's executive order as of 18 May 2011 targeting Bashar Assad specifically and six other senior officials.[108][109][110] On 23 May 2011, the EU foreign ministers agreed at a meeting in Brussels to add Assad and nine other officials to a list affected by travel bans and asset freezes.[111] On 24 May 2011, Canada imposed sanctions on Syrian leaders, including Assad.[112]
On 20 June, in response to the demands of protesters and international pressure, Assad promised a national dialogue involving movement toward reform, new parliamentary elections, and greater freedoms. He also urged refugees to return home from Turkey, while assuring them amnesty and blaming all unrest on a small number of saboteurs.[113]
In July 2011, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Assad had "lost legitimacy" as president.[109] On 18 August 2011, Barack Obama issued a written statement that urged Assad to "step aside".[114][115][116] In August, the cartoonist Ali Farzat, a critic of Assad's government, was attacked. Relatives of the humourist told media outlets that the attackers threatened to break Farzat's bones as a warning for him to stop drawing cartoons of government officials, particularly Assad. Farzat was hospitalised with fractures in both hands and blunt force trauma to the head.[117][118]
Since October 2011, Russia, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, repeatedly vetoed Western-sponsored draft resolutions in the UN Security Council that would have left open the possibility of UN sanctions, or even military intervention, against the Assad government.[119][120][121]
By the end of January 2012, it was reported by Reuters that over 5,000 civilians and protesters (including armed militants) had been killed by the Syrian army, security agents and militia (Shabiha), while 1,100 people had been killed by "terrorist armed forces".[122]
On 10 January 2012, Assad gave a speech in which he maintained the uprising was engineered by foreign countries and proclaimed that "victory [was] near". He also said that the Arab League, by suspending Syria, revealed that it was no longer Arab. However, Assad also said the country would not "close doors" to an Arab-brokered solution if "national sovereignty" was respected. He also said a referendum on a new constitution could be held in March.[123]
On 27 February 2012, Syria claimed that a proposal that a new constitution be drafted received 90% support during the relevant referendum. The referendum introduced a fourteen-year cumulative term limit for the president of Syria. The referendum was pronounced meaningless by foreign nations including the U.S. and Turkey; the EU announced fresh sanctions against key regime figures.[124] In July 2012, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov denounced Western powers for what he said amounted to blackmail thus provoking a civil war in Syria.[125] On 15 July 2012, the International Committee of the Red Cross declared Syria to be in a state of civil war,[126] as the nationwide death toll for all sides was reported to have neared 20,000.[127]
On 6 January 2013, Assad, in his first major speech since June, said that the conflict in his country was due to "enemies" outside of Syria who would "go to Hell" and that they would "be taught a lesson". However, he said that he was still open to a political solution saying that failed attempts at a solution "does not mean we are not interested in a political solution."[128][129] In July 2014, Assad renewed his third term of presidency after voting process conducted in pro-regime territories which were boycotted by the opposition and condemned by the United Nations.[65][66][67] According to Joshua Landis: "He's (Assad) going to say: 'I am the state, I am Syria, and if the West wants access to Syrians, they have to come through me.'"[66]
After the fall of four military bases in September 2014,[130] which were the last government footholds in the Raqqa Governorate, Assad received significant criticism from his Alawite base of support.[131] This included remarks made by Douraid al-Assad, cousin of Bashar al-Assad, demanding the resignation of the Syrian Defence Minister, Fahd Jassem al-Freij, following the massacre by the Islamic State of hundreds of government troops captured after the IS victory at Tabqa Airbase.[132] This was shortly followed by Alawite protests in Homs demanding the resignation of the governor,[133] and the dismissal of Assad's cousin Hafez Makhlouf from his security position leading to his subsequent exile to Belarus.[134] Growing resentment towards Assad among Alawites was fuelled by the disproportionate number of soldiers killed in fighting hailing from Alawite areas,[135] a sense that the Assad regime has abandoned them,[136] as well as the failing economic situation.[137] Figures close to Assad began voicing concerns regarding the likelihood of its survival, with one saying in late 2014; "I don't see the current situation as sustainable ... I think Damascus will collapse at some point."[130]
In 2015, several members of the Assad family died in Latakia under unclear circumstances.[138] On 14 March, an influential cousin of Assad and founder of the shabiha, Mohammed Toufic al-Assad, was assassinated with five bullets to the head in a dispute over influence in Qardaha—the ancestral home of the Assad family.[139] In April 2015, Assad ordered the arrest of his cousin Munther al-Assad in Alzirah, Latakia.[140] It remains unclear whether the arrest was due to actual crimes.[141]
After a string of government defeats in northern and southern Syria, analysts noted growing government instability coupled with continued waning support for the Assad government among its core Alawite base of support,[142] and that there were increasing reports of Assad relatives, Alawites, and businessmen fleeing Damascus for Latakia and foreign countries.[143][144] Intelligence chief Ali Mamlouk was placed under house arrest sometime in April and stood accused of plotting with Assad's exiled uncle Rifaat al-Assad to replace Bashar as president.[145] Further high-profile deaths included the commanders of the Fourth Armoured Division, the Belli military airbase, the army's special forces and of the First Armoured Division, with an errant air strike during the Palmyra offensive killing two officers who were reportedly related to Assad.[146]
Since Russian intervention 2015–present
On 4 September 2015, when prospects of Assad's survival looked bleak, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia was providing the Assad government with sufficiently "serious" help: with both logistical and military support.[147][148][149] Shortly after the start of direct military intervention by Russia on 30 September 2015 at the formal request of the Syrian government, Putin stated the military operation had been thoroughly prepared in advance and defined Russia's goal in Syria as "stabilising the legitimate power in Syria and creating the conditions for political compromise".[150] Putin's intervention saved the Assad regime at a time when it was on the verge of a looming collapse. It also enabled Moscow to achieve its key geo-strategic objectives such as total control of Syrian airspace, naval bases that granted permanent martial reach across the Eastern Mediterranean and easier access to intervene in Libya.[149]
In November 2015, Assad reiterated that a diplomatic process to bring the country's civil war to an end could not begin while it was occupied by "terrorists", although it was considered by BBC News to be unclear whether he meant only ISIL or Western-supported rebels as well.[151] On 22 November, Assad said that within two months of its air campaign Russia had achieved more in its fight against ISIL than the U.S.-led coalition had achieved in a year.[152] In an interview with Česká televize on 1 December, he said that the leaders who demanded his resignation were of no interest to him, as nobody takes them seriously because they are "shallow" and controlled by the U.S.[153][154] At the end of December 2015, senior U.S. officials privately admitted that Russia had achieved its central goal of stabilising Syria and, with the expenses relatively low, could sustain the operation at this level for years to come.[155]
In December 2015, Putin stated that Russia was supporting Assad's forces and was ready to back anti-Assad rebels in a joint fight against IS.[156]
On 22 January 2016, the Financial Times, citing anonymous "senior western intelligence officials", claimed that Russian general Igor Sergun, the director of GRU, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, had shortly before his sudden death on 3 January 2016 been sent to Damascus with a message from Vladimir Putin asking that President Assad step aside.[157] The Financial Times' report was denied by Putin's spokesman.[158]
It was reported in December 2016 that Assad's forces had retaken half of rebel-held Aleppo, ending a 6-year stalemate in the city.[159][160] On 15 December, as it was reported government forces were on the brink of retaking all of Aleppo—a "turning point" in the civil war, Assad celebrated the "liberation" of the city, and stated, "History is being written by every Syrian citizen."[161]
After the election of Donald Trump, the priority of the U.S. concerning Assad was unlike the priority of the Obama administration, and in March 2017 U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley stated the U.S. was no longer focused on "getting Assad out",[162] but this position changed in the wake of the 2017 Khan Shaykhun chemical attack.[163] Following the missile strikes on a Syrian airbase on the orders of President Trump, Assad's spokesperson described the U.S.' behaviour as "unjust and arrogant aggression" and stated that the missile strikes "do not change the deep policies" of the Syrian government.[164] President Assad also told the Agence France-Presse that Syria's military had given up all its chemical weapons in 2013, and would not have used them if they still retained any, and stated that the chemical attack was a "100 percent fabrication" used to justify a U.S. airstrike.[165] In June 2017, Russian President Putin said "Assad didn't use the [chemical weapons]" and that the chemical attack was "done by people who wanted to blame him for that."[166] UN and international chemical weapons inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) found the attack was the work of the Assad regime.[167]
On 7 November 2017, the Syrian government announced that it had signed the Paris Climate Agreement.[168] In May 2018, it recognized the independence of Russian-occupied separatist republics of Abhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, leading to backlash from the European Union, United States, Canada and other countries.[169][170][171] On 30 August 2020, the First Hussein Arnous government was formed, which included a new Council of Ministers.[172]
In the 2021 presidential elections held on 26 May, Assad secured his fourth 7-year tenure; by winning 95.2% of the eligible votes. The elections were boycotted by the opposition and SDF; while the refugees and internally displaced citizens were disqualified to vote; enabling only 38% of Syrians to participate in the process. Independent international observers as well as representatives of Western countries described the elections as a farce. United Nations condemned the elections for directly violating Resolution 2254; and announced that it has "no mandate".[173][174][175][176][177]
On 10 August 2021, the Second Hussein Arnous government was formed.[178] Under Assad, Syria became a strong supporter of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and was one of the five countries that opposed the UN General Assembly resolution denouncing the invasion, which called upon Russia to pull back its troops. Three days prior to the invasion, Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad was dispatched to Moscow to affirm Syria's recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk separatist republics. A day after the invasion, Bashar al-Assad praised the invasion as "a correction of history and a restoration of balance in the global order after the fall of the Soviet Union" in a phone call with Vladimir Putin.[179][180][181] Syria became the first country after Russia to officially recognize the "independence and sovereignty" of the two breakaway regions in June 2022.[182][183][184]
On the 12th anniversary of beginning of the protests of Syrian Revolution, Bashar al-Assad held a meeting with Vladimir Putin during an official visit to Russia. In a televised broadcast with Putin, Assad defended Russia's "special military operation" as a war against "neo-Nazis and old Nazis" of Ukraine.[185][186] He recognised the Russian annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts and ratified the new Russian borders, claiming that the territories were "historically Russian". Assad also urged Russia to expand its military presence in Syria by establishing new bases and deploying more boots on the ground, making its military role permanent.[k]
In March 2023, he visited the United Arab Emirates and met with UAE's President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.[192] In May 2023, he attended the Arab League summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he was welcomed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.[193] In September 2023, Assad attended the Asian Games opening ceremony in Hangzhou and met with Chinese President Xi Jinping.[194] They announced the establishment of a China–Syria strategic partnership.[195]
Controversies
Corruption
Main article: Corruption in Syria
See also: Economy of Syria
At the onset of the Syrian revolution, corruption in Syria was endemic, and the country was ranked 129th in the 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index.[196] Since the 1970s, Syria's economy has been dominated by the patronage networks of Ba'ath party elites and Alawite loyalists of the Assad family, who established control over Syria's public sectors based on kinship and nepotism. The pervasive nature of corruption had been a source of controversy within the Ba'ath party circles and the wider public; as early as the 1980s.[197]
Bashar al-Assad's economic liberalization programme during the 2000s became a symbol of corruption and nepotism, as the beneficiaries of the scheme were Alawite loyalists who seized much of the privatized sectors and business assets. This alienated the government from the vast majority of the Syrian public, particularly rural Syrians and urban working classes, who widely loathed the ensuing economic disparities, which became overtly visible.[22][71] Assad's cousin Rami Makhlouf was the regime's most favored oligarch during this period, marked by the institutionalization of corruption, handicapping of small businesses and casting down private entrepreneurship.[198] The persistence of corruption, sectarian bias towards Alawites, nepotism and widespread bribery that existed in party, bureaucracy and military led to popular anger that resulted in the eruption of the 2011 Syrian Revolution. The protests were the most fierce in working-class neighbourhoods, which had long bore the brunt of the regime's exploitation policies that privileged its own loyalists.[199][200]
According to ABC News, as a result of the Syrian civil war, "government-controlled Syria is truncated in size, battered and impoverished."[201] Economic sanctions (the Syria Accountability Act) were applied long before the Syrian civil war by the U.S. and were joined by the EU at the outbreak of the civil war, causing disintegration of the Syrian economy.[202] These sanctions were reinforced in October 2014 by the EU and U.S.[203][204] Industry in parts of the country that are still held by the government is heavily state-controlled, with economic liberalisation being reversed during the current conflict.[205] The London School of Economics has stated that as a result of the Syrian civil war, a war economy has developed in Syria.[206] A 2014 European Council on Foreign Relations report also stated that a war economy has formed:
Three years into a conflict that is estimated to have killed at least 140,000 people from both sides, much of the Syrian economy lies in ruins. As the violence has expanded and sanctions have been imposed, assets and infrastructure have been destroyed, economic output has fallen, and investors have fled the country. Unemployment now exceeds 50 percent and half of the population lives below the poverty line ... against this backdrop, a war economy is emerging that is creating significant new economic networks and business activities that feed off the violence, chaos, and lawlessness gripping the country. This war economy – to which Western sanctions have inadvertently contributed – is creating incentives for some Syrians to prolong the conflict and making it harder to end it.[207]
A UN commissioned report by the Syrian Centre for Policy Research states that two-thirds of the Syrian population now lives in "extreme poverty".[208] Unemployment stands at 50 percent.[209] In October 2014, a $50 million mall opened in Tartus which provoked criticism from government supporters and was seen as part of an Assad government policy of attempting to project a sense of normalcy throughout the civil war.[210] A government policy to give preference to families of slain soldiers for government jobs was cancelled after it caused an uproar[135] while rising accusations of corruption caused protests.[137] In December 2014, the EU banned sales of jet fuel to the Assad government, forcing the government to buy more expensive uninsured jet fuel shipments in the future.[211]
Taking advantage of the increased role of the state as a result of the civil war, Bashar and his wife Asma have begun annexing Syria's economic assets from their loyalists, seeking to displace the old business elites and monopolize their direct control of the economy. Maher al-Assad, the brother of Bashar, has also become wealthy by overseeing the operations of Syria's state-sponsored captagon drug industry and seizing much of the spoils of war. The ruling couple currently owns vast swathes of Syria's shipping, real estate, telecommunications and banking sectors.[212][213] Significant changes have been happening to Syrian economy since the government's confiscation campaigns launched in 2019, which involved major economic assets being transferred to the Presidential couple to project their power and influence. Particularly noteworthy dynamic has been the rise of Asma al-Assad, who heads Syria's clandestine economic council and is thought to have become "a central funnel of economic power in Syria". Through her Syria Trust NGO, the backbone of her financial network, Asma vets the foreign aid coming to Syria; since the government authorizes UN organizations only if it works under state agencies.[214]
Corruption has been rising sporadically in recent years, with Syria being considered the most corrupt country in the Arab World.[215][216] As of 2022, Syria is the ranked second worst globally in the Corruption Perceptions Index.[217][218]
Sectarianism
Hafiz al-Assad's government was widely counted amongst the most repressive Arab dictatorships of the 20th century. As Bashar inherited his father's mantle, he sought to implement "authoritarian upgrading" by purging the Old Guard and staffing party and military with loyalist Alawite officers, further entrenching the sectarianism within the system.[219][80] While officially the Ba'athist government adheres to a strict secularist doctrine, in practice it has implemented sectarian engineering policies in the society to suppress dissent and monopolize its absolute power.[220]
The regime has attempted to portray itself to the outside world as "the protector of minorities" and instills the fear of the majority rule in the society to mobilize loyalists from minorities.[222] Assad loyalist figures like Michel Samaha have advocated sectarian mobilization to defend the regime from what he labelled as the “sea of Sunnis.” Assad regime has unleashed sectarian violence through private Alawite militias like the Shabiha, particularly in Sunni areas. Alawite religious iconography and communal sentiments are common themes used by Alawite warrior-shaykhs who lead the Alawite militias; as justification to commit massacres, abductions and torture in opposition strongholds.[223] Various development policies adopted by the regime had followed a sectarian pattern. An urbanization scheme implemented by the government in the city of Homs led to expulsions of thousands of Sunni residents during the 2000s, while Alawite majority areas were left intact.[224]
Even as Syrian Ba'athism absorbed diverse communal identities into the homogenous unifying discourse of the state; socio-political power became monopolized by Alawite loyalists. Despite officially adhering to non-confessionalism, Syrian Armed Forces have also been institutionally sectarianized. While the conscripts and lower-ranks are overwhelmingly non-Alawite, the higher ranks are packed by Alawite loyalists who effectively control the logistics and security policy. Elite units of the Syrian military such as the Tiger Forces, Republican Guard, 4th Armoured Division, etc. regarded by the government as crucial for its survival; are composed mostly of Alawites. Sunni officers are under constant surveillance by the secret police, with most of them being assigned with Alawite assistants who monitor their movements. Pro-regime paramilitary groups such as the National Defense Force are also organized around sectarian loyalty to the Ba'athist government. During the Syrian Revolution uprisings, the Ba'athist government deployed a securitization strategy that depended on sectarian mobilization, unleashing violence on protestors and extensive crackdowns across the country, prompting opposition groups to turn to armed revolt. Syrian society was further sectarianized following the Iranian intervention in the Syrian civil war, which witnessed numerous Khomeinist militant groups sponsored by Iran fight in the side of the Assad government.[225][221]
Human rights
See also: Human rights in Syria
Ba'athist government has been ruling Syria as a totalitarian state, policing every aspect of Syrian society for decades. Commanders of government's security forces – consisting of Syrian Arab Army, secret police, Ba'athist paramilitaries – directly implement the executive functions of the state, with scant regard for legal processes and bureaucracy. The surveillance system of the Mukhabarat is pervasive, with the total number of agents working for its various branches estimated to be as high as 1:158 ratio with the civilian population. Security services shut down civil society organizations, curtail freedom of movement within the country and bans non-Ba'athist political literature and symbols.[99][226] In 2010, Human Rights Watch published the report "A Wasted Decade" documenting repression during Assad's first decade of emergency rule; marked by arbitrary arrests, censorship and discrimination against Syrian Kurds.[226][227]
Throughout the 2000s, the dreaded Mukhabarat agents carried out routine abductions, arbitrary detentions and torture of civilians. Numerous show trials were conducted against dissidents, filling Syrian prisons with journalists and human rights activists. Members of Syria's General Intelligence Directorate had long enjoyed broad privileges to carry out extrajudicial actions and they have immunity from criminal offences. In 2008, Assad extended this immunity to other departments of security forces.[227] Human Rights groups, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have detailed how the Assad government's secret police tortured, imprisoned, and killed political opponents, and those who speak out against the government.[228][229] In addition, some 600 Lebanese political prisoners are thought to be held in government prisons since the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, with some held for as long as over 30 years.[230] Since 2006, the Assad government has expanded the use of travel bans against political dissidents.[231] In an interview with ABC News in 2007, Assad stated: "We don't have such [things as] political prisoners," though The New York Times reported the arrest of 30 Syrian political dissidents who were organising a joint opposition front in December 2007, with 3 members of this group considered to be opposition leaders being remanded in custody.[232]
The government also denied permission for human rights organizations and independent NGOs to work in the country.[227] In 2010, Syria banned face veils at universities.[233][234] Following the protests of Syrian Revolution in 2011, Assad partially relaxed the veil ban.[235]
Foreign Affairs journal released an editorial on the Syrian situation in the wake of the 2011 protests:[236]
During its decades of rule... the Assad family developed a strong political safety net by firmly integrating the military into the government. In 1970, Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father, seized power after rising through the ranks of the Syrian armed forces, during which time he established a network of loyal Alawites by installing them in key posts. In fact, the military, ruling elite, and ruthless secret police are so intertwined that it is now impossible to separate the Assad regime from the security establishment. Bashar al-Assad's threat to use force against protesters would be more plausible than Tunisia's or Egypt's were. So, unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, where a professionally trained military tended to play an independent role, the regime and its loyal forces have been able to deter all but the most resolute and fearless oppositional activists... At the same time, it is significantly different from Libya, where the military, although brutal and loyal to the regime, is a more disorganized group of militant thugs than a trained and disciplined army.
Between 2011 and 2013; the state security apparatus is believed to have tortured and killed over 10,000 civil activists, political dissidents, journalists, civil defense volunteers and those accused of treason and terror charges, as part of a campaign of deadly crackdown ordered by Assad.[237] In June 2023, UN General Assembly voted in favour of establishing an independent body to investigate the whereabouts of hundreds of thousands of missing civilians who have been forcibly disappeared, killed or languishing in Assad regime's dungeons and torture chambers. The vote was condemned by Russia, North Korea and Iran.[238][239][240]
In 2023, Canada and Netherlands filed a lawsuit against Syria at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), charging the latter with violating the United Nations Convention Against Torture. The joint petition accused the Syrian regime of organizing "unimaginable physical and mental pain and suffering" as a strategy to collectively punish the Syrian population.[241][242][243] Russia vetoed UN Security Council efforts to prosecute Bashar al-Assad at the International Criminal Court.[244]
Repression of Kurds
Ba'athist Syria had long banned Kurdish language in schools and public institutions; and discrimination against Kurds steadily increased during the rule of Bashar al-Assad. State policy officially suppressed Kurdish culture; with more than 300,000 Syrian Kurds being rendered stateless. Kurdish grievances against state persecution eventually culminated in the 2004 Qamishli Uprisings, which were crushed down violently after sending Syrian military forces. The ensuing crackdown resulted in the killings of more than 36 Kurds and injuring at least 160 demonstrators. More than 2000 civilians were arrested and tortured in government detention centres. Restrictions on Kurdish activities has been further tightened following the Qamishli massacre, with the Assad regime virtually banning all Kurdish cultural gatherings and political activism under the charges of “inciting strife” or “weakening national sentiment.” During 2005–2010, Human Rights Watch verified security crackdowns on at least 14 Kurdish political and cultural gatherings.[227][226] In March 2008, Syrian military opened fire at a Kurdish gathering in Qamishli that marked Nowruz, killing three and injuring five civilians.[245]
Censorship
On 22 September 2001, Assad decreed a Press Law that tightened government control over all literature printed or published in Syria; ranging from newspapers to books, pamphlets and periodicals. Publishers, writers, editors, distributors, journalists and other individuals accused of violating the Press Law are imprisoned or fined. Censorship has also been expanded into the cyberspace, and various websites are banned. Numerous bloggers and content creators have been arrested under various "national security" charges.[227]
A 2007 law requires internet cafés to record all the comments users post on chat forums.[246] Another decree in 2008 obligated internet cafes to keep records of their customers and notify them routinely to the police.[247] Websites such as Arabic Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook were blocked intermittently between 2008 and February 2011.[248][249][250] Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) ranked Syria as the third dangerous country to be an online blogger in 2009. Individuals are arrested based on a wide variety of accusations; ranging from undermining "national unity" to posting or sharing "false" content.[227][247]
Syria was ranked as the third most censored country in CPJ's 2012 report. Apart from restrictions for international journalists that prohibit their entry, domestic press is controlled by state agencies that promote Ba'athist ideology. From 2011, the Syrian government has issued a complete media blackout and foreign correspondents were quickly detained, abducted or tortured. As a result, the outside world is able to know of situations happening inside Syria only through videos of independent civilian journalists. The Assad government has shut down internet coverage, mobile networks as well as telephone lines in areas under its control to prevent any news that has its attempts to monopolize information related to Syria.[251]
Crackdowns, ethnic cleansing, and forced disappearances
The crackdown ordered by Bashar al-Assad against Syrian protestors was the most ruthless of all military clampdowns in the entire Arab Spring. As violence deteriorated and death toll mounted to the thousands; the European Union, Arab League and United States began imposing wide range of sanctions against Assad regime. By December 2011, United Nations had declared the situation in Syria to be a "civil war".[252] By this point, all the protestors and armed resistance groups had viewed the unconditional resignation of Bashar al-Assad as part of their core demands. In July 2012, Arab League held an emergency session demanding the "swift resignation" of Assad and promised "safe exit" if he accepted the offer.[253][254] Assad rebuffed the offers, instead seeking foreign military support from Iran and Russia to defend his embattled regime through scorched-earth tactics, massacres, sieges, forced starvations, ethnic cleansing, etc.[255]
The crackdowns and extermination campaigns of Assad regime resulted in the Syrian refugee crisis; causing the forced displacement of 14 million Syrians, with around 7.2 million refugees.[256] This has made the Syrian refugee crisis the largest refugee crisis in the world; and UNHCR High Commissioner Filippo Grandi has described it as "the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time and a continuing cause for suffering."[256][257]
Ethnic cleansing
Eva Koulouriotis has described Bashar al-Assad as the "master of ethnic cleansing in the 21st century".[258] During the course of the civil war, Assad ordered depopulation campaigns throughout the country to re-shape its demography in favour of his regime, and the military tactics have been compared to the persecutions of the Bosnian war. Between 2011 and 2015, Ba'athist militias are reported to have committed 49 ethno-sectarian massacres for the purpose of implementing its social engineering agenda in the country. Alawite loyalist militias known as the Shabiha have been launched into Sunni villages and towns; perpetrating numerous anti-Sunni massacres. These include the Houla, Bayda and Baniyas massacres, Al-Qubeir massacre, Al-Hasawiya massacre, etc. which have resulted in hundreds of deaths; with hundreds of thousands of residents fleeing under threats of regime persecution and sexual violence. Pogroms and deportations were pronounced in central Syrian regions and Alawite majority coastal areas, where the Syrian military and Hezbollah view as a priority to establish strategic control by expelling Sunni residents and bringing in Iran-backed Shia militants.[259][260][258][261] In 2016, UN officials criticized Bashar al-Assad for pursuing demographic engineering and ethnic cleansing in Darayya district in Damascus, under the guise of de-escalation deals.[262]
Syrian government forces have pursued mass-killings of civilian populations as part of its war-strategy throughout the conflict; and is responsible for inflicting more than 90% of the total civilian deaths in the Syrian civil war.[7] Between 2011 and 2021, a minimum of 306,000 civilian deaths are estimated to have occurred by the UN.[105][106] As of 2022, total death toll has risen to approximately 580,000.[263] An additional 154,000 civilians have been forcibly disappeared or subject to arbitrary detentions across Syria, between 2011 and 2023. As of 2023, more than 135,000 individuals are being tortured, incarcerated or dead in Ba'athist prison networks, including thousands of women and children.[264]
War crimes
Numerous politicians, dissidents, authors and journalists have nicknamed Assad as the "butcher" of Syria for his war-crimes, anti-Sunni sectarian mass-killings, chemical weapons attacks and ethnic cleansing campaigns.[266][267][268][269] The Federal Bureau of Investigation has stated that at least 10 European citizens were tortured by the Assad government while detained during the Syrian civil war, potentially leaving Assad open to prosecution by individual European countries for war crimes.[270][167] UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay stated in December 2013 that UN investigations directly implicated Bashar al-Assad guilty of crimes against humanity and pursuing an extermination strategy developed "at the highest level of government, including the head of state."[271]
Stephen Rapp, the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, stated in 2014 that the crimes committed by Assad are the worst seen since those of Nazi Germany.[272] In March 2015, Rapp further stated that the case against Assad is "much better" than those against Slobodan Milošević of Serbia or Charles Taylor of Liberia, both of whom were indicted by international tribunals.[273] Charles Lister, Director of the Countering Terror and Extremism Program at Middle East Institute, describes Bashar al-Assad as "21st century's biggest war criminal".[177]
In a February 2015 interview with the BBC, Assad dismissed accusations that the Syrian Arab Air Force used barrel bombs as "childish", claiming that his forces have never used these types of "barrel" bombs and responded with a joke about not using "cooking pots" either.[274] The BBC Middle East editor conducting the interview, Jeremy Bowen, later described Assad's statement regarding barrel bombs as "patently not true".[275][276] As soon as demonstrations arose in 2011–2012, Bashar al-Assad opted to implement the "Samson option", the characteristic approach of the neo-Ba'athist regime since the era of Hafiz al-Assad; wherein protests were violently suppressed and demonstrators were shot and fired at directly by the armed forces. However, unlike Hafiz; Bashar had even less loyalty and was politically fragile, exacerbated by alienation of the majority of the population. As a result, Bashar chose to crack down on dissent far more comprehensively and harshly than his father; and a mere allegation of collaboration was reason enough to get assassinated.[277]
Nadim Shehadi, the director of The Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, stated that "In the early 1990s, Saddam Hussein was massacring his people and we were worried about the weapons inspectors," and claimed that "Assad did that too. He kept us busy with chemical weapons when he massacred his people."[278][279] Contrasting the policies of Hafiz al-Assad and that of his son Bashar, former Syrian vice-president and Ba'athist dissident Abdul Halim Khaddam states:
"The Father had a mind and the Son has a loss of reason. How could the army use its force and the security appartus with all its might to destroy Syria because of a protest against the mistakes of one of your security officials. The father would act differently. Father Hafiz hit Hama after he encircled it, warned and then hit Hama after a long siege... But his son is different. On the subject of Daraa, Bashar gave instructions to open fire on the demonstrators."[280]
Human rights organizations and criminal investigators have documented Assad's war crimes and sent it to the International Criminal Court for indictment.[281] Since Syria is not a party to the Rome Statute, International Criminal Court requires authorization from the UN Security Council to send Bashar al-Assad to tribunal. As this gets consistently vetoed by Assad's primary backer Russia, ICC prosecutions have not transpired. On the other hand, courts in various European countries have begun prosecuting and convicting senior Ba'ath party members, Syrian military commanders and Mukhabarat officials charged with war crimes.[282] In September 2015, France began an inquiry into Assad for crimes against humanity, with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius stating "Faced with these crimes that offend the human conscience, this bureaucracy of horror, faced with this denial of the values of humanity, it is our responsibility to act against the impunity of the killers".[283]
In February 2016, head of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, Paulo Pinheiro, told reporters: "The mass scale of deaths of detainees suggests that the government of Syria is responsible for acts that amount to extermination as a crime against humanity." The UN Commission reported finding "unimaginable abuses", including women and children as young as seven perishing while being held by Syrian authorities. The report also stated: "There are reasonable grounds to believe that high-ranking officers—including the heads of branches and directorates—commanding these detention facilities, those in charge of the military police, as well as their civilian superiors, knew of the vast number of deaths occurring in detention facilities ... yet did not take action to prevent abuse, investigate allegations or prosecute those responsible".[284]
In March 2016, the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs led by New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith called on the Obama administration to create a war crimes tribunal to investigate and prosecute violations "whether committed by the officials of the Government of Syria or other parties to the civil war".[285]
In June 2018, Germany's chief prosecutor issued an international arrest warrant for one of Assad's most senior military officials, Jamil Hassan.[286] Hassan is the head of Syria's powerful Air Force Intelligence Directorate. Detention centers run by Air Force Intelligence are among the most notorious in Syria, and thousands are believed to have died because of torture or neglect. Charges filed against Hassan claim he had command responsibility over the facilities and therefore knew of the abuse. The move against Hassan marked an important milestone of prosecutors trying to bring senior members of Assad's inner circle to trial for war crimes.
In an investigative report about the Tadamon Massacre, Professors Uğur Ümit Üngör and Annsar Shahhoud, found witnesses who attested that Assad gave orders for the Syrian Military Intelligence to direct the Shabiha to kill civilians.[287]
2023-2024 Arrest Warrant and Legal Proceedings
On 15 November 2023, France issued an arrest warrant against Syrian President Bashar Assad over the use of banned chemical weapons against civilians in Syria.[14] In May 2024, French anti-terrorism prosecutors requested the Paris appeals court to consider revoking Assad's arrest warrant, asserting his absolute immunity as a serving head of state.[288]
On 26 June 2024, the Paris appeals court determined that the international arrest warrant issued by France against Assad for alleged complicity in war crimes during the Syrian civil war remains valid. This decision was confirmed by attorneys involved in the case.[288]
According to the lawyers, this ruling marked the first instance where a national court acknowledged that the personal immunity of a serving head of state is not absolute, as reported by The Associated Press.[288]
Chemical attacks
The Syrian military has deployed chemical warfare as a systematic military strategy in the Syrian civil war, and is estimated to have committed over 300 chemical attacks, targeting civilian populations throughout the course of the conflict.[289][290] Investigation conducted by the GPPi research institute documented 336 confirmed attacks involving chemical weapons in Syria between 23 December 2012 and 18 January 2019. The study attributed 98% of the total verified chemical attacks to the Assad's regime. Almost 90% of the attacks had occurred after the Ghouta chemical attack in August 2013.[291][292]
Syria joined the Chemical Weapons Convention and OPCW member state in October 2013, and there are currently three OPCW missions with UN mandates to investigate chemical weapons issues in Syria. These are the Declaration Assessment Team (DAT) to verify Syrian declarations of CW Programme; OPCW Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) tasked to identify the chemical attacks and type of weapons used; and the Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) which investigates the perpetrators of the chemical attacks. The conclusions are submitted to the United Nations bodies.[293]
In April 2021, Syria was suspended from OPCW through the public vote of member states, for not co-operating with the body's Investigation Identification Team (IIT) and violating the Chemical Weapons Convention.[294][295][296] Findings of another investigation report published the OPCW-IIT in July 2021 concluded that the Syrian regime had engaged in confirmed chemical attacks at least 17 times, out of the reported 77 chemical weapon attacks attributed to Assadist forces.[297][298] As of March 2023, independent United Nations inquiry commissions have confirmed at least nine chemical attacks committed by forces loyal to the Assad government.[299][300]
The deadliest chemical attack have been the Ghouta chemical attacks, when Assad government forces launched the nerve agent sarin into civilian areas during its brutal Siege of Eastern Ghouta in early hours of 21 August 2013. Thousands of infected and dying victims flooded the nearby hospitals, showing symptoms such as foaming, body convulsions and other neurotoxic symptoms. An estimated 1,100-1,500 civilians; including women and children, are estimated to have been killed in the attacks.[301][302][303] The attack was internationally condemned and represented the deadliest use of chemical weapons since the Iran-Iraq war.[304][305] On 21 August 2022, United States government marked the ninth anniversary of Ghouta Chemical attacks stating: "United States remembers and honors the victims and survivors of the Ghouta attack and the many other chemical attacks we assess the Assad regime has launched. We condemn in the strongest possible terms any use of chemical weapons anywhere, by anyone, under any circumstances... The United States calls on the Assad regime to fully declare and destroy its chemical weapons program... and for the regime to allow the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ Declaration Assessment Team."[306]
In April 2017, there was a sarin chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun that killed more than 80 people.[308][237] The attack prompted U.S. President Donald Trump to order the U.S. military to launch 59 missiles at the Syrian Shayrat airbase.[309][310] Several months later, a joint report from the UN and international chemical weapons inspectors concluded that the attack was the work of the Assad regime.[167][311]
In April 2018, a chemical attack occurred in Douma, prompting the U.S. and its allies to accuse Assad of violating international laws and initiated joint missile strikes at chemical weapons facilities in Damascus and Homs. Both Syria and Russia denied the involvement of the Syrian government at this time.[312][313] The third report published on 27 January 2023 by the OPCW-IIT concluded that the Assad regime was responsible for the 2018 Douma chemical attack which killed at least 43 civilians.[l]
See also: Holocaust denial
In a speech delivered at the Ba'ath party's central committee meeting in December 2023, Bashar al-Assad claimed that there was "no evidence" of the killings of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Emphasizing that Jews were not the sole victims of Nazi extermination campaigns, Assad alleged that the Holocaust was "politicized" by Allied powers to facilitate the mass-deportation of European Jews to Palestine, and that it was used as an excuse to justify the creation of Israel. Assad also accused the U.S. government of financially and militarily sponsoring the rise of Nazism during the inter-war period.[314][315]
Public image
Domestic opposition and support
Further information: Syrian opposition
The secular resistance to Assad rule is mainly represented by the Syrian National Council and National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, two political bodies that constitute a coalition of centre-left and right-wing conservative factions of the Syrian opposition. Military commanders and civilian leaders of Free Syrian Army militias are represented in these councils. The coalition represents the political wing of the Syrian Interim Government and seeks the democratic transition of Syria through grass-roots activism, protests and armed resistance to overthrow the Ba'athist dictatorship.[316][317][318] A less influential faction within the Syrian opposition is the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change (NCC), a coalition of left-wing socialist parties that seek to end the rule of Assad family but without foreign involvement. Established in June 2011, major parties in the NCC coalition are the Democratic Arab Socialist Union, Syrian Democratic People's Party and the Communist Labour Party.[319]
National Democratic Rally (NDR) was an older left-wing opposition coalition of socialist parties formed in 1980, but banned by the Baathist government. NDR was active during the nation-wide protests of the 1980s and the Damascus Spring of the 2000s.[320] During the early years of the civil war, the Druze in Syria primarily sought to remain neutral, "seeking to stay out of the conflict". Druze-Israeli politician Majalli Wahabi claimed in 2016 that over half support the Assad government despite its relative weakness in Druze areas.[321] The "Sheikhs of Dignity" movement, which had sought to remain neutral and to defend Druze areas,[322] blamed the government after its leader Sheikh Wahid al-Balous was assassinated and organized large scale protests which left six government security personnel dead.[323] Druze community became fervently opposed to the Assad government over time and has been vocal about its opposition to increasing Iranian interference in Syria.[324] In August 2023, mass protests against Assad regime erupted in the Druze-majority city of Suweida,[325][326] which eventually spread to other regions of Southern Syria.[327][328][329] Druze cleric Hikmat al-Hajiri, religious leader of Syrian Druze community, has declared war against "Iranian invasion of the country".[330] Syrian Sufi scholar Muhammad al-Yaqoubi, a fervent opponent of both the Ba'athist regime and Islamic State group, has described Assad's rule as a "reign of terror" that wreaked havoc and enormous misery on the Syrian populace.[331]
Central to the regime's support base is the Ba'athist loyalists who dominate Syrian politics, trade unions, youth organizations, students unions, bureaucracy and armed forces.[332] Ba'ath party institutions and its political activities form the "vital pillars of regime survival". Family networks of politicians in the Ba'ath party-led National Progressive Front (NPF) and businessmen loyal to the Assad family form another pole of support. Electoral listing is supervised by Ba'ath party leadership which expels candidates not deemed "sufficiently loyal".[333][334][335] Although it has been reported at various stages of the Syrian civil war that religious minorities such as the Alawites and Christians in Syria favour the Assad government because of its secularism,[336][337] opposition exists among Assyrian Christians who have claimed that the Assad government seeks to use them as "puppets" and deny their distinct ethnicity, which is non-Arab.[338] Although Syria's Alawite community forms Bashar al-Assad's core support base and dominate the military and security apparatus,[339][340] in April 2016, BBC News reported that Alawite leaders released a document seeking to distance themselves from Assad.[341]
Kurdish Supreme Committee was a coalition of 13 Kurdish political parties opposed to Assad regime. Before its dissolution in 2015, the committee consisted of KNC and PYD.[319] Circassians in Syria have also become strong opponents of the regime as Ba'athist crackdowns and massacres across Syria intensified viciously; and members of Circassian ethnic minority have attempted to escape Syria, fearing persecution.[342] In 2014, the Christian Syriac Military Council, the largest Christian organization in Syria, allied with the Free Syrian Army opposed to Assad,[343] joining other Syrian Christian militias such as the Sutoro who had joined the Syrian opposition against the Assad government.[344] Abu Muhammad al-Joulani, commander of the Tahrir al-Sham rebel militia, condemned Assad regime for converting Syria "into an ongoing earthquake the past 12 years", in the context of the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes.[345]
"In June 2014, Assad won a disputed presidential election held in government-controlled areas (and boycotted in opposition-held areas[346] and Kurdish areas governed by the Democratic Union Party[347]) with 88.7% of the vote. Turnout was estimated to be 73.42% of eligible voters, including those in rebel-controlled areas.[348] The regime's electoral commission also disqualified millions of Syrian citizens displaced outside the country from voting.[349] Independent observers and academic scholarship unanimously describe the event as a sham election organized to legitimise Assad's rule.[350][351][352] In his inauguration ceremony, Bashar denounced the opposition as "terrorists" and "traitors"; while attacking the West for backing what he described as the "fake Arab spring".[353]
Times of Israel reported that although various individuals interviewed in a "Sunni-dominated, middle-class neighborhood of central Damascus" exhibited fealty for Assad; it was not possible to discern the actual support for the regime due to the ubiquitous influence of the secret police in the society.[354] Ba'athist dissident Abdul Halim Khaddam who had served as Syrian Vice President during the tenures of both Hafiz and Bashar, disparaged Bashar al-Assad as a pawn in Iran's imperial scheme. Contrasting the power dynamics that existed under both the autocrats, Khaddam stated:
"[Bashar] is not like his father.. He never allowed the Iranians to intervene in Syrian affairs.. During Hafez Assad's time, an Iranian delegation arrived in Syria and attempted to convert some of the Muslim Alawite Syrians to Shia Islam... Assad ordered his minister of foreign Affairs to summon the Iranian ambassador to deliver an ultimatum: The delegation has 24 hours to exit Syria.... They had no power [during Hafez's rule], unlike Bashar who gave them [Iranians] power and control."[355][356]
International opposition
Foreign journalists and political observers who travelled to Syria have described it as the most "ruthless police state" in the Arab World. Assad's violent repression of Damascus Spring of the early 2000s and the publication of a UN report that implicated him in the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, exacerbated Syria's post-Cold War isolation.[357][358] Following global outrage against Assad regime's deadly crackdown on the Arab Spring protestors which led to the Syrian civil war, scorched-earth policy against the civilian populations resulting in more than half a million deaths, mass murders and systematic deployment of chemical warfare throughout the conflict; Bashar al-Assad became an international pariah and numerous world leaders have urged him to resign.[359][358][360][361]
Since 2011, Bashar al-Assad has lost recognition from several international organizations such as the Arab League (in 2011),[362] Union for the Mediterranean (in 2011)[363] and Organization of Islamic Co-operation (in 2012).[364][365] United States, European Union, Turkey, Arab League and various countries began enforcing broad sets of sanctions against Syrian regime from 2011, with the objective of forcing Assad to resign and assist in a political solution to the crisis.[366] International bodies have criticized one-sided elections organized by Assad government during the conflict. In the 2014 London conference of countries of the Friends of Syria group, British Foreign Secretary William Hague characterized Syrian elections as a "parody of democracy" and denounced the regime's "utter disregard for human life" for perpetrating war-crimes and state-terror on the Syrian population.[367] Assad's policy of holding elections under the circumstances of an ongoing civil war were also rebuked by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.[368]
Georgia suspended all relations with Syria following Bashar al-Assad's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, condemning his government as a "Russian manipulated regime" that supported Russian occupation and "ethnic cleansing".[m] Following Assad's strong backing of Russian invasion of Ukraine and recognition of the breakaway separatist republics, Ukraine cut off all diplomatic relations with Syria in June 2022. Describing Assad's policies as "worthless", Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky pledged to expand further sanctions against Syria.[372][373] In March 2023, National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine put into effect a range of sanctions targeting 141 firms and 300 individuals linked to Assad regime, Russian weapons manufacturers and Iranian dronemakers. This was days after Assad's visit to Moscow, wherein he justified Russian invasion of Ukraine as a fight against "old and new Nazis". Bashar al-Assad, Prime Minister Hussein Arnous and Foreign Minister Faisal Mikdad were amongst the individuals who were sanctioned.[n] Sanctions also involved freezing of all Syrian state properties in Ukraine, curtailment of monetary transactions, termination of economic commitments and recision of all official Ukrainian awards.[377] Syria formally broke its diplomatic ties to Ukraine on July 20, citing the principle of reciprocity.[379]
In April 2023, a French court declared three high-ranking Ba'athist security officials guilty of crimes against humanity, torture and various war-crimes against French-Syrian citizens. These included Ali Mamlouk, director of National Security Bureau of Syrian Ba'ath party and Jamil Hassan, former head of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence Directorate.[380][381] France had issued international arrest warrants against the three officers over the case in 2018.[382] In May 2023, French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna publicly demanded the prosecution of Bashar al-Assad for engaging in chemical warfare and killing hundreds of thousands of people; branding him as "the enemy of his own people".[383][384] On 15 November 2023, France issued an arrest warrant against Assad for use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria.[14]
Left-wing
Bashar al-Assad is widely criticised by left-wing activists and intellectuals world-wide for appropriating leftist ideologies and its socialist, progressive slogans as a cover for his own family rule and to empower a loyalist clique of elites at the expense of ordinary Syrians. His close alliance with clergy-ruled Khomeinist Iran and its sectarian militant networks; while simultaneously pursuing a policy of locking up left-wing critics of Assad family has been subject to heavy criticism.[385]
Egyptian branch of the Iraqi Ba'ath movement has declared its strong support to the Syrian revolution; denouncing Ba'athist Syria as a repressive dictatorship controlled by the "Assad gang". It has attacked Assad family's Ba'athist credentials, accusing the Syrian Ba'ath party of acting as the borderguards of Israel ever since its overthrowal of the Ba'athist National Command during the 1966 coup d'état. Describing Bashar al-Assad as a disgraceful person for inviting hostile powers like Iran to Syria, Egyptian Ba'athists have urged the Syrian revolutionaries to unite in their efforts to overthrow the Assad regime and resist foreign imperialism.[386]
Describing Assad's regime as a mafia state that thrives on corruption and sectarianism, Lebanese socialist academic Gilbert Achcar stated:
"Bashar Assad's cousin became the richest man in the country, controlling – it is widely believed – over half of the economy. And that's only one member of the ruling clan... The clan functions as a real mafia, and has been ruling the country for several decades. This constitutes the deep root of the explosion, in combination with the fact that the Syrian regime is one of the most despotic in the region. Compared to Assad's Syria, Mubarak's Egypt was a beacon of democracy and political freedom!... What is specific to this regime is that Assad's father has reshaped and reconstructed the state apparatus, especially its hard nucleus – the armed forces – in order to create a Pretorian guard for itself. The army, especially its elite forces, is tied to the regime itself in various ways, most prominently through the use of sectarianism. Even people who had never heard of Syria before know now that the regime is based on one minority in the country – about 10% of the population; the Alawites."[387]
The Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) in Lebanon has taken an anti-Assad stance and organised mass-protests in support of the Syrian revolution. In August 2012, PSP publicly denounced the Assad government as a "killing machine" engaged in slaughtering Syrian people. PSP leader Ayman Kamaleddine demanded the expulsion of the Syrian ambassador from Lebanon, describing him as "the representative of the murderer regime in Lebanon".[14][15]
International support
Far-right support
Bashar al-Assad's regime has received support from prominent white nationalist, neo-Nazi and far-right figures in Europe, who were attracted by his "war on terror" discourse against Islamists during the period of European refugee crisis. Assad's bombings of Syrian cities are admired in the Islamophobic discourse of far-right circles, which considers Muslims as a civilizational enemy. American white supremacists often praise Assad as an authoritarian bulwark against what they view as the forces of "Islamic extremism" and globalism; and several pro-Assad slogans were chanted in the neo-Nazi Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville in 2017.[o][388]
Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National Party (BNP), was formerly an official ambassador and guest of the Syrian government;[389] due to public controversy, the Assad government publicly disassociated itself from him after his trip to Syria in 2014.[390] After the 2014 Syrian presidential elections, Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko sent a cable of congratulations to Bashar, expressing his "confidence" in the "leadership" of Bashar al-Assad, and depicted the Ba'athist government's military campaign as part of "the fight against terrorism and foreign interference".[391]
Left-wing
Left-wing support for Assad has been split since the start of the Syrian civil war;[needs update] the Assad government has been accused of cynically manipulating sectarian identity and anti-imperialism to continue its worst activities.
Some heads of state or governments have declared their support for Assad, including North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.[394] After declaring victory in the 2014 elections, Assad received congratulations from President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro,[395] President of Algeria Abdelaziz Bouteflika,[396] President of Guyana Donald Ramotar,[397] President of South Africa Jacob Zuma,[398] President of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega,[399] and Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah and President of the State of Palestine.[400][401][402] Palestinian Marxist-Leninist militant group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) supported Bashar al-Assad during the Syrian civil war. As a result of this stance, Iranian government increased its military and financial funding to PFLP.[403][404]
International public relations
In order to promote their image and media-portrayal overseas, Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma al-Assad hired U.S. and UK based PR firms and consultants.[405] In particular, these secured photoshoots for Asma al-Assad with fashion and celebrity magazines, including Vogue's March 2011 "A Rose in the Desert".[406][407] These firms included Bell Pottinger and Brown Lloyd James, with the latter being paid $5,000 a month for their services.[405][408]
At the outset of the Syrian civil war, Syrian government networks were hacked by the group Anonymous, revealing that an ex-Al Jazeera journalist had been hired to advise Assad on how to manipulate the public opinion of the U.S. Among the advice was the suggestion to compare the popular uprising against the regime to the Occupy Wall Street protests.[409] In a separate e-mail leak several months later by the Supreme Council of the Syrian Revolution, which were published by The Guardian, it was revealed that Assad's consultants had coordinated with an Iranian government media advisor.[410] In March 2015, an expanded version of the aforementioned leaks was handed to the Lebanese NOW News website and published the following month.[411]
After the Syrian civil war began, the Assads started a social media campaign which included building a presence on Facebook, YouTube, and most notably Instagram.[408] A Twitter account for Assad was reportedly activated; however, it remained unverified.[412] This resulted in much criticism, and was described by The Atlantic Wire as "a propaganda campaign that ultimately has made the [Assad] family look worse".[413] The Assad government has also allegedly arrested activists for creating Facebook groups that the government disapproved of,[131] and has appealed directly to Twitter to remove accounts it disliked.[414] The social media campaign, as well as the previously leaked e-mails, led to comparisons with Hannah Arendt's A Report on the Banality of Evil by The Guardian, The New York Times and the Financial Times.[415][416][417]
In October 2014, 27,000 photographs depicting torture committed by the Assad government were put on display at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.[418][419] Lawyers were hired to write a report on the images by the British law firm Carter-Ruck, which in turn was funded by the Government of Qatar.[420]
In November 2014, the Quilliam Foundation reported that a propaganda campaign, which they claimed had the "full backing of Assad", spread false reports about the deaths of Western-born jihadists in order to deflect attention from the government's alleged war crimes. Using a picture of a Chechen fighter from the Second Chechen War, pro-Assad media reports disseminated to Western media outlets, leading them to publish a false story regarding the death of a non-existent British jihadist.[421]
In 2015, Russia intervened in the Syrian civil war in support of Assad, and on 21 October 2015, Assad flew to Moscow and met with Russian president Vladimir Putin, who said regarding the civil war: "this decision can be made only by the Syrian people. Syria is a friendly country. And we are ready to support it not only militarily but politically as well."[422]
2024 - WHY isn't Assad in Prison? [423]
Personal life
Assad speaks fluent English and basic conversational French, having studied at the Franco-Arab al-Hurriyah school in Damascus.[424]
In December 2000, Assad married Asma Akhras, a British citizen of Syrian origin from Acton, London.[425][426] In 2001, Asma gave birth to their first child, a son named Hafez after the child's grandfather Hafiz al-Assad. Bashar al-Assad's son Hafez graduated from Moscow State University in the summer of 2023 with a master's thesis in number theory.[427] Their daughter Zein was born in 2003, followed by their second son Karim in 2004.[24] In January 2013, Assad stated in an interview that his wife was pregnant;[428][429] however, there were no later reports of them having a fourth child.[citation needed]
Bashar al-Assad is an Alawite Muslim.[430] Bashar performed the hajj pilgrimage twice in 1999 and in 2000.[431]
Assad's sister, Bushra al-Assad, and mother, Anisa Makhlouf, left Syria in 2012 and 2013, respectively, to live in the United Arab Emirates.[24] Makhlouf died in Damascus in 2016.[432]
Awards and honours
Revoked and returned awards and honours.
Ribbon Distinction Country Date Location Notes Reference Grand Cross of the National Order of the Legion of Honour France 25 June 2001 Paris Highest rank in the Order of the Legion of Honor in the Republic of France. Returned by Assad on 20 April 2018[433] after the opening of a revocation process by the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, on 16 April 2018. [434][435] Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise Ukraine 21 April 2002 Kyiv Revoked on 18 March 2023, as part of sanctions issued by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy which revoked all previous Ukrainian state awards to Assad government[377] [436][377] Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Francis I Two Sicilies 21 March 2004 Damascus Dynastic order of the House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies; Revoked several years later[when?] by Prince Carlo, Duke of Castro. [437][438] Order of Zayed UAE 31 May 2008 Abu Dhabi Highest civil decoration in the United Arab Emirates. [439] Order of the White Rose of Finland Finland 5 October 2009 Damascus One of three official orders in Finland. [440] Order of King Abdulaziz Saudi Arabia 8 October 2009 Damascus Highest Saudi state order. [441] Knight Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic Italy 11 March 2010 Damascus Highest ranking honour of the Republic of Italy. Revoked by the President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, on 28 September 2012 for "indignity". [442][443] Collar of the Order of the Liberator Venezuela 28 June 2010[444] Caracas Highest Venezuelan state order. [445] Grand Collar of the Order of the Southern Cross Brazil 30 June 2010 Brasília Brazil's highest order of merit. [446] Grand Cordon of the National Order of the Cedar Lebanon 31 July 2010 Beirut Second highest honour of Lebanon. [447] Order of the Islamic Republic of Iran Iran 2 October 2010 Tehran Highest national medal of Iran. [448][449] Uatsamonga Order South Ossetia 2018 Damascus State award of South Ossetia. [450]
See also
List of international presidential trips made by Bashar al-Assad
Presidency of Hafiz al-Assad
Foreign Policy of Bashar al-Assad
Explanatory notes
References
Citations
General and cited references
Further reading
Abboud, Samer (2015). Syria (Hot Spots in Global Politics). Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-9797-0.
Belhadj, Souhaïl (2013). La Syrie de Bashar Al-Asad : Anatomie d'un régime autoritaire [Bashar's Syria: Anatomy of an Authoritarian Regime] (in French). Belin. ISBN 978-2-7011-6467-0.
Hinnebusch, Raymond (2002). Syria: Revolution From Above. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-28568-1.
Perthes, Volker (2005). Syria Under Bashar Al-Asad: Modernisation and the Limits of Change. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-19-856750-9.
Tabler, Andrew (2011). In the Lion's Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle with Syria. Zephyr Press. ISBN 978-1-56976-843-3.
Reports
Yossi Baidatz (August 2001). Bashar's First Year: From Ophthalmology to a National Vision (PDF) (Report). Washington Institute for Near East Policy. ASIN B0006RVLNM. Archived from the original (PDF) on 25 December 2016 .
Annette Büchs (March 2009). The Resilience of Authoritarian Rule in Syria under Hafez and Bashar Al-Asad (PDF) (Report). German Institute of Global and Area Studies. 97. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 October 2017 .
Articles
Abdelnour, Ziad K. (12 April 2003). "Syria's Proxy Forces in Iraq". Al-Hayat.
"Profile: Syria's Bashar al-Assad". BBC News. 10 March 2005.
Harris, William (Summer 2005). "Bashar al-Assad's Lebanon Gamble". Middle East Quarterly.
Pan, Esther (10 March 2006). "Syria's Leaders". Council on Foreign Relations. Archived from the original on 19 July 2006.
"Interview With Syrian President Bashar al-Assad". The Wall Street Journal. 31 January 2011.
"Profile: Bashar al-Assad". Al Jazeera. 25 March 2011.
Rose, Charlie (9 September 2013). "Interview with Bashar Hafez al-Assad". PBS. Archived from the original on 18 November 2016 .
Official website
Biography
Decrees
Speeches
Interviews
Press releases
Appearances on C-SPAN
Bashar al-Assad collected news and commentary at The Guardian
Bashar al-Assad collected news and commentary at The New York Times
Bashar al-Assad at IMDb | ||||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 72 | https://www.aub.edu.lb/doctorates/recipients/Pages/Lahham.aspx | en | Dourade Al Lahham | [
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] | null | [] | null | en | /Style%20Library/AUB/images/favicon.ico?v=2 | https://www.aub.edu.lb/doctorates/recipients/Pages/Lahham.aspx | A leading Syrian comedian, actor, and director of plays for theater and television, Dourade Al Lahham, born in Damascus in 1934 into relative poverty, began his professional life as a university instructor in chemistry. But while a student at Damascus University, he began dancing, captivated by the ethnic dabkeh, and later, as a university instructor, taught dancing and clarinet, and acted in amateur theater. Today Dourade Al Lahham is reputed to be the most famous actor in Syria since the 1960s and one of the most famous in the Arab world.
Reflecting in later life on what he could not achieve through his work in the theater, Al Lahham acknowledged one place where he had made a difference—making acting a reputable profession in Syria. Friends and family had disapproved when he gave up university teaching for acting, and his family even suggested he change his surname. Passionately ready to devote his life to acting, Al Lahham refused, and now he has become one of the best-known performers in the Arab world.
Al Lahham was among the first to act on Syrian television when it began in Damascus in 1960. Director Sabah Qabbani tapped him to star in a mini-series, Sahret Dimashq (Damascus Evening) along with Nihad Qali, an established stage actor. The two became an instant team, Duraid & Nihad, a comic duo often compared to Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello. The team worked together successfully until illness forced Qali’s retirement in 1976.
Al Lahham’s acting career moved from the exuberant slapstick of traditional
comedy to serious social criticism and political satire. In 1965 he created the comic character Ghawar for a mini series, Maqalib Ghawar (Ghawar’s Pranks). Ghawar, a wicked prankster who stops at nothing to achieve his desires, playing off Qali as the mild, long suffering al-Burazan, captivated Arab audiences: “The evil yet lovable Ghawar quickly became a household name in Syria and throughout the Arab word.” Al Lahham continued to act, direct, and write screenplays involving Ghawar until 1981.
These light-hearted comedies of the 1960s and early ’70s, providing rollicking and hilarious entertainment, evolved markedly following the massive Arab defeat of 1967 and Egypt’s separate peace with Israel in 1978, both of which affected Al Lahham deeply, as did the later 2006 war in Lebanon (His mother was from South Lebanon).
After joining political playwright Mohammad al-Maghout, Al Lahham’s art was no longer pure entertainment. He turned Ghawar into a more serious character who expressed the “worries of the Arab citizen” in such TV shows as Kasak Ya Watan (Cheers to the Homeland) in 1978 and Wadi al-Misk (The Misk Valley) in 1981. After the 1967 Arab defeat, Al Lahham began to use the theater to criticize weaknesses of Arab society. His plays, popular not only in Syria but in other Arab countries as well, dealt with such subjects as the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, Arab emigration to the West, and “the death of relations between citizens and their country.” A 2006 New York Times interview reported: His “biting critique of Arab regimes was sugar-coated with sarcasm and humor.”
From 1981, Al Lahham’s films, too, often written by al-Maghout, contained symbolic situations and political innuendo. In the 1987 al-Hudud (The Border), an Arab traveler who loses his passport is forced to camp on the border between two Arab countries. Neither country will let him in; he loses his country and his identity. Al Lahham himself said “the idea was to mock and dispel the notion of pan-Arabism.” In another film, al-Takrir (The Report) an honest civil servant who refuses to be bribed and decides to report on the corruption of his bosses is finally stomped to death at a soccer match as the papers of his report flutter across the field.
In the New York Times interview Al Lahham said he preferred the term “nationalist commentary” as safer than “political commentary.” Nevertheless, the relentless social criticism of his plays and films did not escape the scrutiny of the government authorities. But when he was threatened with imprisonment, a strong ally, the then Syrian defense minister, Hafez al-Assad, protected him.
Strong humanitarian feelings animate Al Lahham’s life and work. Concerned with protecting the rights of children, he wrote several plays about young people. The 1990 film, Kafroun, starred Al Lahham and a group of children, and he later performed in a TV series to create awareness of children’s problems. In 2009 he initiated a visit to the Gaza strip by a delegation of top Syrian screen stars to support a campaign to break the Israeli siege. Later that same year he joined over 1,000 international activists from 43 countries on a Gaza Freedom March including such figures as the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Alice Walker, octogenarian holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, and South African anti-apartheid leader Ronnie Kasrils, to demonstrate solidarity with the besieged Palestinians. Only days before the group was to enter the strip through the Rafah crossing, the Egyptian government announced the closing of the border.
Throughout his career, Al Lahham acted with other top Egyptian and Syrian actors and actresses such as the Egyptians Maryam Fakhr al-Din, Shadia, Nabila Obeid, Farid Shawki, and Nahid Sharif; and Syrians Talhat Hamdi, Rafiq Sibayi, Anwar al-Baba, Abdel Latif Fathi, and Raghda.
His career won many awards. In 1976 President Hafez al-Assad awarded him the Medal of the Syrian Republic, Excellence Class. He received from Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba a medal honoring his work in 1979 and a medal from Libya’s leader Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi in 1991. To recognize his two children’s productions, the film Kafroun and the play Al-Usfura al-Sa’ida (The Happy Bird), he was named UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for Children’s Affairs in Syria in 1992, and from1999 to 2004 he served as UNICEF Regional Goodwill Ambassador for Childhood in the Middle East and North Africa. At a Syrian Culture Club ceremony at AUB in 1997 President Emile Lahhoud presented Al Lahham with the Order of Merit of the Lebanese Republic.
As the years go on, Dourade Al Lahham has become more philosophical about the role of art and the theater. Once he believed he might help change the world through his plays and films. The New York Times writer Michael Slackman wrote in 2006, “Now, he says over and over, art is useless as a tool for political change. Art cannot change anyone’s mind, he says. It never caused a terrorist to have second thoughts, never transformed a dictator into a democrat. In fact, he says, it never did much but entertain.” Shocked by the words of an Arab official who told him, “‘Talk all you want. We will do all we want,’ [he] stopped making politically challenging shows, stopped thinking of his work as making a difference in the world, and decided instead that there was no shame in simply entertaining people. The war in Lebanon, he says, has served only to validate all his feelings.”
“We had thought that artwork could shock and make change. But no, artwork, at the end of the day, even if it is critical, is entertainment.” Al Lahham continues to entertain, coming out of retirement after a sixteen-year absence to act in a 2008 play in Damascus under the aegis of the city’s designation as Capital for Arab Culture 2008. | ||||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 27 | https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q44329 | en | Bashar al-Assad | [
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wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 25 | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2021/assad-syria-business-government/ | en | Assadâs tightening grip | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/RJH3GSSS5QI6ZA6S3HNLBYR3PY.jpg&w=1200 | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/RJH3GSSS5QI6ZA6S3HNLBYR3PY.jpg&w=1200 | [
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] | 2021-12-04T17:10:34.048000+00:00 | In an escalating campaign, the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and his financially strapped regime have raided and seized dozens of businesses, even targeting foreign corporations and family enterprises that stuck by him during a decade of war. | en | https://www.washingtonpost.com/pf/resources/images/favicon.ico?d=203 | Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2021/assad-syria-business-government/ | The five Syrians pulled from their homes by secret police on the same night last year were not insurgents, spies or suspected of being disloyal to the countryâs president, Bashar al-Assad.
Instead, they were targets in a desperate new phase of Assadâs battle to survive: the hunt for cash.
All five were executives at Syriaâs second-largest cellphone company, MTN Syria, according to individuals familiar with the episode. Their arrests were part of a ruthless campaign by the president to seize MTNâs assets, along with almost every other meaningful source of revenue in Syriaâs shattered economy.
MTN was ultimately brought to its knees four months ago after protracted pressure in which those arrests were followed by demands for multimillion-dollar payments, threats to revoke the companyâs operating license and a dubious court ruling that put an Assad loyalist in charge of the company.
The South Africa-based corporation announced in August that it was abandoning the Syrian market under conditions that its chief executive called âintolerable.â MTNâs cellphone towers are still working, its 6 million subscribers still paying their monthly bills.
âBut where that money is going, no one knows,â said a Syrian executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. âHonestly, no one knows.â
Similar events have played out repeatedly over the past two years, as Assad and his financially strapped regime have raided or outright seized dozens of businesses, including foreign corporations and family enterprises that rode out Syriaâs decade-long war in government-held territory, according to U.S. and other Western officials, as well as Syrians with firsthand knowledge of the regimeâs actions. Neither the Syrian government nor the Syrian presidency responded to requests for comment.
Companies that had survived the war have been raided by teams of regime âauditorsâ and agents, who scour their accounts for supposed tax and customs violations or other pretexts for hefty fines. Business leaders who stuck by Assad have been detained and pressured to cough up money to supposed charities that are widely seen as Assad slush funds.
The moves are part of what one Dubai-based Syrian executive called a âmafia-style money grab.â
The most brazen cases amount to corporate decapitations in which top executives are forced out under duress and replaced by Assad loyalists. Among them is a relative newcomer, Yasar Ibrahim, who in a two-year stretch has acquired control of MTN and other Assad-targeted companies.
Even members of the Assad family have not been spared. Last year, Assad stripped his cousin Rami Makhlouf of companies and assets that had once been part of a massive portfolio estimated by Syria experts to be worth as much as $10 billion.
The regimeâs campaign to commandeer wealth has only intensified since then. U.S. officials and Syria experts said it has been driven by the intense financial pressure on a regime that has been bankrupted by war, daunting debts to Iran and Russia, a meltdown in neighboring Lebanonâs financial sector and continuing economic sanctions from the West.
Assad needs the money, officials and experts said, to meet payroll for his military and security services, to buy fuel and food for the capital and other areas still under regime control, and to reward some Syrian elites who remained loyal to him through the war.
Against this backdrop, an endgame has begun to unfold. U.S. officials and Syria experts said that Assad has so effectively consolidated his control over the countryâs security apparatus and economy that he is poised to emerge from the war with a firmer grip on power than when it started. But after a decade of conflict, he is left in charge of a dismembered and decimated state where nearly half of Syriaâs territory is beyond his governmentâs reach, entire towns lie in ruins and the currency has lost 85 percent of its value since the start of the war.
âIn an era of a shrinking economic pie, the fight for resources becomes even more ferocious,â said Robert Ford, who served as U.S. ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014. The climate of desperation âactually gives Assad even more leverage,â Ford said, because so few potential rivals have the wherewithal, financial or otherwise, âto contest Assadâs control.â
Assad has portrayed the asset seizures as part of his promised fight against corruption. âThere will not be any suspension to this process or leniency with any person involved because ⦠ending [corruption] is an economic, social and patriotic necessity,â he said at a ceremony in July marking his inauguration to a fourth seven-year presidential term.
And Ammar Waqqaf, a Britain-based Syrian businessman who supports the Syrian government, said that the targeted executives âare beneficiaries of privileges not open to the ordinary people. The state sees justice in getting them to pay more.â
But the outcome adds to the bitter legacy of the Arab Spring, which had raised hopes of political reform across the Middle East and expanded economic opportunity. In Syria, the opposite has happened. Assad and his shrunken inner circle have found ways to cling to power and maintain aspects of their elite lifestyles, while much of the rest of the population faces a deepening humanitarian crisis.
More than 90 percent of Syrians now live in poverty, according to the United Nations. Many of the countryâs hospitals, schools and roads outside Damascus have been reduced to rubble. And drought has raised fears of famine, with humanitarian groups estimating that 12 million Syriansâ access to adequate food is at risk.
The United Nations has estimated that rebuilding Syria will cost at least $250 billion. U.S. sanctions are already a major barrier to foreign investment, and the Biden administration has signaled they will remain in place until Assad agrees to substantial political reforms.
The treatment of MTN and others may further undermine the prospects of any money flowing into Syria. âNo sane and rational foreign investor would think of doing anything in Syria under the current operating environment,â said the executive who described the assault on MTN.
A longtime kleptocracy
The mafia-like elements of Assadâs strategy go beyond the seizures of companies.
The Syrian regime has also become an alleged drug trafficker, accused by U.S. and Western officials of producing mass quantities of the amphetamine Captagon at facilities in loyalist areas along Syriaâs coast. In 2020, European and Arab authorities seized shipments with an estimated street value of $3.4 billion â more than Syriaâs annual budget â according to the Center for Operational Analysis and Research, a global risk and development consultancy.
The regime is also accused of diverting tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid intended for impoverished Syrians.
A recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, for instance, documented how the Assad government has pocketed more than half of every dollar brought into the country by aid organizations â charging what CSIS said were artificially inflated exchange rates for Syrian pounds that aid groups need to buy supplies and operate. The Syrian central bank diverted at least $100 million between 2019 and 2020, CSIS concluded, by accepting dollars from aid groups and returning Syrian currency at a fraction of its worth on the open market.
Even before the war, Syria was widely perceived as a kleptocratic country in which the Assad family enriched itself by exploiting access to state-controlled assets and imposing parasitic partnerships on businesses.
But that approach has been upended dramatically over the past two years, as Assad turned on formerly trusted insiders and abandoned any pretense of entrepreneurial partnership.
Among the main targets has been the telecommunications industry, a singularly reliable source of revenue in a country where the poorest Syrians often carry cellphones even if they canât count on reliable access to electricity or clean water.
Pressure on cellphone companies
The regime began targeting companies on the periphery of the industry as early as 2018, according to Syrians with direct knowledge of the matter.
In one early case, a company that provided support services to the countryâs main cellular carriers was told that its clients would sever their contracts unless the smaller firmâs owners relinquished control.
The company had more than 200 employees and revenue of several million dollars each year, according to a Syrian executive knowledgeable about the episode. Senior managers were encouraged to stay, and the business continued to operate largely as it had for years. But the companyâs contracts were taken over by a new entity, Al-Burj Investment Company, the executive said. Al-Burj was controlled by Ibrahim, a financier and businessman who has gained favor with Assad in recent years. Ibrahimâs sister Nasreen was listed on corporate records as an Al-Burj executive, according to Syrian individuals familiar with the case.
âWe were hoping to be one day be part of the new Syria â to be part of the reconstruction and that this regime would not be there,â said an executive with knowledge of the takeover. âWe no longer have any hope of going back.â The executive spoke on the condition of anonymity and asked that the name of the company not be published, saying that relatives and employees still in Syria remain vulnerable.
The Assad regime soon shifted its attention to larger corporations that dominate the cellphone business.
MTN had entered the market in 2008 with the acquisition of a company that had been started by a Lebanese businessman, Najib Mikati, who is now Lebanonâs prime minister. MTN invested heavily and came to hold roughly 45 percent of the Syrian cellphone market.
Then, in late 2019, the company was informed by Syriaâs main telecommunications regulatory agency that the 20-year license it had acquired just four years earlier would be canceled without an additional payment of $40 million. When MTN balked, regime pressure intensified, a second Syrian executive said.
In May of last year, the company executives were arrested. These five top employees, including four men and one woman, were detained in simultaneous 2 a.m. raids and taken to a prison run by the internal security branch of Syriaâs General Intelligence Directorate, according to Syrians familiar with the case. A sixth employee was taken into custody the next day from his office in Damascus.
The employees included MTNâs senior managers in Syria, but not its chief executive, who had left the country earlier in the year. The arrested executives were interrogated for nearly three weeks and faced threats to themselves and their families before being released, Syrian individuals said.
âThe main purpose was not to get information,â one person familiar with the case said. âIt was a message being sent.â
MTN began negotiating to sell its 75 percent stake in its Syria operation to a company called TeleInvest that was controlled by Ibrahim, the Assad associate, who had previously acquired the other 25 percent from a Saudi investor.
But the deal with TeleInvest was delayed by concerns about Ibrahimâs ability to secure the money for the transaction, an executive said, and then collapsed when the United States imposed sanctions on Ibrahim in mid-2020. The Treasury Department referred to Ibrahim as Assadâs âhenchmanâ and said that âusing his networks across the Middle East and beyond, Ibrahim has cut corrupt deals that enrich Assad, while Syrians are dying from a lack of food and medicine.â
MTN, which operates in 21 countries across Africa and the Middle East, worried that it might face U.S. financial penalties if it were caught doing business with the sanctioned Syrian, the executive said.
When the deal fell through, Assadâs government moved to seize control of MTN through different tactics. In a lawsuit, Syriaâs regulatory agency accused MTN of violating the terms of its license, tax evasion and other charges, and secured a ruling that put the company under control of a court-appointed guardian.
The company disputed the allegations and challenged the ruling in court in Syria but lost that case. An MTN spokesman in South Africa said that the company âdeclines to comment any further on this issue.â
The court then handed that role as guardian to TeleInvest, the same Ibrahim-controlled company that had tried and failed to negotiate a purchase of MTN.
The South African company surrendered, bowing out of a business that had generated nearly $1 billion in annual revenue before the war, though earnings had contracted significantly during the conflict. The company still had 6 million subscribers when chief executive Ralph Mupita declared in August that MTN would âabandonâ its business in Syria after having âlost control of the operations through what we feel was an unjust action.â
Dismantling a cousinâs empire
While still stalking MTN, Assad orchestrated a more audacious takedown within his own family.
Rami Makhlouf is the scion of an elite clan that Assadâs father â Syriaâs longtime leader Hafez al-Assad â married into. With virtual free rein over the countryâs economy for nearly two decades, Makhlouf used his influence to build an empire reputed to be worth billions, though it was widely suspected that he was holding much of that wealth on behalf of his cousin, the president.
Makhloufâs most valuable asset was Syriatel, the dominant mobile phone carrier in the country, though he also held lucrative stakes in Syriaâs oil, banking and real estate sectors.
Makhloufâs exploitation of state power was so conspicuous that he was put under U.S. sanctions years before the civil war broke out, accused of having âmanipulated the Syrian judicial system and used Syrian intelligence officials to intimidate his business rivals.â The U.S. Treasury Department in 2008 called Makhlouf âone of the primary centers of corruption in Syria.â
Last year, Assad began publicly denouncing his profligate cousin in terms similar to those used by the U.S. Treasury.
The attacks on Makhlouf came as Assad sought to deflect blame for a deepening crisis in Syriaâs already ravaged economy. A collapse in neighboring Lebanonâs banking system left thousands of Syrians unable to access their savings and sent the countryâs currency into a tailspin.
Syrians also saw other reasons for Makhloufâs reckoning. His familyâs flaunting of its wealth â his sons have a habit of posing on Instagram with exotic cars â triggered outrage among impoverished Syrians.
There has also been speculation among Syrian expatriates that Assadâs wife, Asma, who was born in London and worked as a banker with J.P. Morgan before their marriage in 2000, was asserting more control of the regimeâs finances to secure a fortune for the first familyâs three children.
The dismembering of Makhloufâs empire began in 2019, when Asma was put in charge of the assets of Al-Bustan Association, a Makhlouf-run charity that claimed to support families of regime loyalists killed in the war but became known as a conduit for funding for private militias. In 2017, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on Al-Bustan for ârecruiting and mobilizing individuals to support and augment Syrian military forces.â The organization was at the center of âa vast private network of militias and security-linked institutions,â the Treasury Department said.
Asma, who survived breast cancer in 2019, also heads the Syria Trust for Development, which serves as a major conduit for U.N. assistance money flowing into the country and as a key source of patronage for the Assad family, giving it a powerful say over who receives aid.
Several Syrian businessmen who fled the war said that Asma was behind the push to seize revenue from the cellphone industry in Syria and sideline Makhlouf, in part to ensure that her own eldest son, Hafez, is in a strong position to someday succeed his father.
Last year, Makhlouf suffered the biggest blow yet when he was stripped of his shares of Syriatel, one of the most profitable businesses in the country, with control of 55 percent of Syriaâs cellphone market.
A humiliated Makhlouf resorted to pleading for mercy from his cousin in a series of jarring videos posted on Facebook. He said Syriatel regularly turned over half its revenue to the state and could not pay more without facing collapse. He expressed disbelief that security agencies he once wielded against business rivals were now raiding his own companies. He pleaded with Assad to end his financial âsufferingâ and blamed a âcadreâ close to the president for âframing me as the one who is wrong.â
In his most recent video, in July, Makhlouf ranted against the new owners of Syriatel, accusing them of âthievery.â He obliquely compared himself to Moses, suggesting that he would deliver Syriaâs poor from the predations of the âwar profiteersâ who had taken over his former company. Makhlouf did not respond to a request for further comment.
Shell companies and stockpiled properties
The videos marked a staggering fall for Makhlouf, while creating an unexpected opening in the position he had long held as Assadâs money man.
Several ambitious Syrians auditioned for the job. Among them was Samer Foz, who had grown rich during the war by stockpiling properties including the former Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus, which has continued making money by catering to leaders of aid organizations and U.N. delegations that visit the country.
Foz, 48, had inherited a holding company from his father that billed itself in online brochures as an âinternational group operating in a wide range of industries,â from pharmaceutical supplies to a Lebanese television station. Foz has homes in Dubai and Latakia, Syria, according to the U.S. government, and is a Syrian national who also holds citizenship in Turkey and the Caribbean nation Saint Kitts and Nevis.
Syrians with knowledge of Fozâs operations said he amassed much of his wealth by exploiting his network of connections and ingratiating himself with Assad during the Syrian conflict.
Foz used a private jet to crisscross the Persian Gulf region, soliciting funds for Assad from donors, according to Syrians familiar with his activities. He also delivered ultimatums to wealthy Syrians who had fled the conflict that they could either sell to him the companies they had left behind or risk losing everything.
Secret financial records unearthed as part of the Pandora Papers, which were obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with The Washington Post, show that Foz used the offshore financial system to set up shell companies outside Syria during the war to hold a yacht, a jet and other assets. In 2017, documents show, Foz changed the name of one of his offshore companies from âFoz Holdingsâ to âSkyy Capital Limited,â possibly to avoid attracting attention.
[Trove of secret files details an opaque financial universe where the global elite shield their riches]
But his rising profile and involvement in a brazen real estate scheme put in him the crosshairs of the U.S. Treasury Department. He was the lead private investor in a real estate project called Marota City, which involved the planned construction of luxury high-rises in a Damascus suburb on expropriated land where the regime had bulldozed thousands of homes previously occupied by Syrians who fled the conflict.
The contract was valued at $312 million, according to the Treasury Department, and appeared aimed at attracting money from Persian Gulf investors. But the project foundered after Syrian backers faced a flurry of U.S. sanctions. Among them was Foz, whom the Treasury Department accused of having âleveraged the atrocities of the Syrian conflict into a profit-generating enterprise.â Foz did not respond to a request for comment.
âMoneyman dutiesâ
Foz has since been eclipsed by another Assad-backed upstart.
Yasar Ibrahim, a 38-year-old businessman who was virtually unknown before the war, has presided over the shakedowns of major Syrian firms from an office in Assadâs presidential complex, according to Syrian executives and experts.
There are conflicting theories about what accounts for Ibrahimâs rising influence. An expert on Syriaâs economy noted that Ibrahimâs father had served as a consultant to Hafez al-Assad, and that the Ibrahim family is from the same minority Alawite sect as the ruling family. âHe is Alawite, and they are loyal to Bashar, not Asma,â who was raised Sunni, the expert said.
But others believe that Asma is Ibrahimâs main patron, in part because of her reported close ties with two of Ibrahimâs sisters. âHe gained Assadâs trust by that connection,â said Joel Rayburn, who until last year served as special envoy for Syria at the State Department. âLittle by little, he took on the moneyman duties.â
Either way, Ibrahim now sits at the center of a remarkable constellation of companies in oil, food, construction and other sectors. One, Hokoul SAL Offshore, was hit with U.S. sanctions in 2019 and described by the Treasury Department as a âfront companyâ for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
Most importantly, Ibrahim has amassed near-monopoly power over Syriaâs cellphone market, having displaced the family owners of the support services company, pried control of Syriatel away from Assadâs cousin and seized the reins of MTN after the companyâs capitulation in August.
The regime has portrayed these forays as a crackdown on corruption, a ploy that has won some public support, experts said. In that vein, Ibrahim has cast himself as a benefactor to targeted companies, even as he displaces their owners and commandeers their cash.
A Syrian executive said Ibrahim had summoned senior employees of the seized telecommunications support company to his office, trying to win their loyalties by saying he had intervened to rid the firm of corrupt bosses. He sought to convince the employees that he was âa good guy, a gentle guy, and a patriot,â the executive said. In reality, the executive said, âYasar is the bully,â an enforcer for Assad.
Ibrahim did not respond to a request for comment made via the Syrian presidency, where he works as an economic and financial adviser.
Ibrahim and his sisters, Rana and Nasreen, were also put under U.S. sanctions last year for their allegedly predatory roles in the regime. The designations forced them to remove their names from the boards of directors of Syriatel and other companies. But their standing with Assad appears undiminished. Earlier this fall, Foz was forced to hand over his stake in the former Four Seasons hotel to Ibrahim, according to Syrians with knowledge of the matter.
âThe Ibrahims are by far the rising stars â itâs boggling how far their influence is spreading,â said Karam Shaar, a consultant on Syria and research director at the Operations and Policy Center in Turkey. Even so, Shaar said Ibrahimâs standing is as precarious as that of any of his predecessors. The Assads âuse people like him as pawns, as fronts for the regime,â Shaar said. âIf you get too strong, you will be chopped and replaced by someone else.â
Most in Syria face deprivation
Syria today faces a âhumanitarian catastrophe [that] is now among the largest in the world,â according to a senior U.S. official. The vast majority of the population lives on less than $1.90 a day and 6.2 million are listed as âinternally displacedâ by the United Nations, meaning they remain in Syria but were forced from their homes by a conflict in which Assad used poison gas and barrel bombs against his own people.
In recent months, there have been growing signs that other Middle East leaders who once worked toward Assadâs ouster are resigned to his survival. But U.S. officials and Syria experts said the prospects for postwar recovery in Syria remain distant. The Biden administration has cautioned countries across the Middle East not to aid Assad financially or otherwise. And while Russia and Iran helped rescue Assad militarily when he seemed most at risk of losing the war, neither country has signaled any willingness to cover the projected cost of Syriaâs rebuilding.
[After backing Assad, Iran and Russia compete for influence]
Meanwhile, life for ordinary Syrians continues to deteriorate. Soaring prices put all but the most basic foods beyond the reach of ordinary people. In Damascus, lines for fuel stretch for blocks on end from the early morning hours till late at night, residents say. Blackouts are common.
âWe have deadly poverty, high prices, people cannot pay their rent,â said Salwa, a Damascus resident who asked that her full name not be used. âEveryone wants to leave, she said. âPeople would give anything to leave the country.â
The shakedowns have padded regime accounts, with the Finance Ministry claiming that government revenue had tripled during the first nine months of this year. But Assad may be undermining the countryâs longer-term prospects, said Shaar, the consultant. âHe thinks you can coerce businessmen to do what he wants, but thatâs not how economies work,â he said. âThey will run away.â
The country has indeed seen an exodus of business owners â possibly thousands of them, according to Syrian media reports. Many are taking what remains of their capital and expertise to Egypt and other Arab countries.
Assad, however, remains ensconced in an upscale neighborhood of Damascus, a city largely unscathed by the conflict. Elites who have profited from the war continue to dine out and drink in bars and restaurants.
Even the Makhloufs appear to be clinging to aspects of their privileged lifestyle. Rami Makhlouf continues to live at his villa in a suburb of the city. His son, Ali, surfaced on social media in October in Beverly Hills behind the wheel of a $300,000 Ferrari. | ||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 70 | https://www.washington.edu/boundless/speaking-words-of-justice/ | en | Speaking words of justice | [
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] | null | [] | null | University of Washington | en | Be Boundless | https://www.washington.edu/boundless/speaking-words-of-justice/ | When Malak Shalabi visits her extended family in Jordan, they sometimes drive through the countryside and see Syria in the distance. “But there’s no going back,” she says. “Whenever I spend time with my family and they share stories of life back home, I hold on to every word, because this is one of the closest connections I’ll ever have to our motherland.”
Shalabi’s family are refugees scattered throughout the Middle East and the U.S. Her father’s father was born in Palestine but moved to Qatar in 1958. Born in Syria, Shalabi’s mother immigrated to Kuwait with her family during the presidency of Hafez al-Assad. She was visiting her brothers in the U.S. when the Gulf War broke out and devastated her community at home. “My mother ended up staying here because there was nothing to return to,” says Shalabi.
Shalabi’s father came to the U.S. for college and met her mother, who had worked hard to learn English and get into a top dental school. Even after they married and built new lives in America, they kept monitoring global politics that affected the friends, family and countries they loved.
“Al Jazeera was always on TV in our living room, especially during the invasion of Iraq and uprisings in Palestine. And when the revolutions [the Arab Spring] began in the Middle East, we were following all of it,” Shalabi says. “My parents would ask, ‘Do you truly know your roots?’ and it would provoke me to look into it more.”
Drawing from experience
While majoring in Law, Economics & Public Policy at UW Bothell, Shalabi was inspired by her professors to research the issues that have affected her family — and to use her perspective as a Muslim to guide her work. Bruce Kochis, who teaches at the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, “encouraged students to explore the idea of religion,” Shalabi says. “If I was talking about my faith, he would say, ‘Write about it. Explain it in your class.’ And that was something I had never really experienced before.”
When Shalabi sought out Kochis as an adviser for a research project, he continued urging her to draw from her personal experiences.
“He asked me, ‘What’s the one thing that sticks out to you when you speak to Syrians back home or here?’ says Shalabi. “And it was the torture” — specifically, the targeted torture and murder of Sunni Muslims in Syrian prisons.
For her research, Shalabi traveled to Amman, Jordan, where she visited a care center for Syrian refugees and spoke with a psychologist who treated victims of torture. She also interviewed a man who had survived a stint in a Syrian prison.
“I met with him in a café. People around us were laughing and enjoying their day, and he was calmly telling me the most horrendous things you could ever imagine being done to a person,” Shalabi says. “It hit me at that moment: There are many thousands of people detained in Syria right now. This is their reality — they’re living in an entirely different world.”
Bringing Syrian voices to Washington
Shalabi returned with a sense of responsibility to help share with Westerners the stories she’d heard during her travels. She had conducted the interviews in Arabic, which she grew up speaking at home, then translated them into English.
Her resulting paper, an exploration of the cruel treatment in Syrian prisons, details sectarian abuses and examines the civil war’s religious dimensions. While much of the West’s attention is trained on ISIS, Shalabi focuses on those who are too often left out of the narrative: Syrian citizens marginalized by the government of Bashar al-Assad, especially those at odds with its increasingly sectarian leanings.
“The more I read, the more responsibility I felt,” she says. “This is a way of bringing the Syrian voice into the West.”
Shalabi’s work earned her an undergraduate research award. “My mother cried when I won,” she says. “It meant the world to her that her children are able to do what her generation and her father’s generation couldn’t: speak a word of justice against an oppressive tyrant.”
“Malak has an unquestionable commitment to giving voice to oppressed populations,” says Karam Dana, assistant professor at the UW Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences. “Her findings can help us study religious communities that are scrutinized, oppressed and targeted around the world.”
Active in the community
Staying connected to her roots has also motivated Shalabi to help others forge — or regain — connections to their homelands. For nearly a year, she ran Free Syria Seattle, a grassroots organization that engaged local activists with Syrians in a stand against oppression by facilitating discussions, art exhibits and protests.
More recently, Shalabi has begun teaching Muslim youth groups about the history of Syria and the Middle East. “Some people don’t even flinch when they see the news about the violence in Syria,” she says. “I want to share what I’ve learned with them.” | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 3 | 86 | https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268201173/defiance-in-exile | en | Defiance in Exile | [
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] | null | [] | 2023-02-14T14:03:48+00:00 | This book offers a glimpse into Syrian refugee women’s stories of defiance and triumph in the aftermath of the Syrian uprising.The al-Zaatari Camp in north... | en | University of Notre Dame | https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268201173/defiance-in-exile | The children worked in silence. They worked without speaking to each other. They handled the hazardous products with their bare hands. They worked with no gloves or masks, no protective gear of any kind. They just worked.
An old radio played in the background, interrupted only by a commanding voice that came from the corner of the shop. The man gave the children instructions from time to time. He was the proprietor of the shop, and they were his workers. He rarely spoke, but when he did, the children listened. They also obeyed. They obeyed without delay, without question, without uttering a word. They obeyed without eye contact.
The three boys were Syrian refugees.
The shop was on the outskirts of Irbid, Jordan’s third-largest city, a mere twelve miles from the Syrian border. It’s also where we grew up and spent most of our young lives. After spending years abroad, we were just beginning to realize the effects of the Syrian refugee crisis in the city.
The scorching July sun, blended with the smoke and smell of burning gasoline from half a-century-old cars, made this rough and industrial part of the city particularly unbearable. This was no place for children.
We inched closer to the owner, trying to get a sense of why this was happening. He finally pulled out some rusty old chairs and offered us a seat.
“It seems he knows what he is doing,” we said, pointing to the older brother, who was applying black polish to the body of the car with his bare hands.
“Yes. This is American polish. It’s the best in the market. Top quality,” the owner answered and took a loud sip of his coffee.
“But this boy. He seems focused. What’s his story?” we asked.
“He is maskeen, you know. I gave them a job. I did it for God. I am just trying to help them. Their father died in Syria. Their mother is sick. They have nobody here to look after them.”
The three boys earned a total of fifteen U.S. dollars a day: five dollars each for a day’s work. The availability of such cheap, expendable labor made it possible for businesses to take advantage of the situation. Some employers also exploited the initial lack of regulations dealing with Syrian refugee workers. The country’s lawmakers had struggled to deal with the influx of refugees in the country.
As time passed, the government allowed some Syrians to obtain work permits and introduced a regulated leave system for refugees living in camps. However, new regulations could not fix Jordan’s already frail economy, which could not create enough jobs for citizens and refugees.
Cities such as Irbid witnessed a major change in the wake of the Syrian crisis. Urban centers became key hosts for refugee communities. Many refugees arrived in search of employment, hoping to find a job—any job—in major cities during such difficult times. But when there were not enough jobs, Syrian refugees often had to take difficult and hazardous jobs at low wages. Low as it may be, if you did the work, you got the pay, right? Well, sometimes you did.
Syrian refugees were in a gray area in Jordan—many not legally permitted to work. This left them at the mercy of employers. When Syrian refugees went unpaid, they could not report it to the authorities. Oftentimes, employers simply terminated workers and brought in new ones without consequences. Law and decision makers in Jordan have given much needed attention to labor conditions of Syrian refugees in Jordan, which has resulted recently in institutionalizing new regulations allowing Syrian refugees to work providing they adhere to these regulations.
The constant threat of being deported made things worse. As we came to learn later in al Zaatari Camp, there was a specific expression used there to describe this threat: “We’ll hurl you” back to Syria. The word literally means “to swing or launch,” as one would a shell or a missile.
When we talked to the eldest of the brothers, he was understandably reluctant to give any information. Why should he trust anyone? Adults were carrying on this atrocious war and causing children like himself to suffer. Even then, as he worked in that awful body shop, an adult was exploiting his hard labor.
But, that young boy emphatically told us, “Al-hamdullilah, at least we’re not in the camp.”
It was not the first time we had heard this. We had been speaking to refugee families in the city of Irbid and the surrounding villages. The one sentence echoed so many times was, “We are thankful we are not in the camp.” When we asked what that meant, we often heard, “You have to go there and see for yourselves.”
Umm Omar had told us so.
Umm Omar was a seventy-nine-year-old Syrian woman who had seen it all. She had lived under the Assad regime’s tyranny since the 1970s. At her old age, Umm Omar had made a difficult journey to seek refuge in Jordan.
Umm Omar was also our neighbor in Irbid. She came out to her apartment’s balcony early in the day and sat there, observing the busy streets. Things that sometime bothered us did not seem to even cross her mind. The screaming kids who played soccer until 2 a.m.? Well, they were just fine.
We greeted Umm Omar every morning and secretly waited for her well-wishes and prayer of tawfeeq. She had the warmth and kindness of a grandmother, one who had seen it all but was still smiling. That was powerful to us—that whatever Assad took away, he failed to take that.
We asked Umm Omar about al-Zaatari. She had a few words to say, but for us, these words were enough: “Ya Khalto. The injustice we saw in our lifetime cannot be described. We could not think of who we are or what we wanted. Thoughts scared us, but not anymore. We paid the price, and there is no going back. God help the women in this war. They have to act strong and listen to everyone else’s concerns, but who listens to them? It’s a long story that you have to hear from those who own it.”
That day, we made Umm Omar a promise. We would find these women and listen to their stories, and then we would then tell them to the world. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 3 | 90 | https://syrcox.org/syrian-community-oxfordshire-awards/ | en | Syrian community Oxfordshire Awards | [
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] | null | [] | 2021-10-30T19:06:38+00:00 | Award 1 March 2021 Oxford MP (Anneliese Dodds) thanks SYRCOX. Oxford MP (Anneliese Dodds) thanks all of the Syrian Community volunteers for their hard work and a brilliant job supporting the local community. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nYx7E8Fvu0&ab_channel=SyrianCommunityOxfordshire Award 2 November 2021 High Sheriff Award This award was made by The High Sheriff of Oxfordshire to Hadi Nuri (Founder… | en | SYRCOX | https://syrcox.org/syrian-community-oxfordshire-awards/ | Award 1 March 2021
Oxford MP (Anneliese Dodds) thanks SYRCOX.
Oxford MP (Anneliese Dodds) thanks all of the Syrian Community volunteers for their hard work and a brilliant job supporting the local community.
Award 2 November 2021
High Sheriff Award
This award was made by The High Sheriff of Oxfordshire to Hadi Nuri (Founder and Director of Syrcox) in recognition of great and valuable service to Oxfordshire’s community during the Covid 19 pandemic. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 66 | https://www.newstatesman.com/uncategorized/2013/12/bashar-al-assad-intimate-profile-mass-murderer | en | Bashar Al Assad: an intimate profile of a mass murderer | https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?d=https://www.newstatesman.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/Author-177x177.png&s=177?1721888081 | https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?d=https://www.newstatesman.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/Author-177x177.png&s=177?1721888081 | [
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] | 2013-12-30T13:23:42+00:00 | How Syria polite dictator won. | en | New Statesman | https://www.newstatesman.com/uncategorized/2013/12/bashar-al-assad-intimate-profile-mass-murderer | This post originally appeared on NewRepublic.com.
In 1982, not long after his father’s military pulverized a town called Hama, Bashar Al Assad got a jet ski.
It was the tail end of one of the bloodiest periods in Syrian history—what one intellectual called “the hunting time.” In Damascus, a white Peugeot 504 idled on every other corner with mukhabarat, or secret police, inside. Corruption and smuggling were ubiquitous; at least 30 percent of the country’s GDP, and probably much more, came from the black market. Everyday goods like bananas and paper tissues were hard to find; jet skis were practically unknown.
Bashar was 16 years old, a pudgy, frizzy-haired kid with chipmunk cheeks and a double chin he would never grow out of. He had his own bodyguards but was so shy about his appearance that he would cover his teeth with his hands when he smiled.
One day, as the story goes, Bashar was sitting at home with a friend when some boys he knew called. They were going on an excursion to Syria’s Mediterranean coast. Could they borrow his new toy?
Yes, yes, of course! Bashar said.
As soon as the boys hung up, Bashar summoned the head of the guards at the presidential palace. Some friends of mine might come and ask to use my jet ski, he said. If they do, tell them it’s broken.
If there’s one thing those who know him agree on, it’s that Bashar Al Assad is awfully eager to please. Friends and even some enemies portray the Syrian president as a kind and generous man, always ready to use his connections to provide a favor: for a job, a heart operation, or just the permit the government has required, under Syria’s authoritarian form of socialism, to buy a tank of propane gas for cooking food. “Easygoing,” say diplomats who have faced him in negotiations. “I would have described him as a real gentleman, before this,” says a Damascene businessman who was part of Assad’s social circle and has now fled the country to escape its ongoing civil war.
The subtext here is that Assad is weak; the polite phrasing, among educated Syrians, has always been that he “does not have the qualities of a leader.” That is to say, he does not have the gravitas of his ruthless, gnomic father, Hafez Al Assad, who ruled the country from 1970 until June 2000. Other Syrians put it less delicately. They call him donkey, giraffe, taweel wa habeel—a Levantine putdown for a big, bumbling doofus. Diplomats, analysts, and a few heads of state have been just as harsh, predicting his imminent downfall since the day he took power.
Two-thousand thirteen was the year when it seemed as if those predictions would finally come true. As the uprising against him ground into its third summer, his regime lost territory and international legitimacy. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states lavished cash and weaponry on rebel fighters. Even the United States was reluctantly edging closer to supporting the revolution with something more than words. Then, on August 21, Assad’s regime used the nerve gas sarin to kill hundreds of Syrian civilians, crossing the “red line” that Barack Obama had said would prompt a U.S. military response. It looked like the end. If a formerly untouchable military dictator like Hosni Mubarak could go down in Egypt, then why not Syria’s lanky, lisping president?
What outsiders have been slow to realize is that in the game Assad is playing, a weak man (or one perceived that way) can cling to his throne just as tenaciously, and violently, as a strongman. Over the course of his reign, he has learned how to turn his biggest shortcomings—his desire for approval, his tendency toward prevarication—into his greatest assets. The world wants him to give up the chemical munitions he used against his own citizens, and he has begun to do that. The world wants an end to the conflict that has killed more than 100,000 Syrians and displaced millions more; his government is now willing to participate in peace talks. This nebbishy second son, who was never meant to inherit the family regime, has proved exceptionally talented in the art of self-preservation.
“He’s more clever than all the Western and U.S. politicians, for sure,” Ayman Abdelnour, a close adviser to Assad before he fell out of favor and fled into exile, told me. Abdelnour then recalled—by way of explaining why Assad was so difficult to take down—something the young president would tell his inner circle about their foreign adversaries. “They are here for a few years,” Assad would say. “My father, seven presidents passed through him.”
When Hafez Al Assad seized power in 1970, Syria had just suffered through nearly a quarter century of coups. The former defense minister was determined to impose stability. He made his Baath Party the country’s “leading party,” meaning the only one with any real authority. And he wagered that an understanding between the urban Sunni merchant classes and the secular security state, increasingly dominated by members of his clan, would hold his regime together. But the calm did not last.
In the late ’70s, Sunni Islamists, led by Baath’s old rival, the Muslim Brotherhood, unleashed a campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations that killed several hundred officers and civil servants. Many of their targets were Alawites, the Muslim minority to which the Assads belong. The faith combines tenets of Shia Islam, elements of Christianity and even Zoroastrian mysticism, and heterodox beliefs like reincarnation. (The thirteenth-century Syrian theologian Ibn Taymiyya, a godfather of today’s militant Sunni Islam, issued three fatwas against its followers.) Historically, Syria’s Alawites were among the poorest of the poor. But during the country’s decades as a colony of France, many of them found a path out of poverty through the military. Alawites continued to use armed service to rise in influence after Syria won independence.
In June 1980, as the power struggle between Baath and Brotherhood took on an increasingly sectarian tone, Hafez narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. His military responded by unleashing its full wrath on the Brotherhood, crushing its Islamist uprising through torture, mass executions, commando raids, and the assault on Hama, a three-week siege that killed tens of thousands of people, the vast majority of them civilians. Hafez liked to call himself “a peasant and the son of a peasant,” but the Assads came to position themselves as a cosmopolitan bulwark against the primitive forces of militant Islam—a modern, enlightened clan ruling a backward people, gently but firmly, for their own good. “In the end,” says a former adviser, “they see themselves much higher than others, as a family.” Suriyet al-Assad, the Syria of Assad, would have to be preserved at all costs.
Hafez ran his household the way he ran his country: demanding total loyalty and tolerating no complaint. Bashar’s older brother, Basil, who was being groomed to take over the presidency, would bully and beat up his little brother, according to one former adviser; but his parents, in keeping with the family code, did not discuss the matter. As a father, Hafez “was not the type of person who ever said ‘bravo’ or good job—he rather told you about the things you should not do, the negative,” Bashar told his biographer, the Middle East history professor David Lesch.
Ali Duba, Hafez’s dreaded head of military intelligence, starred in another bit of Assad parenting lore. One day, according to a story told by Syrians with contacts in the regime, Hafez was sitting around with friends, indulging a rare moment of relaxation, when he exclaimed, “I wish my sons were tough, like Ali Duba’s sons!” Years later, when Duba tried to challenge Bashar’s succession, the son would not dare ask his father for help. It was all part of the strange silence, verging on hostility, between the two. “No, no!” shouted Abdelnour, in alarm, when I asked him if Bashar ever discussed his problems with Hafez. “Even in his mind, he doesn’t discuss it!”
“I do not think [Hafez] was very enthusiastic to see his son replacing him,” Farouk Al Sharaa, a former Syrian foreign minister, told Lesch, “simply because perhaps he never thought he was going to die.”
This coldness inspired in Bashar a quiet rebellion against his father’s cult of personality. In his heyday, Hafez staged massive, North Korean–style extravaganzas, with a sea of people flashing cards to make a picture of his face. Crowds would clap wildly whenever the leader’s name was mentioned; Bashar’s tiny gesture of defiance was refusing to join in, because he did not think a man should be applauded without doing something to earn it. He showed other flashes of independence. The Assad children attended exclusive, French-language schools, alongside the sons of the Damascene elite. Though they had people to do their homework for them, in the finest ruling-class tradition, friends of the family say a young Bashar always insisted on doing his own. “He wants to do things his way,” a former adviser says.
Bashar got his chance to prove himself in January 1994, when Basil crashed his Mercedes Benz on his way to the Damascus airport and died. Bashar was called in from London, where he was doing a residency in ophthalmology, to begin a residency in dictatorship. He planned to succeed where his father had failed: at being liked, not just feared. His Syria would be modern and technocratic, a new model for the Middle East. “He wants approval—from the West, from educated Damascenes, from the artists and the intellectual class,” says a Syrian intellectual who asks not to be named. But the boy who grew up without approval did not understand how to earn it. He lacked what the Syrian intellectual calls “the celestial imagination”—the ability to understand the motivations and desires of other people, who might be dreaming of something beyond how much they admire him.
After his return to Damascus, Bashar joined the officer corps and took over the Syrian Computer Society, formerly Basil’s fiefdom. He started working out and learned how to speak without his youthful habit of covering his mouth. He also set out to build a kitchen cabinet of young reformers and technocrats. Bashar’s people were fellow doctors, engineers, college professors: nerds. They wanted Internet access, better technology, and a country with less corruption and more freedom of expression. Abdelnour was now a close adviser and confidant who drew up proposals for “management by objective” and modernizing the regime from within.
When Hafez died in June 2000, a special referendum installed Bashar as president. He had finally forced out his nemesis, Ali Duba, a few months earlier and now pushed other members of the old guard into retirement. On New Year’s Day 2001, Bashar married Asma Al Akhras, an investment banker from an elite Sunni family who had grown up in London. “There was almost a sense that he came to power reluctantly,” says Mona Yacoubian, a former State Department official who lived in Syria during Hafez Al Assad’s reign and is now a senior adviser for the Middle East program at the Stimson Center. “He wasn’t Basil, who was the more thuggish, stronger brother. He had this beautiful wife. They struck this picture of what people hoped Syria would become.”
The new president announced a series of changes. He released hundreds of political prisoners and permitted Syrians to host salons in their homes to discuss politics and ideas, which was previously forbidden. He allowed private ownership of banks. The government even granted a license to the country’s first independent newspaper, The Lamplighter, a satirical broadsheet run by the brilliant political cartoonist Ali Ferzat. And Syria finally got Internet access, albeit limited and heavily supervised. “At the time, I and millions of Syrians were hoping for the best, and wanting for him to open up the economy, to liberalize politics, to allow freedoms,” says Murhaf Jouejati, a professor at the National Defense University, who met with Bashar early in his presidency. “We were expecting that he would.”
Bashar took pains to appear more modern than his father. He liked to throw on jeans and drive his Audi A6 to Naranj, an upscale restaurant with an open kitchen that served an elegantly simple take on Syrian peasant cuisine. According to a friend, Bashar was partial to a toshi, a Damascene pressed sandwich—classic, regular-guy street food. Another story told of him walking into a restaurant in Aleppo unannounced and politely asking an old woman how she was enjoying her meal. “There is what I call the ‘modest king’ theory in Middle Eastern history: He wears normal clothes, he goes among the people, he sits normally,” says the Syrian intellectual. “And Bashar fits into this tradition.”
But the gestures were mostly symbolic; the so-called “Damascus Spring” would prove short-lived. In January 2001, a group of Syrian activists, intellectuals, and professionals, encouraged by the apparent opening of their country’s political culture, issued a declaration known as the “Statement of 1,000.” They called for an end to martial law and emergency rule and the release of all remaining political prisoners. (Then, as now, nobody knew how many the regime held.) They also demanded democratic, multiparty elections, under the supervision of an independent judiciary. Some of the activists had the temerity to form new political parties.
The Assad regime struck back immediately, beginning a campaign of harassment and intimidation that would last, with varying intensity, for the next ten years. A number of the citizens responsible for the Statement of 1,000 were arrested. By early 2002, the government had forced The Lamplighter out of print and thrown leaders of the fledgling discussion groups in jail. Despite his early feints at democracy, Assad was not interested in surrendering even an inch of his power. Suriyet al-Assad needed his benevolent guidance.
To Bashar and his wife, it wasn’t the Syrian regime that required real reform. It was the Syrian people. Asma’s official biography, passed to me by an old friend of Bashar’s, distills their governing ideology. It reads like a tract from Rand Paul: Syrians need to stop depending on the state and assume “personal responsibility for achieving the common good,” the document proclaims, adding, “the sustainable answer to social need is not aid but opportunity” and “creating circumstances where people can help themselves.” That the Assad family and its loyalists have been helping themselves to Syria’s national wealth for decades does not enter into this narrative.
During the winter of 2006, one of Assad’s advisers showed up for a meeting at the president’s office. He found his boss hyperventilating, unable to speak. “They will reach me,” Assad finally gasped. The adviser desperately attempted to calm him down, offering him juice and coffee. Assad was in an abject state of panic—“complete moral collapse” is how the adviser recalls the scene. After 15 minutes, the dictator collected himself and began the meeting, as if nothing had happened.
Assad was under pressure from several sides. Early in the war on terror, Syria had been an unofficial partner of the United States, even covertly torturing suspected militants. But following the fall of Baghdad in 2003, the Bush administration began hinting that Syria could be the next candidate for regime change, the penalty for its patronage of Hamas and Hezbollah. Assad started allowing Sunni insurgents and jihadi funds to flow through his country into Iraq, hoping to help bog down the United States. But he was also coming under fire over the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the Sunni former prime minister of Lebanon, who had begun to challenge Syrian meddling in his country in the months before his death. A United Nations investigation into the killing stopped just short of implicating regime officials. There was talk that Assad himself could be brought up on charges by a special U.N. tribunal.
Despots who find themselves trapped in confrontations with other countries rely on a venerable set of tactics. Some tyrants embrace conflict, using it to rally their subjects behind them. Others, like Hafez Al Assad, perfect the art of intransigence. He was “a stone wall,” says one senior Western diplomat who knew both father and son. Bashar, however, took a very different approach: “[He] was much more supple, much more ready to talk details. He’s very smooth-edged. Very agreeable—nothing seemed to be beyond imagining.” Bashar was so eager to create an impression of pliancy, says another diplomat, that during one round of high-level negotiations, he launched into discussions before the pre-talk photo op was even over. His foreign minister had to quietly remind him not to discuss state matters in front of the press.
For years, many Western analysts and diplomats have viewed Assad as malleable, even naïve. But his former aides describe a man who is accustomed to being underestimated and adept at exploiting those misperceptions. Before negotiations, Assad would tell his team to let the other side think they had won: “Give them always nice words, nice meetings, nice phrases,” Abdelnour recalls him saying. “They will be happy, they will say good things about us, and they cannot withdraw from it later.” In the end, though, Assad rarely delivers on the concessions that he grants so courteously. He always has an excuse, a variable beyond his control: Yes, he would try to stop the flow of jihadists into Iraq, but he could not police the entire border.
According to another former aide, Assad took pleasure in toying with the West. “He told me once, ‘When I sit with the Arabs, it’s a session of takazu’—mutual lying, we say in Arabic,” says the former adviser. “ ‘But when I sit with those foreigners, and you see me on television, really it’s a game of Tom and Jerry.’ ”
Assad also had a different, homegrown model for his approach. “Give them a sandwichet Ghawwar,” has been one of Bashar’s instructions to his team when the regime feels squeezed. Ghawwar Al Toshi is a beloved Syrian TV character, a stubborn prankster with a lush mustache and an old-school Damascene accent. He seems bumbling and feckless, a little like a Syrian Mr. Bean, but his implausible capers always somehow work out to his advantage. In one famous episode, Ghawwar opens a sandwich stand; instead of buying all the necessary ingredients, he takes a single piece of meat and ties a string to its end. His customers walk away, unaware that Ghawwar is about to pull back the fillings and leave them with nothing but empty bread.
Assad can play the gag expertly. By 2007, the Hariri investigation was foundering. The United States was losing control in Iraq and, once again, pleading for his help reining in Islamic militants. He had not only survived his crises; he emerged from them stronger, or so he believed. He thought he was creating a legacy of his own. When a Syrian TV announcer called Hafez the greatest Arab leader in history, Bashar had one of his advisers, Buthaina Shaaban, call the announcer and order him never to say it again.
In October, after some back-and-forth, one of Assad’s high school friends agreed to meet with me. He asked that I not use his name, or any identifying characteristics, because he was afraid the opposition would make him a target. “Even the secular guys are really crazy,” he said. “You could get whacked really easily.”
We met in a hotel lobby on New York City’s Upper East Side. Immediately, he suggested that we go somewhere else. “I don’t like it here,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the side entrance where he had specified we meet. A surprising number of people from Assad’s inner circle have fled to the United States in the past few years as their lives in Syria, which had been quite comfortable, became less so.
Assad spent his first term in office refining an economic policy based on cronyism, privatizing the old state-run industries without actually creating any new competition. It was gangster capitalism cloaked in neoliberal free-market rhetoric. His maternal cousin, Rami Makhlouf, became the symbol of the ruling clan’s racketeering. Makhlouf controlled a network of extraordinarily lucrative monopolies, from one of the national cell-phone carriers to a chain of duty-free stores. After bringing in the Egyptian telecom giant Orascom as a partner to develop Syriatel, he edged the Egyptians out and kept the spoils for himself, which discouraged other foreign investors and left Syria’s economy more isolated than ever.
Experts have been warning for years that Syria was headed for a demographic disaster if economic conditions did not improve. “Signs of internal restlessness are increasing,” Yassin Haj-Saleh, a dissident who spent 17 years in jail under Hafez, warned me back in the summer of 2005. “If we have a social explosion, God forbid, it might take on a sectarian character.” Over the next few years, the country absorbed more than a million Iraqi refugees, straining its already weak infrastructure. A devastating drought began in 2007 and dragged on for three years, exacerbated by the government’s mismanagement of water and land resources. As the Assads burnished their international profile by hosting Sting and Angelina Jolie in Damascus, 80 percent of the people from the drought-stricken areas, mostly agricultural peasants, were left destitute, so poor that they subsisted on bread and tea.
In January 2011, as popular uprisings spread through Tunisia and Egypt, Assad spoke with two reporters from The Wall Street Journal. “We have more difficult circumstances than most of the Arab countries, and in spite of that Syria is stable,” Assad said. “You have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people.” Syrians, he insisted, did not want “cosmetic” reforms just to please the West; they knew that the only real solution was to “upgrade the whole society.”
That February, a group of children in Deraa, a dusty southern Syrian town full of poor agricultural migrants, got tired of waiting for their upgrade. With cans of spray-paint, they took up the revolutionary cry spreading across North Africa and Yemen: The people want the fall of the regime. Security forces rounded up 15 of them.
Here is how people in Syria tell the story of what happened next: In March, the boys’ fathers went to Atef Najib, the head of political security in the province and a relative of the Assads. They laid their keffiyehs on the table to show that they would not leave without their sons. “You want your sons back?” Najib laughed, throwing their keffiyehs into the trash. “Bring me your wives, and I will make you more sons!” Protests broke out; within the week, 120 anti-government demonstrators were dead.
This time, the world’s approval would be out of reach. So Assad set about making himself the least-bad option. On March 30, 2011, as the conflict escalated, he gave a defiant and conspiratorial speech casting himself as the victim of “foreign powers” who had stirred up insurrection in a bid to destroy Syria. “They adopt the principle,” he said of his enemies, “of ‘lie until you believe your lie.’ ”
In fact, it is Assad who has done exactly that. Calmly and deliberately, he has painted a picture that in the beginning was not completely accurate: The demonstrators, he said, were jihadists who would bring Afghanistan-type chaos to the country. Then he sat back and waited for it to become true. “He’s very strategic. From the very first day, he was talking about terrorists and Syria’s national unity,” says a former regime official, who has now defected to the United States. “People were talking about democracy, human rights, silly stuff—not silly, but not strategic—and he is talking about Al Qaeda.”
And if a series of well-timed massacres by the regime would provoke outrage in the West, Assad also knew that images of carnage would cause Gulf states to arm the Islamist opposition and escalate the sectarian warfare. This was his strategy: to make intervention so unpalatable that the international community would take no steps to alter the course of the conflict. “These jihadists who have come in, largely courtesy of private Gulf money, these are his enemies of choice,” says Frederic C. Hof, the Obama administration’s former envoy to the Syrian opposition and currently a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “I call it a coalition of co-dependency.”
As the Al Qaeda element grew stronger, the regime became increasingly aggressive at playing it up. With Islamist rebels seizing territory closer and closer to Israeli-occupied areas, the opposition posted a video of a half-dozen fighters driving along the border of the Golan Heights. “For forty years, not one shot has been fired against Israel from here,” one of the fighters shouts in Arabic. “Allahu akbar!” At that, some of his companions raise their Kalashnikovs with one hand and shoot them into the air. “The regime made sure that this video was all over [the Internet] the next day,” says the former Assad official. “They took their whole media machine and they put it everywhere, to show the Israelis: Look what’s coming.”
Meanwhile, the regime methodically discredited the revolution’s moderate, secular factions with sophisticated dirty tricks. For the first four or five months of the war, security forces treated detainees from Damascus with relative caution, even as they massacred villagers in rural areas—a shrewd way to make opposition claims of brutality look hysterical to the capital’s middle and upper classes. “If you were from a good family, they wouldn’t torture you,” says Mohamad Al Bardan, a nonviolent opposition leader who now lives abroad. “People like me, at one point, we felt they were stupid. They are not stupid at all.”
Later, when what Graham Greene called “the torturable class” expanded to wealthy, Internet-connected urbanites, Assad and his henchmen adopted a tactic that would have made Jerry the mouse proud. A rumor would swirl that the regime had detained a certain supporter of the revolution. The opposition would mobilize: media alerts, petitions, pleas to international human rights organizations. Once the alarm had reached a frenzy, the supposedly jailed activist would appear on state-run television, making the opposition look unreliable. “They did that multiple times,” says Bardan. In one of the most wicked examples, word spread that Alawite regime thugs had beheaded a beautiful young Sunni Muslim girl because her brother was an opposition activist. When she resurfaced a few weeks later, she told a different story: She had run away from home because her brother was abusing her.
The regime is constantly refining its dark arts of propaganda and deception. When it captures an activist, his comrades often try to shut down his social-media accounts as quickly as possible, to prevent the regime from mining them for intelligence. As security forces figured this out, they began forcing detainees to reopen their accounts. Social-media companies would get a message supposedly from the detainee, claiming to be free and complaining that he had been maliciously targeted. When activists tried to explain what really happened, it sounded like a conspiracy theory. After a few of these incidents, the social-media companies weren’t sure whom to believe. “They thought we were playing, doing some kids’ stuff,” says Bardan. “It’s difficult to describe to any American, that this is the way that we live in Syria. … Different cultures, different societies cannot understand exactly how evil could be.”
By the time the Syrian military used the nerve gas sarin to kill hundreds of civilians in the ring of suburbs around Damascus on August 21, 2013, the jihadists were so ascendant, and the secular opposition so discredited, that Assad could claim the rebels carried out the attacks and not be universally dismissed. His version of events did not have to be credible. It just had to create confusion and doubt. In a Pew poll conducted eight days after the attacks, only 53 percent of Americans believed there was “clear evidence” that Assad was to blame. Even supposedly better-informed authorities, including the revered journalist Seymour Hersh, entertained the regime’s carefully planted suggestions.
While the Obama administration never seriously doubted Assad’s role in the attack, it accepted other crucial pieces of the dictator’s narrative. “The regime has been extraordinarily successful with a very disciplined and single–minded disinformation campaign,” says Hof. “Even in the executive branch, you’ve got people arguing over what’s the bigger threat, Assad or Al Qaeda. You’ve got people worrying about all kinds of hypotheses—what if Assad were overthrown? What would happen to Syria? As if what’s happening to Syria is something we can all live with.”
According to one former Assad aide, about a week after the sarin-gas attack, as the White House vacillated over how to respond, Assad called his top military and intelligence chiefs into a meeting. This was unusual; he rarely gathers them in one place, preferring one-on-one meetings. Assad told the men not to worry: If the United States launches air strikes, they will be merely cosmetic—a face-saving measure for Obama. We are safe, he told them.
One recurring theory about Assad, which the regime has perhaps subtly encouraged, holds that he is not really running his country, but is in thrall to a shadowy set of figures that varies according to whom you’re talking—in some versions, it is his father’s old circle; in others, the Alawite elite. (This theory was especially appealing to the Western governments who once hoped that high-level defections could help weaken Assad, and perhaps even supply his replacement.) Most of the former regime officials I spoke to rejected that idea. “This is a kind of one-man show,” says a former regime official. “The system will not collapse as long as Assad does not collapse. Any other person is replaceable.”
Under the deus ex machina set in motion by Russia, Assad has until the middle of 2014 to facilitate the removal and destruction of all of Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpiles and manufacturing capabilities. Even though this agreement does nothing to threaten Assad’s hold on power—Moscow can veto any U.N. punishment for the regime’s failure to comply—it has been widely celebrated. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is overseeing the process, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Assad joked in front of reporters from a Lebanese newspaper that he should have received the award himself.
When I asked one former regime official about what will happen next, he suggested the following scenario: International chemical weapons inspectors are operating out of the fortress-like Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus. Assad knows that a few of these inspectors will be Western intelligence agents. Syrian operatives will figure out who they are and quietly approach them with tips: a known terrorist is in this province; we have pictures; we’re fighting Al Qaeda, just like you. “And I will not be surprised at all if the American and Syrian intelligence agencies work together again,” says one defector. “If not today, tomorrow. If not directly, indirectly. The door will be open.”
The last time Bashar Al Assad stood for reelection in Syria, where the presidential term lasts for seven years, was in May 2007. He had no credible opponent and won with 97.6 percent of the vote. Instead of his father’s Pyongyang-style extravaganzas, Bashar celebrated with a more postmodern spectacle: an exquisitely orchestrated “uprising” of support, part Roman triumph, part faux Orange Revolution. Crowds of people danced debkeh in the streets with choreographed spontaneity, waving torches and posters of Bashar and singing: “We love you, yes! We love you!”
Syria’s next presidential election is scheduled for May. In an October interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel, Assad played coy about whether he will seek a third term. “I cannot decide now whether I am going to run,” he said. “It’s still early, because you have to probe the mood and will of the people.” But he seemed to like his chances. “Who isn’t against me?” Assad said. “You’ve got the United States, the West, the richest countries in the Arab world, and Turkey. All this and I am killing my people, and they still support me! Am I a Superman? No. So how can I still stay in power after two and a half years? Because a big part of the Syrian people support me.” Besides, Assad added, “Where is another leader who would be similarly legitimate?”
Annia Ciezadlo, a veteran Middle East correspondent, is the author of Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War.
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wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 89 | https://www.dukeupress.edu/dissident-syria | en | Duke University Press | [
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] | null | /Assets/DUP/favicon/apple-icon-57x57.png | null | “Dissident Syria is a powerful, insightful, and incisively analyzed book that deserves to be read by students, academics, and policymakers alike. miriam cooke has succeeded most admirably in her goal to bring Syria's cultural harvest outside the country.” — Margaret L. Venzke, Middle East Journal
“Dissident Syria provides an engaging picture of Syrian cultural life. . . .” — Edward Ziter, Theatre Journal
“A thorough – and heartbreaking – account of creative life in Syria, and an implicit homage to the indomitable human spirit, in this case Arab men who can be counted among the great dissidents of our times. . . . Miriam Cooke’s book on dissidents in Syria exceeds its original purpose by opening the door to Syrian intellectuals, writers and filmmakers. It points to a crucial problem – the abuse of power that has turned that nation into a police state – and opines that Syria, with all its richness and diversity, deserves better. Given real peace, both inside and outside its borders, Syria could again become a center of creativity, culture and civilization.” — Etel Adnan, Al Jadid
“[cooke’s] conversations with local authors make up the most interesting part of the book, especially those who discuss the opportunities and constraints they felt as writers in Syria, the literary lifestyle, and what they’ve endured to create their works. And her summaries of the major works allow readers to glimpse into a hard-to-access literature, little of which has been translated or made available to Western audiences.” — Jessica Jacobson, feminist review blog
“[cooke] candidly writes about her initial failures to grasp nuances of Syria's culture, including giving a public lecture on women's literature in Syria with Assad's pronouncement on culture as its title. . . . Yet Ms. cooke's persistence paid off with startling revelations about the middle ground in Syrian art between collaboration and incarceration.” — Richard Byrne, Chronicle of Higher Education
“[m]iriam cooke’s Dissident Syria is a useful examination of Syrian artists’ struggle to produce critical works while on the one hand evading reenlistment by the Syrian regime to bolster its legitimacy, and on the other, avoiding the fate of many Syrian artists and dissidents: prison, or worse.” — Michael Page, Syrian Studies Association Newsletter
“cooke offers a scathing critique of the current regime, a heartfelt identification with the dissidents among whom she worked and lived, and a thoughtful analysis of the contradictions not only of Syrian society and culture, but of scholarship on the Middle East as well. For this reason this text should be required reading for upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level courses in Middle East studies, literature, human rights, politics, and public policy. The lessons to be learned from Syria, and from this analysis, extend far beyond the limits of Middle East studies or Arabic letters.” — Jonathan Shannon, Monthly Review
“cooke usefully destabilizes the category of ‘women writers’ without undermining its potential power, showing how the controversies among various literary societies and writers in Syria are caught up in multiple contexts and shifting centers of power in an ever-changing Syria.” — Jill M. Hoslin, Contemporary Women's Writing
“cooke’s book portrays for us the story of Syria’s history from a unique and interesting angle, through the eyes and via the stories, biographies, creative works, and thoughts of Syrian intellectuals and creative artists.” — Eyal Zisser, Middle Eastern Studies
“In Dissident Syria, scholar of contemporary Arabic literature miriam cooke sheds light on the heretofore neglected world of Syrian oppositional culture. . . . This important work will attract specialists in a range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Dissident Syria will appeal to those interested in Syrian, Arab, and Middle Eastern expressive culture. It adds an important dimension to the literature on the relationship between politics and the arts. It also forms a significant contribution to a growing body of work on prison literature. cooke’s accessible, engaging style makes Dissident Syria an ideal choice for undergraduate courses in the same range of topics.” — Christa Salamandra, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies
“Including notes and a few illustrations, this book of personal observations is a valuable contribution to the study of dissident literature and culture, particularly in the Middle East. Recommended.” — C. E. Farah, Choice
“This book fills a major gap in our knowledge of the intellectual history of Syria’s writers, filmmakers, and artists.” — Ja’far Muhibullah, Digest of Middle East Studies
“This volume is a fascinating record of the limits of freedom.” — Peter Clark, Banipal | |||||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 64 | https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-13216195 | en | Bashar al-Assad's inner circle | [
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] | 2011-04-27T16:52:11+00:00 | Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is surrounded by military and intelligence figures, most of whom are either related to him or are members of his minority Alawite community. | en | BBC News | https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-13216195 | Before his promotion to general, Maher commanded a Republican Guard brigade. This provided him with valuable military experience and allowed him to establish personal ties with many officers.
In 2000, shortly after Bashar became president, Maher became a member of Baath Party's second highest body, the Central Committee.
He has a reputation for being excessively violent and emotionally unstable, and allegedly shot and wounded his brother-in-law, Asef Shawkat.
In 2000, Maher is reported to have helped persuade Bashar to put an end to the political openness seen during the first few months of his rule - the short-lived "Damascus Spring". Years of suppression followed.
Three years later, Israeli media said Maher had attended a series of informal meetings in Jordan with the director of Israel's foreign minister and two Israeli-Arab businessmen to discuss resuming peace talks.
In 2005, Maher and Shawkat were both mentioned in a preliminary report by UN investigators as one of the people who might have planned the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri.
When mass pro-democracy protests began in the southern city of Deraa in March 2011, Maher's fourth armoured division - a successor to Rifaat al-Assad's Defence Brigades which is deployed on Syrian territory bordering the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and controls the capital's approaches - was sent in to crush them. Human rights activists say dozens of people have since been killed.
At one protest in Deraa, many shouted slogans denouncing Maher, including: "Maher you coward. Send your troops to liberate the Golan."
By late April, witnesses said the fourth division's tanks had cut off Deraa and were shelling residential areas, while troops were storming homes and rounding up people believed to have been taking part in the protests.
The US subsequently announced sanctions against Maher, saying the fourth division had "played a leading role in the Syrian regime's actions in Deraa". The EU also imposed sanctions on Maher, describing him as the "principal overseer of violence against demonstrators".
In May 2011, a video emerged purportedly showing Maher, dressed in a leather jacket and surrounded by police officers, firing a rifle at unarmed protesters in the Damascus suburb of Barzeh, external.
The next month, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters: "I say this clearly and openly, from a humanitarian point of view, [Maher] is not behaving in a humane manner. And he is chasing after savagery."
Rumours persist that Maher might challenge his brother's rule - much like his uncle Rifaat attempted to seize power from Hafez in 1983 - but there is no evidence that he has sufficient power to challenge his rule.
Born in 1969, Mr Makhlouf took over the businesses built up by his father, Mohammed, the brother of Hafez al-Assad's wife, Anisa Makhlouf. After Bashar became president in 2000, Mr Makhlouf's financial empire expanded.
In 2001, he and the Egyptian telecommunications company, Orascom, were awarded one of Syria's two mobile phone operator licences. After a court dispute over control of Syriatel, Orascom was forced to sell its 25% stake.
When Riad Seif, an opposition MP, criticised the "irregularities" in the awarding of the phone licences, he was arrested and imprisoned.
In addition to Syriatel, Mr Makhlouf is believed to control two banks, free trade zones, duty free shops, a construction company, an airline, two TV channels, and imports luxury cars and tobacco. He also owns shares in and is vice-chairman of Cham Holding, considered Syria's largest private company, and has stakes in several oil and gas companies.
In 2008, the US treasury banned US firms and individuals from doing business with Mr Makhlouf, and froze his US-based assets. It accused him of "corrupt behaviour", "disadvantaging innocent Syrian businessmen and entrenching a regime that pursues oppressive and destabilising politics".
"Makhlouf has manipulated the Syrian judicial system and used Syrian intelligence officials to intimidate his business rivals. He employed these techniques when trying to acquire exclusive licenses to represent foreign companies in Syria and to obtain contract awards," a statement said.
"Despite President Assad's highly publicised anti-corruption campaigns, Makhlouf remains one of the primary centres of corruption in Syria."
The US imposed sanctions on Mr Makhlouf's younger brother, Hafez- a senior official in the General Security Directorate - in 2007 for his connection with efforts to reassert Syrian control over Lebanon.
Former Vice-President Abdul Halim Khaddam said in 2009 that Bashar's rule had been marked by "transforming corruption into an institution" headed by Mr Makhlouf. He said corruption, suppression of dissent, and economic hardship were pushing Syrians over the edge.
Two years later, anti-government protesters in Deraa initially directed their wrath at Mr Makhlouf, some chanting: "We'll say it clearly, Rami Makhlouf is robbing us". A branch of Syriatel in Deraa was set on fire.
Opposition websites later accused Mr Makhlouf of financing pro-government demonstrations both across Syria and abroad, by providing flags, meals and money for those participating.
In May 2011, the EU imposed sanctions against Mr Makhlouf, saying he was an "associate of Maher al-Assad" who "bankrolls the regime allowing violence against demonstrators".
The tycoon insists his businesses are legitimate and provide professional employment for thousands of Syrians.
Following the US sanctions announcement in 2007, he told the BBC that the designation was tantamount to "a medal we hang on our chest", and was part of a "political ploy aimed at undermining important individuals".
President Assad is reported to have been angered by an interview Mr Makhlouf gave to the New York Times in May 2011, in which he said the government would fight "until the end" and that it would "not suffer alone". He also said that regime change in Syria could push the Middle East into turmoil and even war. Syria's ambassador to the US responded by saying Mr Makhlouf was a "private citizen" who did not "speak on behalf of the Syrian authorities".
The next month Mr Makhlouf announced that he was quitting business and moving into charity work. He told a televised news conference that he would offer shares of Syriatel to the poor and that profits would go, in part, to the families of those killed in the uprising. Profits from other businesses would go to charitable and humanitarian organisations, Mr Makhlouf added, promising not to enter any new business venture that would bring him personal gain.
Opposition figures doubted the sincerity, though it did seem a member of the president's inner circle was being forced to publicly step aside.
In August 2011, the US imposed sanctions on Syriatel, saying the Syrian government had directed the company to "sever network connectivity in areas where attacks were planned" and that it had recorded mobile-phone conversations for the security services.
Born in 1946, Lt Gen Mamluk is the director of the Baath Party Regional Command's National Security Bureau (NSB), which in theory co-ordinates the work of Syria's intelligence agencies and formulates recommendations for the president. In practice, however, the agencies operate with a high degree of autonomy, answerable mainly to the president.
Between 2005 and 2012, he was head of the General Security Directorate (State Security), where he was involved in some of the most sensitive issues concerning Syria. Before that he was deputy head of the feared Air Force Intelligence.
A leaked US classified diplomatic cable discussing whether to impose financial sanctions on Gen Mamluk in 2007 said he was well known for his "objectionable activities regarding Lebanon, and his suppressing Syrian civil society and the internal opposition". The embassy in Damascus said sanctions against Gen Mamluk would "resonate well" in the country.
Despite this, Gen Mamluk discussed efforts to increase co-operation between Washington and Damascus on terrorism issues at a surprise meeting with US diplomats in 2010, according to a leaked US classified cable. He said the GSD had been more successful at fighting terrorism in the region because "we are practical and not theoretical".
In April 2011, the US government imposed sanctions on Gen Mamluk, saying he had been responsible for human rights abuses, including through the use of violence against civilians.
His agency had repressed internal dissent, monitored individual citizens, and had been "involved in the Syrian regime's actions in Deraa, where protesters were killed by Syrian security services", it alleged.
The next month, the EU also imposed sanctions on Gen Mamluk, saying he had been involved in efforts to crush anti-government protesters.
A Sunni from Damascus, he is said to be on good terms with all of Syria's intelligence agencies - Jamil Hassan, the head of Air Force Intelligence, and Mohammed Dib Zaitoun, the General Security Directorate chief, were once his assistants.
The US also said in April that Gen Mamluk had overseen a communications programme directed at opposition group and had received both technological and analytical support from Iran's ministry of intelligence and security (MOIS). Mamluk had "worked with the MOIS to provide both technology and training to Syria, to include internet monitoring technology" and "requested MOIS training and assistance on social media monitoring and other cyber tools for the GSD", it added.
Rami Abdul Rahman, the head of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Gen Mamluk had also met several opposition figures inside Syria to "incite them to renounce violence and back the reforms of the Assad regime".
President Assad asked Gen Mamluk to lead the National Security Bureau after its director, Gen Hisham Ikhtiar, died after a bomb attack on its headquarters on 18 July 2012, Syrian officials and Lebanese media reported. The blast also killed Mr Assad's brother-in-law, Deputy Defence Minister Gen Assef Shawkat, Defence Minister Gen Daoud Rajiha, and former Defence Minister Hassan Turkomani, who was in charge of the security forces' crisis management office.
Gen Qudsiya became deputy director of the National Security Bureau (NSB) in July 2012. He had previously been head of Military Intelligence, the paramount security agency in Syria.
Before replacing the president's late brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, as military intelligence chief sometime between 2005 and 2009, he was head of Air Force Intelligence.
Earlier in his career, Gen Qudsiya - an Alawite born in 1953 - served as head of the Republican Guard's security office, and as personal secretary to the president.
Gen Qudsiya was asked in 2008 to lead the security committee investigating the assassination of Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus. The committee notably did not include Gen Shawkat, who was criticised for failing to prevent the killing.
In May 2011, Gen Qudsiya was included in a list of Syrian officials subjected to EU sanctions for their roles in violence against protesters. Military Intelligence is said to have played a prominent role in the crackdown, firing on crowds of protesters and killing a large number of civilians.
The US also imposed sanctions on Gen Qudsiya later that month, accusing his agency of using force against and arresting demonstrators participating in the unrest.
Gen Qusiya was appointed Gen Ali Mamluk's deputy at the National Security Bureau following the bomb attack on its headquarters in Damascus on 18 July, Syrian officials and Lebanese media reported.
Maj Gen Rafiq Shahada is believed to be the head of Military Intelligence, the paramount security agency in Syria, which has a reputation for ruthless efficiency and whose leaders have wielded considerable influence over presidents.
As well as strategic and tactical intelligence, the agency has a critical role in ensuring the leadership's physical security and the loyalty of the army.
In August 2011, the EU imposed sanctions on Gen Shahada, describing him as head of Military Intelligence's Branch 293, which is responsible for internal affairs, in Damascus. He was accused of being "directly involved in repression and violence against the civilian population" in the capital. The EU also said Gen Shahada was also serving as adviser to President Assad for strategic questions and military intelligence.
Gen Shahada was promoted to chief of Military Intelligence in July 2012 after his predecessor, Abdul Fatah Qudsiya, became deputy head of the National Security Bureau, according to Syrian officials and Lebanese media reports. One unconfirmed report said Gen Shahada had until then been head of Military Intelligence in Homs.
Maj Gen Hassan replaced Abdul Fatah Qudsiya as head of Air Force Intelligence in 2009.
Though smaller than Military Intelligence, AFI is seen by some as the elite agency of Syria's intelligence empire. The agency owes its power to Hafez al-Assad, who was air force chief before coming to power in a coup. It plays a leading role in operations against Islamist opposition groups, as well as covert actions abroad, and has a reputation for brutality.
Gen Hassan, an Alawite, previously served as a security official in the eastern governorate of Deir al-Zour.
In late April 2011, personnel from Air Force Intelligence fired tear gas and live ammunition to disperse crowds of demonstrators who took to the streets in Damascus and other cities after noon prayers, killing at least 43 people, according to the US. In one incident in Nawa, PSD agents reportedly opened fire on a crowd of protesters waiving olive branches.
The next month, the EU said Gen Hassan was "involved in the repression against the civilian population" during the recent anti-government unrest, and imposed a travel ban and asset freeze on him.
Maj Gen Zaitoun, a Sunni born in 1951, is reportedly the new head of the General Security Directorate (GSD), which is the most powerful civilian intelligence agency and plays an important role in quelling internal dissent.
Tasked primarily with safeguarding against and preventing domestic subversion and organised crime, the GSD is organised into three branches - internal security, external security and Palestinian affairs. It controls the civilian police and the border guards, and has primary responsibility for surveillance of the Baath Party, the state bureaucracy and the general population.
Gen Zaitoun was previously head of the Political Security Directorate (PSD) between 2009 and 2012, and before then deputy head of the GSD.
In 2008, he was asked - along with other members of the president's inner circle - to investigate the assassination of Hezbollah's Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus.
In May 2011, the EU accused Gen Zaitoun of involvement in violence against demonstrators, and announced a travel ban and asset freeze. The US also imposed sanctions on him later that month, accusing him of human rights abuses.
Gen Zaitoun became head of the GSD in July 2012 following the bomb attack on the National Security Bureau in Damascus which killed four senior security chiefs, Syrian officials and Lebanese media reported.
Born in 1953, he is a former chief of Syrian Military Intelligence in Lebanon, and was in the post when Rafik Hariri was assassinated.
Gen Ghazali assumed command in 2002, and was the "implementing agent of Syrian policies in Lebanon" until the Syrian withdrawal in 2005, according to the US treasury department. It accused Gen Ghazali of manipulating Lebanese politics to ensure officials and public policy remained committed to Syria's goals and interests. He reportedly used his influence to ensure former President Emile Lahoud's term of office was renewed, while Lebanon's military chiefs allegedly reported to him.
After the withdrawal from Lebanon little was heard of him. However, at the beginning of the protests in the city of Deraa, Gen Ghazali was sent by Bashar al-Assad to assure locals of the president's good intentions. He reportedly told them: "We have released the children" - a reference to several teenagers who were arrested for writing anti-regime graffiti inspired by the events in Egypt and Tunisia.
In May 2011, the EU said Gen Ghazali was head of Military Intelligence in Damascus Countryside (Rif Dimashq) governorate, which borders Deraa governorate, and was involved in "violence against the civilian population". The US imposed individual sanctions on Gen Ghazali the next month, saying he was a high-ranking member of Military Intelligence.
In July 2012, Gen Ghazali was appointed head of the PSD following the bomb attack on the National Security Bureau in Damascus, Syrian officials and Lebanese media reported. His appointment firmly quashed rumours that he had defected the previous week.
Gen Kheirbek is a member of the Alawite Kalabiya tribe, to which Bashar al-Assad belongs. Their families are also connected by marriage - a relative is married to one of Rifaat al-Assad's daughters.
The general, who was born in 1937 and is reported to have medical problems, has long served the Syrian regime and remains an influential adviser to the president. He was a very close adviser to the late Hafez al-Assad before being appointed deputy director of the General Security Directorate (GSD) in 1999.
He served in the position until 2006, when he was named deputy vice-president for security affairs. The next year, the US froze his assets for "contributing to the government of Syria's problematic behaviour", which it said included support of international terrorism, the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, and the undermining of efforts in Iraq.
A leaked US diplomatic cable described Gen Kheirbek as Syria's "point-man for its relationship with Iran". It said designating him could "heighten Syrian and regional concerns about the [government's] willingness to accommodate an expansionary Iranian agenda".
In May 2011, the EU imposed sanctions on Gen Kheirbek, saying he had been "involved in violence against the civilian population".
The next month, the general reportedly travelled to Tehran to meet Gen Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, the elite overseas operations arm of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC). They are said to have discussed opening a supply route that would enable Iran to transfer military hardware directly to Syria via a new military compound at Latakia airport.
Gen Shalish is Bashar's first cousin and head of Presidential Security, an elite force. In June 2011, the EU imposed sanctions of him, saying he had been "involved in violence against demonstrators".
He once owned SES International, which the US government alleged in 2005 was a "vehicle to put military goods into the hands" of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his regime.
He and his brother, Assef, who managed SES, acted as a "false end user" for Iraq, helping to procure defence-related goods for the Iraqi military before the US-led invasion, it added. SES allegedly provided exporters with end-user certificates indicating Syria was the final destination, and then shipped them illegally to Iraq. He was said to have provided close personal assistance to Saddam's oldest son, Uday.
Gen Shalish's influence within the president's inner circle is believed to have increased since the beginning of the uprising. Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma told the New York Times in July 2012 that he was now a key financier and organiser of feared pro-Assad militiamen known as "shabiha", who activists say have been used by the government to intensify the crackdown on protesters and commit atrocities on its behalf.
Gen Shalish and his immediate family were "looked at as lowlife no-goodniks a year ago, but today they have been catapulted into the ranks of the inner circle because they are willing to do the dirty work for the regime," Mr Landis said. "There are only so many family members." | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 51 | https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/civil-war-in-syria/alassad-system/6315B2709202AEC8297716153E759BC5 | en | Assad System (Chapter 1) | [
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"Adam Baczko",
"Gilles Dorronsoro",
"Arthur Quesnay"
] | null | Civil War in Syria - February 2018 | en | /core/cambridge-core/public/images/favicon.ico | Cambridge Core | https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/civil-war-in-syria/alassad-system/6315B2709202AEC8297716153E759BC5 | To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 8 | https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q118725 | en | Hafez al-Assad | [
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] | null | [] | null | 18th President of Syria | en | /static/apple-touch/wikidata.png | https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q118725 | 18th President of Syria
edit
Language Label Description Also known as English
Hafez al-Assad
18th President of Syria
Statements
Identifiers | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 47 | https://www.usip.org/press/2000/06/generation-next-new-generation-leaders-middle-east-challenge | en | Generation Next: Is the New Generation of Leaders in the Middle East Up to the Challenge? | [
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] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2016-12-01T16:34:23-05:00 | How will the death of Syria's influential Pres. Hafez al-Assad affect this week's Final Status talk in Washington? Is Syria in for an easy transition of power or will there be bumps in the road ahead? What role will new leadership in Syria, Jordan, and other Arab powers play in U.S. facilitated efforts to bring peace and stability to the Middle East? Middle East specialists Jon Alterman, Jeffery Helsing, and Steven Riskin ... | en | /themes/custom/usip/favicon.ico | United States Institute of Peace | https://www.usip.org/press/2000/06/generation-next-new-generation-leaders-middle-east-challenge | How will the death of Syria's influential Pres. Hafez al-Assad affect this week's Final Status talk in Washington? Is Syria in for an easy transition of power or will there be bumps in the road ahead? What role will new leadership in Syria, Jordan, and other Arab powers play in U.S. facilitated efforts to bring peace and stability to the Middle East? Middle East specialists Jon Alterman, Jeffery Helsing, and Steven Riskin are available for questions, commentary, and analysis in examining the impact of the new generation of Arab leadership in the ongoing quest to bring peace to the Middle East.
Jon B. Alterman
Jeffery Helsing
Steven Riskin | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 3 | 12 | https://www.maginternational.org/whats-happening/mag-awarded-6-million-for-syria-operations/ | en | MAG awarded $6 million for Syria operations | [
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] | null | [] | null | Discover the latest news and views from MAG (Mines Advisory Group). | en | /static/img/favicon/apple-touch-icon.7be9c737cde7.png | https://www.maginternational.org/whats-happening/mag-awarded-6-million-for-syria-operations/ | MAG has been awarded a $6 million grant by the United States Government to conduct landmine clearance activities and deliver risk education in Syria.
The funding has been awarded by the U.S. State Department’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, the world’s single largest financial supporter of humanitarian demining.
MAG has been present in northeast Syria since 2016 and is the largest humanitarian mine action operator in the area. To date, MAG has removed more than 78,000 explosive ordnance items, released more than 40 million square meters of land across the region, and delivered risk education sessions to over 600,000 people.
The new grant will enable MAG to continue operations in Syria to clear a further 3.6 million square meters of land and deliver risk education sessions to an additional 34,000 people living at risk of injury.
The funding will also enable MAG to train local Community Focal Points to identify and report suspicious items. Community Focal Points are integral to amplifying safety messaging in their communities.
Existing trained and equipped teams will be deployed to operations across northeast Syria.
The 2022 Humanitarian Needs Overview (HNO) estimated that over 2 million internally displaced people are living in last-resort sites, with many not returning to their homes due to severe damage and the fear of explosive ordnance. Some 12 years of conflict has left massive contamination in the form of landmines, booby-traps, and improvised explosive devices, leaving approximately one third of populated communities contaminated with explosive ordnance.
With the full extent of contaminated land not yet known, support for further survey and clearance activities is vital to better understand the scale of the problem, and where mine action can have the greatest benefit for conflict affected communities.
MAG Regional Director for the Middle East Najat El Hamri said: “The past 12 years of conflict in Syria have had a devastating impact on ordinary citizens. More than 90% of the Syrian population now lives below the poverty line. Clearing contaminated land is essential for the economic security of those dependent on agriculture-based livelihoods and for the rehabilitation of properties and homes affected by the conflict.
“This grant will enable us to increase civilian security through clearing explosive ordnance and returning land and infrastructure to productive use.
“The continued support of the U.S. Government is crucial to our life-saving operations worldwide. We are extremely thankful for their continued trust and partnership.”
Karen Chandler, Director of the Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, said: “WRA is pleased to continue supporting MAG operations in Syria. MAG’s achievements since the conflict began have been vital in improving civilian security in Syria, where the presence of unexploded ordnance is wide." | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 10 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifaat_al-Assad | en | Rifaat al | [
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] | 2005-10-08T15:02:00+00:00 | en | /static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifaat_al-Assad | Syrian major general (born 1937)
Rifaat Ali al-Assad (Arabic: رِفْعَتُ عَلِيِّ ٱلْأَسَدِ, romanized: Rifʿat al-ʾAsad; born 22 August 1937) is the younger brother of the late President of Syria, Hafez al-Assad, and Jamil al-Assad, and the uncle of the incumbent President Bashar al-Assad. He was the commanding officer of the ground operations of the 1982 Hama massacre ordered by Hafez al-Assad.[2][3]
After launching a failed coup attempt against Hafez al-Assad in 1984,[4][5] Rifaat lived in exile in France for 36 years and returned to Syria in October 2021 after being found guilty in France of acquiring millions of euros diverted from the Syrian state.[6][7] In September 2022, France's highest court, the Cour de Cassation, confirmed the ruling.[8]
In August 2023, Switzerland issued an international arrest warrant on Rifaat al-Assad after its Federal Criminal Court demanded his extradition to prosecute him for his role in supervising ground operations of the Hama Massacre. The warrant was issued as part of the proceedings related to the war-crimes complaint filed in 2013 by the human rights organization "TRIAL International" at the Swiss Office of Attorney General. In March 2024, the Swiss OAG charged Rifaat Al-Assad with numerous crimes committed in the February 1982 Hama massacre.[9][10][11][12]
Early life and education
[edit]
Rifaat al-Assad was born in the village of Qardaha, near Lattakia in western Syria on 22 August 1937. He studied Political Science and Economics at Damascus University and was later given an honorary PhD in Politics from the Soviet Academy of Sciences.[1]
Early experience
[edit]
Rifaat joined the Syrian Arab Army in 1958 as a First Lieutenant, and was rapidly promoted after training in various Soviet military academies (mainly in the Yekaterinburg Artillery school).[1] In 1965, he became commander of a special security force loyal to the military wing of the Ba'ath and soon, supported Hafez al-Assad's overthrow of Salah Jadid and seizure of power in 1970.[1] He was allowed to form his own paramilitary group, the Defense Companies, in 1971, which soon transformed into a powerful and regular military force trained and armed by the Soviet Union. He was a qualified paratrooper.
Under Hafez's rule
[edit]
Rifaat al-Assad played a key role in his brother's takeover of executive power in 1970, dubbed the Corrective Revolution, and ran the elite internal security forces and the Defense Companies (Arabic: سرايا الدفاع; Sarāyā ad-Difāʿ) in the 1970s and early 1980s.[13][14] In addition to his military posture, Rifaat created the "League of Higher Graduates" (Arabic: رابطة الخريجين العليا, Rabitat al kharijin al-'ulia ), which provided discussion forums on public affairs for Syrian post-graduates, outside the constraints of the Baath party. With more than fifteen branches across Syria, this cultural project gathered tens of thousands of members.[15] He had a pivotal role throughout the 1970s and, until 1984, many saw him as the likely successor to his elder brother. Hafez Assad appointed him second vice president in March 1984.[16]
In 1976, he visited Lebanon as a guest of Tony Frangiyeh since they had close and personal ties.[17]
On 28 June 1979 fifteen men were hanged in Damascus. They had been convicted of attempting to assassinate Rifaat al-Assad.[18]
Foreign relations
[edit]
Numerous rumours tie Rifaat al-Assad to various foreign interests. Rifaat was close to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.[19][20] Abdullah was married to a sister of Rifaat's wife, and Rifaat has on occasions—even after his public estrangement from the rulers in Syria—been invited to Saudi Arabia, with pictures of him and the royal family displayed in the state-controlled press.
After the Iraq War, there were press reports that he had started talks with US government representatives on helping to form a coalition with other anti-Assad groups to provide an alternative Syrian leadership, on the model of the Iraqi National Congress. Rifaat has held a meeting with the former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Yossef Bodansky, the director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, has stated that Rifaat enjoys support from both the United States and Saudi Arabia; he has been featured in the Saudi press as visiting the royal family in 2007. The Bashar government remains wary of his intentions and carefully monitors his activities.
Rifaat was mentioned by the influential American think tank Stratfor as a possible suspect for the 2005 bombing that killed Lebanese ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri and the string of attacks that struck Beirut after the subsequent Syrian withdrawal.[citation needed] The goal would have been to destabilize the Syrian government. However, there has been no mention of Rifaat in the United Nations Mehlis reports on the crime.
In 1983, Rifaat met with PLO leader Yasir Arafat in an attempt to appease growing tensions between Syria and Arafat's loyalists.[21] [22]
Ion Mihai Pacepa, a general in the security forces of Communist Romania who defected to the U.S. in 1978, claimed that Rifaat al-Assad was recruited by Romanian intelligence during the Cold War. In Pacepa's 1996 novel Red Horizons, Romanian President Nicolae Ceaușescu is quoted as saying that Rifaat was "eating out of our hand" and went on to say: "Do I need a back channel for secret political communications? A way to inform Hafez secretly about my future discussions with Carter? Do I need to have somebody disappear in the West? Rifaat will take care of it. Now he can't do without my money."[23] Pacepa later reasserted this allegation, describing Rifaat as "our well-paid agent" in a 2003 article in which he discussed the then Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.[24]
Release of David S. Dodge
[edit]
Rifaat al-Assad contributed to the release of US politician and educator David S. Dodge on 21 July 1983.[25][26]
On 19 July 1982, Dodge was abducted by pro-Iranian militiamen, members of the Islamic Amal in Beirut, led by Hussein al-Musawi.[27] He was first held in Lebanon and then kept captive in Iran until his release one year later.[28] Through contacts in the Iranian regime of Khomeini, Rifaat was able to secure the release of Dodge and was publicly thanked by US president Ronald Reagan.[29]
On 21 July 1983 US deputy press secretary Larry Speakes stated:
The Government of the United States is grateful to Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad and to Dr. Rifaat al-Assad for the humanitarian efforts they undertook which led to Mr. Dodge’s release.[30]
Hama massacre
[edit]
See also: 1982 Hama massacre
In February 1982, as commander of the Defense Companies, he commanded the forces that put down a revolt in the city of Hama, by ordering his forces to shell the city with BM-21 Grad rockets, killing thousands of its inhabitants (reports of the total number of deaths range from between 10,000 and 40,000). This became known as the Hama Massacre.[9][10][11] Due to his high-profile role in the military campaign that killed tens of thousands of civilians and destroyed most sections of Hama city, Rifaat acquired the nickname "Butcher of Hama".[9][11][31] US journalist Thomas Friedman stated in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem that Rifaat later said that the total number of victims was 38,000.[32]
Rifaat, however, has repeatedly denied playing any role in the Hama massacre.[13][33][34] Rifaat al-Assad presented his version for the Hama massacre during the conference in Paris to form the Syrian National Democratic Council on 15 November 2011.[35] He was also implicated in the 1980 Tadmor Prison massacre and acquired the sobriquet, the "butcher of Tadmor."[36]
Rifaat al-Assad was also mentioned in a CIA report regarding drug smuggling activities in Syria during the 1980s, along with other Syrian officials such as Ali Haydar, Mustafa Tlass and Shafiq Fayadh.[37]
Attempted coup d'état
[edit]
When Hafez al-Assad suffered from heart problems in late 1983, he established a six-member committee to run the country composed of Abdul Halim Khaddam, Abdullah al-Ahmar, Mustafa Tlass, Mustafa al-Shihabi, Abdul Rauf al-Kasm and Zuhair Masharqa.[38] Rifaat was not included, and the council consisted entirely of close Sunni Muslim loyalists to Hafez, who were mostly lightweights in the military-security establishment. This caused unease in the Alawi-dominated officer corps, and several high-ranking officers began rallying around Rifaat, while others remained loyal to Hafez's instructions.
In March 1984, Rifaat's troops, now numbering more than 55,000 with tanks, artillery, aircraft and helicopters, began asserting control over Damascus. A squadron of Rifaat's T-72 tanks took position at the central roundabout of Kafr Sousa and in Mount Qasioun, overlooking the city.[39] Rifaat's forces set up checkpoints and roadblocks, put up posters of him in State buildings, disarmed regular troops and arbitrarily arrested soldiers of the regular Army, occupied and commandeered Police Stations, Intelligence buildings, and State buildings; the Defense Companies rapidly outnumbered and took control over both the Special Forces and the Republican Guard.[39] Although Damascus was divided between two armies and seemed on the brink of war, Rifaat did not move. Informed that Rifaat was heading to Damascus, his brother Hafez al Assad left his headquarters to meet him.
British journalist Patrick Seale reports an intimate moment between the two brothers :
At Rifat's home in Mezze the brothers were at last face to face. 'You want to overthrow the regime?' Asad asked. 'Here I am. I am the regime.' For an hour they stormed at each other but, in his role of elder brother and with his mother in the house, Asad could not fail to win the contest. Deferring to him at last, as he had so often done in their youths, Rifat chose to accept (although with some inward scepticism) Asad's pledge that trust between them would be restored and would be the basis for their future work together.[39]
There was a clear division and tensions between forces loyal to Hafez, namely the 3rd Armoured Division (commanded by General Shafiq Fayadh), the Republican Guard (commanded by General Adnan Makhlouf), the various Intelligence services (commanded by Generals Mohamed Khouli and Ali Duba), the National Police, and the Special Forces (commanded by General Ali Haidar); and the Defense Companies loyal to Rifaat. By the middle of 1984 Hafez had returned from his sick bed and assumed full control, at which point most officers rallied around him. Initially, it seemed that Rifaat was going to be put on trial and even faced a questioning that was broadcast on television. However, it is believed that Hafez's daughter Bushra actually saved her uncle by convincing her father that purging him would disgrace the family and might cause tensions not only in the Assad family, but with the Makhlouf family as well (since Rifaat is also married to a woman from that family, who are also the second most prevalent Alawite family, dominating the leadership of the security services behind the Assads).[40] In what at first seemed a compromise, Rifaat was made vice-president with responsibility for security affairs, but this proved a wholly nominal post. Command of the 'Defense Companies', which was trimmed down to an Armoured Division size, was transferred to another officer, and ultimately the entire unit was disbanded and absorbed into other units, like the 4th Mechanized Division, the Republican Guard, and the Airborne Special Forces Division. Rifaat was then sent to the Soviet Union on "an open-ended working visit". His closest supporters and others who had failed to prove their loyalty to Hafez were purged from the army and Baath Party in the years that followed. Upon his departure, Rifaat acquired $US300 million of public money including a $US100 million Libyan loan. In 2015, he claimed that the money had been a gift from Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.[41]
During the 1990s
[edit]
See also: 1999 Latakia protests
Although he returned for his mother's funeral in 1992, and for some time lived in Syria, Rifaat was thereafter confined to exile in France and Spain. He nominally retained the post of vice president until 8 February 1998, when he was stripped of this.[42] He had retained a large business empire both in Syria and abroad, partly through his son Sumer. However, the 1999 crackdown, involving armed clashes in Lattakia, destroyed much of his remaining network in Syria; large numbers of Rifaat's supporters were arrested. This was seen as tied to the issue of succession, with Rifaat having begun to position himself to succeed the ailing Hafez, who in his turn sought to eliminate all potential competition for his designated successor, his son Bashar al-Assad.
In France, Rifaat has loudly protested against the succession of Bashar to the post of president, claiming that he himself embodies the "only constitutional legality" (as vice president, alleging his dismissal was unconstitutional). He has made threatening remarks about planning to return to Syria at a time of his choosing to assume "his responsibilities and fulfill the will of the people", and that while he will rule benevolently and democratically, he will do so with "the power of the people and the army" behind him.
Groups and organizations
[edit]
Rifaat's son Sumer is the head of a minor pan-Arab TV channel, the Arab News Network (ANN), which functions as his father's political mouthpiece. He also claims to run a political party, of uncertain fortunes. Rifaat himself heads the United National Group (al-tajammu' al-qawmi al-muwahhid), which is another political party or alliance; it is known to have self-professed members among Rifaat's fellow exiles from Syria, but neither can be considered an active organization,[citation needed] even if they regularly release statements in favor of Rifaat's return to Syria and protesting to president Bashar al-Assad. Further, Rifaat founded the Arab Democratic Party in Lebanon in the early 1970s, a small Alawite sectarian/political group in Lebanon, which during the Lebanese Civil War acted as an armed militia loyal to the Syrian government (through Rifaat).[43] Ali Eid, the general secretary of the party today, supports the Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad.[citation needed]
Distinctions
[edit]
Ribbon Distinction Country Date Location Notes Reference Order of Military Merit (Commander) Morocco 1974 Rabat Sharifian (Royal) Order of Military Merit in Morocco. Awarded by King Hassan II [44] Grand Cross of the National Order of the Legion of Honour France 1986 Paris Highest rank in the Order of the Legion of Honor in the Republic of France. Awarded by former president François Mitterrand[45] [46][47][48][49]
Legal issues in Europe and return to Syria
[edit]
In December 2013, human rights organization "Trial International" filed criminal proceedings against Rifaat al-Assad. As commander of Defense Brigades that took part in the Hama Massacre, Rifaat was charged with organizing extrajudicial killings, large-scale torture, sexual violence, mass-rapes, summary executions and forced disappearances.[50][11] An inquiry was launched by the Swiss Office of the Attorney General (OAG) on 19 December of the same year.[51]
Since 2014, Rifaat was accused of organised money laundering, aggravated tax fraud and embezzling Syrian funds to buy property worth at least €90 million in France.[52] In addition, Spanish authorities have seized his assets and bank accounts in a money laundering investigation since 2017.[53][54] In June 2020, a Paris court sentenced Rifaat to four years in prison; hence, his properties in Paris and London would be seized.[7]
In October 2021, Rifaat returned to Damascus at the age of 84. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad allowed his uncle to return to the country after decades in exile in order "to avoid imprisonment in France".[55][56]
In September 2022, France's highest court, the Cour de Cassation, confirmed the four-year prison sentence.[57] In August 2023, the Swiss Federal Criminal Court ordered the extradition of Rifaat al-Assad, prompting their authorities to issue an arrest warrant to prosecute him.[9][10][11]
Personal life
[edit]
In 2010, Rifaat was living in Mayfair, London.[58][59] As of 2011 he was living in Avenue Foch, Paris,[60] while trying to sell his real estate properties.[61]
Rifaat married four times and his polygamous marriages as well as the marriages of his children have produced strong alliances and ties with prominent families and prestigious clans within Syria and the Arab world .[1] He firstly married one of his cousins, Amirah, from al-Qurdahah. Then, he married Salma Makhlouf, a cousin of Hafez Assad's wife, Anisa. His third spouse is a young woman from the traditional Sunni Muslim establishment, Rajaa Bakrat. His fourth wife, Lina al-Khayyir, is from one of the most prominent Alawite families in Syria.[1] The sister of one of his spouses was married to the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
Rifaat's daughter Tumadir married Muin Nassif Kheir Beik, a member of the most powerful and prestigious Alawite family. His son-in-law is a relative of the Syrian activist and poet Kamal Kheir Beik.[62] Tamadhin, another daughter, married a Makhlouf. Lama married Ala Fayyad, the son of Alawite General Shafiq Fayadh. Rifaat's eldest son, Mudar, married Maya Haydar, the daughter of the ultra-rich entrepreneur Muhammad Haydar from the prominent al-Haddadin Alawite tribe.[1] His youngest son, Ribal Al-Assad, born 1975, is a businessman and political activist. He resided in Paris and has spoken frequently on French and international media on the Syrian crisis.[63]
See also
[edit]
Biography portal
Politics portal
Al-Assad family
Presidency of Hafez al-Assad
References
[edit]
Bibliography
[edit]
Thomas L. Friedman (2012). "4. Hama Rules". From Beirut to Jerusalem (Revised ed.). Picador. ISBN 978-1250015495. | ||||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 3 | https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q118725 | en | Hafez al-Assad | [
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edit
Language Label Description Also known as English
Hafez al-Assad
18th President of Syria
Statements
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wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 9 | https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-13216195 | en | Bashar al-Assad's inner circle | [
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"BBC News",
"www.facebook.com"
] | 2011-04-27T16:52:11+00:00 | Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is surrounded by military and intelligence figures, most of whom are either related to him or are members of his minority Alawite community. | en | BBC News | https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-13216195 | Before his promotion to general, Maher commanded a Republican Guard brigade. This provided him with valuable military experience and allowed him to establish personal ties with many officers.
In 2000, shortly after Bashar became president, Maher became a member of Baath Party's second highest body, the Central Committee.
He has a reputation for being excessively violent and emotionally unstable, and allegedly shot and wounded his brother-in-law, Asef Shawkat.
In 2000, Maher is reported to have helped persuade Bashar to put an end to the political openness seen during the first few months of his rule - the short-lived "Damascus Spring". Years of suppression followed.
Three years later, Israeli media said Maher had attended a series of informal meetings in Jordan with the director of Israel's foreign minister and two Israeli-Arab businessmen to discuss resuming peace talks.
In 2005, Maher and Shawkat were both mentioned in a preliminary report by UN investigators as one of the people who might have planned the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri.
When mass pro-democracy protests began in the southern city of Deraa in March 2011, Maher's fourth armoured division - a successor to Rifaat al-Assad's Defence Brigades which is deployed on Syrian territory bordering the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and controls the capital's approaches - was sent in to crush them. Human rights activists say dozens of people have since been killed.
At one protest in Deraa, many shouted slogans denouncing Maher, including: "Maher you coward. Send your troops to liberate the Golan."
By late April, witnesses said the fourth division's tanks had cut off Deraa and were shelling residential areas, while troops were storming homes and rounding up people believed to have been taking part in the protests.
The US subsequently announced sanctions against Maher, saying the fourth division had "played a leading role in the Syrian regime's actions in Deraa". The EU also imposed sanctions on Maher, describing him as the "principal overseer of violence against demonstrators".
In May 2011, a video emerged purportedly showing Maher, dressed in a leather jacket and surrounded by police officers, firing a rifle at unarmed protesters in the Damascus suburb of Barzeh, external.
The next month, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters: "I say this clearly and openly, from a humanitarian point of view, [Maher] is not behaving in a humane manner. And he is chasing after savagery."
Rumours persist that Maher might challenge his brother's rule - much like his uncle Rifaat attempted to seize power from Hafez in 1983 - but there is no evidence that he has sufficient power to challenge his rule.
Born in 1969, Mr Makhlouf took over the businesses built up by his father, Mohammed, the brother of Hafez al-Assad's wife, Anisa Makhlouf. After Bashar became president in 2000, Mr Makhlouf's financial empire expanded.
In 2001, he and the Egyptian telecommunications company, Orascom, were awarded one of Syria's two mobile phone operator licences. After a court dispute over control of Syriatel, Orascom was forced to sell its 25% stake.
When Riad Seif, an opposition MP, criticised the "irregularities" in the awarding of the phone licences, he was arrested and imprisoned.
In addition to Syriatel, Mr Makhlouf is believed to control two banks, free trade zones, duty free shops, a construction company, an airline, two TV channels, and imports luxury cars and tobacco. He also owns shares in and is vice-chairman of Cham Holding, considered Syria's largest private company, and has stakes in several oil and gas companies.
In 2008, the US treasury banned US firms and individuals from doing business with Mr Makhlouf, and froze his US-based assets. It accused him of "corrupt behaviour", "disadvantaging innocent Syrian businessmen and entrenching a regime that pursues oppressive and destabilising politics".
"Makhlouf has manipulated the Syrian judicial system and used Syrian intelligence officials to intimidate his business rivals. He employed these techniques when trying to acquire exclusive licenses to represent foreign companies in Syria and to obtain contract awards," a statement said.
"Despite President Assad's highly publicised anti-corruption campaigns, Makhlouf remains one of the primary centres of corruption in Syria."
The US imposed sanctions on Mr Makhlouf's younger brother, Hafez- a senior official in the General Security Directorate - in 2007 for his connection with efforts to reassert Syrian control over Lebanon.
Former Vice-President Abdul Halim Khaddam said in 2009 that Bashar's rule had been marked by "transforming corruption into an institution" headed by Mr Makhlouf. He said corruption, suppression of dissent, and economic hardship were pushing Syrians over the edge.
Two years later, anti-government protesters in Deraa initially directed their wrath at Mr Makhlouf, some chanting: "We'll say it clearly, Rami Makhlouf is robbing us". A branch of Syriatel in Deraa was set on fire.
Opposition websites later accused Mr Makhlouf of financing pro-government demonstrations both across Syria and abroad, by providing flags, meals and money for those participating.
In May 2011, the EU imposed sanctions against Mr Makhlouf, saying he was an "associate of Maher al-Assad" who "bankrolls the regime allowing violence against demonstrators".
The tycoon insists his businesses are legitimate and provide professional employment for thousands of Syrians.
Following the US sanctions announcement in 2007, he told the BBC that the designation was tantamount to "a medal we hang on our chest", and was part of a "political ploy aimed at undermining important individuals".
President Assad is reported to have been angered by an interview Mr Makhlouf gave to the New York Times in May 2011, in which he said the government would fight "until the end" and that it would "not suffer alone". He also said that regime change in Syria could push the Middle East into turmoil and even war. Syria's ambassador to the US responded by saying Mr Makhlouf was a "private citizen" who did not "speak on behalf of the Syrian authorities".
The next month Mr Makhlouf announced that he was quitting business and moving into charity work. He told a televised news conference that he would offer shares of Syriatel to the poor and that profits would go, in part, to the families of those killed in the uprising. Profits from other businesses would go to charitable and humanitarian organisations, Mr Makhlouf added, promising not to enter any new business venture that would bring him personal gain.
Opposition figures doubted the sincerity, though it did seem a member of the president's inner circle was being forced to publicly step aside.
In August 2011, the US imposed sanctions on Syriatel, saying the Syrian government had directed the company to "sever network connectivity in areas where attacks were planned" and that it had recorded mobile-phone conversations for the security services.
Born in 1946, Lt Gen Mamluk is the director of the Baath Party Regional Command's National Security Bureau (NSB), which in theory co-ordinates the work of Syria's intelligence agencies and formulates recommendations for the president. In practice, however, the agencies operate with a high degree of autonomy, answerable mainly to the president.
Between 2005 and 2012, he was head of the General Security Directorate (State Security), where he was involved in some of the most sensitive issues concerning Syria. Before that he was deputy head of the feared Air Force Intelligence.
A leaked US classified diplomatic cable discussing whether to impose financial sanctions on Gen Mamluk in 2007 said he was well known for his "objectionable activities regarding Lebanon, and his suppressing Syrian civil society and the internal opposition". The embassy in Damascus said sanctions against Gen Mamluk would "resonate well" in the country.
Despite this, Gen Mamluk discussed efforts to increase co-operation between Washington and Damascus on terrorism issues at a surprise meeting with US diplomats in 2010, according to a leaked US classified cable. He said the GSD had been more successful at fighting terrorism in the region because "we are practical and not theoretical".
In April 2011, the US government imposed sanctions on Gen Mamluk, saying he had been responsible for human rights abuses, including through the use of violence against civilians.
His agency had repressed internal dissent, monitored individual citizens, and had been "involved in the Syrian regime's actions in Deraa, where protesters were killed by Syrian security services", it alleged.
The next month, the EU also imposed sanctions on Gen Mamluk, saying he had been involved in efforts to crush anti-government protesters.
A Sunni from Damascus, he is said to be on good terms with all of Syria's intelligence agencies - Jamil Hassan, the head of Air Force Intelligence, and Mohammed Dib Zaitoun, the General Security Directorate chief, were once his assistants.
The US also said in April that Gen Mamluk had overseen a communications programme directed at opposition group and had received both technological and analytical support from Iran's ministry of intelligence and security (MOIS). Mamluk had "worked with the MOIS to provide both technology and training to Syria, to include internet monitoring technology" and "requested MOIS training and assistance on social media monitoring and other cyber tools for the GSD", it added.
Rami Abdul Rahman, the head of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Gen Mamluk had also met several opposition figures inside Syria to "incite them to renounce violence and back the reforms of the Assad regime".
President Assad asked Gen Mamluk to lead the National Security Bureau after its director, Gen Hisham Ikhtiar, died after a bomb attack on its headquarters on 18 July 2012, Syrian officials and Lebanese media reported. The blast also killed Mr Assad's brother-in-law, Deputy Defence Minister Gen Assef Shawkat, Defence Minister Gen Daoud Rajiha, and former Defence Minister Hassan Turkomani, who was in charge of the security forces' crisis management office.
Gen Qudsiya became deputy director of the National Security Bureau (NSB) in July 2012. He had previously been head of Military Intelligence, the paramount security agency in Syria.
Before replacing the president's late brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, as military intelligence chief sometime between 2005 and 2009, he was head of Air Force Intelligence.
Earlier in his career, Gen Qudsiya - an Alawite born in 1953 - served as head of the Republican Guard's security office, and as personal secretary to the president.
Gen Qudsiya was asked in 2008 to lead the security committee investigating the assassination of Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus. The committee notably did not include Gen Shawkat, who was criticised for failing to prevent the killing.
In May 2011, Gen Qudsiya was included in a list of Syrian officials subjected to EU sanctions for their roles in violence against protesters. Military Intelligence is said to have played a prominent role in the crackdown, firing on crowds of protesters and killing a large number of civilians.
The US also imposed sanctions on Gen Qudsiya later that month, accusing his agency of using force against and arresting demonstrators participating in the unrest.
Gen Qusiya was appointed Gen Ali Mamluk's deputy at the National Security Bureau following the bomb attack on its headquarters in Damascus on 18 July, Syrian officials and Lebanese media reported.
Maj Gen Rafiq Shahada is believed to be the head of Military Intelligence, the paramount security agency in Syria, which has a reputation for ruthless efficiency and whose leaders have wielded considerable influence over presidents.
As well as strategic and tactical intelligence, the agency has a critical role in ensuring the leadership's physical security and the loyalty of the army.
In August 2011, the EU imposed sanctions on Gen Shahada, describing him as head of Military Intelligence's Branch 293, which is responsible for internal affairs, in Damascus. He was accused of being "directly involved in repression and violence against the civilian population" in the capital. The EU also said Gen Shahada was also serving as adviser to President Assad for strategic questions and military intelligence.
Gen Shahada was promoted to chief of Military Intelligence in July 2012 after his predecessor, Abdul Fatah Qudsiya, became deputy head of the National Security Bureau, according to Syrian officials and Lebanese media reports. One unconfirmed report said Gen Shahada had until then been head of Military Intelligence in Homs.
Maj Gen Hassan replaced Abdul Fatah Qudsiya as head of Air Force Intelligence in 2009.
Though smaller than Military Intelligence, AFI is seen by some as the elite agency of Syria's intelligence empire. The agency owes its power to Hafez al-Assad, who was air force chief before coming to power in a coup. It plays a leading role in operations against Islamist opposition groups, as well as covert actions abroad, and has a reputation for brutality.
Gen Hassan, an Alawite, previously served as a security official in the eastern governorate of Deir al-Zour.
In late April 2011, personnel from Air Force Intelligence fired tear gas and live ammunition to disperse crowds of demonstrators who took to the streets in Damascus and other cities after noon prayers, killing at least 43 people, according to the US. In one incident in Nawa, PSD agents reportedly opened fire on a crowd of protesters waiving olive branches.
The next month, the EU said Gen Hassan was "involved in the repression against the civilian population" during the recent anti-government unrest, and imposed a travel ban and asset freeze on him.
Maj Gen Zaitoun, a Sunni born in 1951, is reportedly the new head of the General Security Directorate (GSD), which is the most powerful civilian intelligence agency and plays an important role in quelling internal dissent.
Tasked primarily with safeguarding against and preventing domestic subversion and organised crime, the GSD is organised into three branches - internal security, external security and Palestinian affairs. It controls the civilian police and the border guards, and has primary responsibility for surveillance of the Baath Party, the state bureaucracy and the general population.
Gen Zaitoun was previously head of the Political Security Directorate (PSD) between 2009 and 2012, and before then deputy head of the GSD.
In 2008, he was asked - along with other members of the president's inner circle - to investigate the assassination of Hezbollah's Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus.
In May 2011, the EU accused Gen Zaitoun of involvement in violence against demonstrators, and announced a travel ban and asset freeze. The US also imposed sanctions on him later that month, accusing him of human rights abuses.
Gen Zaitoun became head of the GSD in July 2012 following the bomb attack on the National Security Bureau in Damascus which killed four senior security chiefs, Syrian officials and Lebanese media reported.
Born in 1953, he is a former chief of Syrian Military Intelligence in Lebanon, and was in the post when Rafik Hariri was assassinated.
Gen Ghazali assumed command in 2002, and was the "implementing agent of Syrian policies in Lebanon" until the Syrian withdrawal in 2005, according to the US treasury department. It accused Gen Ghazali of manipulating Lebanese politics to ensure officials and public policy remained committed to Syria's goals and interests. He reportedly used his influence to ensure former President Emile Lahoud's term of office was renewed, while Lebanon's military chiefs allegedly reported to him.
After the withdrawal from Lebanon little was heard of him. However, at the beginning of the protests in the city of Deraa, Gen Ghazali was sent by Bashar al-Assad to assure locals of the president's good intentions. He reportedly told them: "We have released the children" - a reference to several teenagers who were arrested for writing anti-regime graffiti inspired by the events in Egypt and Tunisia.
In May 2011, the EU said Gen Ghazali was head of Military Intelligence in Damascus Countryside (Rif Dimashq) governorate, which borders Deraa governorate, and was involved in "violence against the civilian population". The US imposed individual sanctions on Gen Ghazali the next month, saying he was a high-ranking member of Military Intelligence.
In July 2012, Gen Ghazali was appointed head of the PSD following the bomb attack on the National Security Bureau in Damascus, Syrian officials and Lebanese media reported. His appointment firmly quashed rumours that he had defected the previous week.
Gen Kheirbek is a member of the Alawite Kalabiya tribe, to which Bashar al-Assad belongs. Their families are also connected by marriage - a relative is married to one of Rifaat al-Assad's daughters.
The general, who was born in 1937 and is reported to have medical problems, has long served the Syrian regime and remains an influential adviser to the president. He was a very close adviser to the late Hafez al-Assad before being appointed deputy director of the General Security Directorate (GSD) in 1999.
He served in the position until 2006, when he was named deputy vice-president for security affairs. The next year, the US froze his assets for "contributing to the government of Syria's problematic behaviour", which it said included support of international terrorism, the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, and the undermining of efforts in Iraq.
A leaked US diplomatic cable described Gen Kheirbek as Syria's "point-man for its relationship with Iran". It said designating him could "heighten Syrian and regional concerns about the [government's] willingness to accommodate an expansionary Iranian agenda".
In May 2011, the EU imposed sanctions on Gen Kheirbek, saying he had been "involved in violence against the civilian population".
The next month, the general reportedly travelled to Tehran to meet Gen Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, the elite overseas operations arm of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC). They are said to have discussed opening a supply route that would enable Iran to transfer military hardware directly to Syria via a new military compound at Latakia airport.
Gen Shalish is Bashar's first cousin and head of Presidential Security, an elite force. In June 2011, the EU imposed sanctions of him, saying he had been "involved in violence against demonstrators".
He once owned SES International, which the US government alleged in 2005 was a "vehicle to put military goods into the hands" of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his regime.
He and his brother, Assef, who managed SES, acted as a "false end user" for Iraq, helping to procure defence-related goods for the Iraqi military before the US-led invasion, it added. SES allegedly provided exporters with end-user certificates indicating Syria was the final destination, and then shipped them illegally to Iraq. He was said to have provided close personal assistance to Saddam's oldest son, Uday.
Gen Shalish's influence within the president's inner circle is believed to have increased since the beginning of the uprising. Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma told the New York Times in July 2012 that he was now a key financier and organiser of feared pro-Assad militiamen known as "shabiha", who activists say have been used by the government to intensify the crackdown on protesters and commit atrocities on its behalf.
Gen Shalish and his immediate family were "looked at as lowlife no-goodniks a year ago, but today they have been catapulted into the ranks of the inner circle because they are willing to do the dirty work for the regime," Mr Landis said. "There are only so many family members." | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 46 | https://www.rienner.com/title/Damascus_Diary_An_Inside_Account_of_Hafez_al_Assad_s_Peace_Diplomacy_1990_2000 | en | Damascus Diary An Inside Account of Hafez al Assad s Peace Diplomacy 1990 2000 | [
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wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 88 | https://goldenglobes.com/articles/syrian-cinema-times-crisis/ | en | Syrian Cinema in Times of Crisis | [
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] | 2021-08-16T13:53:50+00:00 | The history of Syrian cinema is inextricably linked to its political history beginning in 1920 when the French took colonial control, forcing King Faisal to leave the country. Under their rule, many theatres were built in Damascus... | en | Golden Globes | https://goldenglobes.com/articles/syrian-cinema-times-crisis/ | The history of Syrian cinema is inextricably linked to its political history beginning in 1920 when the French took colonial control, forcing King Faisal to leave the country. Under their rule, many theatres were built in Damascus, but they screened primarily French films. The first Syrian-produced film was The Innocent Suspect, a black-and-white silent feature made in 1927. This was only one year after Egypt released its first feature film. The film was created by three Syrian film fans who imported a German camera which none of them knew how to use, so they hired a photographer to write the script and operate the camera. The film was a hit, and the three then formed the first Syrian production company, Hermon Films. However, their second film, Under the Damascus Sky (1934), did not fare as well. Unfortunately, its release date coincided with that of the Egyptian musical Hymn of the Heart, whose success overshadowed its Syrian counterpart, and it became a commercial flop. Not only that: the film was banned by the French authorities for exceeding its budget and fined for copyright infringement for its music. Since Egyptian films dominated the Syrian box office, Syrian filmmakers sought opportunities in Cairo.
Although Syria was recognized as an independent republic in 1945, the French did not leave until 1946. A year later the first Syrian talkie Light and Darkness (1947) was produced by Nazih Shabander, and the 1950s saw a rise in local productions, with films reflecting the popular themes of the times. But they had difficulty distributing the films since it was more profitable to release the Egyptian films.
In the 1960s Syrian military coup after coup ensued. But in 1963 the Ba’ath government established the National Film Organization, which controlled every aspect of filmmaking including financing. Hence, the films turned to documentaries as propaganda promoting the great achievements of the state. These were released in theaters, Syrian television and film clubs organized by the NFO.
This was the Golden Age of Syrian film. The restrictions imposed by the NFO led to creative solutions to censorship. Modeling films after the successful Egyptian features, Syrian films ran the gamut from musicals to romance to comedies, but after Minister of Defense Hafez al-Assad seized power in November 1970, Syrian documentaries and political fiction became the mainstay of the national film industry. They were finally recognized internationally, as was The Knife, directed by Khaled Hammada, selected for the 1971 Moscow International Film Festival. Directors of other Middle East regions were welcomed by the NFO to make films in Syria. Egypt’s Tewfik Salah’s 1972 The Dupes became one of the first Arab films to seriously address the Palestinian question. Other key films in this period were Men Under the Sun directed in 1971 by Iraqi-born Kays Al Zbaide, and Kafr Kassem, a drama about the gruesome massacre of Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis, directed by Lebanon’s Borhane Alaouie.
In the late 1970s, filmmakers began to criticize the control of the regime. In 1979 the Damascus Film Festival was formed by the late Syrian film director Muhammad Shahin. Though many films were banned in Syria, they won accolades in film festivals around the world.
Following the Hama massacre in 1982, the regime began to crack down on liberal dissent, and filmmakers began to develop their own scripts with a more personal style, focusing on the trials and tribulations in Syria. At this time, the use of metaphor became very important, with filmmakers facing the constraints of limited funding, censorship and lack of distribution. But international film festivals supported Syrian films and still do so to this day.
In 2017 Little Gandhi became the first Syrian film ever submitted to the Oscars. For Sama (2019), a documentary following director Waad Al Kateab through five years of her life in war-torn Syria has won 63 international awards and was nominated for an Oscar. In an interview with the website InfoMigrants, she said “I don’t want your tears – I want you to do something. You can make a difference.” This is the power of film. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 32 | https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/in-assads-syria-there-is-no-imagination/ | en | Anthony Shadid: "In Assad's Syria, There Is No Imagination" | [
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"Anthony Shadid"
] | 2011-11-08T16:06:20+00:00 | The country is "rendered in their image, haunted by their phobias and ordered by their machinations," Anthony Shadid writes of the Assad regime. | en | FRONTLINE | https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/in-assads-syria-there-is-no-imagination/ | The House of Assad evokes an imperial sense of power, or at least its trappings, with iconography that one scholar described as infused with “laudatory slogans and sempiternal images.”
But my first impression of Rami Makhlouf, President Bashar al-Assad’s cousin and one-time confidante, was of his unassuming quality. Here was a tycoon, a figure as rich as he was loathed, who eschewed formalities and ceremony. I had seen it before, in men like Saad Hariri, a former prime minister in Lebanon, lavished with so much privilege and so much wealth that pretensions become unnecessary. Even his most brazen threats seemed more pleading than menacing, as if I should understand the logic behind them. Don’t the Israelis know that they will suffer if we do; don’t the Europeans; don’t the Americans realize that we are the bulwark before forces that they can’t imagine — Islamists, chaos, wars roiling an already combustible region?
It was [Hafez al-Assad’s] ability to inculcate a suffocating cult of personality, buttressed by fear, often the most visceral sort, the kind that once led Egyptians to quip that the only place where it was safe to open your mouth was the dentist’s office.
By the end of several hours interviewing Makhlouf in May, it was not pomp, not imagery and not detachment that denoted the imperium. It was the pronouns. The way he used them said much about how power has been exercised in the Arab world and why it has finally begun to crumble.
“We believe there is no continuity without unity,” he told me. “As a person, each one of us knows we cannot continue without staying united together.”
He echoed an Arabic proverb – alaya wa ala aadai’i ya rab.
Translated loosely, it means that we won’t go down alone.
“We will not go out, leave on our boat, go gambling, you know,” he told me at his plush, wood-paneled headquarters in Damascus. “We will sit here. We call it a fight until the end.” He added later: “They should know when we suffer, we will not suffer alone.”
What Makhlouf, a businessman with no title, no official capacity save his membership in the president’s family, suggested was that Syria belonged to them: its property and people, their aspirations and fate, their history and their future. In essence, consciously or not, he gave voice to the sign that has long marked the crossing for visitors across the rocky wadis dividing Lebanon and Syria.
“Assad’s Syria,” it reads.
Deprived of a popular mandate, or even consent, Arab leaders have long searched for the instruments to show their power was an entitlement. Sometimes they are symbols, meant to convey legitimacy. Anwar Sadat mined the 1973 war, when Egyptian troops overwhelmed Israeli defenses on the Suez Canal. He turned to Islam, casting himself as “The Believer President.” His successor, Hosni Mubarak, tedious and taciturn, saw the very notion of stability as legitimizing his rule. Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, looked far and wide, too. His rule was meant to seem eternal, as his images were omnipresent. “The Leader Forever,” his portraits read. But his success relied not on his regime’s ability to end a volatile chapter of Syrian history that saw dozens of attempted coups over more than 20 years, or the modernization of infrastructure and education, or his service to the poor and rural, like him, who represented his base. It was his ability to inculcate a suffocating cult of personality, buttressed by fear, often the most visceral sort, the kind that once led Egyptians to quip that the only place where it was safe to open your mouth was the dentist’s office.
Hafez al-Assad was sophisticated, and the dour visage that he fostered was supposed to suggest a certain cunning, an understanding of how pervasive fear could be. He built the wall brick after demolished brick in Hama, where his regime’s crushing of an uprising in 1982 is one of the bloodiest chapters of the modern Arab world. He tended to that wall, too, with the machinations of an inveterate plotter who understood the sectarian dynamics of the country — he ensured that every sect shared in the bloodletting in Hama — and who knew that loyalty was best fostered by reliance on family and sect, namely his own Alawite clan, a heterodox Muslim group that accounts for about 10 percent of the population.
This was Syria of the Assads: rendered in their image, haunted by their phobias and ordered by their machinations.
Bashar seemed to think he was different. With his Sunni Muslim wife, education abroad and upbringing in the privileged circles of Damascus, where the children of poor Alawite officers from the countryside mixed with those of the moneyed elite, he lacked his father’s edge. He seemed to take pride in an everyman quality, frequenting restaurants and driving his own car. He made it clear that he wanted to be liked. Rare is an official who visits Bashar and doesn’t find him amiable, even humble. And so he presided over a brief opening after taking power in 2000, called the Damascus Spring. (His regime soon crushed it). He inaugurated a veneer of consumerism in the capital Damascus and Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city. He dismantled the façade of the grim police state in both those cities and promised the bromide of every authoritarian leader: a China-style economic liberalization whose very success would mitigate the need for political reform.
For a time, his seeming humility brought a measure of support his father never enjoyed. Even today Turkish officials, once his admirers and now plotting against him, rue what they see as a missed opportunity. Had he introduced sweeping reform and held elections before the uprising erupted in March, they say, he surely would have won. But Bashar believed his own aura. In those days, he declared his state immune from the upheavals of Egypt and Tunisia. He insisted that his foreign policy, built rhetorically on enmity with Israel, opposition to American hegemony and support for the kind of resistance preached by Lebanon’s Hezbollah, reflected the sentiments of an Arab world long humiliated by its impotence.
His father, a poor boy who proved he was more, would have known better. Sheltered by a royal court, Bashar seemed oblivious to a drought-stricken countryside seething under the sway of utterly unaccountable security forces. He overlooked crimes that his family and the state had committed. He had forgotten that in the calculus of the imperium his father created, the instrument through which Bashar really exercised power, fear made more sense than adulation, whatever his modernizing pretensions. Even today, eight months after an uprising and a ferocious crackdown that, by the United Nations’ count, has killed more than 3,000 people and, by the Arab League’s estimate, put more than 70,000 in jail, people who have seen Bashar contend that he still doesn’t recognize the severity of the challenge. This summer, Turkish officials actually offered him their own intelligence to persuade him that the information coming from his people was bad, incomplete and misleading. They were telling him what he wanted to hear. But since then, the old truths have returned, and his regime has fallen back on the premise of his father’s rule. It has sought to restore the wall of dread between ruler and ruled.
Syria is still subsumed in the logic of fear, which forces once diverse societies to hew to their smaller parts, obliterating the ability to imagine broader communities and other identities.
“What support today it enjoys is almost entirely of a negative sort,” the International Crisis Group wrote this month. “Fear of sectarian retribution, Islamism, foreign interference, social upheaval or, more simply, anxiety about the unknown.”
As in Iraq, Syria’s neighbor to the east, the clichés of superficial analysis that preceded tumult now threaten to come true: Us or chaos. The regime posed as the guardian of Syria’s diversity, even as the House of Assad and its lieutenants relentlessly stirred that diversity so as to divide and rule. Pitting community against community, never in a more pronounced way than now, it may finally bring forth the civil war that it long claimed it was the bulwark against.
In their ambition at least, the Arab revolts and revolutions were about a positive sort of legitimacy: democracy, freedom, social justice and individual rights. They remain an unfulfilled promise, but no one in Egypt, Tunisia or Libya is really afraid to speak anymore. The cacophony that has ensued is the most liberating feature of rejuvenated societies. It already echoes in parts of Syria. When I was in Hama this summer, a city still scarred by memory and for a brief moment freed from security forces, youths embraced their new space by protesting every couple of hours in streets made kinetic by the allure of self-determination. They demonstrated simply because they could. In Homs, a city whose uprising could prove Syria’s demise or salvation, youths drawn from an eclectic array of leftists, liberals, nationalists, Islamists and the simply pissed-off articulated the essence of courage: They had come too far to go back.
“In the end, I’m a person now,” a young activist named Iyad told me in Homs. “I can say what I want. I love you if I want to love you, I hate you if I want to hate you. I can denounce your beliefs or I can support them. I can agree with your position or disagree with it. But I’m a person now.” He dragged on his cigarette, and we shared more tea. “We’re not waiting to live our lives until after the fall of the regime,” he went on. “We started living them the first day of the protests.”
His country, though, is not yet liberated. Not in the sense of a dictator’s fall, or a coup vanquishing the family, or a rebel army entering Damascus or Makhlouf sailing off in the boat he swore never to board. Syria is still subsumed in the logic of fear, which forces once diverse societies to hew to their smaller parts, obliterating the ability to imagine broader communities and other identities. Beyond a set of principles, or promises so vague as to inspire more fear, no one has described the Syria of tomorrow. Not Assad, who offers his people a path back to the 1980s, when a stern government presided over a dreary economy with the grimace of a police state. But the opposition hasn’t really either, and that lack of vision has left frightened minorities more aligned with the regime.
There may someday be a vision for Syria and the Middle East that draws on their past, where ancient trajectories of the Ottoman Empire stitched together a landscape that often embraced its many identities. There is probably a future in which loyalties are less to the state and more to those antique metropoles like Aleppo, Tripoli, Mosul or Beirut, which often answered questions of community better than the contrived countries that absorbed them. The term might be post-Ottoman, where borders that never made all that much sense are encompassed by connections from Cairo to Istanbul, Maydan to Basra, and Marjayoun to Arish, in which people can imagine themselves as Alawite, Levantine, Arab, Syrian, Eastern — or some hybrid that transcends them all.
But none of that is possible until the smallest identities are protected. A Tunisian Islamist named Said Ferjani told me a few weeks ago that such safeguards and guarantees would require what he called “a charismatic state.” It was the antithesis of all those sempiternal leaders, presiding over imperiums with hollow slogans and manipulating society’s components with cynicism portrayed as principle. A charismatic state could mend itself, reform, adapt and heal when it failed in its fundamental task, delivering the rights and duties of citizenship. And only in citizenship, he told me, could diversity be preserved and protected. Citizenship, he seemed to suggest, would permit us to become greater than our parts. It would allow us to imagine.
Toward the end of the interview with Makhlouf, over a dinner of fish, he warned of a zero-sum future, Syria falling into the hands of militant Islamists, infused with intolerance and bent on vengeance.
“We won’t accept it,” he told me, his words blending notions of entitlement, ownership, power and fear. “And we have a lot of fighters.”
In Assad’s Syria, it still seems, there is no imagination. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 3 | 87 | https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2019/04/04/dropping-sniper-nests-in-four-story-buildings-a-10-warthogs-earn-gallantry-award-in-syria/ | en | Dropping sniper nests in four story buildings: A-10 Warthogs earn gallantry award in Syria | [
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"Kyle Rempfer"
] | 2019-04-04T00:00:00 | The A-10 Warthog pilots from the 74th Fighter Squadron were working over a dense urban battlefield to conduct close-air support for friendly troops. | en | /pf/resources/img/favicons/air/apple-touch-icon.png?d=124 | Air Force Times | https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2019/04/04/dropping-sniper-nests-in-four-story-buildings-a-10-warthogs-earn-gallantry-award-in-syria/ | The Air Force awarded the Gallant Unit Citation to the 74th Fighter Squadron out of Moody Air Force Base, Georgia, March 14 for its combined actions during close-air support missions against the Islamic State group in Syria.
The squadron struck more than 44 percent of targets in the Operation Inherent Resolve theater over the course of 181 days with only 12 aircraft beginning in the summer of 2017, according to the unit citation.
The Gallant Unit Citation has only been awarded five times since it was created in 2001, according to a service news release. The 74th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron is also the first individual squadron to earn the award.
The citation said the pilots faced persistent surface-to-air threats and repeated intercepts by Russian aircraft while developing “new tactics to strike enemy fighters fortified in deep enemy terrain while protecting civilians and coalition forces.”
The A-10 Warthog pilots from the squadron were working over an urban battlefield assisting friendly troops that primarily consisted of U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.
The bombing in Raqqa, Syria, which the 74th Fighter Squadron took part in, has also been the subject of frustration from many human rights groups.
“More than 18 months after the capture of Raqqa from ISIS, we haven’t had a proper official accounting of the casualties and destruction which resulted from the U.S.-led assault,” said Chris Woods, director of Airwars, a London-based non-profit that tracks civilian casualties in Syria and Iraq.
“According to locals themselves, several thousand civilians died — most killed when buildings collapsed on top of them during ferocious air and artillery strikes,” Woods told Air Force Times. “More than 70 percent of the city was entirely destroyed, according to the UN."
The SDF partner forces that did the vast majority of ground fighting against ISIS were often forced into difficult combat environments in urban settings, replete with explosive-laden suicide vehicles and militants who had years to prepare their defensive fighting positions.
It became necessary for the SDF to rely on American air power to carve out an advantage against ISIS. The Kurdish-led SDF claims to have lost 11,000 of its own fighters by the end of the campaign in Syria.
“We were trying to strike these snipers that were in this dense urban city and we didn’t have tactics for it," Lt. Col. Craig Morash, 74th Fighter Squadron commander, said in a 23rd Wing video.
The squadron reached out to other units and they put their “smartest guys on it," Morash said. They ultimately came up with new attack plans as the fight against ISIS entered the dense urban setting, which ultimately saved SDF and coalition lives, the pilots said.
The A-10s, which flew out of Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, conducted combat sorties from July 2017 to January 2018.
During the first half of the deployment, the pilots were operating within “danger-close” distances of friendlies, meaning they were at a significantly high risk of injury from the weapons dropped.
“I expected more of the Afghanistan-type mission, and I am getting 9-lines that are like, ‘Hey, I need you to drop this four-story building in a city,’ which is fundamentally different from what we, or what I expected,” said one A-10 pilot in the video.
A 9-line is used by joint terminal attack controllers to uniformly tell aircraft information about targets and friendly locations.
Throughout its six-month deployment, the unit flew more than 1,600 sorties, striking nearly 2,500 targets and claiming to kill 3,100 ISIS fighters during the liberation of Raqqa.
Numbers regarding enemy killed in action have historically been unreliable, however.
One A-10 pilot described a particularly challenging airstrike — during his third combat sortie — in an urban area against concealed insurgents.
“We ended up shooting a Maverick [air-to-ground missile] into a building to take out the sniper team that was firing on the SDF," he said.
“I thought it was pretty awesome that we could go out there and affect the infrastructure as much as we did,” a different pilot said. "Going back and looking at what we actually struck and the damage we did was pretty cool.”
The Inherent Resolve coalition has at times come under scrutiny for not recognizing the damage caused by bombing city infrastructure, even when the rules of engagement allow its forces to do so.
“It’s troubling to hear A-10 pilots and commanders talking about being ‘let off the leash’ at Raqqa; of being ordered ‘to drop four story buildings in the city’, and describing the catastrophic damage as ‘pretty cool,'” Woods said. "For civilians on the ground caught in conflict, war is never cool.”
The video in which the comments were made was not intended to make light of warfare, said Capt. Jessica Colby, a spokeswoman for the A-10 squadron.
“The 23rd Wing sincerely hopes that the video did not come across as insensitive or give the illusion that we take the loss of infrastructure and life as anything but serious,” Colby told Air Force Times. “The intention of the video is to highlight these innovative aviators that came together, with other members across the community, to develop groundbreaking tactics to accomplish the mission they were tasked.”
A Pentagon review under Defense Secretary James Mattis did find merit with some human rights groups’ complaints over the course of the Syrian conflict, saying that the U.S. military should refine how it identifies and measures civilian casualties. Then, the U.S. should work harder to compensate the families of those impacted, the review said.
Airwars estimates that there were between 7,500 and 12,200 civilian casualties that resulted from the U.S.-led coalition’s campaign against ISIS.
Those numbers are based on local reporting assessed by the nonprofit as “confirmed” or “fair” in credibility. Airwars reports that there have been as many as 29,000 allegations of U.S.-inflicted civilian deaths, but the group does not deem them all to be credible.
The U.S.-led coalition estimate is far more conservative, at roughly 1,200 confirmed civilian deaths between August 2014 and the end of January 2019. During that time period, the coalition conducted nearly 34,000 airstrikes.
The coalition does re-assess civilian casualties if it deems new and credible information is brought forth. | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 24 | https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/feb/16/syria | en | Amin al-Hafez obituary | [
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"Lawrence Joffe",
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] | 2010-02-16T00:00:00 | <p>Leader of Syria's first Ba'athist regime</p> | en | the Guardian | https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/feb/16/syria | Amin al-Hafez, who has died aged 88, ruled Syria's first Ba'athist administration with a genial smile and an iron fist during the turbulent years from 1963 to 1966. He was also the last genuine president from that country's Sunni Muslim majority, since his successor was just a Sunni figurehead for two Alawite officers.
Although Hafez cemented Ba'ath party rule over Syria, he was more a military opportunist than a dedicated ideologue. Ultimately his dictatorial tendencies did not prevent his downfall, and his ties to an Israeli spy proved particularly embarrassing. Syria experienced stability, albeit of a nervous sort, only after Hafez al-Assad became president in 1970.
Al-Hafez's first taste of politics came in 1958 as part of a Syrian army delegation that visited Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian president. The 14 officers beseeched the "hero of Suez" to rescue their coup-ridden nation. The two states duly merged into one United Arab Republic in February that year, and Hafez was posted to Cairo.
Soon formerly enthusiastic Ba'athists grew to loathe Nasser for banning their party and turning Syria into a virtual satrapy. The union crumbled after another Syrian uprising in September 1961, and the resultant secessionist regime banished the troublesome Hafez to Argentina as Syria's military attaché.
Hafez returned to join the Ba'athist-led cabal that toppled Damascus's pro-western government on 8 March 1963, a month after other Ba'athists had taken Iraq. Suddenly allied radicals were steering two of the region's most powerful countries.
While Iraq's Ba'athists were ousted within nine months, in Syria the party's civilian founders cleverly used the bluff Major General Hafez as their military shield. In May 1963 he became interior minister. And after viciously crushing a pro-Egyptian rebellion on 18 July, submachine gun in hand, he was appointed president of the ruling National Council.
Hafez declared a state of emergency that still exists, and nationalised all Arab-owned banks and oil resources. He also improved ties with the Soviets, bankrolled Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Fatah guerrillas, and ordered engineers to divert two rivers that fed Israel's share of the Jordan. The ensuing artillery exchanges across the Israeli-Syrian border almost certainly led to the 1967 six-day war. By then, however, Hafez had been toppled by a bloody coup on 23 February 1966.
Hafez was born in humble circumstances in Aleppo, northern Syria. The son of a policeman, he graduated from Syria's military academy in 1946, the same year French troops left his country. Hafez gravitated towards the secular, anti-imperialist, pan-Arab Ba'ath party after fighting in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Yet he remained at heart a Nasserist, and forlornly dreamt of reuniting Syria, Egypt and Iraq – even when his idol called him a fascist.
While in Buenos Aires, Hafez befriended a supposed Lebanese trader named Kamal Amin Thaabet, in reality an Egyptian-born Jewish Mossad agent, Eli Cohen. The spy arrived in Syria in early 1962, a year before Hafez's return, and soon began relaying reports and photographs about Syrian military plans to Israel.
As president, Hafez groomed his friend to be a future defence minister, possibly even his successor. He invited him to banquets, thanked him for giving his wife a $1,000 fur coat and led him on tours of secret Golan Heights fortifications. When Cohen was caught red-handed in January 1965, Hafez personally interrogated him and arrested 500 of his high-placed friends. Brushing aside international pleas for clemency and his own qualms, Hafez ordered Cohen's public execution, by hanging, in Damascus.
Hafez proved as ruthless when he crushed a Sunni uprising in 1964. He authorised the aerial bombing of the Sultan mosque in Hama and awarded himself new titles, including prime minister. But 15 reshuffles from 1963 onwards and numerous army purges eroded his limited support base. Most imprudently, he sacked Salah Jadid, the dynamic leftist general, as chief of staff in September 1965.
In the end, as the historian Sami Moubayed has noted, Hafez fell victim to his stubborn refusal to arbitrate between feuding Ba'ath factions. He seemed startled when Jadid and Assad, of the clandestine Ba'ath military committee, dared to challenge him.
Wounded in a three-hour shootout during their 1966 assault, Hafez was jailed in Damascus's Mazza prison, then spirited away to Lebanon in June 1967, before relocating to Baghdad in 1968. Damascus sentenced Hafez to death, in absentia, in 1971. Yet Saddam Hussein treated him and his fellow exile, Ba'ath founder Michel Aflaq, like royalty. After the fall of Saddam in 2003, Hafez was allowed home. He received a state funeral. He is survived by his wife, Zainab, and their five children. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 26 | https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Bashar_al-Assad | en | Bashar al-Assad | https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ucp-internal-test-starter-commons/images/a/aa/FandomFireLogo.png/revision/latest?cb=20210713142711 | https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ucp-internal-test-starter-commons/images/a/aa/FandomFireLogo.png/revision/latest?cb=20210713142711 | [
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"Contributors to Military Wiki"
] | 2024-07-03T16:38:30+00:00 | {{Infobox officeholder |birth_name = Bashar Hafez al-Assad |native_name = بشار حافظ الأ Template:Ba'athism sidebar Bashar al-Assad[lower-alpha 1]Template:Family name footnote (born 11 September 1965) is a Syrian politician who is the current and 19th president of Syria since 17 July 2000. In... | en | /skins-ucp/mw139/common/favicon.ico | Military Wiki | https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Bashar_al-Assad | {{Infobox officeholder |birth_name = Bashar Hafez al-Assad |native_name = بشار حافظ الأ
Template:Ba'athism sidebar Bashar al-Assad[lower-alpha 1]Template:Family name footnote (born 11 September 1965) is a Syrian politician who is the current and 19th president of Syria since 17 July 2000. In addition, he is the commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces and the secretary-general of the Central Command of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, which nominally espouses a neo-Ba'athist ideology. His father and predecessor was General Hafiz al-Assad, whose presidency in 1971–2000 marked the transfiguration of Syria from a republican state into a de facto dynastic dictatorship, tightly controlled by an Alawite-dominated elite composed of the armed forces and the Mukhabarat (secret services), who are loyal to the al-Assad family.
Born and raised in Damascus, Bashar graduated from the medical school of Damascus University in 1988 and began to work as a doctor in the Syrian Army. Four years later, he attended postgraduate studies at the Western Eye Hospital in London, specialising in ophthalmology. In 1994, after his elder brother Bassel died in a car accident, Bashar was recalled to Syria to take over Bassel's role as heir apparent. He entered the military academy, taking charge of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon in 1998. On 17 July 2000, Bashar al-Assad became president, succeeding his father Hafiz, who had died on 10 June 2000. A series of crackdowns in 2001–02 ended the Damascus Spring, a period of cultural and political activism marked by calls for transparency and democracy. Although Bashar inherited the power structures and personality cult nurtured by Hafiz al-Assad, he lacked the loyalty received by his father, which led to rising discontent against his rule. As result, many members of the Old Guard resigned or were purged; and the inner-circle were replaced by staunch loyalists from Alawite clans. Bashar al-Assad's early economic liberalisation programs worsened inequalities and centralized the socio-political power of the loyalist Damascene elite of the Assad family; alienating the Syrian rural population, urban working classes, businessmen, industrialists and people from once-traditional Ba'ath strongholds. The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in February 2005, triggered by the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, forced Bashar al-Assad to end Syrian occupation of Lebanon.
Assad's regime is a highly personalist dictatorship,[lower-alpha 2] which governs Syria as a totalitarian police state.[lower-alpha 3] Bashar al-Assad's reign has been characterised by numerous human rights violations and severe repression. While the Assad government describes itself as secular, various political scientists and observers note that his regime exploits sectarian tensions in the country. The first decade in power was marked by intense censorship, summary executions, forced disappearances, discrimination of ethnic minorities and extensive surveillance by the Ba'athist secret police. The United States, the European Union, and majority of the Arab League called for Assad's resignation from the presidency in 2011 after he ordered a violent crackdown on Arab Spring protesters during the events of the Syrian revolution, which led to the Syrian civil war. The civil war has killed around 580,000 people, of which a minimum of 306,000 deaths are non-combatant, with pro-Assad forces causing more than 90% of the civilian deaths.[7] The war has also forcibly displaced 14 million Syrians, with over 7 million refugees, causing the largest refugee crisis in the world. An additional 154,000 civilians have been forcibly disappeared or subject to arbitrary detentions; with over 135,000 individuals being tortured, imprisoned, or dead in government detention centres as of 2023.[lower-alpha 4]
The Assad regime's perpetration of numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity during the civil war has led to international condemnation and isolation.[lower-alpha 5] The Syrian military is estimated to have conducted over 300 chemical attacks, with UN investigations confirming at least nine chemical attacks conducted by pro-Assad forces.[13] The deadliest incident was a chemical attack in Ghouta on 21 August 2013, which caused the deaths of 1,100–1,500 civilians. In December 2013, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay stated that findings from an inquiry by the UN implicated Assad in war crimes. Investigations by the OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism and OPCW-UN IIT concluded that the Assad government was responsible for the 2017 Khan Shaykhun sarin attack and 2018 Douma chemical attack respectively.[lower-alpha 6] In June 2014, the American Syrian Accountability Project included Assad on a list of war crimes indictments of government officials and sent it to the International Criminal Court. In 2023, Canada and the Netherlands filed a joint lawsuit at the International Court of Justice accusing the Assad government of infringing UN Convention Against Torture.[lower-alpha 7] On 15 November 2023, France issued an arrest warrant against Assad over the use of banned chemical weapons against civilians in Syria.[14] Assad has categorically denied the allegations of these charges and has accused foreign countries, especially the American-led intervention in Syria, of purportedly attempting regime change.[15][16]
Early life, family and education[]
Further information: Al-Assad family
Bashar al-Assad was born in Damascus on 11 September 1965, as the second son and third child of Anisa Makhlouf and Hafiz al-Assad. "Al-Assad" in Arabic means "the lion". Assad's paternal grandfather, Ali Sulayman al-Assad, had managed to change his status from peasant to minor notable and, to reflect this, in 1927 he had changed the family name from "Wahsh" (meaning "Savage") to "Al-Assad".
Assad's father, Hafiz, was born to an impoverished rural family of Alawite background and rose through the Ba'ath Party ranks to take control of the Syrian branch of the Party in the Corrective Movement, culminating in his rise to the Syrian presidency. Hafiz promoted his supporters within the Ba'ath Party, many of whom were also of Alawite background.[20] After the revolution, Alawite strongmen were installed while Sunnis, Druze, and Ismailis were removed from the army and Ba'ath party. Hafiz al-Assad's 30-year military rule witnessed the transformation of Syria into a dynastic dictatorship. The new political system was led by the Ba'ath party elites dominated by the Alawites, who were fervently loyal to the Assad family and controlled the military, security forces and secret police.[22][23]
The younger Assad had five siblings, three of whom are deceased. A sister named Bushra died in infancy.[24] Assad's youngest brother, Majd, was not a public figure and little is known about him other than he was intellectually disabled,[25] and died in 2009 after a "long illness".[26]
Unlike his brothers Bassel and Maher, and second sister, also named Bushra, Bashar was quiet, reserved and lacked interest in politics or the military.[25][28] The Assad children reportedly rarely saw their father,[29] and Bashar later stated that he only entered his father's office once while he was president.[30] He was described as "soft-spoken",[31] and according to a university friend, he was timid, avoided eye contact and spoke in a low voice.[32]
Assad received his primary and secondary education in the Arab-French al-Hurriya School in Damascus. In 1982, he graduated from high school and then studied medicine at Damascus University.
Medical career and rise to power[]
In 1988, Assad graduated from medical school and began working as an army doctor at the Tishrin Military Hospital on the outskirts of Damascus.[34][35] Four years later, he settled in London to start postgraduate training in ophthalmology at the Western Eye Hospital. He was described as a "geeky I.T. guy" during his time in London.[37] Bashar had few political aspirations, and his father had been grooming Bashar's older brother Bassel as the future president. However, he died in a car accident in 1994 and Bashar was recalled to the Syrian Army shortly thereafter. State propaganda soon began elevating Bashar's public imagery as "the hope of the masses" to prepare him as the next patriarch in charge of Syria, to continue the rule of the Assad dynasty.[40][41]
Soon after the death of Bassel, Hafiz al-Assad decided to make Bashar the new heir apparent. Over the next six and a half years, until his death in 2000, Hafiz prepared Bashar for taking over power. General Bahjat Suleiman, an officer in the Defense Companies, was entrusted with overseeing preparations for a smooth transition,[43][29] which were made on three levels. First, support was built up for Bashar in the military and security apparatus. Second, Bashar's image was established with the public. And lastly, Bashar was familiarised with the mechanisms of running the country.
To establish his credentials in the military, Bashar entered the military academy at Homs in 1994 and was propelled through the ranks to become a colonel of the elite Syrian Republican Guard in January 1999.[34][46] To establish a power base for Bashar in the military, old divisional commanders were pushed into retirement, and new, young, Alawite officers with loyalties to him took their place.
In 1998, Bashar took charge of Syria's Lebanon file, which had since the 1970s been handled by Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam, who had until then been a potential contender for president. By taking charge of Syrian affairs in Lebanon, Bashar was able to push Khaddam aside and establish his own power base in Lebanon. In the same year, after minor consultation with Lebanese politicians, Bashar installed Emile Lahoud, a loyal ally of his, as the President of Lebanon and pushed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri aside, by not placing his political weight behind his nomination as prime minister. To further weaken the old Syrian order in Lebanon, Bashar replaced the long-serving de facto Syrian High Commissioner of Lebanon, Ghazi Kanaan, with Rustum Ghazaleh.
Parallel to his military career, Bashar was engaged in public affairs. He was granted wide powers and became head of the bureau to receive complaints and appeals of citizens, and led a campaign against corruption. As a result of this campaign, many of Bashar's potential rivals for president were put on trial for corruption.[34] Bashar also became the President of the Syrian Computer Society and helped to introduce the internet in Syria, which aided his image as a moderniser and reformer. Ba'athist loyalists in the party, military and the Alawite sect were supportive of Bashar al-Assad, enabling him to become his father's successor.[51]
Presidency[]
Further information: Foreign Policy of Bashar al-Assad
Before civil war: 2000–2011[]
After the death of Hafiz al-Assad on 10 June 2000, the Constitution of Syria was amended. The minimum age requirement for the presidency was lowered from 40 to 34, which was Bashar's age at the time.[52] Assad contested as the only candidate and subsequently confirmed president on 10 July 2000, with 97.29% support for his leadership.[53][54][55] In line with his role as President of Syria, he was also appointed the commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces and Regional Secretary of the Ba'ath Party.[51] A series of state elections have since been held regularly every seven years which Assad won with overwhelming majority of votes. The elections are unanimously regarded by independent observers as a sham process and boycotted by the opposition.[lower-alpha 8][lower-alpha 9] The last two elections - held in 2014 and 2021 - were conducted only in areas controlled by the Syrian government during the country's ongoing civil war and condemned by the United Nations.[65][66][67]
Damascus Spring[]
See also: Damascus Spring
Immediately after he took office, a reform movement known as Damascus Spring led by writers, intellectuals, dissidents, cultural activists, etc. made cautious advances, which led to the shut down of Mezzeh prison and the declaration of a wide-ranging amnesty releasing hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood affiliated political prisoners. However, security crackdowns commenced again within the year, turning it into the Damascus Winter.[69][70] Hundreds of intellectuals were arrested, targeted, exiled or sent to prison and the state of emergency was continued. The early concessions were rolled back to tighten authoritarian control, censorship was increased and the Damascus Spring movement was banned under the pretext of "national unity and stability". The regime's policy of a "social market economy" became a symbol of corruption, as Assad loyalists became its sole beneficiaries.[51][71][72][73] Several discussion forums were shut down and many intellectuals were abducted by the Mukhabarat to get tortured and killed. Many analysts believe that initial promises of opening up were part a government strategy to find out Syrians who were not supportive of the new leadership.[70]
During a state visit by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Syria in October 2001, Bashar publicly condemned the United States invasion of Afghanistan in a joint press conference, stating that "[w]e cannot accept what we see every day on our television screens - the killing of innocent civilians. There are hundreds dying every day." Assad also praised Palestinian militant groups as "freedom fighters" and criticised Israel and the Western world during the conference. British officials subsequently described Assad's political views as being more conciliatory in private, claiming that he criticized the September 11 attacks and accepted the legitimacy of the State of Israel.[74]
During the war on terror, Assad played realpolitik with the United States, at-times co-operating and other times clashing with the American government. Syria's prison networks were a major site of extraordinary rendition by the CIA of al-Qaeda suspects, who were interrogated in Syrian prisons.[75][76][77] Soon after Assad assumed power, he "made Syria's link with Hezbollah—and its patrons in Tehran—the central component of his security doctrine",[78] and in his foreign policy, Assad adopted a belligerent stance towards the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.[79] During the Iraqi insurgency against American occupation, Syrian intelligence trained Al-Qaeda militants, turning Syria into a transit hub for Jihadists travelling into Iraq. AQI would subsequently evolve into the Islamic State group, which sent its fighters from Iraq to join the Syrian Civil War.[80][81]
Killing of Rafic Hariri and Cedar Revolution[]
See also: Assassination of Rafic Hariri, Cedar Revolution, and Syrian occupation of Lebanon
On 14 February 2005, Rafic Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon, was assassinated in a massive truck-bomb explosion in Beirut, killing 22 people. The Christian Science Monitor reported that "Syria was widely blamed for Hariri's murder. In the months leading to the assassination, relations between Hariri and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad plummeted amid an atmosphere of threats and intimidation."[83] Bashar promoted his brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, a key figure suspected of orchestrating the terrorist attack, as the chief of Syrian Military Intelligence Directorate immediately after Hariri's death.[84]
The killings caused massive uproar, triggering an intifada in Lebanon and hundreds of thousands of protestors poured on the streets to demand total withdrawal of Syrian military forces. After mounting international pressure that called Syria to implement the UNSC Resolution 1559, Bashar al-Assad declared on 5 March that he shall order the departure of Syrian soldiers. On 14 March 2005, more than a million Lebanese protestors - Muslims, Christians, Druze - demonstrated in Beirut, marking the monthly anniversary of Hariri's murder. UN Resolution 1595, adopted on 7 April, send an international commission to investigate the assassination of Hariri. By 5 May 2005, United Nations had officially confirmed the total departure of all Syrian soldiers, ending the 29-year old military occupation. The uprisings that occurred in these months came to be known as Lebanon's "independence intifada" or the "Cedar Revolution".[85]
UN investigation commission's report published on 20 October 2005 revealed that high-ranking members of Syrian intelligence and Assad family had directly supervised the killing.[86][87][88] The BBC reported in December 2005 that "Damascus has strongly denied involvement in the car bomb which killed Hariri in February".[89]
On 27 May 2007, Assad was approved for another seven-year term in a referendum on his presidency, with 97.6% of the votes supporting his continued leadership.[90][91][92] Opposition parties were not allowed in the country and Assad was the only candidate in the referendum.[55] Syria's opposition parties under the umbrella of Damascus Declaration denounced the elections as illegitimate and part of the regime's strategy to sustain the "totalitarian system".[93][94] Elections in Syria are officially designated as the event of "renewing the pledge of allegiance" to the Assads and voting is enforced as a compulsory duty on every citizen. Announcement of the results are followed by pro-government rallies conducted across the country extolling the regime, wherein citizens declare their "devotion" to the President and celebrate "the virtues" of the Assad dynasty.[95][96][97]
Syria began developing a covert nuclear weapons programme with assistance of North Korea during the 2000s, but its suspected nuclear reactor was destroyed by the Israeli Air Force during Operation Outside the Box in September 2007.[98][99][100]
During the Syrian civil war[]
2011–2015[]
See also: Arab Spring, 2011 Syrian Revolution, Syrian civil war, and Sanctions against Syria
Protests in Syria began on 26 January 2011 following the Arab Spring protests that called for political reforms and the reinstatement of civil rights, as well as an end to the state of emergency which had been in place since 1963.[101] One attempt at a "day of rage" was set for 4–5 February, though it ended uneventfully.[102] Protests on 18–19 March were the largest to take place in Syria for decades, and the Syrian authority responded with violence against its protesting citizens.[103] In his first public response to the protests delivered on 30 March 2011, Assad blamed the unrest on "conspiracies" and accused the Syrian opposition and protestors of seditious "fitna", toeing the party-line of framing the Ba'athist state as the victim of an international plot. He also derided the Arab Spring movement, and described those participating in the protests as "germs" and fifth-columnists.[104][105][106]
The U.S. imposed limited sanctions against the Assad government in April 2011, followed by Barack Obama's executive order as of 18 May 2011 targeting Bashar Assad specifically and six other senior officials.[108][109][110] On 23 May 2011, the EU foreign ministers agreed at a meeting in Brussels to add Assad and nine other officials to a list affected by travel bans and asset freezes.[111] On 24 May 2011, Canada imposed sanctions on Syrian leaders, including Assad.[112] On 20 June, in response to the demands of protesters and international pressure, Assad promised a national dialogue involving movement toward reform, new parliamentary elections, and greater freedoms. He also urged refugees to return home from Turkey, while assuring them amnesty and blaming all unrest on a small number of saboteurs.[113]
In July 2011, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Assad had "lost legitimacy" as president.[109] On 18 August 2011, Barack Obama issued a written statement that urged Assad to "step aside".[114][115][116] In August, the cartoonist Ali Farzat, a critic of Assad's government, was attacked. Relatives of the humourist told media outlets that the attackers threatened to break Farzat's bones as a warning for him to stop drawing cartoons of government officials, particularly Assad. Farzat was hospitalised with fractures in both hands and blunt force trauma to the head.[117][118]
Since October 2011, Russia, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, repeatedly vetoed Western-sponsored draft resolutions in the UN Security Council that would have left open the possibility of UN sanctions, or even military intervention, against the Assad government.[119][120][121]
By the end of January 2012, it was reported by Reuters that over 5,000 civilians and protesters (including armed militants) had been killed by the Syrian army, security agents and militia (Shabiha), while 1,100 people had been killed by "terrorist armed forces".[122]
On 10 January 2012, Assad gave a speech in which he maintained the uprising was engineered by foreign countries and proclaimed that "victory [was] near". He also said that the Arab League, by suspending Syria, revealed that it was no longer Arab. However, Assad also said the country would not "close doors" to an Arab-brokered solution if "national sovereignty" was respected. He also said a referendum on a new constitution could be held in March.[123]
On 27 February 2012, Syria claimed that a proposal that a new constitution be drafted received 90% support during the relevant referendum. The referendum introduced a fourteen-year cumulative term limit for the president of Syria. The referendum was pronounced meaningless by foreign nations including the U.S. and Turkey; the EU announced fresh sanctions against key regime figures.[124] In July 2012, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov denounced Western powers for what he said amounted to blackmail thus provoking a civil war in Syria.[125] On 15 July 2012, the International Committee of the Red Cross declared Syria to be in a state of civil war,[126] as the nationwide death toll for all sides was reported to have neared 20,000.[127]
On 6 January 2013, Assad, in his first major speech since June, said that the conflict in his country was due to "enemies" outside of Syria who would "go to Hell" and that they would "be taught a lesson". However, he said that he was still open to a political solution saying that failed attempts at a solution "does not mean we are not interested in a political solution."[128][129] In July 2014, Assad renewed his third term of presidency after voting process conducted in pro-regime territories which were boycotted by the opposition and condemned by the United Nations.[65][66][67] According to Joshua Landis: "He's (Assad) going to say: 'I am the state, I am Syria, and if the West wants access to Syrians, they have to come through me.'"[66]
After the fall of four military bases in September 2014,[130] which were the last government footholds in the Raqqa Governorate, Assad received significant criticism from his Alawite base of support.[131] This included remarks made by Douraid al-Assad, cousin of Bashar al-Assad, demanding the resignation of the Syrian Defence Minister, Fahd Jassem al-Freij, following the massacre by the Islamic State of hundreds of government troops captured after the IS victory at Tabqa Airbase.[132] This was shortly followed by Alawite protests in Homs demanding the resignation of the governor,[133] and the dismissal of Assad's cousin Hafez Makhlouf from his security position leading to his subsequent exile to Belarus.[134] Growing resentment towards Assad among Alawites was fuelled by the disproportionate number of soldiers killed in fighting hailing from Alawite areas,[135] a sense that the Assad regime has abandoned them,[136] as well as the failing economic situation.[137] Figures close to Assad began voicing concerns regarding the likelihood of its survival, with one saying in late 2014; "I don't see the current situation as sustainable ... I think Damascus will collapse at some point."[130]
In 2015, several members of the Assad family died in Latakia under unclear circumstances.[138] On 14 March, an influential cousin of Assad and founder of the shabiha, Mohammed Toufic al-Assad, was assassinated with five bullets to the head in a dispute over influence in Qardaha—the ancestral home of the Assad family.[139] In April 2015, Assad ordered the arrest of his cousin Munther al-Assad in Alzirah, Latakia.[140] It remains unclear whether the arrest was due to actual crimes.[141]
After a string of government defeats in northern and southern Syria, analysts noted growing government instability coupled with continued waning support for the Assad government among its core Alawite base of support,[142] and that there were increasing reports of Assad relatives, Alawites, and businessmen fleeing Damascus for Latakia and foreign countries.[143][144] Intelligence chief Ali Mamlouk was placed under house arrest sometime in April and stood accused of plotting with Assad's exiled uncle Rifaat al-Assad to replace Bashar as president.[145] Further high-profile deaths included the commanders of the Fourth Armoured Division, the Belli military airbase, the army's special forces and of the First Armoured Division, with an errant air strike during the Palmyra offensive killing two officers who were reportedly related to Assad.[146]
Since Russian intervention 2015–present[]
On 4 September 2015, when prospects of Assad's survival looked bleak, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia was providing the Assad government with sufficiently "serious" help: with both logistical and military support.[147][148][149] Shortly after the start of direct military intervention by Russia on 30 September 2015 at the formal request of the Syrian government, Putin stated the military operation had been thoroughly prepared in advance and defined Russia's goal in Syria as "stabilising the legitimate power in Syria and creating the conditions for political compromise".[150] Putin's intervention saved the Assad regime at a time when it was on the verge of a looming collapse. It also enabled Moscow to achieve its key geo-strategic objectives such as total control of Syrian airspace, naval bases that granted permanent martial reach across the Eastern Mediterranean and easier access to intervene in Libya.[149]
In November 2015, Assad reiterated that a diplomatic process to bring the country's civil war to an end could not begin while it was occupied by "terrorists", although it was considered by BBC News to be unclear whether he meant only ISIL or Western-supported rebels as well.[151] On 22 November, Assad said that within two months of its air campaign Russia had achieved more in its fight against ISIL than the U.S.-led coalition had achieved in a year.[152] In an interview with Česká televize on 1 December, he said that the leaders who demanded his resignation were of no interest to him, as nobody takes them seriously because they are "shallow" and controlled by the U.S.[153][154] At the end of December 2015, senior U.S. officials privately admitted that Russia had achieved its central goal of stabilising Syria and, with the expenses relatively low, could sustain the operation at this level for years to come.[155]
In December 2015, Putin stated that Russia was supporting Assad's forces and was ready to back anti-Assad rebels in a joint fight against IS.[156]
On 22 January 2016, the Financial Times, citing anonymous "senior western intelligence officials", claimed that Russian general Igor Sergun, the director of GRU, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, had shortly before his sudden death on 3 January 2016 been sent to Damascus with a message from Vladimir Putin asking that President Assad step aside.[157] The Financial Times' report was denied by Putin's spokesman.[158]
It was reported in December 2016 that Assad's forces had retaken half of rebel-held Aleppo, ending a 6-year stalemate in the city.[159][160] On 15 December, as it was reported government forces were on the brink of retaking all of Aleppo—a "turning point" in the civil war, Assad celebrated the "liberation" of the city, and stated, "History is being written by every Syrian citizen."[161]
After the election of Donald Trump, the priority of the U.S. concerning Assad was unlike the priority of the Obama administration, and in March 2017 U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley stated the U.S. was no longer focused on "getting Assad out",[162] but this position changed in the wake of the 2017 Khan Shaykhun chemical attack.[163] Following the missile strikes on a Syrian airbase on the orders of President Trump, Assad's spokesperson described the U.S.' behaviour as "unjust and arrogant aggression" and stated that the missile strikes "do not change the deep policies" of the Syrian government.[164] President Assad also told the Agence France-Presse that Syria's military had given up all its chemical weapons in 2013, and would not have used them if they still retained any, and stated that the chemical attack was a "100 percent fabrication" used to justify a U.S. airstrike.[165] In June 2017, Russian President Putin said "Assad didn't use the [chemical weapons]" and that the chemical attack was "done by people who wanted to blame him for that."[166] UN and international chemical weapons inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) found the attack was the work of the Assad regime.[167]
On 7 November 2017, the Syrian government announced that it had signed the Paris Climate Agreement.[168] In May 2018, it recognized the independence of Russian-occupied separatist republics of Abhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, leading to backlash from the European Union, United States, Canada and other countries.[169][170][171] On 30 August 2020, the First Hussein Arnous government was formed, which included a new Council of Ministers.[172]
In the 2021 presidential elections held on 26 May, Assad secured his fourth 7-year tenure; by winning 95.2% of the eligible votes. The elections were boycotted by the opposition and SDF; while the refugees and internally displaced citizens were disqualified to vote; enabling only 38% of Syrians to participate in the process. Independent international observers as well as representatives of Western countries described the elections as a farce. United Nations condemned the elections for directly violating Resolution 2254; and announced that it has "no mandate".[173][174][175][176][177]
On 10 August 2021, the Second Hussein Arnous government was formed.[178] Under Assad, Syria became a strong supporter of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and was one of the five countries that opposed the UN General Assembly resolution denouncing the invasion, which called upon Russia to pull back its troops. Three days prior to the invasion, Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad was dispatched to Moscow to affirm Syria's recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk separatist republics. A day after the invasion, Bashar al-Assad praised the invasion as "a correction of history and a restoration of balance in the global order after the fall of the Soviet Union" in a phone call with Vladimir Putin.[179][180][181] Syria became the first country after Russia to officially recognize the "independence and sovereignty" of the two breakaway regions in June 2022.[182][183][184]
On the 12th anniversary of beginning of the protests of Syrian Revolution, Bashar al-Assad held a meeting with Vladimir Putin during an official visit to Russia. In a televised broadcast with Putin, Assad defended Russia's "special military operation" as a war against "neo-Nazis and old Nazis" of Ukraine.[185][186] He recognised the Russian annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts and ratified the new Russian borders, claiming that the territories were "historically Russian". Assad also urged Russia to expand its military presence in Syria by establishing new bases and deploying more boots on the ground, making its military role permanent.[lower-alpha 10]
In March 2023, he visited the United Arab Emirates and met with UAE's President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.[192] In May 2023, he attended the Arab League summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he was welcomed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.[193] In September 2023, Assad attended the Asian Games opening ceremony in Hangzhou and met with Chinese President Xi Jinping.[194] They announced the establishment of a China–Syria strategic partnership.[195]
Controversies[]
Corruption[]
Main article: Corruption in Syria
See also: Economy of Syria
At the onset of the Syrian revolution, corruption in Syria was endemic, and the country was ranked 129th in the 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index.[196] Since the 1970s, Syria's economy has been dominated by the patronage networks of Ba'ath party elites and Alawite loyalists of the Assad family, who established control over Syria's public sectors based on kinship and nepotism. The pervasive nature of corruption had been a source of controversy within the Ba'ath party circles and the wider public; as early as the 1980s.[197]
Bashar al-Assad's economic liberalization programme during the 2000s became a symbol of corruption and nepotism, as the beneficiaries of the scheme were Alawite loyalists who seized much of the privatized sectors and business assets. This alienated the government from the vast majority of the Syrian public, particularly rural Syrians and urban working classes, who widely loathed the ensuing economic disparities, which became overtly visible.[22][71] Assad's cousin Rami Makhlouf was the regime's most favored oligarch during this period, marked by the institutionalization of corruption, handicapping of small businesses and casting down private entrepreneurship.[198] The persistence of corruption, sectarian bias towards Alawites, nepotism and widespread bribery that existed in party, bureaucracy and military led to popular anger that resulted in the eruption of the 2011 Syrian Revolution. The protests were the most fierce in working-class neighbourhoods, which had long bore the brunt of the regime's exploitation policies that privileged its own loyalists.[199][200]
According to ABC News, as a result of the Syrian civil war, "government-controlled Syria is truncated in size, battered and impoverished."[201] Economic sanctions (the Syria Accountability Act) were applied long before the Syrian civil war by the U.S. and were joined by the EU at the outbreak of the civil war, causing disintegration of the Syrian economy.[202] These sanctions were reinforced in October 2014 by the EU and U.S.[203][204] Industry in parts of the country that are still held by the government is heavily state-controlled, with economic liberalisation being reversed during the current conflict.[205] The London School of Economics has stated that as a result of the Syrian civil war, a war economy has developed in Syria.[206] A 2014 European Council on Foreign Relations report also stated that a war economy has formed:
Three years into a conflict that is estimated to have killed at least 140,000 people from both sides, much of the Syrian economy lies in ruins. As the violence has expanded and sanctions have been imposed, assets and infrastructure have been destroyed, economic output has fallen, and investors have fled the country. Unemployment now exceeds 50 percent and half of the population lives below the poverty line ... against this backdrop, a war economy is emerging that is creating significant new economic networks and business activities that feed off the violence, chaos, and lawlessness gripping the country. This war economy – to which Western sanctions have inadvertently contributed – is creating incentives for some Syrians to prolong the conflict and making it harder to end it.[207]
A UN commissioned report by the Syrian Centre for Policy Research states that two-thirds of the Syrian population now lives in "extreme poverty".[208] Unemployment stands at 50 percent.[209] In October 2014, a $50 million mall opened in Tartus which provoked criticism from government supporters and was seen as part of an Assad government policy of attempting to project a sense of normalcy throughout the civil war.[210] A government policy to give preference to families of slain soldiers for government jobs was cancelled after it caused an uproar[135] while rising accusations of corruption caused protests.[137] In December 2014, the EU banned sales of jet fuel to the Assad government, forcing the government to buy more expensive uninsured jet fuel shipments in the future.[211]
Taking advantage of the increased role of the state as a result of the civil war, Bashar and his wife Asma have begun annexing Syria's economic assets from their loyalists, seeking to displace the old business elites and monopolize their direct control of the economy. Maher al-Assad, the brother of Bashar, has also become wealthy by overseeing the operations of Syria's state-sponsored captagon drug industry and seizing much of the spoils of war. The ruling couple currently owns vast swathes of Syria's shipping, real estate, telecommunications and banking sectors.[212][213] Significant changes have been happening to Syrian economy since the government's confiscation campaigns launched in 2019, which involved major economic assets being transferred to the Presidential couple to project their power and influence. Particularly noteworthy dynamic has been the rise of Asma al-Assad, who heads Syria's clandestine economic council and is thought to have become "a central funnel of economic power in Syria". Through her Syria Trust NGO, the backbone of her financial network, Asma vets the foreign aid coming to Syria; since the government authorizes UN organizations only if it works under state agencies.[214]
Corruption has been rising sporadically in recent years, with Syria being considered the most corrupt country in the Arab World.[215][216] As of 2022, Syria is the ranked second worst globally in the Corruption Perceptions Index.[217][218]
Sectarianism[]
Hafiz al-Assad's government was widely counted amongst the most repressive Arab dictatorships of the 20th century. As Bashar inherited his father's mantle, he sought to implement "authoritarian upgrading" by purging the Old Guard and staffing party and military with loyalist Alawite officers, further entrenching the sectarianism within the system.[219][80] While officially the Ba'athist government adheres to a strict secularist doctrine, in practice it has implemented sectarian engineering policies in the society to suppress dissent and monopolize its absolute power.[220]
The regime has attempted to portray itself to the outside world as "the protector of minorities" and instills the fear of the majority rule in the society to mobilize loyalists from minorities.[222] Assad loyalist figures like Michel Samaha have advocated sectarian mobilization to defend the regime from what he labelled as the “sea of Sunnis.” Assad regime has unleashed sectarian violence through private Alawite militias like the Shabiha, particularly in Sunni areas. Alawite religious iconography and communal sentiments are common themes used by Alawite warrior-shaykhs who lead the Alawite militias; as justification to commit massacres, abductions and torture in opposition strongholds.[223] Various development policies adopted by the regime had followed a sectarian pattern. An urbanization scheme implemented by the government in the city of Homs led to expulsions of thousands of Sunni residents during the 2000s, while Alawite majority areas were left intact.[224]
Even as Syrian Ba'athism absorbed diverse communal identities into the homogenous unifying discourse of the state; socio-political power became monopolized by Alawite loyalists. Despite officially adhering to non-confessionalism, Syrian Armed Forces have also been institutionally sectarianized. While the conscripts and lower-ranks are overwhelmingly non-Alawite, the higher ranks are packed by Alawite loyalists who effectively control the logistics and security policy. Elite units of the Syrian military such as the Tiger Forces, Republican Guard, 4th Armoured Division, etc. regarded by the government as crucial for its survival; are composed mostly of Alawites. Sunni officers are under constant surveillance by the secret police, with most of them being assigned with Alawite assistants who monitor their movements. Pro-regime paramilitary groups such as the National Defense Force are also organized around sectarian loyalty to the Ba'athist government. During the Syrian Revolution uprisings, the Ba'athist government deployed a securitization strategy that depended on sectarian mobilization, unleashing violence on protestors and extensive crackdowns across the country, prompting opposition groups to turn to armed revolt. Syrian society was further sectarianized following the Iranian intervention in the Syrian civil war, which witnessed numerous Khomeinist militant groups sponsored by Iran fight in the side of the Assad government.[225][221]
Human rights[]
See also: Human rights in Syria
Ba'athist government has been ruling Syria as a totalitarian state, policing every aspect of Syrian society for decades. Commanders of government's security forces – consisting of Syrian Arab Army, secret police, Ba'athist paramilitaries – directly implement the executive functions of the state, with scant regard for legal processes and bureaucracy. The surveillance system of the Mukhabarat is pervasive, with the total number of agents working for its various branches estimated to be as high as 1:158 ratio with the civilian population. Security services shut down civil society organizations, curtail freedom of movement within the country and bans non-Ba'athist political literature and symbols.[99][226] In 2010, Human Rights Watch published the report "A Wasted Decade" documenting repression during Assad's first decade of emergency rule; marked by arbitrary arrests, censorship and discrimination against Syrian Kurds.[226][227]
Throughout the 2000s, the dreaded Mukhabarat agents carried out routine abductions, arbitrary detentions and torture of civilians. Numerous show trials were conducted against dissidents, filling Syrian prisons with journalists and human rights activists. Members of Syria's General Intelligence Directorate had long enjoyed broad privileges to carry out extrajudicial actions and they have immunity from criminal offences. In 2008, Assad extended this immunity to other departments of security forces.[227] Human Rights groups, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have detailed how the Assad government's secret police tortured, imprisoned, and killed political opponents, and those who speak out against the government.[228][229] In addition, some 600 Lebanese political prisoners are thought to be held in government prisons since the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, with some held for as long as over 30 years.[230] Since 2006, the Assad government has expanded the use of travel bans against political dissidents.[231] In an interview with ABC News in 2007, Assad stated: "We don't have such [things as] political prisoners," though The New York Times reported the arrest of 30 Syrian political dissidents who were organising a joint opposition front in December 2007, with 3 members of this group considered to be opposition leaders being remanded in custody.[232] The government also denied permission for human rights organizations and independent NGOs to work in the country.[227] In 2010, Syria banned face veils at universities.[233][234] Following the protests of Syrian Revolution in 2011, Assad partially relaxed the veil ban.[235]
Foreign Affairs journal released an editorial on the Syrian situation in the wake of the 2011 protests:[236]
During its decades of rule... the Assad family developed a strong political safety net by firmly integrating the military into the government. In 1970, Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father, seized power after rising through the ranks of the Syrian armed forces, during which time he established a network of loyal Alawites by installing them in key posts. In fact, the military, ruling elite, and ruthless secret police are so intertwined that it is now impossible to separate the Assad regime from the security establishment. Bashar al-Assad's threat to use force against protesters would be more plausible than Tunisia's or Egypt's were. So, unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, where a professionally trained military tended to play an independent role, the regime and its loyal forces have been able to deter all but the most resolute and fearless oppositional activists... At the same time, it is significantly different from Libya, where the military, although brutal and loyal to the regime, is a more disorganized group of militant thugs than a trained and disciplined army.
Between 2011 and 2013; the state security apparatus is believed to have tortured and killed over 10,000 civil activists, political dissidents, journalists, civil defense volunteers and those accused of treason and terror charges, as part of a campaign of deadly crackdown ordered by Assad.[237] In June 2023, UN General Assembly voted in favour of establishing an independent body to investigate the whereabouts of hundreds of thousands of missing civilians who have been forcibly disappeared, killed or languishing in Assad regime's dungeons and torture chambers. The vote was condemned by Russia, North Korea and Iran.[238][239][240]
In 2023, Canada and Netherlands filed a lawsuit against Syria at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), charging the latter with violating the United Nations Convention Against Torture. The joint petition accused the Syrian regime of organizing "unimaginable physical and mental pain and suffering" as a strategy to collectively punish the Syrian population.[241][242][243] Russia vetoed UN Security Council efforts to prosecute Bashar al-Assad at the International Criminal Court.[244]
Repression of Kurds[]
Further information: Arab Belt, Arabization#Arabization in Syria, and Qamishli massacre
Ba'athist Syria had long banned Kurdish language in schools and public institutions; and discrimination against Kurds steadily increased during the rule of Bashar al-Assad. State policy officially suppressed Kurdish culture; with more than 300,000 Syrian Kurds being rendered stateless. Kurdish grievances against state persecution eventually culminated in the 2004 Qamishli Uprisings, which were crushed down violently after sending Syrian military forces. The ensuing crackdown resulted in the killings of more than 36 Kurds and injuring at least 160 demonstrators. More than 2000 civilians were arrested and tortured in government detention centres. Restrictions on Kurdish activities has been further tightened following the Qamishli massacre, with the Assad regime virtually banning all Kurdish cultural gatherings and political activism under the charges of “inciting strife” or “weakening national sentiment.” During 2005–2010, Human Rights Watch verified security crackdowns on at least 14 Kurdish political and cultural gatherings.[227][226] In March 2008, Syrian military opened fire at a Kurdish gathering in Qamishli that marked Nowruz, killing three and injuring five civilians.[245]
Censorship[]
Main articles: Censorship in Syria and Internet censorship in Syria
On 22 September 2001, Assad decreed a Press Law that tightened government control over all literature printed or published in Syria; ranging from newspapers to books, pamphlets and periodicals. Publishers, writers, editors, distributors, journalists and other individuals accused of violating the Press Law are imprisoned or fined. Censorship has also been expanded into the cyberspace, and various websites are banned. Numerous bloggers and content creators have been arrested under various "national security" charges.[227]
A 2007 law requires internet cafés to record all the comments users post on chat forums.[246] Another decree in 2008 obligated internet cafes to keep records of their customers and notify them routinely to the police.[247] Websites such as Arabic Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook were blocked intermittently between 2008 and February 2011.[248][249][250] Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) ranked Syria as the third dangerous country to be an online blogger in 2009. Individuals are arrested based on a wide variety of accusations; ranging from undermining "national unity" to posting or sharing "false" content.[227][247]
Syria was ranked as the third most censored country in CPJ's 2012 report. Apart from restrictions for international journalists that prohibit their entry, domestic press is controlled by state agencies that promote Ba'athist ideology. From 2011, the Syrian government has issued a complete media blackout and foreign correspondents were quickly detained, abducted or tortured. As a result, the outside world is able to know of situations happening inside Syria only through videos of independent civilian journalists. The Assad government has shut down internet coverage, mobile networks as well as telephone lines in areas under its control to prevent any news that has its attempts to monopolize information related to Syria.[251]
Crackdowns, ethnic cleansing, and forced disappearances[]
Further information: Casualties of the Syrian civil war and Syrian refugee crisis
The crackdown ordered by Bashar al-Assad against Syrian protestors was the most ruthless of all military clampdowns in the entire Arab Spring. As violence deteriorated and death toll mounted to the thousands; the European Union, Arab League and United States began imposing wide range of sanctions against Assad regime. By December 2011, United Nations had declared the situation in Syria to be a "civil war".[252] By this point, all the protestors and armed resistance groups had viewed the unconditional resignation of Bashar al-Assad as part of their core demands. In July 2012, Arab League held an emergency session demanding the "swift resignation" of Assad and promised "safe exit" if he accepted the offer.[253][254] Assad rebuffed the offers, instead seeking foreign military support from Iran and Russia to defend his embattled regime through scorched-earth tactics, massacres, sieges, forced starvations, ethnic cleansing, etc.[255]
The crackdowns and extermination campaigns of Assad regime resulted in the Syrian refugee crisis; causing the forced displacement of 14 million Syrians, with around 7.2 million refugees.[256] This has made the Syrian refugee crisis the largest refugee crisis in the world; and UNHCR High Commissioner Filippo Grandi has described it as "the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time and a continuing cause for suffering."[256][257]
Ethnic cleansing[]
Eva Koulouriotis has described Bashar al-Assad as the "master of ethnic cleansing in the 21st century".[258] During the course of the civil war, Assad ordered depopulation campaigns throughout the country to re-shape its demography in favour of his regime, and the military tactics have been compared to the persecutions of the Bosnian war. Between 2011 and 2015, Ba'athist militias are reported to have committed 49 ethno-sectarian massacres for the purpose of implementing its social engineering agenda in the country. Alawite loyalist militias known as the Shabiha have been launched into Sunni villages and towns; perpetrating numerous anti-Sunni massacres. These include the Houla, Bayda and Baniyas massacres, Al-Qubeir massacre, Al-Hasawiya massacre, etc. which have resulted in hundreds of deaths; with hundreds of thousands of residents fleeing under threats of regime persecution and sexual violence. Pogroms and deportations were pronounced in central Syrian regions and Alawite majority coastal areas, where the Syrian military and Hezbollah view as a priority to establish strategic control by expelling Sunni residents and bringing in Iran-backed Shia militants.[259][260][258][261] In 2016, UN officials criticized Bashar al-Assad for pursuing demographic engineering and ethnic cleansing in Darayya district in Damascus, under the guise of de-escalation deals.[262]
Syrian government forces have pursued mass-killings of civilian populations as part of its war-strategy throughout the conflict; and is responsible for inflicting more than 90% of the total civilian deaths in the Syrian civil war.[7] Between 2011 and 2021, a minimum of 306,000 civilian deaths are estimated to have occurred by the UN.[105][106] As of 2022, total death toll has risen to approximately 580,000.[263] An additional 154,000 civilians have been forcibly disappeared or subject to arbitrary detentions across Syria, between 2011 and 2023. As of 2023, more than 135,000 individuals are being tortured, incarcerated or dead in Ba'athist prison networks, including thousands of women and children.[264]
War crimes[]
Numerous politicians, dissidents, authors and journalists have nicknamed Assad as the "butcher" of Syria for his war-crimes, anti-Sunni sectarian mass-killings, chemical weapons attacks and ethnic cleansing campaigns.[266][267][268][269] The Federal Bureau of Investigation has stated that at least 10 European citizens were tortured by the Assad government while detained during the Syrian civil war, potentially leaving Assad open to prosecution by individual European countries for war crimes.[270][167] UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay stated in December 2013 that UN investigations directly implicated Bashar al-Assad guilty of crimes against humanity and pursuing an extermination strategy developed "at the highest level of government, including the head of state."[271] Stephen Rapp, the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, stated in 2014 that the crimes committed by Assad are the worst seen since those of Nazi Germany.[272] In March 2015, Rapp further stated that the case against Assad is "much better" than those against Slobodan Milošević of Serbia or Charles Taylor of Liberia, both of whom were indicted by international tribunals.[273] Charles Lister, Director of the Countering Terror and Extremism Program at Middle East Institute, describes Bashar al-Assad as "21st century's biggest war criminal".[177]
In a February 2015 interview with the BBC, Assad dismissed accusations that the Syrian Arab Air Force used barrel bombs as "childish", claiming that his forces have never used these types of "barrel" bombs and responded with a joke about not using "cooking pots" either.[274] The BBC Middle East editor conducting the interview, Jeremy Bowen, later described Assad's statement regarding barrel bombs as "patently not true".[275][276] As soon as demonstrations arose in 2011–2012, Bashar al-Assad opted to implement the "Samson option", the characteristic approach of the neo-Ba'athist regime since the era of Hafiz al-Assad; wherein protests were violently suppressed and demonstrators were shot and fired at directly by the armed forces. However, unlike Hafiz; Bashar had even less loyalty and was politically fragile, exacerbated by alienation of the majority of the population. As a result, Bashar chose to crack down on dissent far more comprehensively and harshly than his father; and a mere allegation of collaboration was reason enough to get assassinated.[277] Nadim Shehadi, the director of The Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, stated that "In the early 1990s, Saddam Hussein was massacring his people and we were worried about the weapons inspectors," and claimed that "Assad did that too. He kept us busy with chemical weapons when he massacred his people."[278][279] Contrasting the policies of Hafiz al-Assad and that of his son Bashar, former Syrian vice-president and Ba'athist dissident Abdul Halim Khaddam states:
"The Father had a mind and the Son has a loss of reason. How could the army use its force and the security appartus with all its might to destroy Syria because of a protest against the mistakes of one of your security officials. The father would act differently. Father Hafiz hit Hama after he encircled it, warned and then hit Hama after a long siege... But his son is different. On the subject of Daraa, Bashar gave instructions to open fire on the demonstrators."[280]
Human rights organizations and criminal investigators have documented Assad's war crimes and sent it to the International Criminal Court for indictment.[281] Since Syria is not a party to the Rome Statute, International Criminal Court requires authorization from the UN Security Council to send Bashar al-Assad to tribunal. As this gets consistently vetoed by Assad's primary backer Russia, ICC prosecutions have not transpired. On the other hand, courts in various European countries have begun prosecuting and convicting senior Ba'ath party members, Syrian military commanders and Mukhabarat officials charged with war crimes.[282] In September 2015, France began an inquiry into Assad for crimes against humanity, with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius stating "Faced with these crimes that offend the human conscience, this bureaucracy of horror, faced with this denial of the values of humanity, it is our responsibility to act against the impunity of the killers".[283]
In February 2016, head of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, Paulo Pinheiro, told reporters: "The mass scale of deaths of detainees suggests that the government of Syria is responsible for acts that amount to extermination as a crime against humanity." The UN Commission reported finding "unimaginable abuses", including women and children as young as seven perishing while being held by Syrian authorities. The report also stated: "There are reasonable grounds to believe that high-ranking officers—including the heads of branches and directorates—commanding these detention facilities, those in charge of the military police, as well as their civilian superiors, knew of the vast number of deaths occurring in detention facilities ... yet did not take action to prevent abuse, investigate allegations or prosecute those responsible".[284]
In March 2016, the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs led by New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith called on the Obama administration to create a war crimes tribunal to investigate and prosecute violations "whether committed by the officials of the Government of Syria or other parties to the civil war".[285]
In June 2018, Germany's chief prosecutor issued an international arrest warrant for one of Assad's most senior military officials, Jamil Hassan.[286] Hassan is the head of Syria's powerful Air Force Intelligence Directorate. Detention centers run by Air Force Intelligence are among the most notorious in Syria, and thousands are believed to have died because of torture or neglect. Charges filed against Hassan claim he had command responsibility over the facilities and therefore knew of the abuse. The move against Hassan marked an important milestone of prosecutors trying to bring senior members of Assad's inner circle to trial for war crimes.
In an investigative report about the Tadamon Massacre, Professors Uğur Ümit Üngör and Annsar Shahhoud, found witnesses who attested that Assad gave orders for the Syrian Military Intelligence to direct the Shabiha to kill civilians.[287]
2023-2024 Arrest Warrant and Legal Proceedings[]
On 15 November 2023, France issued an arrest warrant against Syrian President Bashar Assad over the use of banned chemical weapons against civilians in Syria.[14] In May 2024, French anti-terrorism prosecutors requested the Paris appeals court to consider revoking Assad's arrest warrant, asserting his absolute immunity as a serving head of state.[288]
On 26 June 2024, the Paris appeals court determined that the international arrest warrant issued by France against Assad for alleged complicity in war crimes during the Syrian civil war remains valid. This decision was confirmed by attorneys involved in the case.[288]
According to the lawyers, this ruling marked the first instance where a national court acknowledged that the personal immunity of a serving head of state is not absolute, as reported by The Associated Press.[288]
Chemical attacks[]
The Syrian military has deployed chemical warfare as a systematic military strategy in the Syrian civil war, and is estimated to have committed over 300 chemical attacks, targeting civilian populations throughout the course of the conflict.[289][290] Investigation conducted by the GPPi research institute documented 336 confirmed attacks involving chemical weapons in Syria between 23 December 2012 and 18 January 2019. The study attributed 98% of the total verified chemical attacks to the Assad's regime. Almost 90% of the attacks had occurred after the Ghouta chemical attack in August 2013.[291][292]
Syria joined the Chemical Weapons Convention and OPCW member state in October 2013, and there are currently three OPCW missions with UN mandates to investigate chemical weapons issues in Syria. These are the Declaration Assessment Team (DAT) to verify Syrian declarations of CW Programme; OPCW Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) tasked to identify the chemical attacks and type of weapons used; and the Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) which investigates the perpetrators of the chemical attacks. The conclusions are submitted to the United Nations bodies.[293] In April 2021, Syria was suspended from OPCW through the public vote of member states, for not co-operating with the body's Investigation Identification Team (IIT) and violating the Chemical Weapons Convention.[294][295][296] Findings of another investigation report published the OPCW-IIT in July 2021 concluded that the Syrian regime had engaged in confirmed chemical attacks at least 17 times, out of the reported 77 chemical weapon attacks attributed to Assadist forces.[297][298] As of March 2023, independent United Nations inquiry commissions have confirmed at least nine chemical attacks committed by forces loyal to the Assad government.[299][300]
The deadliest chemical attack have been the Ghouta chemical attacks, when Assad government forces launched the nerve agent sarin into civilian areas during its brutal Siege of Eastern Ghouta in early hours of 21 August 2013. Thousands of infected and dying victims flooded the nearby hospitals, showing symptoms such as foaming, body convulsions and other neurotoxic symptoms. An estimated 1,100-1,500 civilians; including women and children, are estimated to have been killed in the attacks.[301][302][303] The attack was internationally condemned and represented the deadliest use of chemical weapons since the Iran-Iraq war.[304][305] On 21 August 2022, United States government marked the ninth anniversary of Ghouta Chemical attacks stating: "United States remembers and honors the victims and survivors of the Ghouta attack and the many other chemical attacks we assess the Assad regime has launched. We condemn in the strongest possible terms any use of chemical weapons anywhere, by anyone, under any circumstances... The United States calls on the Assad regime to fully declare and destroy its chemical weapons program... and for the regime to allow the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ Declaration Assessment Team."[306]
In April 2017, there was a sarin chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun that killed more than 80 people.[308][237] The attack prompted U.S. President Donald Trump to order the U.S. military to launch 59 missiles at the Syrian Shayrat airbase.[309][310] Several months later, a joint report from the UN and international chemical weapons inspectors concluded that the attack was the work of the Assad regime.[167][311]
In April 2018, a chemical attack occurred in Douma, prompting the U.S. and its allies to accuse Assad of violating international laws and initiated joint missile strikes at chemical weapons facilities in Damascus and Homs. Both Syria and Russia denied the involvement of the Syrian government at this time.[312][313] The third report published on 27 January 2023 by the OPCW-IIT concluded that the Assad regime was responsible for the 2018 Douma chemical attack which killed at least 43 civilians.[lower-alpha 11]
[]
See also: Holocaust denial
In a speech delivered at the Ba'ath party's central committee meeting in December 2023, Bashar al-Assad claimed that there was "no evidence" of the killings of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Emphasizing that Jews were not the sole victims of Nazi extermination campaigns, Assad alleged that the Holocaust was "politicized" by Allied powers to facilitate the mass-deportation of European Jews to Palestine, and that it was used as an excuse to justify the creation of Israel. Assad also accused the U.S. government of financially and militarily sponsoring the rise of Nazism during the inter-war period.[314][315]
Public image[]
Domestic opposition and support[]
Further information: Syrian opposition
The secular resistance to Assad rule is mainly represented by the Syrian National Council and National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, two political bodies that constitute a coalition of centre-left and right-wing conservative factions of the Syrian opposition. Military commanders and civilian leaders of Free Syrian Army militias are represented in these councils. The coalition represents the political wing of the Syrian Interim Government and seeks the democratic transition of Syria through grass-roots activism, protests and armed resistance to overthrow the Ba'athist dictatorship.[316][317][318] A less influential faction within the Syrian opposition is the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change (NCC), a coalition of left-wing socialist parties that seek to end the rule of Assad family but without foreign involvement. Established in June 2011, major parties in the NCC coalition are the Democratic Arab Socialist Union, Syrian Democratic People's Party and the Communist Labour Party.[319] National Democratic Rally (NDR) was an older left-wing opposition coalition of socialist parties formed in 1980, but banned by the Baathist government. NDR was active during the nation-wide protests of the 1980s and the Damascus Spring of the 2000s.[320] During the early years of the civil war, the Druze in Syria primarily sought to remain neutral, "seeking to stay out of the conflict". Druze-Israeli politician Majalli Wahabi claimed in 2016 that over half support the Assad government despite its relative weakness in Druze areas.[321] The "Sheikhs of Dignity" movement, which had sought to remain neutral and to defend Druze areas,[322] blamed the government after its leader Sheikh Wahid al-Balous was assassinated and organized large scale protests which left six government security personnel dead.[323] Druze community became fervently opposed to the Assad government over time and has been vocal about its opposition to increasing Iranian interference in Syria.[324] In August 2023, mass protests against Assad regime erupted in the Druze-majority city of Suweida,[325][326] which eventually spread to other regions of Southern Syria.[327][328][329] Druze cleric Hikmat al-Hajiri, religious leader of Syrian Druze community, has declared war against "Iranian invasion of the country".[330] Syrian Sufi scholar Muhammad al-Yaqoubi, a fervent opponent of both the Ba'athist regime and Islamic State group, has described Assad's rule as a "reign of terror" that wreaked havoc and enormous misery on the Syrian populace.[331]
Central to the regime's support base is the Ba'athist loyalists who dominate Syrian politics, trade unions, youth organizations, students unions, bureaucracy and armed forces.[332] Ba'ath party institutions and its political activities form the "vital pillars of regime survival". Family networks of politicians in the Ba'ath party-led National Progressive Front (NPF) and businessmen loyal to the Assad family form another pole of support. Electoral listing is supervised by Ba'ath party leadership which expels candidates not deemed "sufficiently loyal".[333][334][335] Although it has been reported at various stages of the Syrian civil war that religious minorities such as the Alawites and Christians in Syria favour the Assad government because of its secularism,[336][337] opposition exists among Assyrian Christians who have claimed that the Assad government seeks to use them as "puppets" and deny their distinct ethnicity, which is non-Arab.[338] Although Syria's Alawite community forms Bashar al-Assad's core support base and dominate the military and security apparatus,[339][340] in April 2016, BBC News reported that Alawite leaders released a document seeking to distance themselves from Assad.[341]
Kurdish Supreme Committee was a coalition of 13 Kurdish political parties opposed to Assad regime. Before its dissolution in 2015, the committee consisted of KNC and PYD.[319] Circassians in Syria have also become strong opponents of the regime as Ba'athist crackdowns and massacres across Syria intensified viciously; and members of Circassian ethnic minority have attempted to escape Syria, fearing persecution.[342] In 2014, the Christian Syriac Military Council, the largest Christian organization in Syria, allied with the Free Syrian Army opposed to Assad,[343] joining other Syrian Christian militias such as the Sutoro who had joined the Syrian opposition against the Assad government.[344] Abu Muhammad al-Joulani, commander of the Tahrir al-Sham rebel militia, condemned Assad regime for converting Syria "into an ongoing earthquake the past 12 years", in the context of the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes.[345]
"In June 2014, Assad won a disputed presidential election held in government-controlled areas (and boycotted in opposition-held areas[346] and Kurdish areas governed by the Democratic Union Party[347]) with 88.7% of the vote. Turnout was estimated to be 73.42% of eligible voters, including those in rebel-controlled areas.[348] The regime's electoral commission also disqualified millions of Syrian citizens displaced outside the country from voting.[349] Independent observers and academic scholarship unanimously describe the event as a sham election organized to legitimise Assad's rule.[350][351][352] In his inauguration ceremony, Bashar denounced the opposition as "terrorists" and "traitors"; while attacking the West for backing what he described as the "fake Arab spring".[353]
Times of Israel reported that although various individuals interviewed in a "Sunni-dominated, middle-class neighborhood of central Damascus" exhibited fealty for Assad; it was not possible to discern the actual support for the regime due to the ubiquitous influence of the secret police in the society.[354] Ba'athist dissident Abdul Halim Khaddam who had served as Syrian Vice President during the tenures of both Hafiz and Bashar, disparaged Bashar al-Assad as a pawn in Iran's imperial scheme. Contrasting the power dynamics that existed under both the autocrats, Khaddam stated:
"[Bashar] is not like his father.. He never allowed the Iranians to intervene in Syrian affairs.. During Hafez Assad's time, an Iranian delegation arrived in Syria and attempted to convert some of the Muslim Alawite Syrians to Shia Islam... Assad ordered his minister of foreign Affairs to summon the Iranian ambassador to deliver an ultimatum: The delegation has 24 hours to exit Syria.... They had no power [during Hafez's rule], unlike Bashar who gave them [Iranians] power and control."[355][356]
International opposition[]
Foreign journalists and political observers who travelled to Syria have described it as the most "ruthless police state" in the Arab World. Assad's violent repression of Damascus Spring of the early 2000s and the publication of a UN report that implicated him in the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, exacerbated Syria's post-Cold War isolation.[357][358] Following global outrage against Assad regime's deadly crackdown on the Arab Spring protestors which led to the Syrian civil war, scorched-earth policy against the civilian populations resulting in more than half a million deaths, mass murders and systematic deployment of chemical warfare throughout the conflict; Bashar al-Assad became an international pariah and numerous world leaders have urged him to resign.[359][358][360][361]
Since 2011, Bashar al-Assad has lost recognition from several international organizations such as the Arab League (in 2011),[362] Union for the Mediterranean (in 2011)[363] and Organization of Islamic Co-operation (in 2012).[364][365] United States, European Union, Turkey, Arab League and various countries began enforcing broad sets of sanctions against Syrian regime from 2011, with the objective of forcing Assad to resign and assist in a political solution to the crisis.[366] International bodies have criticized one-sided elections organized by Assad government during the conflict. In the 2014 London conference of countries of the Friends of Syria group, British Foreign Secretary William Hague characterized Syrian elections as a "parody of democracy" and denounced the regime's "utter disregard for human life" for perpetrating war-crimes and state-terror on the Syrian population.[367] Assad's policy of holding elections under the circumstances of an ongoing civil war were also rebuked by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.[368]
Georgia suspended all relations with Syria following Bashar al-Assad's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, condemning his government as a "Russian manipulated regime" that supported Russian occupation and "ethnic cleansing".[lower-alpha 12] Following Assad's strong backing of Russian invasion of Ukraine and recognition of the breakaway separatist republics, Ukraine cut off all diplomatic relations with Syria in June 2022. Describing Assad's policies as "worthless", Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky pledged to expand further sanctions against Syria.[372][373] In March 2023, National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine put into effect a range of sanctions targeting 141 firms and 300 individuals linked to Assad regime, Russian weapons manufacturers and Iranian dronemakers. This was days after Assad's visit to Moscow, wherein he justified Russian invasion of Ukraine as a fight against "old and new Nazis". Bashar al-Assad, Prime Minister Hussein Arnous and Foreign Minister Faisal Mikdad were amongst the individuals who were sanctioned.[lower-alpha 13] Sanctions also involved freezing of all Syrian state properties in Ukraine, curtailment of monetary transactions, termination of economic commitments and recision of all official Ukrainian awards.[377] Syria formally broke its diplomatic ties to Ukraine on July 20, citing the principle of reciprocity.[379]
In April 2023, a French court declared three high-ranking Ba'athist security officials guilty of crimes against humanity, torture and various war-crimes against French-Syrian citizens. These included Ali Mamlouk, director of National Security Bureau of Syrian Ba'ath party and Jamil Hassan, former head of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence Directorate.[380][381] France had issued international arrest warrants against the three officers over the case in 2018.[382] In May 2023, French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna publicly demanded the prosecution of Bashar al-Assad for engaging in chemical warfare and killing hundreds of thousands of people; branding him as "the enemy of his own people".[383][384] On 15 November 2023, France issued an arrest warrant against Assad for use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria.[14]
Left-wing[]
Bashar al-Assad is widely criticised by left-wing activists and intellectuals world-wide for appropriating leftist ideologies and its socialist, progressive slogans as a cover for his own family rule and to empower a loyalist clique of elites at the expense of ordinary Syrians. His close alliance with clergy-ruled Khomeinist Iran and its sectarian militant networks; while simultaneously pursuing a policy of locking up left-wing critics of Assad family has been subject to heavy criticism.[385]
Egyptian branch of the Iraqi Ba'ath movement has declared its strong support to the Syrian revolution; denouncing Ba'athist Syria as a repressive dictatorship controlled by the "Assad gang". It has attacked Assad family's Ba'athist credentials, accusing the Syrian Ba'ath party of acting as the borderguards of Israel ever since its overthrowal of the Ba'athist National Command during the 1966 coup d'état. Describing Bashar al-Assad as a disgraceful person for inviting hostile powers like Iran to Syria, Egyptian Ba'athists have urged the Syrian revolutionaries to unite in their efforts to overthrow the Assad regime and resist foreign imperialism.[386]
Describing Assad's regime as a mafia state that thrives on corruption and sectarianism, Lebanese socialist academic Gilbert Achcar stated:
"Bashar Assad's cousin became the richest man in the country, controlling – it is widely believed – over half of the economy. And that's only one member of the ruling clan... The clan functions as a real mafia, and has been ruling the country for several decades. This constitutes the deep root of the explosion, in combination with the fact that the Syrian regime is one of the most despotic in the region. Compared to Assad's Syria, Mubarak's Egypt was a beacon of democracy and political freedom!... What is specific to this regime is that Assad's father has reshaped and reconstructed the state apparatus, especially its hard nucleus – the armed forces – in order to create a Pretorian guard for itself. The army, especially its elite forces, is tied to the regime itself in various ways, most prominently through the use of sectarianism. Even people who had never heard of Syria before know now that the regime is based on one minority in the country – about 10% of the population; the Alawites."[387]
The Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) in Lebanon has taken an anti-Assad stance and organised mass-protests in support of the Syrian revolution. In August 2012, PSP publicly denounced the Assad government as a "killing machine" engaged in slaughtering Syrian people. PSP leader Ayman Kamaleddine demanded the expulsion of the Syrian ambassador from Lebanon, describing him as "the representative of the murderer regime in Lebanon".[14][15]
International support[]
Far-right support[]
Bashar al-Assad's regime has received support from prominent white nationalist, neo-Nazi and far-right figures in Europe, who were attracted by his "war on terror" discourse against Islamists during the period of European refugee crisis. Assad's bombings of Syrian cities are admired in the Islamophobic discourse of far-right circles, which considers Muslims as a civilizational enemy. American white supremacists often praise Assad as an authoritarian bulwark against what they view as the forces of "Islamic extremism" and globalism; and several pro-Assad slogans were chanted in the neo-Nazi Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville in 2017.[lower-alpha 14][388]
Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National Party (BNP), was formerly an official ambassador and guest of the Syrian government;[389] due to public controversy, the Assad government publicly disassociated itself from him after his trip to Syria in 2014.[390] After the 2014 Syrian presidential elections, Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko sent a cable of congratulations to Bashar, expressing his "confidence" in the "leadership" of Bashar al-Assad, and depicted the Ba'athist government's military campaign as part of "the fight against terrorism and foreign interference".[391]
Left-wing[]
Left-wing support for Assad has been split since the start of the Syrian civil war;[needs update] the Assad government has been accused of cynically manipulating sectarian identity and anti-imperialism to continue its worst activities.
Some heads of state or governments have declared their support for Assad, including North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.[394] After declaring victory in the 2014 elections, Assad received congratulations from President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro,[395] President of Algeria Abdelaziz Bouteflika,[396] President of Guyana Donald Ramotar,[397] President of South Africa Jacob Zuma,[398] President of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega,[399] and Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah and President of the State of Palestine.[400][401][402] Palestinian Marxist-Leninist militant group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) supported Bashar al-Assad during the Syrian civil war. As a result of this stance, Iranian government increased its military and financial funding to PFLP.[403][404]
International public relations[]
In order to promote their image and media-portrayal overseas, Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma al-Assad hired U.S. and UK based PR firms and consultants.[405] In particular, these secured photoshoots for Asma al-Assad with fashion and celebrity magazines, including Vogue's March 2011 "A Rose in the Desert".[406][407] These firms included Bell Pottinger and Brown Lloyd James, with the latter being paid $5,000 a month for their services.[405][408]
At the outset of the Syrian civil war, Syrian government networks were hacked by the group Anonymous, revealing that an ex-Al Jazeera journalist had been hired to advise Assad on how to manipulate the public opinion of the U.S. Among the advice was the suggestion to compare the popular uprising against the regime to the Occupy Wall Street protests.[409] In a separate e-mail leak several months later by the Supreme Council of the Syrian Revolution, which were published by The Guardian, it was revealed that Assad's consultants had coordinated with an Iranian government media advisor.[410] In March 2015, an expanded version of the aforementioned leaks was handed to the Lebanese NOW News website and published the following month.[411]
After the Syrian civil war began, the Assads started a social media campaign which included building a presence on Facebook, YouTube, and most notably Instagram.[408] A Twitter account for Assad was reportedly activated; however, it remained unverified.[412] This resulted in much criticism, and was described by The Atlantic Wire as "a propaganda campaign that ultimately has made the [Assad] family look worse".[413] The Assad government has also allegedly arrested activists for creating Facebook groups that the government disapproved of,[131] and has appealed directly to Twitter to remove accounts it disliked.[414] The social media campaign, as well as the previously leaked e-mails, led to comparisons with Hannah Arendt's A Report on the Banality of Evil by The Guardian, The New York Times and the Financial Times.[415][416][417]
In October 2014, 27,000 photographs depicting torture committed by the Assad government were put on display at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.[418][419] Lawyers were hired to write a report on the images by the British law firm Carter-Ruck, which in turn was funded by the Government of Qatar.[420]
In November 2014, the Quilliam Foundation reported that a propaganda campaign, which they claimed had the "full backing of Assad", spread false reports about the deaths of Western-born jihadists in order to deflect attention from the government's alleged war crimes. Using a picture of a Chechen fighter from the Second Chechen War, pro-Assad media reports disseminated to Western media outlets, leading them to publish a false story regarding the death of a non-existent British jihadist.[421]
In 2015, Russia intervened in the Syrian civil war in support of Assad, and on 21 October 2015, Assad flew to Moscow and met with Russian president Vladimir Putin, who said regarding the civil war: "this decision can be made only by the Syrian people. Syria is a friendly country. And we are ready to support it not only militarily but politically as well."[422]
Personal life[]
Assad speaks fluent English and basic conversational French, having studied at the Franco-Arab al-Hurriyah school in Damascus.[423]
In December 2000, Assad married Asma Akhras, a British citizen of Syrian origin from Acton, London.[424][425] In 2001, Asma gave birth to their first child, a son named Hafez after the child's grandfather Hafiz al-Assad. Bashar al-Assad's son Hafez graduated from Moscow State University in the summer of 2023 with a master's thesis in number theory.[426] Their daughter Zein was born in 2003, followed by their second son Karim in 2004.[24] In January 2013, Assad stated in an interview that his wife was pregnant;[427][428] however, there were no later reports of them having a fourth child.[citation needed]
Bashar al-Assad is an Alawite Muslim.[429] Bashar performed the hajj pilgrimage twice in 1999 and in 2000.[430]
Assad's sister, Bushra al-Assad, and mother, Anisa Makhlouf, left Syria in 2012 and 2013, respectively, to live in the United Arab Emirates.[24] Makhlouf died in Damascus in 2016.[431]
Awards and honours[]
Revoked and returned awards and honours.
Ribbon Distinction Country Date Location Notes Reference Grand Cross of the National Order of the Legion of Honour France 25 June 2001 Paris Highest rank in the Order of the Legion of Honor in the Republic of France. Returned by Assad on 20 April 2018[432] after the opening of a revocation process by the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, on 16 April 2018. [433][434] Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise Ukraine 21 April 2002 Kyiv Revoked on 18 March 2023, as part of sanctions issued by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy which revoked all previous Ukrainian state awards to Assad government[377] [435][377] Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Francis I Two Sicilies 21 March 2004 Damascus Dynastic order of the House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies; Revoked several years later by Prince Carlo, Duke of Castro. [436][437] Order of Zayed UAE 31 May 2008 Abu Dhabi Highest civil decoration in the United Arab Emirates. [438] Order of the White Rose of Finland Finland 5 October 2009 Damascus One of three official orders in Finland. [439] Order of King Abdulaziz Saudi Arabia 8 October 2009 Damascus Highest Saudi state order. [440] Knight Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic Italy 11 March 2010 Damascus Highest ranking honour of the Republic of Italy. Revoked by the President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, on 28 September 2012 for "indignity". [441][442] Collar of the Order of the Liberator Venezuela 28 June 2010[443] Caracas Highest Venezuelan state order. [444] Grand Collar of the Order of the Southern Cross Brazil 30 June 2010 Brasília Brazil's highest order of merit. [445] Grand Cordon of the National Order of the Cedar Lebanon 31 July 2010 Beirut Second highest honour of Lebanon. [446] Order of the Islamic Republic of Iran Iran 2 October 2010 Tehran Highest national medal of Iran. [447][448] Uatsamonga Order South Ossetia 2018 Damascus State award of South Ossetia. [449]
See also[]
Template:Portalbar
List of international presidential trips made by Bashar al-Assad
Presidency of Hafiz al-Assad
Foreign Policy of Bashar al-Assad
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wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 53 | https://newrepublic.com/article/115993/bashar-al-assad-profile-syrias-mass-murderer | en | Bashar Al Assad: An Intimate Profile of a Mass Murderer | [
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"Annia Ciezadlo"
] | 2013-12-19T00:00:00 | In 1982, not long after his father's military pulverized a town called Hama, Bashar Al Assad got a jet ski.It was the tail end of one of the bloodiest periods in Syrian history—what one intellectual called “the hunting time.” In Damascus, a white Peugeot 504 idled on every other corner with mukhabarat, or secret police, inside. Corruption and smuggling were ubiquitous; at least 30 percent of the c... | en | //assets.newrepublic.com/assets/favicons/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png | The New Republic | https://newrepublic.com/article/115993/bashar-al-assad-profile-syrias-mass-murderer | In 1982, not long after his father's military pulverized a town called Hama, Bashar Al Assad got a jet ski.
It was the tail end of one of the bloodiest periods in Syrian history—what one intellectual called “the hunting time.” In Damascus, a white Peugeot 504 idled on every other corner with mukhabarat, or secret police, inside. Corruption and smuggling were ubiquitous; at least 30 percent of the country’s GDP, and probably much more, came from the black market. Everyday goods like bananas and paper tissues were hard to find; jet skis were practically unknown.
Bashar was 16 years old, a pudgy, frizzy-haired kid with chipmunk cheeks and a double chin he would never grow out of. He had his own bodyguards but was so shy about his appearance that he would cover his teeth with his hands when he smiled.
One day, as the story goes, Bashar was sitting at home with a friend when some boys he knew called. They were going on an excursion to Syria’s Mediterranean coast. Could they borrow his new toy?
Yes, yes, of course! Bashar said.
As soon as the boys hung up, Bashar summoned the head of the guards at the presidential palace. Some friends of mine might come and ask to use my jet ski, he said. If they do, tell them it’s broken.
If there’s one thing those who know him agree on, it’s that Bashar Al Assad is awfully eager to please. Friends and even some enemies portray the Syrian president as a kind and generous man, always ready to use his connections to provide a favor: for a job, a heart operation, or just the permit the government has required, under Syria’s authoritarian form of socialism, to buy a tank of propane gas for cooking food. “Easygoing,” say diplomats who have faced him in negotiations. “I would have described him as a real gentleman, before this,” says a Damascene businessman who was part of Assad’s social circle and has now fled the country to escape its ongoing civil war.
The subtext here is that Assad is weak; the polite phrasing, among educated Syrians, has always been that he “does not have the qualities of a leader.” That is to say, he does not have the gravitas of his ruthless, gnomic father, Hafez Al Assad, who ruled the country from 1970 until June 2000. Other Syrians put it less delicately. They call him donkey, giraffe, taweel wa habeel—a Levantine putdown for a big, bumbling doofus. Diplomats, analysts, and a few heads of state have been just as harsh, predicting his imminent downfall since the day he took power.
Two-thousand thirteen was the year when it seemed as if those predictions would finally come true. As the uprising against him ground into its third summer, his regime lost territory and international legitimacy. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states lavished cash and weaponry on rebel fighters. Even the United States was reluctantly edging closer to supporting the revolution with something more than words. Then, on August 21, Assad’s regime used the nerve gas sarin to kill hundreds of Syrian civilians, crossing the “red line” that Barack Obama had said would prompt a U.S. military response. It looked like the end. If a formerly untouchable military dictator like Hosni Mubarak could go down in Egypt, then why not Syria’s lanky, lisping president?
What outsiders have been slow to realize is that in the game Assad is playing, a weak man (or one perceived that way) can cling to his throne just as tenaciously, and violently, as a strongman. Over the course of his reign, he has learned how to turn his biggest shortcomings—his desire for approval, his tendency toward prevarication—into his greatest assets. The world wants him to give up the chemical munitions he used against his own citizens, and he has begun to do that. The world wants an end to the conflict that has killed more than 100,000 Syrians and displaced millions more; his government is now willing to participate in peace talks. This nebbishy second son, who was never meant to inherit the family regime, has proved exceptionally talented in the art of self-preservation.
“He’s more clever than all the Western and U.S. politicians, for sure,” Ayman Abdelnour, a close adviser to Assad before he fell out of favor and fled into exile, told me. Abdelnour then recalled—by way of explaining why Assad was so difficult to take down—something the young president would tell his inner circle about their foreign adversaries. “They are here for a few years,” Assad would say. “My father, seven presidents passed through him.”
When Hafez Al Assad seized power in 1970, Syria had just suffered through nearly a quarter century of coups. The former defense minister was determined to impose stability. He made his Baath Party the country’s “leading party,” meaning the only one with any real authority. And he wagered that an understanding between the urban Sunni merchant classes and the secular security state, increasingly dominated by members of his clan, would hold his regime together. But the calm did not last.
In the late ’70s, Sunni Islamists, led by Baath’s old rival, the Muslim Brotherhood, unleashed a campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations that killed several hundred officers and civil servants. Many of their targets were Alawites, the Muslim minority to which the Assads belong. The faith combines tenets of Shia Islam, elements of Christianity and even Zoroastrian mysticism, and heterodox beliefs like reincarnation. (The thirteenth-century Syrian theologian Ibn Taymiyya, a godfather of today’s militant Sunni Islam, issued three fatwas against its followers.) Historically, Syria’s Alawites were among the poorest of the poor. But during the country’s decades as a colony of France, many of them found a path out of poverty through the military. Alawites continued to use armed service to rise in influence after Syria won independence.
In June 1980, as the power struggle between Baath and Brotherhood took on an increasingly sectarian tone, Hafez narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. His military responded by unleashing its full wrath on the Brotherhood, crushing its Islamist uprising through torture, mass executions, commando raids, and the assault on Hama, a three-week siege that killed tens of thousands of people, the vast majority of them civilians. Hafez liked to call himself “a peasant and the son of a peasant,” but the Assads came to position themselves as a cosmopolitan bulwark against the primitive forces of militant Islam—a modern, enlightened clan ruling a backward people, gently but firmly, for their own good. “In the end,” says a former adviser, “they see themselves much higher than others, as a family.” Suriyet al-Assad, the Syria of Assad, would have to be preserved at all costs.
Hafez ran his household the way he ran his country: demanding total loyalty and tolerating no complaint. Bashar’s older brother, Basil, who was being groomed to take over the presidency, would bully and beat up his little brother, according to one former adviser; but his parents, in keeping with the family code, did not discuss the matter. As a father, Hafez “was not the type of person who ever said ‘bravo’ or good job—he rather told you about the things you should not do, the negative,” Bashar told his biographer, the Middle East history professor David Lesch.
Ali Duba, Hafez’s dreaded head of military intelligence, starred in another bit of Assad parenting lore. One day, according to a story told by Syrians with contacts in the regime, Hafez was sitting around with friends, indulging a rare moment of relaxation, when he exclaimed, “I wish my sons were tough, like Ali Duba’s sons!” Years later, when Duba tried to challenge Bashar’s succession, the son would not dare ask his father for help. It was all part of the strange silence, verging on hostility, between the two. “No, no!” shouted Abdelnour, in alarm, when I asked him if Bashar ever discussed his problems with Hafez. “Even in his mind, he doesn’t discuss it!”
“I do not think [Hafez] was very enthusiastic to see his son replacing him,” Farouk Al Sharaa, a former Syrian foreign minister, told Lesch, “simply because perhaps he never thought he was going to die.”
This coldness inspired in Bashar a quiet rebellion against his father’s cult of personality. In his heyday, Hafez staged massive, North Korean–style extravaganzas, with a sea of people flashing cards to make a picture of his face. Crowds would clap wildly whenever the leader’s name was mentioned; Bashar’s tiny gesture of defiance was refusing to join in, because he did not think a man should be applauded without doing something to earn it. He showed other flashes of independence. The Assad children attended exclusive, French-language schools, alongside the sons of the Damascene elite. Though they had people to do their homework for them, in the finest ruling-class tradition, friends of the family say a young Bashar always insisted on doing his own. “He wants to do things his way,” a former adviser says.
Bashar got his chance to prove himself in January 1994, when Basil crashed his Mercedes Benz on his way to the Damascus airport and died. Bashar was called in from London, where he was doing a residency in ophthalmology, to begin a residency in dictatorship. He planned to succeed where his father had failed: at being liked, not just feared. His Syria would be modern and technocratic, a new model for the Middle East. “He wants approval—from the West, from educated Damascenes, from the artists and the intellectual class,” says a Syrian intellectual who asks not to be named. But the boy who grew up without approval did not understand how to earn it. He lacked what the Syrian intellectual calls “the celestial imagination”—the ability to understand the motivations and desires of other people, who might be dreaming of something beyond how much they admire him.
After his return to Damascus, Bashar joined the officer corps and took over the Syrian Computer Society, formerly Basil’s fiefdom. He started working out and learned how to speak without his youthful habit of covering his mouth. He also set out to build a kitchen cabinet of young reformers and technocrats. Bashar’s people were fellow doctors, engineers, college professors: nerds. They wanted Internet access, better technology, and a country with less corruption and more freedom of expression. Abdelnour was now a close adviser and confidant who drew up proposals for “management by objective” and modernizing the regime from within.
When Hafez died in June 2000, a special referendum installed Bashar as president. He had finally forced out his nemesis, Ali Duba, a few months earlier and now pushed other members of the old guard into retirement. On New Year’s Day 2001, Bashar married Asma Al Akhras, an investment banker from an elite Sunni family who had grown up in London. “There was almost a sense that he came to power reluctantly,” says Mona Yacoubian, a former State Department official who lived in Syria during Hafez Al Assad’s reign and is now a senior adviser for the Middle East program at the Stimson Center. “He wasn’t Basil, who was the more thuggish, stronger brother. He had this beautiful wife. They struck this picture of what people hoped Syria would become.”
The new president announced a series of changes. He released hundreds of political prisoners and permitted Syrians to host salons in their homes to discuss politics and ideas, which was previously forbidden. He allowed private ownership of banks. The government even granted a license to the country’s first independent newspaper, The Lamplighter, a satirical broadsheet run by the brilliant political cartoonist Ali Ferzat. And Syria finally got Internet access, albeit limited and heavily supervised. “At the time, I and millions of Syrians were hoping for the best, and wanting for him to open up the economy, to liberalize politics, to allow freedoms,” says Murhaf Jouejati, a professor at the National Defense University, who met with Bashar early in his presidency. “We were expecting that he would.”
Bashar took pains to appear more modern than his father. He liked to throw on jeans and drive his Audi A6 to Naranj, an upscale restaurant with an open kitchen that served an elegantly simple take on Syrian peasant cuisine. According to a friend, Bashar was partial to a toshi, a Damascene pressed sandwich—classic, regular-guy street food. Another story told of him walking into a restaurant in Aleppo unannounced and politely asking an old woman how she was enjoying her meal. “There is what I call the ‘modest king’ theory in Middle Eastern history: He wears normal clothes, he goes among the people, he sits normally,” says the Syrian intellectual. “And Bashar fits into this tradition.”
But the gestures were mostly symbolic; the so-called “Damascus Spring” would prove short-lived. In January 2001, a group of Syrian activists, intellectuals, and professionals, encouraged by the apparent opening of their country’s political culture, issued a declaration known as the “Statement of 1,000.” They called for an end to martial law and emergency rule and the release of all remaining political prisoners. (Then, as now, nobody knew how many the regime held.) They also demanded democratic, multiparty elections, under the supervision of an independent judiciary. Some of the activists had the temerity to form new political parties.
The Assad regime struck back immediately, beginning a campaign of harassment and intimidation that would last, with varying intensity, for the next ten years. A number of the citizens responsible for the Statement of 1,000 were arrested. By early 2002, the government had forced The Lamplighter out of print and thrown leaders of the fledgling discussion groups in jail. Despite his early feints at democracy, Assad was not interested in surrendering even an inch of his power. Suriyet al-Assad needed his benevolent guidance.
To Bashar and his wife, it wasn’t the Syrian regime that required real reform. It was the Syrian people. Asma’s official biography, passed to me by an old friend of Bashar’s, distills their governing ideology. It reads like a tract from Rand Paul: Syrians need to stop depending on the state and assume “personal responsibility for achieving the common good,” the document proclaims, adding, “the sustainable answer to social need is not aid but opportunity” and “creating circumstances where people can help themselves.” That the Assad family and its loyalists have been helping themselves to Syria’s national wealth for decades does not enter into this narrative.
During the winter of 2006, one of Assad’s advisers showed up for a meeting at the president’s office. He found his boss hyperventilating, unable to speak. “They will reach me,” Assad finally gasped. The adviser desperately attempted to calm him down, offering him juice and coffee. Assad was in an abject state of panic—“complete moral collapse” is how the adviser recalls the scene. After 15 minutes, the dictator collected himself and began the meeting, as if nothing had happened.
Assad was under pressure from several sides. Early in the war on terror, Syria had been an unofficial partner of the United States, even covertly torturing suspected militants. But following the fall of Baghdad in 2003, the Bush administration began hinting that Syria could be the next candidate for regime change, the penalty for its patronage of Hamas and Hezbollah. Assad started allowing Sunni insurgents and jihadi funds to flow through his country into Iraq, hoping to help bog down the United States. But he was also coming under fire over the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the Sunni former prime minister of Lebanon, who had begun to challenge Syrian meddling in his country in the months before his death. A United Nations investigation into the killing stopped just short of implicating regime officials. There was talk that Assad himself could be brought up on charges by a special U.N. tribunal.
Despots who find themselves trapped in confrontations with other countries rely on a venerable set of tactics. Some tyrants embrace conflict, using it to rally their subjects behind them. Others, like Hafez Al Assad, perfect the art of intransigence. He was “a stone wall,” says one senior Western diplomat who knew both father and son. Bashar, however, took a very different approach: “[He] was much more supple, much more ready to talk details. He’s very smooth-edged. Very agreeable—nothing seemed to be beyond imagining.” Bashar was so eager to create an impression of pliancy, says another diplomat, that during one round of high-level negotiations, he launched into discussions before the pre-talk photo op was even over. His foreign minister had to quietly remind him not to discuss state matters in front of the press.
For years, many Western analysts and diplomats have viewed Assad as malleable, even naïve. But his former aides describe a man who is accustomed to being underestimated and adept at exploiting those misperceptions. Before negotiations, Assad would tell his team to let the other side think they had won: “Give them always nice words, nice meetings, nice phrases,” Abdelnour recalls him saying. “They will be happy, they will say good things about us, and they cannot withdraw from it later.” In the end, though, Assad rarely delivers on the concessions that he grants so courteously. He always has an excuse, a variable beyond his control: Yes, he would try to stop the flow of jihadists into Iraq, but he could not police the entire border.
According to another former aide, Assad took pleasure in toying with the West. “He told me once, ‘When I sit with the Arabs, it’s a session of takazu’—mutual lying, we say in Arabic,” says the former adviser. “ ‘But when I sit with those foreigners, and you see me on television, really it’s a game of Tom and Jerry.’ ”
Assad also had a different, homegrown model for his approach. “Give them a sandwichet Ghawwar,” has been one of Bashar’s instructions to his team when the regime feels squeezed. Ghawwar Al Toshi is a beloved Syrian TV character, a stubborn prankster with a lush mustache and an old-school Damascene accent. He seems bumbling and feckless, a little like a Syrian Mr. Bean, but his implausible capers always somehow work out to his advantage. In one famous episode, Ghawwar opens a sandwich stand; instead of buying all the necessary ingredients, he takes a single piece of meat and ties a string to its end. His customers walk away, unaware that Ghawwar is about to pull back the fillings and leave them with nothing but empty bread.
Assad can play the gag expertly. By 2007, the Hariri investigation was foundering. The United States was losing control in Iraq and, once again, pleading for his help reining in Islamic militants. He had not only survived his crises; he emerged from them stronger, or so he believed. He thought he was creating a legacy of his own. When a Syrian TV announcer called Hafez the greatest Arab leader in history, Bashar had one of his advisers, Buthaina Shaaban, call the announcer and order him never to say it again.
In October, after some back-and-forth, one of Assad’s high school friends agreed to meet with me. He asked that I not use his name, or any identifying characteristics, because he was afraid the opposition would make him a target. “Even the secular guys are really crazy,” he said. “You could get whacked really easily.”
We met in a hotel lobby on New York City’s Upper East Side. Immediately, he suggested that we go somewhere else. “I don’t like it here,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the side entrance where he had specified we meet. A surprising number of people from Assad’s inner circle have fled to the United States in the past few years as their lives in Syria, which had been quite comfortable, became less so.
Assad spent his first term in office refining an economic policy based on cronyism, privatizing the old state-run industries without actually creating any new competition. It was gangster capitalism cloaked in neoliberal free-market rhetoric. His maternal cousin, Rami Makhlouf, became the symbol of the ruling clan’s racketeering. Makhlouf controlled a network of extraordinarily lucrative monopolies, from one of the national cell-phone carriers to a chain of duty-free stores. After bringing in the Egyptian telecom giant Orascom as a partner to develop Syriatel, he edged the Egyptians out and kept the spoils for himself, which discouraged other foreign investors and left Syria’s economy more isolated than ever.
Experts have been warning for years that Syria was headed for a demographic disaster if economic conditions did not improve. “Signs of internal restlessness are increasing,” Yassin Haj-Saleh, a dissident who spent 17 years in jail under Hafez, warned me back in the summer of 2005. “If we have a social explosion, God forbid, it might take on a sectarian character.” Over the next few years, the country absorbed more than a million Iraqi refugees, straining its already weak infrastructure. A devastating drought began in 2007 and dragged on for three years, exacerbated by the government’s mismanagement of water and land resources. As the Assads burnished their international profile by hosting Sting and Angelina Jolie in Damascus, 80 percent of the people from the drought-stricken areas, mostly agricultural peasants, were left destitute, so poor that they subsisted on bread and tea.
In January 2011, as popular uprisings spread through Tunisia and Egypt, Assad spoke with two reporters from The Wall Street Journal. “We have more difficult circumstances than most of the Arab countries, and in spite of that Syria is stable,” Assad said. “You have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people.” Syrians, he insisted, did not want “cosmetic” reforms just to please the West; they knew that the only real solution was to “upgrade the whole society.”
That February, a group of children in Deraa, a dusty southern Syrian town full of poor agricultural migrants, got tired of waiting for their upgrade. With cans of spray-paint, they took up the revolutionary cry spreading across North Africa and Yemen: The people want the fall of the regime. Security forces rounded up 15 of them.
Here is how people in Syria tell the story of what happened next: In March, the boys’ fathers went to Atef Najib, the head of political security in the province and a relative of the Assads. They laid their keffiyehs on the table to show that they would not leave without their sons. “You want your sons back?” Najib laughed, throwing their keffiyehs into the trash. “Bring me your wives, and I will make you more sons!” Protests broke out; within the week, 120 anti-government demonstrators were dead.
This time, the world’s approval would be out of reach. So Assad set about making himself the least-bad option. On March 30, 2011, as the conflict escalated, he gave a defiant and conspiratorial speech casting himself as the victim of “foreign powers” who had stirred up insurrection in a bid to destroy Syria. “They adopt the principle,” he said of his enemies, “of ‘lie until you believe your lie.’ ”
In fact, it is Assad who has done exactly that. Calmly and deliberately, he has painted a picture that in the beginning was not completely accurate: The demonstrators, he said, were jihadists who would bring Afghanistan-type chaos to the country. Then he sat back and waited for it to become true. “He’s very strategic. From the very first day, he was talking about terrorists and Syria’s national unity,” says a former regime official, who has now defected to the United States. “People were talking about democracy, human rights, silly stuff—not silly, but not strategic—and he is talking about Al Qaeda.”
And if a series of well-timed massacres by the regime would provoke outrage in the West, Assad also knew that images of carnage would cause Gulf states to arm the Islamist opposition and escalate the sectarian warfare. This was his strategy: to make intervention so unpalatable that the international community would take no steps to alter the course of the conflict. “These jihadists who have come in, largely courtesy of private Gulf money, these are his enemies of choice,” says Frederic C. Hof, the Obama administration’s former envoy to the Syrian opposition and currently a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “I call it a coalition of co-dependency.”
As the Al Qaeda element grew stronger, the regime became increasingly aggressive at playing it up. With Islamist rebels seizing territory closer and closer to Israeli-occupied areas, the opposition posted a video of a half-dozen fighters driving along the border of the Golan Heights. “For forty years, not one shot has been fired against Israel from here,” one of the fighters shouts in Arabic. “Allahu akbar!” At that, some of his companions raise their Kalashnikovs with one hand and shoot them into the air. “The regime made sure that this video was all over [the Internet] the next day,” says the former Assad official. “They took their whole media machine and they put it everywhere, to show the Israelis: Look what’s coming.”
Meanwhile, the regime methodically discredited the revolution’s moderate, secular factions with sophisticated dirty tricks. For the first four or five months of the war, security forces treated detainees from Damascus with relative caution, even as they massacred villagers in rural areas—a shrewd way to make opposition claims of brutality look hysterical to the capital’s middle and upper classes. “If you were from a good family, they wouldn’t torture you,” says Mohamad Al Bardan, a nonviolent opposition leader who now lives abroad. “People like me, at one point, we felt they were stupid. They are not stupid at all.”
Later, when what Graham Greene called “the torturable class” expanded to wealthy, Internet-connected urbanites, Assad and his henchmen adopted a tactic that would have made Jerry the mouse proud. A rumor would swirl that the regime had detained a certain supporter of the revolution. The opposition would mobilize: media alerts, petitions, pleas to international human rights organizations. Once the alarm had reached a frenzy, the supposedly jailed activist would appear on state-run television, making the opposition look unreliable. “They did that multiple times,” says Bardan. In one of the most wicked examples, word spread that Alawite regime thugs had beheaded a beautiful young Sunni Muslim girl because her brother was an opposition activist. When she resurfaced a few weeks later, she told a different story: She had run away from home because her brother was abusing her.
The regime is constantly refining its dark arts of propaganda and deception. When it captures an activist, his comrades often try to shut down his social-media accounts as quickly as possible, to prevent the regime from mining them for intelligence. As security forces figured this out, they began forcing detainees to reopen their accounts. Social-media companies would get a message supposedly from the detainee, claiming to be free and complaining that he had been maliciously targeted. When activists tried to explain what really happened, it sounded like a conspiracy theory. After a few of these incidents, the social-media companies weren’t sure whom to believe. “They thought we were playing, doing some kids’ stuff,” says Bardan. “It’s difficult to describe to any American, that this is the way that we live in Syria. ... Different cultures, different societies cannot understand exactly how evil could be.”
By the time the Syrian military used the nerve gas sarin to kill hundreds of civilians in the ring of suburbs around Damascus on August 21, 2013, the jihadists were so ascendant, and the secular opposition so discredited, that Assad could claim the rebels carried out the attacks and not be universally dismissed. His version of events did not have to be credible. It just had to create confusion and doubt. In a Pew poll conducted eight days after the attacks, only 53 percent of Americans believed there was “clear evidence” that Assad was to blame. Even supposedly better-informed authorities, including the revered journalist Seymour Hersh, entertained the regime’s carefully planted suggestions.
While the Obama administration never seriously doubted Assad’s role in the attack, it accepted other crucial pieces of the dictator’s narrative. “The regime has been extraordinarily successful with a very disciplined and single–minded disinformation campaign,” says Hof. “Even in the executive branch, you’ve got people arguing over what’s the bigger threat, Assad or Al Qaeda. You’ve got people worrying about all kinds of hypotheses—what if Assad were overthrown? What would happen to Syria? As if what’s happening to Syria is something we can all live with.”
According to one former Assad aide, about a week after the sarin-gas attack, as the White House vacillated over how to respond, Assad called his top military and intelligence chiefs into a meeting. This was unusual; he rarely gathers them in one place, preferring one-on-one meetings. Assad told the men not to worry: If the United States launches air strikes, they will be merely cosmetic—a face-saving measure for Obama. We are safe, he told them.
One recurring theory about Assad, which the regime has perhaps subtly encouraged, holds that he is not really running his country, but is in thrall to a shadowy set of figures that varies according to whom you’re talking—in some versions, it is his father’s old circle; in others, the Alawite elite. (This theory was especially appealing to the Western governments who once hoped that high-level defections could help weaken Assad, and perhaps even supply his replacement.) Most of the former regime officials I spoke to rejected that idea. “This is a kind of one-man show,” says a former regime official. “The system will not collapse as long as Assad does not collapse. Any other person is replaceable.”
Under the deus ex machina set in motion by Russia, Assad has until the middle of 2014 to facilitate the removal and destruction of all of Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpiles and manufacturing capabilities. Even though this agreement does nothing to threaten Assad’s hold on power—Moscow can veto any U.N. punishment for the regime’s failure to comply—it has been widely celebrated. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is overseeing the process, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Assad joked in front of reporters from a Lebanese newspaper that he should have received the award himself.
When I asked one former regime official about what will happen next, he suggested the following scenario: International chemical weapons inspectors are operating out of the fortress-like Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus. Assad knows that a few of these inspectors will be Western intelligence agents. Syrian operatives will figure out who they are and quietly approach them with tips: a known terrorist is in this province; we have pictures; we’re fighting Al Qaeda, just like you. “And I will not be surprised at all if the American and Syrian intelligence agencies work together again,” says one defector. “If not today, tomorrow. If not directly, indirectly. The door will be open.”
The last time Bashar Al Assad stood for reelection in Syria, where the presidential term lasts for seven years, was in May 2007. He had no credible opponent and won with 97.6 percent of the vote. Instead of his father’s Pyongyang-style extravaganzas, Bashar celebrated with a more postmodern spectacle: an exquisitely orchestrated “uprising” of support, part Roman triumph, part faux Orange Revolution. Crowds of people danced debkeh in the streets with choreographed spontaneity, waving torches and posters of Bashar and singing: “We love you, yes! We love you!”
Syria’s next presidential election is scheduled for May. In an October interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel, Assad played coy about whether he will seek a third term. “I cannot decide now whether I am going to run,” he said. “It’s still early, because you have to probe the mood and will of the people.” But he seemed to like his chances. “Who isn’t against me?” Assad said. “You’ve got the United States, the West, the richest countries in the Arab world, and Turkey. All this and I am killing my people, and they still support me! Am I a Superman? No. So how can I still stay in power after two and a half years? Because a big part of the Syrian people support me.” Besides, Assad added, “Where is another leader who would be similarly legitimate?”
Annia Ciezadlo, a veteran Middle East correspondent, is the author of Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War. | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 10 | https://www.martinennalsaward.org/hrd/aktham-naisse/ | en | Martin Ennals Award Aktham Naisse | [
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] | null | [] | 2016-07-18T14:17:28+00:00 | Aktham Naisse - Martin Ennals Award 2005 laureate. Aktham Naisse co-founded the Committee for the Defense of Democratic Liberties and Human Rights (CDF). | en | Martin Ennals Award | https://www.martinennalsaward.org/hrd/aktham-naisse/ | After more than a decade struggling for human rights in Syria, on December 1989, Aktham Naisse co-founded the Committee for the Defense of Democratic Liberties and Human Rights (CDF). The first of its kind in Syria, CDF quickly began defending political prisoners, denouncing Syria’s longstanding 1963 Emergency Law and calling for political reforms.
The same year, Naisse took matters a step further and began publicizing a newsletter under the name Sawt ad-Dimuqratiya (Voice of Democracy). Naisse would earn the ire of the Syrian authorities – running an illegal NGO and publishing a newsletter critical of the regime.
Working between the lines was by no means ‘new territory’ for Naisse – for nearly 15 years he had been seeking permission from the government to work openly and freely on human rights issues in Syria.
On 18 December 1991, only a few days after the CDF’s 2nd anniversary, Naisse was arrested. The torture sessions ensued and following a categorically ‘unfair’ trial, he was sentenced to nine years imprisonment. He was provisionally released in 1996, however he continued to agitate the Syrian authorities over democratic and human rights, maintained his fervent criticism of the State of Emergency, landing him in jail a further five times between 1996 and 1998.
Immediately after his final release in 1998, he would further bolster the CDF’s efforts by launching a campaign to lift the State of Emergency and allow all exiled Syrian to return.
Almost a year later in 2000, then-president Hafez Al-Assad died, his son Bashar, taking over the reins while making promises of ‘political reforms’. With the release of 600 political prisoners in November 2000 and a renewed tolerance for civil society groups, Syria seemed to be approaching a new era under its new youthful President. But as more than 60 discussion forums would emerge, hope was short-lived, as the previous darkness Syrians knew all too well came to settle once again.
By 2001 the vast majority of the new-founded discussion fora and civil society groups had once again disappeared and in June 2002, the European parliament adopted a resolution condemning the imprisonment of Syrian intellectuals and political opponents.
On 27 August 2003, the CDF was told to shut down, despite the threats, Naisse’s didn’t back down, rather leading the CDF in doubling its efforts.
In early 2004 the CDF published a petition signed by 7000 intellectuals calling for an end to the Emergency Law. The same year, on 8 March the anniversary of the 41st of Baath party rule, Naisse organized a peaceful sit-in outside the Damascus parliament, during which protestors made calls for democratic reforms and the release of political prisoners.
An alleged 700 demonstrators were arrested, but released the following day. A month later, Naisse was summoned by the military security services in Latakia, west Syria and arrested.
He was charged with “opposing the objectives of the revolution” and “disseminating false information aiming at weakening the State” – charges that could land him 15-years in jail.
By now Naisse was used to the Syrian authorities’ draconian tactics, having been the target of threats and harassment over the last 10 years, escalating to an incident when his mother was beaten by security services in 2003.
The international human rights community instantly mobilized as the FIDH, OMCT, Frontline and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Right Network amongst others issued appeals on Naisse’s behalf.
While in custody, Naisse was awarded the Ludovic Trarieux international human rights prize for 2004
While in custody, awaiting trial, Naisse suddenly suffered a stroke after being denied medication for his kidney and heart problems. Fearing he might die, Syria’s Supreme State Security Court (SSSC) conditionally released Naisse on 17 August 2004 for 10,000 Syrian Pounds, and called on the authorities to drop all charges.
After successive postponements in his trial – culminating on 24 April 2005 during a hearing with a protest of more than 200 demonstrators outside the SSSC in Damascus – Aktham Naisse was acquitted by SSSC on 26 June 2005.
News of his release was welcomed across the globe and a few days before his trial Naisse wrote to the Martin Ennals Foundation saying,
“I feel more motivated and happy because there are people interested in our problem, people that care for us and support us in our fight for human liberty. I have a great belief now that I know we are not struggling alone against human rights violations.”
On 12 October 2005, Naisse was awarded the 2005 Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders during a ceremony at the Bâtiment des Forces Motrices in Geneva, Switzerland.
Naisse was until recently under constant surveillance in Syria, in internal exile since a travel ban was imposed on him in October 2008. In 2011 the Syrian government launched a bloody repression against the opposition. In August 2011 the city of Latakia was bombarded by land and sea, fortunately Aktham Naisse was able to escape and take refuge in Europe. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 12 | https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/international/200418/syrias-assad-returns-legion-honour-award-france | en | Syria's Assad returns legion of honour award from France | [
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] | 2018-04-20T21:16:00+02:00 | Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has returned his Legion d'honneur award, France's highest recognition of civil merit which was given to him in 2001, in retaliation for French participation in airbor… | en | /icon-news.ico | Mediapart | https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/international/200418/syrias-assad-returns-legion-honour-award-france | Managing cookies
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wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 47 | https://adst.org/2013/09/a-gamble-for-peace-negotiating-the-camp-david-accords/ | en | A Gamble for Peace – Negotiating the Camp David Accords – Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training | [
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] | null | [] | null | en | https://adst.org/2013/09/a-gamble-for-peace-negotiating-the-camp-david-accords/ | Unrest in the Middle East has been an unrelenting problem for centuries, the Gordian knot that cannot be cut. The founding of Israel in May 1948 further complicated matters, leading to several wars and a state of heightened tension. While there have been many international efforts to find a lasting peace in the Middle East, the Camp David Accords marked the first substantive step toward that end and still stand as a watershed moment. After meeting in secret at Camp David for 13 days of negations, the parties were able to make a breakthrough in the talks. President Jimmy Carter, President Anwar El Sadat of Egypt, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords on September 17, 1978.
The Accords comprised A Framework for Peace in the Middle East, and A Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel. The first framework was later condemned by the United Nations General Assembly because it regarded Palestinian territories without participation from the Palestinians. The second framework though, led directly to the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, which is still in effect today, despite considerable upheaval in the region.
The Accords and subsequent events, including Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem, were very controversial, especially in the Arab world. Yasser Arafat of the PLO, King Hussein of Jordan, and Hafez al-Assad of Syria refused to participate in multilateral peace talks, and many Arabs turned against Sadat because they believed he wasn’t defending the Arab objective. Despite criticism back home, Begin and Sadat received world-wide praise for their efforts. As a result of the Camp David Accords, Begin and Sadat were both awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978.
Ambassadors Samuel W. Lewis and Hermann Frederick Eilts reflect on their experiences during the often heated negotiations, the difficulties in reaching a compromise, the race to get an agreement before the deadline, and the trouble with the accords that started coming up almost immediately afterward. Eilts served as Ambassador to Egypt from 1974-79, and Lewis as Ambassador to Israel from 1977-85; both were crucial players in the negotiations. Ambassador Lewis was interviewed by Peter Jessup in 1998; Ambassador Eilts was interviewed by Ambassador William D. Brewer in 1988.
You can read about the Yom Kippur War, which helped lay the groundwork for negotiations, Sadat’s key role in the negotiations, his assassination, the opening of the UN Sinai Field Mission, and other Moments on the Middle East.
Invitations to Camp David
LEWIS: Carter sent [Secretary of State Cyrus] Vance with a hand-written invitation first to Jerusalem and then to Cairo, inviting Begin and Sadat to Camp David. Begin, who had been hoping for such an invitation, accepted immediately and so did Sadat. The stage was set by early August for the Camp David meeting in September 1978.
In retrospect, it is clear that Begin and Sadat had concluded by this time that the negotiating process between their two governments had come to an end and that a meeting between the two of them hosted by Carter might be the only hope for progress. So they both accepted the invitation with alacrity. There was about a month between the invitation having been delivered and the start of the Camp David conference, on September 5, 1978.
Carter was extremely well briefed; he was really on top of the material and was knowledgeable of all aspects — having been immersed almost continuously with the problem for eighteen months.
Therefore, he knew much about Sadat and Begin already; he had met them before and understood their political constraints. He was particularly interested in overcoming the psychological barrier that had been erected in the past six- eight months in the aftermath of Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem — things had gone off the track in that period and the Sadat-Begin relationships had become increasingly tense. They had not met since Christmas Day of 1977.
The State [Department] officials were by and large rather pessimistic about what could be achieved at Camp David. Carter had asked State to prepare a set of goals for what might be achieved. I remember that during the lunch, Carter indicated that he thought the goals were far too modest and that he was setting his sights considerably higher.
He was aiming for a full peace, not a partial or intermediary solution. I thought at the time that it was very wise for Carter to shoot high, although I also was not as optimistic as the President as what might be realistically expected. I notice from my notes for this period that I shared Carter’s qualified optimism more than some of the other advisors. I felt that all parties had too much riding on the conference to let it fail, but it was still up to Carter to put a viable package together, which was terrifically difficult task.
EILTS: Carter had said, “I want to do something for the Palestinians,” which I must say gave me great hope. And he said, “You know, I think we should be able to do something, get something done in four or five days.” I remember we were making bets on how long it would take.
Nerves Run High as Confrontation Looms
EILTS: Before we went to Camp David, I had seen Sadat prior to my own flight back to Washington. Sadat had said, “I want a confrontation with the Israelis, and I need Carter’s help on it. They are not really being responsive to anything, as you know.” At least this was the way he said it, “I want a confrontation.” Begin, as I understand it, reckoned that there would be an effort to get a confrontation.
LEWIS: On September 5, I met Begin at the airport. In the helicopter that took us from Andrews Air Force Base to Camp David, Begin was very keyed up. He was almost manic in the way he was approaching the conference. He was very excited. Ezer Weizman was very jumpy; he thought that Begin was too confident and he was very worried. He thought if the conference went badly, Begin would become very defiant, which would have been characteristic. Weizman worried about the potential problems ahead. Dayan, as always, was very contained and reserved. He like all the other Israelis was very tense.
EILTS: Both Sam Lewis, our Ambassador to Israel, and I warned the President at that luncheon, “Don’t bring Sadat and Begin together, other than for social events.” The reason was clear.
By that time, Sadat’s reaction to Begin, despite their earlier meetings, was very negative and bitter. Carter seemed to accept that. To our surprise, however, no sooner had we gotten to Camp David when Carter called Sadat and Begin together and said to Sadat, “Mr. President why don’t you read your proposal?” Sadat hadn’t been prepared for this, but he had the Egyptian proposal with him and in a monotone he read that proposal. Begin was chafing at the bit.
At the end of the presentation, Carter said, “Well, let’s now adjourn and meet again tomorrow morning.” Then Carter came to the American delegation. He looked at Sam Lewis and at me, and said, “You fellows told me not to get them together. It worked beautifully. No problem.”
The following morning he got them together again. No sooner were they seated when Begin said, “Mr. President, if you’re going to accept this man’s (Sadat, he was much more polite) proposal, I insist the Israeli proposal be accepted as the basis for discussion.”
With that Sadat, pointing to Begin, said, “This man is responsible for all the problems.” Sparks were flying and Carter had to adjourn the meeting right away.
From that point on the negotiations took place between the American delegation and the Israelis; and the American delegation and the Egyptians. There was no direct negotiating between Egyptians and Israelis. Sadat and Begin didn’t meet again except in a social context.
A Difference in Strategy Between Sadat and Begin
LEWIS: On the second night, Carter joined the American delegation at about ten o’clock after having watched the movie. He spent about two and half hours with the whole American delegation, describing his impressions of the initial meeting between Sadat, Begin and himself.
He outlined what he saw the strategy for the rest of the conference to be; he described the personalities and their positions and assessed the prospects. He also told us at that time about some very sensitive concessions that Sadat had made to him privately for Carter’s use with Begin whenever Carter felt that they would be effective. It was an extraordinary meeting.
Carter dealt with all of us as part of his team. That was flattering to me and to Eilts. He revealed a lot more about his views, his strategy and other people than he had done previously, except perhaps to his own immediate inner White House circle.
Sadat had adopted what I considered a brilliant strategy in dealing with Carter; that strategy culminated at Camp David. Sadat was uninterested in details; he was interested only in the broad principles. Begin was very interested in the details and every language change was significant to Begin.
So Begin took a real interest in the drafting and redrafting of every document; Sadat took less interest, but listened to his staff. His staff, which had unanimously objected to Sadat coming to Camp David at all, felt he was in a very tough position and didn’t really want to agree to anything.
Begin’s staff was very eager for an agreement and their strategy throughout was designed to bring Begin around to something that was acceptable to others and viable from the Israeli point of view. Therefore, the strategy of the two delegations were almost mirror images.
Camp David succeeded in part because Sadat over-ruled all of his advisors. Begin ultimately acquiesced in certain concessions that his delegation had urged on him and which Carter was pressing for. Sadat’s technique was to express full confidence in Carter’s understanding of Egypt’s situation and full reliance on Carter’s unwillingness to do anything that would hurt Egypt.
He implicitly and explicitly put himself in Carter’s hands, which of course was very flattering to Carter. Begin on the other hand looked with a very gimlet eye on the crosses on the “t”s and the dots on the “i”s of anything that Carter would suggest, which did not create the same sympathetic attitude that Sadat’s approach did. Apparently, in the course of the early meetings, Sadat had given Carter a number of specific fall-back positions that he would agree to if Carter told him that they were necessary to achieve an agreement. He left the tactics entirely up to Carter.
EILTS: The first ten days — first of all it took much more than a week — by the end of the tenth day we still had no agreement on anything. Every agreement was tentative, conditional on something else. So it went. Carter was becoming very impatient. He had immobilized himself at Camp David for this long a period.
And he finally said to the parties, “I have to go back to Washington on Sunday. Either we get something by Sunday, or it’s a failure.” By then, of course, his own prestige was heavily invested in this, which was important.
Settling Sinai
EILTS: On the evening of the tenth day, a Thursday, Sadat was finally persuaded by Carter, Vance and Ezer Weizman to receive [Minister of Foreign Affairs Moshe] Dayan. Dayan, in his customary forthright fashion, told Sadat, “If anyone has told you, Mr. President, that any Israeli government can get out of the Sinai settlements, they’re deluding you. It can’t be.” It was Weizman who had told this to Sadat. This so upset Sadat that he called me. He said, “I have to see the President.”
He saw President Carter and said, “I’m leaving. If I can’t even get the Sinai settlements out of this, what’s the use of coming here?” Now that forced Carter, who up to that point had been trying to persuade Sadat to allow the Sinai settlements to remain, if not under IDF — Israeli Defense Force — protection, under UNEF [United Nations Emergency Force, deployed in the Middle East in 1956 after the Suez Crisis] or even Egyptian military protection.
Sadat had consistently refused. Carter was now forced to go to Begin and say, “Mr. Prime Minister, here’s the situation. Nobody is going to understand why this peace conference fell apart because of your insistence on remaining in Sinai.”
And Begin, with obvious reluctance, because it went against everything he stood for, agreed to submit the issue of removing the Sinai settlements to the Knesset “without the whip”, i.e., people would be free to vote their consciences. It was understood that, if the Knesset vote was negative, anything else that might be worked out at Camp David was null and void.
That agreement came into being late at night on the tenth night, a Thursday night, three days before Carter had indicated the conference must close. The remaining two days then were spent in working out, (with Carter and Osama El-Baz on the Egyptian side and Aharon Barak on the Israeli side), in working out a Sinai agreement. That is the Egyptian-Israeli agreement that would deal with Sinai.
“Framework of Peace in the Middle East”
EILTS: The rest of us were involved in working out a West Bank-Gaza autonomy agreement, the so-called “Framework for Peace in the Middle East.” That second document went through 18 drafts and, as you might imagine, as this happens, instead of being strengthened, the document becomes more and more ambiguous.
It was no longer constructively ambiguous, but just ambiguous. For example, nobody was quite sure what autonomy meant. To Egypt it meant self-determination, or leading to self-determination. To Israel, it meant a kind of bondage status.
So we ended up on that Sunday morning with a Sinai document that was reasonably explicit and could serve as a good basis for peace negotiations. The West Bank-Gaza document on the other hand, “The Framework for Peace in the Middle East”, was totally ambiguous, subject to divergent interpretations, and lacked anything about the future of Israeli settlements in the West Bank or in Gaza.
Carter, however, at the last minute, thought he had an oral agreement from Begin that Israel would undertake a protracted freeze on settlements in the West Bank and in Gaza. By protracted freeze, Carter meant no more settlements until such time as a self-governing Palestinian authority envisaged in the West Bank-Gaza agreement had been set up, however long that would take.
Thereafter that self-governing body would negotiate with Israel on the existing settlements and on any future settlements. Had we in fact obtained that kind of agreement in writing we could probably have sold what was a vague document, West Bank-Gaza as far as Palestinian rights were concerned, to the other Arabs.
The Jerusalem Crisis and the Danger of Losing the Agreement
LEWIS: During Sunday, we were putting the final touches on the draft. Carter was preparing to launch his campaign with the other two leaders to get them to the signing point.
Sunday, in fact, turned into a cliffhanger, not a wind-down as it should have. That I gather is common to many conferences in which you think you have a deal, only to find out at the last minute that there are still issues to be resolved. That is what happened at Camp David on the final day.
We thought everything had been pretty well resolved. Then the all of a sudden, the issue of Jerusalem exploded unexpectedly. Since no meeting of the minds was possible on the issue. it had been agreed by the three delegations that each would state its own view of the problem in a letter to be attached to the agreement.
Actually, we had all agreed on some language at one point — a simple statement that Jerusalem should remain undivided, the rights to the holy places should be respected and that Jerusalem’s ultimate status should be left to further negotiations — all very vague and general — but Sadat was persuaded Saturday night by his advisors not to agree to that because it was giving away too much for Arab sensitivities.
Sadat was convinced that it would have been better to be silent on the subject than to have a minimal agreement that was achievable. On the basis of our understanding, we had drafted a letter on our position on Jerusalem, addressed to Sadat and Begin. We delivered that letter to the Israelis so that they could see it in advance before they delivered their letter to us.
The difficulties arose because Carter and Vance thought that it had been clear to Begin that the U.S. would restate our view on Jerusalem — that our views would be stated in addition to the Israeli and Egyptian views. The fact that we had to state our views is because that was the understanding we had reached with Sadat in exchange for his approval of dropping the whole issue out of the final Camp David agreement.
He knew of course, that our view was somewhat closer to his than it was to that of Israel’s and he wanted our view on the public record, even if were to be in a side letter.
This was one of the two topics that was discussed in the marathon meeting Saturday night. It is there that the misunderstanding started which is not surprising in light of the weariness of the participants which may have made them miss the nuances. It is a lesson why negotiations should not be carried on too late at night.
So on Sunday morning, Vance read to Dayan the text of our draft letter on Jerusalem, which was essentially a summary of statements that [U.S. Ambassadors to the United Nations] Arthur Goldberg and Charles Yost had made to the UN previously in 1967 and 1969.
Dayan was very upset to hear our position restated so baldly — namely that the status of Jerusalem was subject to later negotiations, which along with other nuances, implied that we viewed Jerusalem as occupied territory and not an integral part of Israel. Dayan went off to explain it to Begin. He was particularly upset by a phrase which identified East Jerusalem as occupied territory. (We should note that the same issues have recently arisen again….)
Shortly after that meeting broke up at about 12:30 and the Israelis went off to lunch, I got an agitated call from Meir Rosenne, the legal advisor of the Foreign Affairs Ministry and a member of the Israeli delegation. He wanted a copy of our letter immediately, which I brought to him, after carefully marking it “First draft-uncleared”.
When I arrived at the Israeli cabin, I found Begin fuming angrily to his colleagues, all of whom looked very worried. Dayan took me aside and described to me Begin’s explosion at the idea that the U.S. would put forth its position at this last moment. He urged me to try to convince Vance that our draft had to be killed or that the conference might break down.
Begin was furious when he spoke to his delegation. So I went back and reported to Vance, who insisted that Begin had been told of our intentions the night before and had not objected. Carter had given assurances just that Sunday morning that we would state our position in a side letter. The public restatement of our position on Jerusalem was sine qua non for Sadat’s signature to the final agreement.
It was Vance’s view that Begin would just have to swallow it. I told Vance that I didn’t think he would; he didn’t seem to be bluffing. I also told Vance that none of the three Israelis who were present at the Saturday night meeting — Begin, Dayan and Barak — would admit that they had heard anything about our intention to restate our views on Jerusalem. I went back to Dayan; Begin was adamant.
Finally we got Dayan and Barak to meet with Vance in the pool hall in Holly Cabin. Carter and Mondale suddenly joined in. Then Jordan and Dinitz and Weizman and Saunders and I also joined. It began to be a crowd.
Carter was polite, but cool and tough. He said he could not go back on his word to Sadat. He had made known his intentions to make the letter public the night before. He tactfully pointed out that it was not the Israeli responsibility to tell the U.S. whether or where or how it should state its views and policies.
The meeting broke up in a pessimistic view. Then Carter picked up a hint from Dayan. He asked Vance to look at the language of our draft letter again to see what could be done to ease Israeli concerns without breaking his commitment to Sadat. In fact, Vance had already realized by then that the original language could not stand and had already commissioned a new draft. It was practically ready when Carter asked for it.
The new draft merely said that our new position was as had been stated by Goldberg and Yost, but didn’t restate it. This version was eventually accepted by both Begin and Sadat. So the “Jerusalem crisis” was contained and didn’t raise its head again at Camp David.
This episode was a good illustration of the last-minute unexpected events that can blow up towards the end of a conference, which can be resolved, but that at the moment looks like a sure tragedy. In retrospect, I think that the Jerusalem issue could have wrecked the conference because on Sunday morning, although the Israelis were so close to achieving peace with Egypt and would not have wished to have it slip away, Begin might have driven Sadat out of the game inadvertently if he had dragged the meeting out further.
Sealing the Deal – Euphoric Israel, Scared Egypt
LEWIS: At approximately 5:30 p.m., that Sunday afternoon, after the deal had been sealed, we were deluged by a cloudburst, which delayed our departure for about an hour. We then took all the documents and got on helicopters to the White House.
The Israeli delegation, which I accompanied on their helicopter, was euphoric. Everybody was very happy.
The Egyptians were putting up a good front, but they were essentially very unhappy and scared. Many members of the Egyptian delegation genuinely felt they were committing suicide by being party to this peace agreement. They felt that eventually they might lose their lives because of their participation. Kamal had told Sadat two days earlier that he would resign because he couldn’t support Sadat’s determination to reach agreement. Sadat prevailed on him to stay through the conference.
It was clear that Begin’s rather obnoxious and difficult negotiating strategy had paid off. I thought then and I still believe now that Israel got a somewhat better deal than Egypt did, but that both sides had made a good many concessions. It was obvious that neither side was totally satisfied which I consider a good negotiating outcome.
Begin would have some political problems at home about what he had given away in Sinai — the settlements — and other issues, but I was sure that he could overcome the problems because Labor would certainly support him even if all of the Likud didn’t. That is what ultimately happened in the Knesset.
That Sunday evening, we landed at the Washington Monument helipad at about 9:45 p.m. and motorcaded to the White House. Most everyone went to the East Room for the formal announcement to the world.
No one outside the delegations knew that success had been achieved. All the hints coming out of Camp David in the few previous days had been pessimistic.
So the outcome of the conference came as a terrific bombshell for the press, the Congress, the various publics in Israel and Egypt. Interestingly, when we went up to the East Room, only a couple of members of the Egyptian delegation went.
Al Baz was one of them, being very faithful to Sadat and happy that the agreement had been reached. Two or three others drifted away so that they wouldn’t be photographed. The Israelis were all there. Carter, Begin and Sadat sat on the rostrum.
Begin stole the show; he made a warm and witty speech. Sadat gave a formal speech, praising Carter, but not mentioning Begin at all. Then the famous picture was taken; this is the one that got a lot of press play. Begin embraced Carter and then Sadat for a photo opportunity which he was anxious to have on the record. He mouse-trapped Sadat into that picture; Sadat couldn’t avoid it. It was a very smooth performance.
Troubles With the Accords and an Opportunity Lost
EILTS: That Sunday night, after the signing ceremony, but after we went to the State Department and sent messages all over the world, including to Arab leaders, explaining the agreement, and indicating we also had agreement, not textually in the accords but as a side agreement, a protracted settlement freeze for the West Bank and Gaza and asking for their support.
By then, Sadat’s Foreign Minister had resigned in protest against the Camp David accords when Carter got the letter from Begin on Monday. It didn’t speak of a protracted settlement freeze. Instead, it spoke of a three-month freeze, tied to the time period stipulated in the Sinai agreement for the conclusion of an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.
This had nothing to do with the West Bank-Gaza. Carter would not go back to Begin, he would not himself call Begin and say, “Look, this is not consistent with your agreement of yesterday.” I guess he wasn’t sure.
Quite frankly, he rushed through finishing the Camp David accords and perhaps allowed himself to be taken in. And then later, that same Monday, Begin went to New York and made a public statement on what he meant by autonomy for the West Bank. This made it very clear that what he had in mind was totally different from what we had sent out as our explanatory messages to Arab and other leaders. So the Arab states, as you know, generally wouldn’t agree.
But Camp David was a modest accomplishment. My problem with Camp David is two-fold: one that we gave away too much. Certainly Carter, in going into the Summit, had much grander ideas of what could come out of it, including doing something for the Palestinians.
But given the difficulties of the first ten days; and then, the vast array of nitty-gritty work that had to be done in the last two days, by which time he just had to get back to the White House — these were all important elements of the overall problem. Carter knew the problems intimately because he had briefed himself better than any President, but these issues were not given the time that they deserved.
Several suggestions were made — “Can’t we stay a little longer?” But, after all, by that time the President had been away from Washington for two weeks and that was in itself remarkable. My second is this: that then we did not, either under Carter and certainly not under Reagan, take what we had obtained in Camp David and try to develop it into something more meaningful. Once we got the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, that was pretty much it. The following West Bank-Gaza autonomy talks languished.
For Carter, of course, he couldn’t involve himself. He was in the election campaign. He had the Iranian hostage crisis. He named Bob Strauss — Bob Strauss is a great fellow, the former chairman of the Democratic Party — but Bob didn’t like that job. Then he named Ambassador Sol Linowitz. What little was accomplished in the autonomy talks is largely the result of Sol Linowitz’s work.
But then came a new Administration with a different sense of priorities. The whole idea of autonomy talks that flowed from Camp David was given short shrift. A minor functionary of Secretary Haig’s was named to conduct them.
Well, that was not — that kind of a figure, as American representative who had to deal with five Israeli Ministers, (they had by then named five Ministers), and an Egyptian Prime Minister, who was in a position to make anything out of it.
And the Reagan administration, it seemed, really didn’t care. It had strategic consensus and the Soviets on its mind, things of that sort.
So the two problems, in my view, we did not at the end of Camp David work enough to prevent some of the dangers that, at least many of us, saw. And, second, afterward for a variety of reasons, we did not try vigorously to make something out of Camp David. | |||||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 69 | https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2014/0603/Assad-s-father-in-law-becomes-lightning-rod-for-Syrians-in-London | en | Assad's father-in-law becomes lightning rod for Syrians in London | [
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] | 2014-06-03T15:14:27-04:00 | The father-in-law of President Bashar al-Assad, who is staging an election today in Syria, lives on a modest house in London. Some Syrian exiles gripe over his support for the regime. | en | /extension/csm_base/design/standard/images/favicon.ico | The Christian Science Monitor | https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2014/0603/Assad-s-father-in-law-becomes-lightning-rod-for-Syrians-in-London | It is a modest terraced house on a suburban street, with a pebble dash facade and pink roses on its tiny front lawn. But to Syrians opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, who is staging a controversial presidential election in Syria today, the house is a lightning rod.
Its owner is Fawaz Akhras, the father of Mr. Assad's British-born wife and a longtime resident of Britain. His loyalty to Assad's regime has brought on attacks on his suburban house, its walls paint-bombed and windows smashed.
“See the satellite dishes there, so he can follow the news in Syria?” says Mohammed, a Syrian neighbor, gesturing at the house. “But we never see Akhras. I don't want to see him." He declined to give his full name; like other Syrians critical of the regime, he worries about repercussions for his relatives at home.
However, opinions about Mr. Akhras, a cardiologist who works at a private hospital, are far from uniform among Syrians in Acton, a neighborhood in West London with a large Middle Eastern population.
“There are many Syrians here who back the regime”, says Malik al-Abdeh, a Syrian journalist who lives across the road from Akhras and knew Syria's first lady, Asma, when she was growing up. She appeared today on Syrian TV casting a ballot alongside her husband.
At the outset of Syria's conflict, when peaceful protesters called for political reform, there was speculation that she might be a moderating influence on Assad, who succeeded his father in 2000. Similar claims were made for Akhras, the father-in-law, who has lived in Britain for four decades. But leaked emails later showed that both were supportive of the regime despite its brutal tactics in putting down its opponents.
Exiles divided by politics
British Syrians' political and ideological allegiances track those of people back home, says Abdeh, a director at the Movement for Justice and Development, a pro-democracy group. Most Sunnis back the opposition; many non-Sunnis support the regime. But more have swung behind Assad because they fear the Islamist extremists in the opposition, and sense that the regime is winning.
He himself refuses to criticize Akhras. “He's a doctor. He has been here for many years. He isn't ostentatious – in the league table of wickedness he isn't very high up,” he says.
He adds, however, that when it was revealed in 2012 that Akhras had been in friendly contact with the Syrian regime, many local Syrians became “very angry."
Born in Homs, Akhras moved to Britain in 1973 – a time when a large number of Syrians were leaving to escape the dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad. These exiled Syrians hoped that under his son Bashar, a British-trained eye doctor, the situation would improve.
Akhras met his wife, Sahar Otri, then an official at the Syrian embassy, and trained in Britain as a doctor. His daughter, Asma, was born in 1975 and educated in London, where she was known as Emma. After university, she worked in banking before marrying Bashar in 2000.
Early on in the conflict, as the crackdown worsened, observers wondered what Akhras, who is said to be mild-mannered and likeable, made of his son-in-law's brutality, including the Syrian military's shelling and bombing of Homs, his home city.
Moral support for regime
In 2012, the Guardian newspaper obtained several thousand emails between Akhras and the regime, which suggested that as the crackdown worsened and Western criticism mounted, he had offered advice and moral support to the embattled Syrian president.
“Until that moment it was unclear where Fawaz and Asma stood,” says Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, a charity. “I was routinely asked, 'has Asma left Syria?'"
The Guardian reported that Akhras counseled Assad via email on how to shape Syria's response to media reports of brutality by its security forces, including a Channel 4 film that appeared to show torture of children. The emails dated between June 2011 and February 2012.
"The emails confirmed once and for all that they had both nailed their colors to the mast and believed in the crackdown. They showed that they were comfortable with what was going on," says Mr. Doyle.
He speculates that Akhras's interests – in terms of his daughter and family – are now firmly tied to the regime since if it falls he would be unable to return to Syria.
Family and future
The sense that one's future and family in Syria is tied to one's political allegiance is shared by all British Syrians. Unsurprisingly, many declined to talk politics ahead of today's election.
Akhras is keeping a low profile in his adopted hometown. He did not return calls requesting an interview, although the receptionist at his clinic said he was in London and working. Neighbors say he is only seen on the street as he hops into his car on his way to work.
An organization he helped set up, the British Syrian Society, has largely wound down, say observers. Its website has carried no news since 2010, except a simple message.
“The British Syrian Society is saddened and appalled at the violence and loss of life in Syria," it reads. “Our thoughts and wishes go out to all our friends in Syria and we dearly hope for an end to the troubles that have overcome Syria since March 2011." | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 84 | https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/02/25/after-syria | en | After Syria | [
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] | 2013-02-25T00:00:00 | If the Assad regime falls, can Hezbollah survive? | en | https://www.newyorker.com/verso/static/the-new-yorker/assets/favicon.ico | The New Yorker | https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/02/25/after-syria | The bodies of the two young fighters from Hezbollah were already in the ground when the memorial service began. They’d been killed days before, and their smiling portraits hovered above an outdoor stage in their village, Sohmor, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The stage was framed by huge banners, portraying Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. In the portraits, the two fighters—Ali Hussein al-Khishen and Ali Mustafa Alaeddine—looked barely their age, nineteen. Khishen had chubby cheeks and a boyish smile; Alaeddine’s countenance was sterner and more knowing. “You are the proof of martyrdom!” one of the posters said.
The mourners, thousands of them, shuffled to their seats, the black-clad women drifting to the back. The atmosphere was not sombre but upbeat, undefeated, like a football stadium before kickoff. Boys in blue shirts and white kerchiefs—Mahdi Scouts—poured coffee from ornate decanters and handed out bottles of water. A Hezbollah brass band bleated out what sounded like a Sousa march. Khishen and Alaeddine were being celebrated in death.
At the time of the service, late last year, Hezbollah had spent months denying that its men were crossing the border into Syria to fight for Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime. Yet evidence was mounting that they were. The day before the funeral, Syrian rebels announced that they had killed a Hezbollah commander and at least two of his men. Hezbollah acknowledged that the commander, Ali Hussein Nassif, had died, but refused to disclose where or how, saying only that he had been “performing his jihad duties.”
Like the fallen commander, the two dead fighters in Sohmor had been killed under murky circumstances. Hezbollah said that the two had died at an ammunition depot inside Lebanon, in an accidental explosion, four days before. But the service in Sohmor was a thikra usbu’, an Islamic ceremony held seven days after death. At the burial, the bodies of Khishen and Alaeddine had been kept inside their caskets, invisible even to their families.
The crowd stirred as guards began appearing on rooftops, clutching soft violin cases with the butts of machine guns poking out. Then a bearded man in a black turban walked onto the stage with his hands clasped, like a cleric. It was Hashem Safieddine, the head of Hezbollah’s Executive Council. The audience grew silent.
“Don’t cry, Sohmor,” Safieddine began. “You can’t have dignity without young blood.” He didn’t say how Khishen and Alaeddine had been killed, and he made no mention of an ammunition depot. Instead, he told the people that their sons had died for a noble cause, and that Hezbollah was built on sacrifices such as these. Then he talked about Syria. “We are more sure every day that the challenges we face from Israel, America, and the Arab countries are huge—and that the Arab countries are spending money to destroy Syria and Hezbollah,” he said.
Safieddine wasn’t exaggerating: after decades of belligerence, Hezbollah is surrounded by existential threats. In an Arab world dominated by Sunni Muslims, Hezbollah agitates on behalf of Shiite identity—forming, along with Syria and Iran, a column of resistance sometimes called the Shiite Axis. For thirty years, Syria has offered protection and facilitated a pipeline of money and arms from Iran. With Syrian and Iranian help, Hezbollah has become the most powerful force in Lebanon. Too strong to be challenged even by the government, it has set up its own mini-state and built one of the world’s most sophisticated guerrilla armies. It has kept up a relentless campaign to confront Israel, even provoking a war in 2006.
Now the civil war in Syria is threatening to break the axis. Without Syria, Hezbollah would have no bolster against its Sunni enemies, within Lebanon and throughout the region. Worse, it would be left alone to face Israel. In front of the crowd in Sohmor, Safieddine didn’t have to elaborate this point. He said only, “We are aware of what is happening in Syria, and we are courageous and more ready than ever for resistance.”
Back in Beirut, a Hezbollah officer conceded that the explanation for the young martyrs’ death—the explosion at the ammunition depot—had been contrived. They had been killed in Syria, he said: “There were a lot of bodies coming back.” It was something that no one was permitted to discuss, for obvious reasons: Hezbollah could not afford to anger Sunnis, but neither could it allow its allies in Syria to fall. “If Bashar goes down,” a Hezbollah commander told me, “we’re next.”
The Hezbollah commander, who called himself Dani (a pseudonym required to maintain his safety), met me in a private home around the corner from “the secure area,” a cluster of buildings that serves as Hezbollah’s headquarters in the southern Beirut neighborhood of Al Ghobeiry. Dani walked in wearing jeans, a tight black T-shirt, trail shoes, and a Quicksilver cap; his hair was short and his fair-skinned face was shaved clean. I was struck by his appearance, so unlike the cliché of an Islamic militant, and Dani did not fail to notice. “We’re not all bearded fanatics, you know,” he said. Dani, who is about forty years old, looked more like a good-natured auto mechanic, which he is, most of the time. One of eleven siblings, he is married and has two children of his own.
Dani grew up in a village within sight of the Israeli border, but, as he remembers it, his family had no anti-Israeli feelings. His father traded wheat and olives and often crossed over to buy and sell in the Israeli port of Haifa. “My dad had a lot of Jewish friends back then,” Dani said. “He didn’t think a lot about occupation.”
Throughout Dani’s childhood, the Palestine Liberation Organization was based in Lebanon. A Sunni-dominated group, it treated the Shiites harshly, and was an increasingly unwelcomed presence. Then, in 1982, the Israel Defense Forces poured across the border, in a huge military operation aimed at destroying the P.L.O., and soldiers made their way to Dani’s village. At first, the villagers, like many Lebanese, welcomed the Israelis, whom they hoped would rid them of the P.L.O. “I ate the candy they threw us,” Dani said. But it wasn’t long before Israeli soldiers began to sweep the region’s Shiite villages for weapons, detaining men with no connection to the P.L.O. Soon Dani needed written permission from the Israelis to move in and out of town. “They made us prisoners in our own country,” he said.
Ever since the nineteen-twenties, when the colonial French carved Lebanon from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, it has been a political playground for its more powerful neighbors: Israel, Syria, the Palestinians, and Saudi Arabia, each of which has routinely manipulated Lebanese politics through local proxies. Lebanon’s vulnerability lies in its intense polarization, which has bedevilled every government that has tried to run the place. The country was intended by the French as a kind of sanctuary for Maronite Catholics. Over time, the Catholics and other Christians, who were once a majority, clung to power even as they were surpassed in numbers by Muslims. Now eighteen officially recognized religions and sects thrive among four million people, in a country the size of Connecticut. Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians predominate, but none has a majority. In 1975, sectarian tensions, aggravated by the growing militancy of the P.L.O., exploded into a civil war. The war lasted fifteen years, devastated the country, and killed a hundred and twenty thousand people. In the midst of the war, in 1982, came the Israeli Army.
As Dani looked for a way to resist the invaders, the obvious option, the Lebanese Army, was closed. The Army—indeed, most of the government—had all but ceased to exist. Then a new group arose, dedicated to opposing Israel; it was known as Hezbollah, from the Arabic for “Party of God.” The group dates its beginning to November 11, 1982, when a teen-ager named Ahmad Qassir approached the Israeli headquarters in Tyre and blew himself up. Its true origins aren’t so simple. Hezbollah emerged from a collection of disparate armed groups, but almost immediately the fighters began receiving training, direction, and money from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. “The Iranians were looking for an opening in Lebanon, and the Israeli invasion gave it to them,” David Crist, a historian for the U.S. government and the author of “The Twilight War,” an account of the American-Iranian rivalry since 1979, said. “The Iranians’ great success is that they took all these disparate groups that were fighting the Israelis and brought them together.”
The Iranian regime spent as much as two hundred million dollars a year supporting Hezbollah, according to a U.S. Defense Department report. For Iran, Hezbollah was an appealing proxy. Like the Iranian regime, it was composed of Shiites, a minority throughout most of the Islamic world and historically its downtrodden class. Hezbollah’s founders, adhering to the doctrine of wilaayat al faqih, recognized Iran’s Grand Ayatollah as the leader of the global Islamic revolution. But mostly the Iranians wanted Hezbollah as an advance force to confront Israel. In Hezbollah’s first manifesto, published in 1985, its leaders proclaimed their dedication to fighting until Israel was “obliterated.” Paul Salem, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, in Beirut, said, “Hezbollah is an Iranian aircraft carrier parked north of Israel. ‘You hit us, we hit you.’ That is what Hezbollah gets the big bucks and the missiles for.”
Among the fighters in the early days was Hassan Nasrallah, a round-faced cleric whose magnetism captivated almost everyone he met. Nasrallah, then in his early twenties, was a son of Karantina—“the Quarantine”—one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in Beirut. His father sold fruit from a pushcart. He was an avid reader of theology as a boy, and he later attended the fabled Shiite seminaries of Najaf, in Iraq, and Qum, in Iran. In 1992, Israeli forces assassinated Abbas al-Musawi, the leader of Hezbollah, by firing a missile at his car. Nasrallah took his place, only months after returning from Iran.
Soon after Hezbollah was founded, Dani, though still a boy, left home and joined. “I vowed never to return to my village until it was liberated,” he said. Over the next eighteen years, Hezbollah waged a guerrilla war against Israeli soldiers who occupied southern Lebanon. Dani fought all the time. “I became a soldier,” he said. American troops came in to help the Lebanese government, and Hezbollah struck against them as well. According to U.S. officials, two of the bloodiest attacks against Americans in the nineteen-eighties were carried out by Hezbollah operatives with Iranian support: the suicide attack on the American Embassy in Beirut, in April of 1983, which killed sixty-three people; and the truck bombing of Marine barracks that October, which killed two hundred and forty-one Americans. (Hezbollah has denied involvement in either attack.) In 1985, Hezbollah militants kidnapped Colonel William R. Higgins, an American officer overseeing United Nations peacekeepers on the Israeli border, and tortured him to death. “We were under military occupation at the time, as far as I see it, and so therefore I don’t think those were terrorist attacks,” Dani said.
A few days after we first spoke, Dani took me on a tour of southern Lebanon, where war with Israel festered for decades. We drove south out of Beirut, along the Mediterranean coast, past Sidon’s sea castle, the stone fortification built by the Crusaders in the thirteenth century, and through the ancient city of Tyre. “All of this,” he said, pointing out the window, “used to be in Israeli hands.” Martyrdom posters lined the roadside, along with other indications that Hezbollah was governing the place. “Hezbollah welcomes the Pope!” one poster said.
We stopped in a village, at a café called Al Bas, where a young man who introduced himself as Hussein Hodeh was standing behind an espresso machine. When I asked him about the village’s allegiances, he shrugged and said, “It’s a Hezbollah town.” I asked how he knew, and he reached under the counter and unfurled a yellow Hezbollah battle flag. “I’m Hezbollah myself,” he said, with a laugh. “I’m a fighter.”
About ten miles from the Israeli border, we turned inland, moving across a hilly landscape of limestone bluffs and olive trees. Dani pointed out landmarks. “That bridge—the Israelis used to bomb it all the time,” he said. After a while, we reached Mleeta, a fantastical theme park dedicated to Hezbollah’s triumphs, and pulled into a parking lot next to a tour bus. In the nineties and again in 2006, Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah militiamen fought for the ground on which Mleeta sits, and the battlefield has been preserved, in the manner of Normandy or Gettysburg. The grand opening, in 2010, was attended by a representative of the Lebanese Prime Minister. Down a path from a gift shop that sells Hezbollah T-shirts and coffee mugs adorned with Nasrallah’s face, Dani pointed into a wide pit and said, “This is the destroyed Israeli tank.” There lay the carcass of an enormous Merkava, Israel’s finest, its bottom blown out by a bomb and its barrel tied in a knot. It was surrounded by a small sea of Israeli helmets. “It’s all real here, all real,” Dani said. “I know—I remember.”
We walked past a tunnel network and an array of Katyusha rocket batteries, alongside a group of European tourists snapping photos. Here and there, Dani paused. “The Israelis were right here,” he said. “Sometimes they would advance, sometimes we would advance. Sometimes the fighting was face to face.” Dani spoke with predictable contempt for Israel. “It’s a cancer,” he said. “It’s a parasite.” But he had nothing but admiration for the soldiers he had faced in battle. “The Israeli fighters are very fierce and very brave. They knew every inch of this ground, better than we did. We respect them. We don’t take them lightly. That’s why we were able to beat them.”
Everywhere in Mleeta there are placards and inscriptions, all with the same theme: before Hezbollah, there was nothing but humiliation. “From 1948 until the invasion of Lebanon, in 1982, the Israeli enemy imposed on Lebanon and the region only one choice,” one of the placards said. “Surrender, defeat, and subjugation.” Hezbollah, the sign went on, “announced the birth of a different course: Resistance.” In 2000, the last Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon. Dani went back to his village, which his relatives had fled. “I was the first one from my family to enter our village,” he said.
Nasrallah gave a speech in the Hezbollah stronghold of Bint Jbeil that was triumphant and anti-Zionist, if not overtly anti-Semitic. “We must acknowledge the grace of the fighting, the resisting and the sacrificing of the people who left their homes, families, and universities,” he said. With the Israeli withdrawal, Nasrallah became a hero in Lebanon and throughout the Arab world. “Nasrallah’s legitimacy in the Shiite community is almost unquestioned,” Salem, of the Carnegie Middle East Center, told me. “He is one of those historic figures, like Nasser in Egypt, whose identity merges with the people. He’s a messiah figure.”
When I asked Dani what Iran and Syria were doing in Lebanon, he went quiet; the subject is taboo in public and in the press. He would say only, “Assad is our friend; we don’t deny that. If he goes down, it’s bad for us.” On the Syrian civil war, Dani held to the Hezbollah line: it was true that Bashar didn’t treat his people well—“We recognize this,” he said—but the real trouble in Syria was caused by Western nations that were backing the rebels in order to take pressure off Israel. Yet the prospect of a Sunni majority, even a fundamentalist regime, coming to power in Syria was so alarming that at one point Dani seemed to be siding with Israel. “You wait and see,” Dani told me. “You’re going to have Salafists in Syria attacking the Golan Heights. What are you going to do then?”
It was clear that Hezbollah’s leaders had concluded that any change in Syria was almost certain to wash across the border, and that they were getting ready. “If the Sunnis take over Syria,” Dani told me, “we’re going to be fighting them in Beirut.”
To better understand the link between Hezbollah and Syria, I paid a dinner visit to the Beirut home of Walid Joumblatt, the leader of a tiny religious group, the Druze, and perhaps Lebanon’s most nimble and sophisticated politician. Joumblatt is an unprepossessing man—with a bald head, weary eyes, and a tiny mustache, he looks like a latter-day Edgar Allan Poe. But, with his small bloc of parliamentary seats, he has spent his career moving from one faction to another, making and breaking Lebanese governments.
We dined on ‘assafeer, roasted larks so small that you don’t need to remove the bones, and Joumblatt reached frequently for a decanter of sake. His dining room was filled with books; on a side table sat a copy of “Description of Egypt,” Napoleon’s attempt to catalogue Egypt’s archeological history. Oscar, Joumblatt’s Shar-Pei, was underfoot. “My best friend,” he said.
As Joumblatt told it, the Syrians had destroyed his family, and afflicted his country for decades. The Syrian Army first rolled across the border in 1976, in the early part of the Lebanese civil war, on the pretext of restoring order. But, as the civil war continued, the troops remained. Led by Hafez al-Assad, and then his son, Bashar, the Syrians dominated Lebanon’s society and its economy, extracting billions of dollars in tithes, bribes, and drug money. The Assads intervened regularly in Lebanon’s democratic political system, often calling on local proxies to carry out assassinations. Joumblatt’s father was the first. In March of 1977, Kamal Joumblatt, then the leader of the Druze, was shot dead as he was driving home. His militia had been resisting the Syrian troops, and the suspicion has always been that Hafez al-Assad ordered the killing.
Walid, then twenty-seven, took over as leader and, barely a month later, found himself sitting next to Assad. “I still had some hair—I was not yet bald—and Hafez looked at me and said, ‘How strange, you look like your father,’ ” Joumblatt told me. “I was hiding my anger. I had to do it for the sake of my community. I had no choice but to fix up a pact with the devil. So I shook hands with this man. I looked at him. And he did not move—he was known not to move, like a pharaoh.” Joumblatt sighed. “Lebanon is not an independent country. We have the sea, we have Israel, and we have Syria.”
In the nineteen-eighties, Syria’s relationship with Hezbollah was strained, and sometimes devolved into street fighting. But when the civil war ended, in 1990, Hafez al-Assad decided to allow Hezbollah to carry on its fight against the Israelis and to use the group as a local ally. For Hezbollah, an alliance with the Syrians meant that it could go on building its military without interference from the Lebanese government.
Over the years, growing numbers of Lebanese came to regard the Syrians as overbearing and exploitative—an inland relative bullying and mooching off a smaller, more sophisticated cousin. Around 2000, Rafik Hariri, a two-time Lebanese Prime Minister and a charismatic businessman with ties to the Saudi royal family, began trying to pull the country out of Syria’s orbit. In August, 2004, Hariri visited Damascus, where Bashar al-Assad warned him that his efforts were putting him in grave danger. “We will break Lebanon,” Bashar said. When Hariri returned to Lebanon, according to Joumblatt, who was a close friend of his, “he said, ‘Either Bashar is going to kill me or he is going to kill you.’ He was resigned to fatalism. God decides. And it happened.” On February 14, 2005, Hariri was driving along the Corniche, Beirut’s spectacular coastal drive, when a suicide truck bomber crashed into his motorcade. He and twenty-two others were killed.
For Assad, the murder of Hariri appeared to be a routine act of political manipulation. But, instead of quashing Lebanese desires for independence, the killing intensified them. Hundreds of thousands of Christians and Sunni Muslims poured into downtown Beirut to demand an end to the Syrian occupation. (Across town, Hezbollah staged enormous rallies of Shiites calling for the Syrians to stay.) In April of 2005, as outrage over the assassination grew—and as pressure mounted from the United States and the United Nations—Syrian troops departed, ending the occupation after twenty-nine years. “The Syrians came in on the blood of Kamal Joumblatt and left on the blood of Rafik Hariri,” Joumblatt said.
Hezbollah, with its protector gone, was forced to make an uncomfortable move: it got into government. The group had been fielding candidates for parliament since 1992, but only reluctantly, as members insisted that their first duty was to confront Israel. Hezbollah’s parliamentarians have learned to play politics—Nasrallah has dropped the sectarian language of his predecessors and stopped deploying suicide attacks—but they still stand apart. In the national assembly, they typically huddle across the floor from their fellow-Shiites in the Amal Party, whose Westernized members talk freely with women and drink alcohol. And they do not speak without permission from their leaders. (None were willing to coöperate with this article.)
After the assassination of Hariri, Lebanon split into two camps: an anti-Syrian faction led by Hariri’s son, Saad; and a collection of pro-Syrian groups, including Hezbollah. The anti-Syrian faction has taken an increasingly aggressive position toward Hezbollah, demanding that the group give up its weapons and become an ordinary political party. Hezbollah has resisted, sometimes violently. The result has been near-perpetual crisis. In 2008, the Lebanese government, led by the Hariri bloc, voted to outlaw Hezbollah’s private communications network. Within hours, Hezbollah gunmen fanned out across western Beirut, precipitating clashes with Christians and Sunnis that left scores dead. As the violence raised fears of outright sectarian war, Hezbollah and its allies struck a deal that gave them far greater representation in the government. “Hezbollah is in government to make sure there is no decision to take away their arms,” Alain Aoun, a member of the Lebanese parliament and a coalition partner of Hezbollah, said. “This is their main concern.”
The Hariri assassination continues to haunt Hezbollah. Both the Bush and the Obama Administrations believe that Assad was deeply involved, and that he used Hezbollah to help. In 2005, Lebanon detained the heads of four of its security agencies—regarded as Syria’s close allies—for their alleged involvement; they were held for nearly four years and released. Then, in June of 2011, a tribunal backed by the U.N. indicted four members of Hezbollah. According to the indictment, the Hezbollah operatives served as spotters as Hariri’s car drove along the Corniche. Investigators were evidently led to the men because one of them made a cell-phone call to his girlfriend during the stakeout.
Hezbollah insists that the tribunal is biased and invalid. In 2011, with Hariri’s anti-Syrian faction in control of the government, Hezbollah demanded a meeting to discuss the investigation. When Hariri refused, Hezbollah and its allies in the cabinet orchestrated the collapse of the government. “They wanted a government that was not against them on this issue,” Aoun said. After months of negotiation, Hezbollah’s bloc, which already had a large number of parliamentary seats, controlled a majority of the cabinet; Hezbollah members were charged with overseeing the agriculture ministry and the reform of the Lebanese bureaucracy.
Dani told me, “The only reason we get into politics is because we have to. But we hate politics—we hate it.” And yet Hezbollah has found itself charged with such mundane duties as delivering electricity and collecting garbage. “Running a government is not their primary concern,” Mohamad Chatah, a senior member of Hariri’s party and a former ambassador to the United States, said. “Obviously, their stature comes primarily from the battlefield and their hostility to Israel, but their success in doing other things adds to their support, and they have been generally good at doing other stuff. But you have to remember that Lebanese standards are not very high.”
Hezbollah’s emergence as a force in Lebanese politics has put the Obama Administration in a difficult spot. Since 1997, the United States government has deemed Hezbollah a terrorist organization, and thus off limits to American diplomats. In January of 2011, a new Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, who has Hezbollah members in his government but is not affiliated with the group, took office. Officials with the Obama Administration have met with him but not with his Hezbollah partners.
As Hezbollah solidifies its official power, anxiety over assassination still permeates Lebanon’s political class. In April, Samir Geagea, the leader of a Christian party known as Lebanese Forces, narrowly survived a sniper attack while strolling outside his house. No one could prove anything, of course, but many people I talked to assumed that Hezbollah agents, working with Syrians, carried out the attack. In October, General Wissam al-Hassan, a senior intelligence official and an ally of the United States, was killed by a car bomb in Beirut. Hassan had led the investigation into Hezbollah’s role in Hariri’s killing, and had recently ordered the arrest of a pro-Syrian politician named Michel Samaha, for trying to smuggle explosives into Lebanon at the behest of Syrian intelligence. “We think Hezbollah did the killing,” an Israeli official told me. “They are the only ones with the motive and the technical sophistication.”
When I pressed Joumblatt about who might be carrying out the assassinations, he gave me a weary look. “Look, I am not now, morally speaking, someone who is entitled to give lessons,” he said. After his father’s murder, he became one of the most ruthless commanders in Lebanon’s civil war, presiding over shelling in Beirut and sectarian killings. “I was a warlord. My people committed crimes, under my command, sometimes obeying orders, sometimes not obeying orders. Because it was a civil war. War is horrible, but civil war is something worse. I am also someone who has a black past.”
Now, Joumblatt told me, he, too, was worried about his safety. But, despite having lost his father and his friend Hariri to assassination, he wasn’t doing much to protect himself. “I have some guards here,” he said. “But these people—they have the technology to kill you even inside your own home.”
At Wadi Naim, three miles from the Israeli border, a vast Hezbollah bunker complex is hidden in a valley wall, camouflaged by limestone and bush. It’s invisible from the road, two hundred feet below, invisible from the air, invisible even to the visitor standing on top of it. The only way to find it is by using a G.P.S. programmed with the precise coördinates. Under a foot of dirt and rubble is a trap door, and a ladder leading down to the main tunnel. Inside, the only sign of life was a colony of black bats, dangling silently from the ceiling. Startled by my entry, they dropped down, then glided up the shaft toward the light.
Underneath the limestone, the bunker is supported by walls of reinforced steel. There was a kitchen, a bathroom, and space for twenty people to sleep. Standing inside, a hundred feet underground, it was not difficult to imagine a group of Hezbollah fighters sitting out a bombardment for days, even weeks, the Israelis unaware of their location or unable to penetrate it.
In July of 2006, Nasrallah ordered his men to stage an attack inside Israel. They captured a pair of soldiers, and, for the next thirty-four days, the Israel Defense Forces mounted an enormous response. Israel killed scores of Hezbollah’s men and destroyed its headquarters and its supply network. The attacks killed as many as twelve hundred Lebanese civilians, flattened entire blocks of southern Beirut, and destroyed many of the roads, bridges, and public buildings in southern Lebanon.
Yet Hezbollah mounted a fierce resistance, from bunkers like the one in Wadi Naim, where fighters emerged to attack with wire-guided missiles and quickly ran back inside. At the same time, thousands of Hezbollah rockets rained down on Israel from batteries hidden in forests, fortified garages, and even people’s homes. The result was a bloody draw—a revelation to the Israeli Army, accustomed to dominating wherever it fights. General Dan Halutz, the I.D.F.’s chief of staff, resigned during an investigation that identified “grave failings” in his generals’ prosecution of the war. Just how Hezbollah fighters were able to build bunkers such as the one I visited in Wadi Naim has never been fully explained. “Hezbollah will not surprise us again,” Ehud Barak, Israel’s Defense Minister, has said.
For Nasrallah, the war was both a victory and a catastrophe. Shortly after a ceasefire was arranged, he said that he would never have ordered the initial operation had he known that it would lead to war—“absolutely not.” He was nearly killed himself. Halutz told me that Israel had twice sent jets to attack bunkers where Nasrallah was thought to be hiding. “The first time, we had the right place but he was very deep underground,” he said. “The second time, he wasn’t there. The third time, we won’t miss.”
But when the war was over Nasrallah’s status was higher than ever. Israeli soldiers returned from the front lines stunned by the prowess of the Hezbollah fighters, who were sometimes equipped with night-vision goggles and sophisticated eavesdropping equipment. On the first night of the conflict, a Hezbollah missile struck an Israeli destroyer off the coast. Hezbollah fighters destroyed Merkava tanks and killed a hundred and twenty-one Israeli soldiers. “This was a strategic, historic victory, without exaggeration,” Nasrallah said in a televised speech. “We emerged victorious, where Arab armies had previously been defeated.”
Another thing that helped take the sting out of the Israeli assaults was Iranian money. At extraordinary expense, south Beirut and southern Lebanon were rebuilt; it is difficult these days to find a building that shows damage from the war. According to a Lebanese security official, the reconstruction was financed largely by Iran, which bypassed the Lebanese government. In the months after the ceasefire, Hezbollah trucks pulled into devastated neighborhoods and handed out Iranian money to Lebanese who’d lost property and kin. The security official said that the Iranians poured between two and three billion dollars into the country; the money was transported by air to Syria, he said, and then “they brought American dollars on trucks from Damascus.”
As I drove through southern Lebanon with Dani, he pointed to freshly paved roads and newly built hospitals. “Iran paid for all of this,” he said. “If we had been forced to rely on the Lebanese government, this area would still be in ruins.” Iranian money is the crucial means by which Hezbollah militants have cemented support in the Shiite community. In southern Beirut, I met a man who identified himself as Ahmed Shah, a shop owner and father of two who lived a few blocks from Hezbollah’s headquarters. For fifteen days in 2006, Shah and his family rode out the Israeli bombardment, feeling the building shake day and night, until they finally decided—like hundreds of thousands of other Lebanese—to flee. Shah moved his family to an apartment on the Christian side of the city, which the Israelis spared. When he returned, three weeks later, he found his neighborhood demolished. “A missile cut my building in half,” he said.
Shah was seated at a picnic table, drinking tea with friends. Behind him was his rebuilt apartment, paid for almost entirely by Hezbollah. The day the war ended, Shah said, Hezbollah men began walking through the neighborhood, surveying the wreckage and handing out cash. A few days later, Shah met a group of Hezbollah administrators, who laid down the terms: at a cost of forty thousand dollars, they would rebuild his apartment, and they would give him five hundred dollars a month to rent an apartment for the next year and a half. The Hezbollah administrators gave Shah ten thousand dollars more to furnish the new place. Shah figured that the Lebanese government paid for perhaps a quarter of the reconstruction, but even that money was distributed by Hezbollah.
“Everyone supports Hezbollah here—it is the only government we have,” Shah said, as his friends at the table nodded. “We don’t mind that the Iranians are paying for everything.” I asked Shah if his allegiance to Hezbollah wasn’t costing him his neighborhood. Hezbollah started the war, after all. He shrugged. “It happened in 1982, 1985, 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2006,” he said. “Every few years, this neighborhood is destroyed, usually by Israel.” His friends nodded again. “It’s about that time again.”
In late January, the Israelis struck a convoy in Syria that they said was carrying anti-aircraft missiles to Hezbollah—missiles that could make it more difficult for Israeli aircraft to fly unhindered over Lebanon. Shortly after that, a senior commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard was killed as he crossed the border into Lebanon; no one claimed responsibility, but Hezbollah accused Israel. Both Hezbollah and Israel are preparing for the next war—and it promises to be far more devastating than the previous one. In 2006, Hezbollah fired an estimated four thousand rockets and missiles into Israel. This time, according to American officials, Hezbollah’s arsenal stands closer to fifty thousand projectiles, many of which have ranges long enough to strike every major city in Israel. The longer ranges have allowed Hezbollah to disperse its missiles across the country—all but insuring that an Israeli response would destroy areas far outside southern Lebanon.
Israelis expect that any war with Hezbollah is likely to be short. Foreign leaders, from the United States and elsewhere, will try to bring fighting to a quick end, which gives both sides an incentive to inflict as much damage as possible before a ceasefire. In Lebanon, I was told repeatedly that Hezbollah could be drawn into war if Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear-enrichment facilities. Last year, Nasrallah threatened that, if Israel struck Iran, American targets would be attacked. “A decision has been taken to respond, and the response will be very great,” he said in a television interview. “American bases in the whole region could be Iranian targets. . . . If Israel targets Iran, America bears responsibility.”
If Hezbollah joined in such attacks, it would be catastrophic for the state of Lebanon. After the 2006 war, Israel announced the Dahiya Doctrine, which an Israeli official explained as “Lebanon is Hezbollah and Hezbollah is Lebanon. Hezbollah shoots at us and we go to war against Lebanon.” Some Lebanese believe that Hezbollah is ultimately more loyal to the Ayatollah than to its home country. “It’s the third time in history that the Persians have been on the shores of the Mediterranean,” Joumblatt said. “You have a community dominated by Hezbollah, well entrenched in Lebanon, with a formidable arsenal, and supplies and ammunition and money that are huge. You have to sit and talk with them, but what do you say? They don’t decide. It’s Khamenei and Ghassem Soleimani who decide,” he said, referring to the Supreme Leader and a powerful Iranian official in the Revolutionary Guard. “It’s beyond Lebanon.”
Halutz, the Israeli commander, believes that Hezbollah’s leaders would not necessarily respond if Israel attacked Iran. “They will wait and see the first results,” he said. “If their partners are not successful, then they will not join. They will not bet on a losing horse.” When I asked Dani about this, he said his leaders assumed that they didn’t have to waste time wondering whether they would fight on Iran’s behalf. “If the Israelis attack Iran, then they will attack us, too,” he said.
Even if there is no war, Hezbollah could lose its main link to Iran if the Assad regime falls. Nearly all of Hezbollah’s war-making material—missiles, money, and ammunition—travels through Syria. The group is already scrambling to find new supply lines. Still, the Lebanese security official said that losing Assad would be a grave blow. “Right now, Hezbollah has enough missiles for one more war—a big war—but then all their weapons are gone,” he said. “When that happens, if Assad is gone, then life will be very hard for Hezbollah. They will have to change. They will have to moderate their behavior. They will have to put away their dreams.”
In the opaque world of Lebanese politics, one path to understanding lies in the study of Hassan Nasrallah’s face. When he was younger, Nasrallah gave off the hard stare of a soldier sure of his aim. As Hezbollah grew, his features softened; he donned wire-rimmed glasses and his beard turned gray, giving him the aspect of a slightly mischievous shopkeeper. Since the war in 2006, Nasrallah has lived almost entirely indoors, often in concrete bunkers, venturing out rarely, lest the Israelis try to kill him.
In October, Nasrallah appeared on Lebanese television, and the uprising in Syria seemed to have changed his face again. It was rounder, puffier, paler—the face of a man who is not only hunted but alone. Seated in front of a bright-blue background, he wore fashionable glasses, a trimmed beard, and the black turban that indicates presumed descent from the Holy Prophet. He started by talking about a pilotless drone that Hezbollah had sent over Israel. The drone, designed by Iran and assembled by Hezbollah technicians, had made it nearly to Dimona, a city in southern Israel that is believed to contain that country’s nuclear facilities, before it was shot down. Nasrallah broke into a smile. The Israelis, he said, were “perplexed” by Hezbollah’s ability to carry off such a sophisticated stunt. “The Lebanese should be proud that they have young men with such brains!” he said. For a moment, Nasrallah seemed his old self. Then his smile vanished, and he said he wanted to talk about reports in the Lebanese press that Hezbollah men were fighting in support of Assad.
The issue of Hezbollah’s role inside Syria raises fundamental questions about its identity and purpose. Is it really a “resistance” organization, dedicated only to fighting Israel? American and Lebanese officials say that Hezbollah fighters are indeed helping the Assad regime in Syria, mainly by advising Syrian fighters. The Hezbollah operatives are working close to the front lines and may be fighting themselves, the American official said. (He added that Iran prefers Hezbollah agents because they speak Arabic, as do the Syrian fighters.) Most Lebanese I talked to took it for granted that Hezbollah operatives were helping prop up Assad, for obvious reasons of self-interest.
Siding with the Assad government has already left Nasrallah alone in the Arab world. In 2011, an American official told me, he went to Damascus to try to persuade Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, to support the Syrian regime. Hamas had been an ally of Assad’s and, like Hezbollah, the recipient of extensive support from Syria and Iran. According to the official, who had knowledge of the meeting, Nasrallah reminded Meshal of their obligation to the Iranian government and pressed him to back Assad. Meshal refused, and shortly thereafter broke publicly with Syria.
In Nasrallah’s televised speech, he mentioned Lebanese news reports of secret Hezbollah funerals for fighters killed there; he spoke of one report saying that seventy-five of his fighters had been killed in a Syrian village called Ribleh. And he mentioned the Free Syrian Army’s claim that a Hezbollah commander had been killed inside Syria. Nasrallah spoke glowingly of the dead: “Dear, chaste holy martyrs!” Then he denied it all. The reports were cooked up by enemies, he said. A number of Hezbollah fighters had been killed, but they were actually Lebanese along the Syrian border, who had come under unprovoked attacks from the rebels. “This has nothing to do with fighting alongside the government,” he said. “This is truly what took place.”
The explanation seemed tortured, even ridiculous, but Nasrallah went on, his eyes narrowing and his mouth tightening. He said that the Lebanese government would not know how to protect its citizens. “What shall we do?” he said. “O our state, our government, our Lebanese parties, our political leaders, and our political and religious authorities!” By the time he brought his speech to an end, every trace of his boyish charm had departed. “Finally, I will say, Let no one bully us. Let no one try us.”
A few days later, I drove to the town of Arsal, on the Syrian border. As I approached, the civil war came into full view: a fight was on for possession of a border post held by the Syrian government. A Syrian gunship circled overhead. Explosions thundered in the distance.
The Masharia mosque, a half mile inside Lebanon, had Hezbollah flags flying, and an ambulance parked outside. Syrian refugees in Arsal told me that Hezbollah members were making regular trips across the border. “They pick up their wounded and bring them back here,” one refugee, who was camped nearby with his family, told me.
Not far from the scene of the battle, I met a mid-level commander in the Free Syrian Army, whose nom de guerre is Abu Bakr. He looked exhausted from months of fighting inside Syria, but his beard was neatly trimmed. Over coffee at his home in Arsal, Abu Bakr told me that he was a Lebanese Sunni—not a Syrian citizen. He was fighting out of solidarity with his fellow-Sunnis, who were resisting the Assad regime across the border. He said he felt confident that the rebels would prevail, but that the fighting he’d been in was horrendous. “They are being slaughtered,” he said of the rebels.
Abu Bakr understood Hezbollah operatives to be playing a significant role in helping the Assad regime, especially in training the shabiha, Assad’s brutal militia. He said that he had interrogated Hezbollah prisoners who were captured inside Syria, and that he had regularly tracked fighters as they crossed from Lebanon. A week before we spoke, comrades in Lebanon had radioed ahead that a Hezbollah convoy was heading to the border. As soon as the convoy crossed into Syria, Abu Bakr and his men struck. “We killed nine Hezbollah fighters,” he said.
The decision to wait until the convoy had entered Syria was an obvious one, Abu Bakr said. The fear of all Lebanese living along the border is that the war in Syria will spill over. So far, he said, it has not, but, the longer the war goes on, the greater the chances that it will. “We hope this will not happen, but everyone is worried about it,” he said.
On a recent Friday morning in Sidon, a crowd of three thousand Sunnis gathered at the Bilal bin Rabah mosque. They had come to hear Sheikh Ahmed al-Assir, one of the country’s best-known Sunni preachers. Sidon is a Sunni-majority city in a region dominated by Hezbollah. In recent months, as the Syrian civil war has taken on a sectarian character, Sunni-Shiite tensions have risen in Sidon, and Assir’s sermons have become inflamed. He is a striking figure: tall and thin, with an enormous wiry beard, which he sometimes sets off with black wraparound sunglasses.
Assir began by telling his listeners what was happening to Sunnis in Syria. “Just watch your television,” he said. “Children are being killed, mothers are crying, destruction is everywhere. Our people and our mosques are being destroyed in Syria.
“We should sympathize with the Syrian revolt on the basis of our religion,” Assir said. “For forty years, the Sunnis in Syria have been stepped on and humiliated. Ask yourself: What am I doing? We are asking you to support the Muslims of Syria.” Assir moved to a more delicate subject. “You know, Hassan Nasrallah says he is not involved in Syria,” he told the crowd. “And he is a liar! They rape women. They are slaughtering our children.” Hezbollah’s attempts to hide its role in Syria were preposterous, Assir said. “It is too big.”
Assir ended his sermon by turning to Lebanon. The struggle engulfing Syria was coming home, he said; the Sunnis of Lebanon have been oppressed no less than the Sunnis of Syria. Already, Assir said, Shiites under Hezbollah’s leadership have persecuted the Sunnis of Sidon, depriving them of municipal services and jobs, turning their neighborhoods into garbage dumps, attacking them and killing them without provocation. As the Sunnis rose against Assad, Assir said, so they will rise against Hezbollah. “Who has enslaved us in Lebanon for years? Who has been blackmailing us? Who killed Rafik Hariri?” he asked. “The same criminal!”
Since the civil war ended, in 1990, the Lebanese political system has relied on an exquisite balance among the main groups, and on a measure of self-restraint on the part of each. Hezbollah, with the help of its Iranian and Syrian benefactors, has pushed and sometimes broken the limits of the Lebanese system. The question for the future may be whether Hezbollah can restrain itself if it is threatened with a diminishment of its power.
The situation could come to a head during parliamentary elections in June, and many Lebanese predict that voters will return Saad Hariri’s anti-Syrian group to power. “If they win, and the Assad government is gone, then I imagine they will try to disarm Hezbollah,” Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a Lebanese writer close to Hezbollah’s leaders, said. “Hezbollah would be forced to defend itself.” When I asked Dani what the consequences might be, he didn’t hesitate: “There would be civil war.”
In the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, sectarian violence has broken out between Sunnis and an enclave of Alawites, killing dozens of people, but the fighting has not spread. For the moment, Joumblatt told me, a civil war is not likely, if only because Hezbollah is too strong to be challenged. “It would be suicidal to go to war with Hezbollah,” he said. Joumblatt believes that Hezbollah will one day transform itself entirely into a political party, but not anytime soon. “The calculation is that, once Bashar is gone, then Hezbollah will be weakened. But I don’t see it. They might be weakened, but, at the same time, they are still here, with their fifty thousand missiles. It took the British twenty years to persuade the I.R.A. to decommission its weapons. Here I think it will take centuries.” | ||||
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] | 2005-05-12T00:00:00+00:00 | Bashar al-Assad - Syrian Conflict, Dictatorship, Human Rights: Beginning in March 2011, Assad faced a significant challenge to his rule when antigovernment protests broke out in Syria, inspired by a wave of pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. (See Arab Spring.) While Syrian security forces used lethal force against demonstrators, Assad offered a variety of concessions, first shuffling his cabinet and then announcing that he would seek to abolish Syria’s emergency law and its Supreme State Security Court, both of which were used to suppress political opposition. However, implementation of those reforms coincided with a significant escalation of violence against protesters, drawing international condemnation for | en | /favicon.png | Encyclopedia Britannica | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bashar-al-Assad/Unrest-and-civil-war | Beginning in March 2011, Assad faced a significant challenge to his rule when antigovernment protests broke out in Syria, inspired by a wave of pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. (See Arab Spring.) While Syrian security forces used lethal force against demonstrators, Assad offered a variety of concessions, first shuffling his cabinet and then announcing that he would seek to abolish Syria’s emergency law and its Supreme State Security Court, both of which were used to suppress political opposition. However, implementation of those reforms coincided with a significant escalation of violence against protesters, drawing international condemnation for Assad and his government.
As unrest spread to new areas of the country, the government deployed tanks and troops to several cities that had become centres of protest. Amid reports of massacres and indiscriminate violence by security forces, Assad maintained that his country was the victim of an international conspiracy to instigate sectarian warfare in Syria and that the government was engaged in combating networks of armed insurgents rather than peaceful civilian protesters.
By September 2011 armed opposition groups had emerged and begun to stage increasingly effective attacks against Syrian forces. Attempts at international mediation by the Arab League and the United Nations failed to achieve a cease-fire, and by mid-2012 the crisis had evolved into a full-blown civil war. In July 2012 Assad’s inner circle suffered its most significant losses to date when several senior security officials were killed by a bomb inside a government building during a meeting. Among those killed were Daoud Rajiha, the minister of defense, and Assef Shawkat, Assad’s brother-in-law and one of his closest advisers.
With rebels and government troops seemingly locked in a bloody stalemate and security conditions deteriorating in Damascus, Assad’s public appearances became increasingly rare and consisted mainly of staged events to rally troops and civilian supporters. International allies of Assad’s regime and of the rebels each stepped up their support, raising the prospect of a regional proxy war. Efforts by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to fund and arm rebels became increasingly public in late 2012 and early 2013 while the Syrian government continued to receive weapons from Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. By late 2012 Hezbollah also had begun sending its own fighters into Syria to battle the rebels.
Assad faced new calls for international military action against his government after alleged chemical weapons attacks in the suburbs of Damascus killed hundreds on August 21, 2013. The Syrian opposition accused pro-Assad forces of having carried out the attacks, but Assad denied having used chemical weapons and asserted that, if such weapons had been used, rebel forces were to blame. U.S., British, and French leaders claimed to possess intelligence proving that Assad’s regime had ordered the attacks, and they made it known that they were considering retaliatory strikes. Russia, China, and Iran spoke out against military action, and Assad vowed to fight what he described as Western aggression. The threat of Western military intervention was averted in September when Russia, Syria, and the United States came to an agreement to place all of Syria’s chemical weapons under international control.
Assad’s tactics against the rebels continued to draw international condemnation even when his forces refrained from using chemical weapons. So-called “barrel bombs”—improvised explosives dropped from helicopters and airplanes—were routinely used to devastating effect against military and civilian targets in rebel-held areas even though human rights groups insisted that employment of such indiscriminate weapons constituted a war crime.
As the civil war dragged on, Assad’s hold on power, which had once seemed doubtful, appeared to grow stronger. The emergence of the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in eastern Syria and western Iraq in 2013 forced some of the countries that had called for Assad’s removal—including the United States—to refocus their efforts on defeating the new menace. Meanwhile, Russia, which had long provided weapons and political support to Assad, launched its own military action in Syria in 2015, bombarding rebel positions and deploying Russian ground troops in support of government forces. The intervention was largely successful: by the end of 2017, Assad’s dominance in most of Syria’s major cities had been reestablished, and the remaining rebels had been confined to a few isolated pockets of territory. By mid-2018 those pockets had been reduced to the region of Idlib, which Turkish forces had vowed to protect from the Syrian army. Assad initially avoided a confrontation in Idlib but advanced his forces in the spring of 2019 after an organization influenced by the ideology of al-Qaeda had become the dominant force in the region.
Meanwhile, as the conflict was dying down in most of the country, Assad began implementing policies to rebuild Syria. They included projects to build infrastructure and new commercial centres as well as efforts to attract foreign investors. One controversial measure, known as Law 10, allowed the government to seize property if its owners failed to reregister it. The purpose of the law was to allow the development or redistribution of property abandoned during the war by its owners. Many critics noted that the time limit for reclaiming property would disenfranchise many displaced Syrians, who simply could not return in time to reclaim their property, while enabling the government to expropriate property from its opponents en masse and give it to loyalists. | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 90 | https://www.ft.com/content/2423c286-8c4d-11e9-b8cb-26a9caa9d67b | en | Assad or We Burn the Country — vivid account of Syrian war | https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/ftlogo-v1%3Abrand-ft-logo-square-coloured?source=update-logos&format=svg | https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/ftlogo-v1%3Abrand-ft-logo-square-coloured?source=update-logos&format=svg | [
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] | null | [] | null | War correspondent’s powerful new book describes the devastation and the west’s reluctance to stop it | https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/ftlogo-v1%3Abrand-ft-logo-square-coloured?source=update-logos&format=svg | null | Why the FT?
See why over a million readers pay to read the Financial Times. | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 89 | https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/02/25/after-syria | en | After Syria | [
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] | 2013-02-25T00:00:00 | If the Assad regime falls, can Hezbollah survive? | en | https://www.newyorker.com/verso/static/the-new-yorker/assets/favicon.ico | The New Yorker | https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/02/25/after-syria | The bodies of the two young fighters from Hezbollah were already in the ground when the memorial service began. They’d been killed days before, and their smiling portraits hovered above an outdoor stage in their village, Sohmor, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The stage was framed by huge banners, portraying Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. In the portraits, the two fighters—Ali Hussein al-Khishen and Ali Mustafa Alaeddine—looked barely their age, nineteen. Khishen had chubby cheeks and a boyish smile; Alaeddine’s countenance was sterner and more knowing. “You are the proof of martyrdom!” one of the posters said.
The mourners, thousands of them, shuffled to their seats, the black-clad women drifting to the back. The atmosphere was not sombre but upbeat, undefeated, like a football stadium before kickoff. Boys in blue shirts and white kerchiefs—Mahdi Scouts—poured coffee from ornate decanters and handed out bottles of water. A Hezbollah brass band bleated out what sounded like a Sousa march. Khishen and Alaeddine were being celebrated in death.
At the time of the service, late last year, Hezbollah had spent months denying that its men were crossing the border into Syria to fight for Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime. Yet evidence was mounting that they were. The day before the funeral, Syrian rebels announced that they had killed a Hezbollah commander and at least two of his men. Hezbollah acknowledged that the commander, Ali Hussein Nassif, had died, but refused to disclose where or how, saying only that he had been “performing his jihad duties.”
Like the fallen commander, the two dead fighters in Sohmor had been killed under murky circumstances. Hezbollah said that the two had died at an ammunition depot inside Lebanon, in an accidental explosion, four days before. But the service in Sohmor was a thikra usbu’, an Islamic ceremony held seven days after death. At the burial, the bodies of Khishen and Alaeddine had been kept inside their caskets, invisible even to their families.
The crowd stirred as guards began appearing on rooftops, clutching soft violin cases with the butts of machine guns poking out. Then a bearded man in a black turban walked onto the stage with his hands clasped, like a cleric. It was Hashem Safieddine, the head of Hezbollah’s Executive Council. The audience grew silent.
“Don’t cry, Sohmor,” Safieddine began. “You can’t have dignity without young blood.” He didn’t say how Khishen and Alaeddine had been killed, and he made no mention of an ammunition depot. Instead, he told the people that their sons had died for a noble cause, and that Hezbollah was built on sacrifices such as these. Then he talked about Syria. “We are more sure every day that the challenges we face from Israel, America, and the Arab countries are huge—and that the Arab countries are spending money to destroy Syria and Hezbollah,” he said.
Safieddine wasn’t exaggerating: after decades of belligerence, Hezbollah is surrounded by existential threats. In an Arab world dominated by Sunni Muslims, Hezbollah agitates on behalf of Shiite identity—forming, along with Syria and Iran, a column of resistance sometimes called the Shiite Axis. For thirty years, Syria has offered protection and facilitated a pipeline of money and arms from Iran. With Syrian and Iranian help, Hezbollah has become the most powerful force in Lebanon. Too strong to be challenged even by the government, it has set up its own mini-state and built one of the world’s most sophisticated guerrilla armies. It has kept up a relentless campaign to confront Israel, even provoking a war in 2006.
Now the civil war in Syria is threatening to break the axis. Without Syria, Hezbollah would have no bolster against its Sunni enemies, within Lebanon and throughout the region. Worse, it would be left alone to face Israel. In front of the crowd in Sohmor, Safieddine didn’t have to elaborate this point. He said only, “We are aware of what is happening in Syria, and we are courageous and more ready than ever for resistance.”
Back in Beirut, a Hezbollah officer conceded that the explanation for the young martyrs’ death—the explosion at the ammunition depot—had been contrived. They had been killed in Syria, he said: “There were a lot of bodies coming back.” It was something that no one was permitted to discuss, for obvious reasons: Hezbollah could not afford to anger Sunnis, but neither could it allow its allies in Syria to fall. “If Bashar goes down,” a Hezbollah commander told me, “we’re next.”
The Hezbollah commander, who called himself Dani (a pseudonym required to maintain his safety), met me in a private home around the corner from “the secure area,” a cluster of buildings that serves as Hezbollah’s headquarters in the southern Beirut neighborhood of Al Ghobeiry. Dani walked in wearing jeans, a tight black T-shirt, trail shoes, and a Quicksilver cap; his hair was short and his fair-skinned face was shaved clean. I was struck by his appearance, so unlike the cliché of an Islamic militant, and Dani did not fail to notice. “We’re not all bearded fanatics, you know,” he said. Dani, who is about forty years old, looked more like a good-natured auto mechanic, which he is, most of the time. One of eleven siblings, he is married and has two children of his own.
Dani grew up in a village within sight of the Israeli border, but, as he remembers it, his family had no anti-Israeli feelings. His father traded wheat and olives and often crossed over to buy and sell in the Israeli port of Haifa. “My dad had a lot of Jewish friends back then,” Dani said. “He didn’t think a lot about occupation.”
Throughout Dani’s childhood, the Palestine Liberation Organization was based in Lebanon. A Sunni-dominated group, it treated the Shiites harshly, and was an increasingly unwelcomed presence. Then, in 1982, the Israel Defense Forces poured across the border, in a huge military operation aimed at destroying the P.L.O., and soldiers made their way to Dani’s village. At first, the villagers, like many Lebanese, welcomed the Israelis, whom they hoped would rid them of the P.L.O. “I ate the candy they threw us,” Dani said. But it wasn’t long before Israeli soldiers began to sweep the region’s Shiite villages for weapons, detaining men with no connection to the P.L.O. Soon Dani needed written permission from the Israelis to move in and out of town. “They made us prisoners in our own country,” he said.
Ever since the nineteen-twenties, when the colonial French carved Lebanon from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, it has been a political playground for its more powerful neighbors: Israel, Syria, the Palestinians, and Saudi Arabia, each of which has routinely manipulated Lebanese politics through local proxies. Lebanon’s vulnerability lies in its intense polarization, which has bedevilled every government that has tried to run the place. The country was intended by the French as a kind of sanctuary for Maronite Catholics. Over time, the Catholics and other Christians, who were once a majority, clung to power even as they were surpassed in numbers by Muslims. Now eighteen officially recognized religions and sects thrive among four million people, in a country the size of Connecticut. Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians predominate, but none has a majority. In 1975, sectarian tensions, aggravated by the growing militancy of the P.L.O., exploded into a civil war. The war lasted fifteen years, devastated the country, and killed a hundred and twenty thousand people. In the midst of the war, in 1982, came the Israeli Army.
As Dani looked for a way to resist the invaders, the obvious option, the Lebanese Army, was closed. The Army—indeed, most of the government—had all but ceased to exist. Then a new group arose, dedicated to opposing Israel; it was known as Hezbollah, from the Arabic for “Party of God.” The group dates its beginning to November 11, 1982, when a teen-ager named Ahmad Qassir approached the Israeli headquarters in Tyre and blew himself up. Its true origins aren’t so simple. Hezbollah emerged from a collection of disparate armed groups, but almost immediately the fighters began receiving training, direction, and money from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. “The Iranians were looking for an opening in Lebanon, and the Israeli invasion gave it to them,” David Crist, a historian for the U.S. government and the author of “The Twilight War,” an account of the American-Iranian rivalry since 1979, said. “The Iranians’ great success is that they took all these disparate groups that were fighting the Israelis and brought them together.”
The Iranian regime spent as much as two hundred million dollars a year supporting Hezbollah, according to a U.S. Defense Department report. For Iran, Hezbollah was an appealing proxy. Like the Iranian regime, it was composed of Shiites, a minority throughout most of the Islamic world and historically its downtrodden class. Hezbollah’s founders, adhering to the doctrine of wilaayat al faqih, recognized Iran’s Grand Ayatollah as the leader of the global Islamic revolution. But mostly the Iranians wanted Hezbollah as an advance force to confront Israel. In Hezbollah’s first manifesto, published in 1985, its leaders proclaimed their dedication to fighting until Israel was “obliterated.” Paul Salem, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, in Beirut, said, “Hezbollah is an Iranian aircraft carrier parked north of Israel. ‘You hit us, we hit you.’ That is what Hezbollah gets the big bucks and the missiles for.”
Among the fighters in the early days was Hassan Nasrallah, a round-faced cleric whose magnetism captivated almost everyone he met. Nasrallah, then in his early twenties, was a son of Karantina—“the Quarantine”—one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in Beirut. His father sold fruit from a pushcart. He was an avid reader of theology as a boy, and he later attended the fabled Shiite seminaries of Najaf, in Iraq, and Qum, in Iran. In 1992, Israeli forces assassinated Abbas al-Musawi, the leader of Hezbollah, by firing a missile at his car. Nasrallah took his place, only months after returning from Iran.
Soon after Hezbollah was founded, Dani, though still a boy, left home and joined. “I vowed never to return to my village until it was liberated,” he said. Over the next eighteen years, Hezbollah waged a guerrilla war against Israeli soldiers who occupied southern Lebanon. Dani fought all the time. “I became a soldier,” he said. American troops came in to help the Lebanese government, and Hezbollah struck against them as well. According to U.S. officials, two of the bloodiest attacks against Americans in the nineteen-eighties were carried out by Hezbollah operatives with Iranian support: the suicide attack on the American Embassy in Beirut, in April of 1983, which killed sixty-three people; and the truck bombing of Marine barracks that October, which killed two hundred and forty-one Americans. (Hezbollah has denied involvement in either attack.) In 1985, Hezbollah militants kidnapped Colonel William R. Higgins, an American officer overseeing United Nations peacekeepers on the Israeli border, and tortured him to death. “We were under military occupation at the time, as far as I see it, and so therefore I don’t think those were terrorist attacks,” Dani said.
A few days after we first spoke, Dani took me on a tour of southern Lebanon, where war with Israel festered for decades. We drove south out of Beirut, along the Mediterranean coast, past Sidon’s sea castle, the stone fortification built by the Crusaders in the thirteenth century, and through the ancient city of Tyre. “All of this,” he said, pointing out the window, “used to be in Israeli hands.” Martyrdom posters lined the roadside, along with other indications that Hezbollah was governing the place. “Hezbollah welcomes the Pope!” one poster said.
We stopped in a village, at a café called Al Bas, where a young man who introduced himself as Hussein Hodeh was standing behind an espresso machine. When I asked him about the village’s allegiances, he shrugged and said, “It’s a Hezbollah town.” I asked how he knew, and he reached under the counter and unfurled a yellow Hezbollah battle flag. “I’m Hezbollah myself,” he said, with a laugh. “I’m a fighter.”
About ten miles from the Israeli border, we turned inland, moving across a hilly landscape of limestone bluffs and olive trees. Dani pointed out landmarks. “That bridge—the Israelis used to bomb it all the time,” he said. After a while, we reached Mleeta, a fantastical theme park dedicated to Hezbollah’s triumphs, and pulled into a parking lot next to a tour bus. In the nineties and again in 2006, Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah militiamen fought for the ground on which Mleeta sits, and the battlefield has been preserved, in the manner of Normandy or Gettysburg. The grand opening, in 2010, was attended by a representative of the Lebanese Prime Minister. Down a path from a gift shop that sells Hezbollah T-shirts and coffee mugs adorned with Nasrallah’s face, Dani pointed into a wide pit and said, “This is the destroyed Israeli tank.” There lay the carcass of an enormous Merkava, Israel’s finest, its bottom blown out by a bomb and its barrel tied in a knot. It was surrounded by a small sea of Israeli helmets. “It’s all real here, all real,” Dani said. “I know—I remember.”
We walked past a tunnel network and an array of Katyusha rocket batteries, alongside a group of European tourists snapping photos. Here and there, Dani paused. “The Israelis were right here,” he said. “Sometimes they would advance, sometimes we would advance. Sometimes the fighting was face to face.” Dani spoke with predictable contempt for Israel. “It’s a cancer,” he said. “It’s a parasite.” But he had nothing but admiration for the soldiers he had faced in battle. “The Israeli fighters are very fierce and very brave. They knew every inch of this ground, better than we did. We respect them. We don’t take them lightly. That’s why we were able to beat them.”
Everywhere in Mleeta there are placards and inscriptions, all with the same theme: before Hezbollah, there was nothing but humiliation. “From 1948 until the invasion of Lebanon, in 1982, the Israeli enemy imposed on Lebanon and the region only one choice,” one of the placards said. “Surrender, defeat, and subjugation.” Hezbollah, the sign went on, “announced the birth of a different course: Resistance.” In 2000, the last Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon. Dani went back to his village, which his relatives had fled. “I was the first one from my family to enter our village,” he said.
Nasrallah gave a speech in the Hezbollah stronghold of Bint Jbeil that was triumphant and anti-Zionist, if not overtly anti-Semitic. “We must acknowledge the grace of the fighting, the resisting and the sacrificing of the people who left their homes, families, and universities,” he said. With the Israeli withdrawal, Nasrallah became a hero in Lebanon and throughout the Arab world. “Nasrallah’s legitimacy in the Shiite community is almost unquestioned,” Salem, of the Carnegie Middle East Center, told me. “He is one of those historic figures, like Nasser in Egypt, whose identity merges with the people. He’s a messiah figure.”
When I asked Dani what Iran and Syria were doing in Lebanon, he went quiet; the subject is taboo in public and in the press. He would say only, “Assad is our friend; we don’t deny that. If he goes down, it’s bad for us.” On the Syrian civil war, Dani held to the Hezbollah line: it was true that Bashar didn’t treat his people well—“We recognize this,” he said—but the real trouble in Syria was caused by Western nations that were backing the rebels in order to take pressure off Israel. Yet the prospect of a Sunni majority, even a fundamentalist regime, coming to power in Syria was so alarming that at one point Dani seemed to be siding with Israel. “You wait and see,” Dani told me. “You’re going to have Salafists in Syria attacking the Golan Heights. What are you going to do then?”
It was clear that Hezbollah’s leaders had concluded that any change in Syria was almost certain to wash across the border, and that they were getting ready. “If the Sunnis take over Syria,” Dani told me, “we’re going to be fighting them in Beirut.”
To better understand the link between Hezbollah and Syria, I paid a dinner visit to the Beirut home of Walid Joumblatt, the leader of a tiny religious group, the Druze, and perhaps Lebanon’s most nimble and sophisticated politician. Joumblatt is an unprepossessing man—with a bald head, weary eyes, and a tiny mustache, he looks like a latter-day Edgar Allan Poe. But, with his small bloc of parliamentary seats, he has spent his career moving from one faction to another, making and breaking Lebanese governments.
We dined on ‘assafeer, roasted larks so small that you don’t need to remove the bones, and Joumblatt reached frequently for a decanter of sake. His dining room was filled with books; on a side table sat a copy of “Description of Egypt,” Napoleon’s attempt to catalogue Egypt’s archeological history. Oscar, Joumblatt’s Shar-Pei, was underfoot. “My best friend,” he said.
As Joumblatt told it, the Syrians had destroyed his family, and afflicted his country for decades. The Syrian Army first rolled across the border in 1976, in the early part of the Lebanese civil war, on the pretext of restoring order. But, as the civil war continued, the troops remained. Led by Hafez al-Assad, and then his son, Bashar, the Syrians dominated Lebanon’s society and its economy, extracting billions of dollars in tithes, bribes, and drug money. The Assads intervened regularly in Lebanon’s democratic political system, often calling on local proxies to carry out assassinations. Joumblatt’s father was the first. In March of 1977, Kamal Joumblatt, then the leader of the Druze, was shot dead as he was driving home. His militia had been resisting the Syrian troops, and the suspicion has always been that Hafez al-Assad ordered the killing.
Walid, then twenty-seven, took over as leader and, barely a month later, found himself sitting next to Assad. “I still had some hair—I was not yet bald—and Hafez looked at me and said, ‘How strange, you look like your father,’ ” Joumblatt told me. “I was hiding my anger. I had to do it for the sake of my community. I had no choice but to fix up a pact with the devil. So I shook hands with this man. I looked at him. And he did not move—he was known not to move, like a pharaoh.” Joumblatt sighed. “Lebanon is not an independent country. We have the sea, we have Israel, and we have Syria.”
In the nineteen-eighties, Syria’s relationship with Hezbollah was strained, and sometimes devolved into street fighting. But when the civil war ended, in 1990, Hafez al-Assad decided to allow Hezbollah to carry on its fight against the Israelis and to use the group as a local ally. For Hezbollah, an alliance with the Syrians meant that it could go on building its military without interference from the Lebanese government.
Over the years, growing numbers of Lebanese came to regard the Syrians as overbearing and exploitative—an inland relative bullying and mooching off a smaller, more sophisticated cousin. Around 2000, Rafik Hariri, a two-time Lebanese Prime Minister and a charismatic businessman with ties to the Saudi royal family, began trying to pull the country out of Syria’s orbit. In August, 2004, Hariri visited Damascus, where Bashar al-Assad warned him that his efforts were putting him in grave danger. “We will break Lebanon,” Bashar said. When Hariri returned to Lebanon, according to Joumblatt, who was a close friend of his, “he said, ‘Either Bashar is going to kill me or he is going to kill you.’ He was resigned to fatalism. God decides. And it happened.” On February 14, 2005, Hariri was driving along the Corniche, Beirut’s spectacular coastal drive, when a suicide truck bomber crashed into his motorcade. He and twenty-two others were killed.
For Assad, the murder of Hariri appeared to be a routine act of political manipulation. But, instead of quashing Lebanese desires for independence, the killing intensified them. Hundreds of thousands of Christians and Sunni Muslims poured into downtown Beirut to demand an end to the Syrian occupation. (Across town, Hezbollah staged enormous rallies of Shiites calling for the Syrians to stay.) In April of 2005, as outrage over the assassination grew—and as pressure mounted from the United States and the United Nations—Syrian troops departed, ending the occupation after twenty-nine years. “The Syrians came in on the blood of Kamal Joumblatt and left on the blood of Rafik Hariri,” Joumblatt said.
Hezbollah, with its protector gone, was forced to make an uncomfortable move: it got into government. The group had been fielding candidates for parliament since 1992, but only reluctantly, as members insisted that their first duty was to confront Israel. Hezbollah’s parliamentarians have learned to play politics—Nasrallah has dropped the sectarian language of his predecessors and stopped deploying suicide attacks—but they still stand apart. In the national assembly, they typically huddle across the floor from their fellow-Shiites in the Amal Party, whose Westernized members talk freely with women and drink alcohol. And they do not speak without permission from their leaders. (None were willing to coöperate with this article.)
After the assassination of Hariri, Lebanon split into two camps: an anti-Syrian faction led by Hariri’s son, Saad; and a collection of pro-Syrian groups, including Hezbollah. The anti-Syrian faction has taken an increasingly aggressive position toward Hezbollah, demanding that the group give up its weapons and become an ordinary political party. Hezbollah has resisted, sometimes violently. The result has been near-perpetual crisis. In 2008, the Lebanese government, led by the Hariri bloc, voted to outlaw Hezbollah’s private communications network. Within hours, Hezbollah gunmen fanned out across western Beirut, precipitating clashes with Christians and Sunnis that left scores dead. As the violence raised fears of outright sectarian war, Hezbollah and its allies struck a deal that gave them far greater representation in the government. “Hezbollah is in government to make sure there is no decision to take away their arms,” Alain Aoun, a member of the Lebanese parliament and a coalition partner of Hezbollah, said. “This is their main concern.”
The Hariri assassination continues to haunt Hezbollah. Both the Bush and the Obama Administrations believe that Assad was deeply involved, and that he used Hezbollah to help. In 2005, Lebanon detained the heads of four of its security agencies—regarded as Syria’s close allies—for their alleged involvement; they were held for nearly four years and released. Then, in June of 2011, a tribunal backed by the U.N. indicted four members of Hezbollah. According to the indictment, the Hezbollah operatives served as spotters as Hariri’s car drove along the Corniche. Investigators were evidently led to the men because one of them made a cell-phone call to his girlfriend during the stakeout.
Hezbollah insists that the tribunal is biased and invalid. In 2011, with Hariri’s anti-Syrian faction in control of the government, Hezbollah demanded a meeting to discuss the investigation. When Hariri refused, Hezbollah and its allies in the cabinet orchestrated the collapse of the government. “They wanted a government that was not against them on this issue,” Aoun said. After months of negotiation, Hezbollah’s bloc, which already had a large number of parliamentary seats, controlled a majority of the cabinet; Hezbollah members were charged with overseeing the agriculture ministry and the reform of the Lebanese bureaucracy.
Dani told me, “The only reason we get into politics is because we have to. But we hate politics—we hate it.” And yet Hezbollah has found itself charged with such mundane duties as delivering electricity and collecting garbage. “Running a government is not their primary concern,” Mohamad Chatah, a senior member of Hariri’s party and a former ambassador to the United States, said. “Obviously, their stature comes primarily from the battlefield and their hostility to Israel, but their success in doing other things adds to their support, and they have been generally good at doing other stuff. But you have to remember that Lebanese standards are not very high.”
Hezbollah’s emergence as a force in Lebanese politics has put the Obama Administration in a difficult spot. Since 1997, the United States government has deemed Hezbollah a terrorist organization, and thus off limits to American diplomats. In January of 2011, a new Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, who has Hezbollah members in his government but is not affiliated with the group, took office. Officials with the Obama Administration have met with him but not with his Hezbollah partners.
As Hezbollah solidifies its official power, anxiety over assassination still permeates Lebanon’s political class. In April, Samir Geagea, the leader of a Christian party known as Lebanese Forces, narrowly survived a sniper attack while strolling outside his house. No one could prove anything, of course, but many people I talked to assumed that Hezbollah agents, working with Syrians, carried out the attack. In October, General Wissam al-Hassan, a senior intelligence official and an ally of the United States, was killed by a car bomb in Beirut. Hassan had led the investigation into Hezbollah’s role in Hariri’s killing, and had recently ordered the arrest of a pro-Syrian politician named Michel Samaha, for trying to smuggle explosives into Lebanon at the behest of Syrian intelligence. “We think Hezbollah did the killing,” an Israeli official told me. “They are the only ones with the motive and the technical sophistication.”
When I pressed Joumblatt about who might be carrying out the assassinations, he gave me a weary look. “Look, I am not now, morally speaking, someone who is entitled to give lessons,” he said. After his father’s murder, he became one of the most ruthless commanders in Lebanon’s civil war, presiding over shelling in Beirut and sectarian killings. “I was a warlord. My people committed crimes, under my command, sometimes obeying orders, sometimes not obeying orders. Because it was a civil war. War is horrible, but civil war is something worse. I am also someone who has a black past.”
Now, Joumblatt told me, he, too, was worried about his safety. But, despite having lost his father and his friend Hariri to assassination, he wasn’t doing much to protect himself. “I have some guards here,” he said. “But these people—they have the technology to kill you even inside your own home.”
At Wadi Naim, three miles from the Israeli border, a vast Hezbollah bunker complex is hidden in a valley wall, camouflaged by limestone and bush. It’s invisible from the road, two hundred feet below, invisible from the air, invisible even to the visitor standing on top of it. The only way to find it is by using a G.P.S. programmed with the precise coördinates. Under a foot of dirt and rubble is a trap door, and a ladder leading down to the main tunnel. Inside, the only sign of life was a colony of black bats, dangling silently from the ceiling. Startled by my entry, they dropped down, then glided up the shaft toward the light.
Underneath the limestone, the bunker is supported by walls of reinforced steel. There was a kitchen, a bathroom, and space for twenty people to sleep. Standing inside, a hundred feet underground, it was not difficult to imagine a group of Hezbollah fighters sitting out a bombardment for days, even weeks, the Israelis unaware of their location or unable to penetrate it.
In July of 2006, Nasrallah ordered his men to stage an attack inside Israel. They captured a pair of soldiers, and, for the next thirty-four days, the Israel Defense Forces mounted an enormous response. Israel killed scores of Hezbollah’s men and destroyed its headquarters and its supply network. The attacks killed as many as twelve hundred Lebanese civilians, flattened entire blocks of southern Beirut, and destroyed many of the roads, bridges, and public buildings in southern Lebanon.
Yet Hezbollah mounted a fierce resistance, from bunkers like the one in Wadi Naim, where fighters emerged to attack with wire-guided missiles and quickly ran back inside. At the same time, thousands of Hezbollah rockets rained down on Israel from batteries hidden in forests, fortified garages, and even people’s homes. The result was a bloody draw—a revelation to the Israeli Army, accustomed to dominating wherever it fights. General Dan Halutz, the I.D.F.’s chief of staff, resigned during an investigation that identified “grave failings” in his generals’ prosecution of the war. Just how Hezbollah fighters were able to build bunkers such as the one I visited in Wadi Naim has never been fully explained. “Hezbollah will not surprise us again,” Ehud Barak, Israel’s Defense Minister, has said.
For Nasrallah, the war was both a victory and a catastrophe. Shortly after a ceasefire was arranged, he said that he would never have ordered the initial operation had he known that it would lead to war—“absolutely not.” He was nearly killed himself. Halutz told me that Israel had twice sent jets to attack bunkers where Nasrallah was thought to be hiding. “The first time, we had the right place but he was very deep underground,” he said. “The second time, he wasn’t there. The third time, we won’t miss.”
But when the war was over Nasrallah’s status was higher than ever. Israeli soldiers returned from the front lines stunned by the prowess of the Hezbollah fighters, who were sometimes equipped with night-vision goggles and sophisticated eavesdropping equipment. On the first night of the conflict, a Hezbollah missile struck an Israeli destroyer off the coast. Hezbollah fighters destroyed Merkava tanks and killed a hundred and twenty-one Israeli soldiers. “This was a strategic, historic victory, without exaggeration,” Nasrallah said in a televised speech. “We emerged victorious, where Arab armies had previously been defeated.”
Another thing that helped take the sting out of the Israeli assaults was Iranian money. At extraordinary expense, south Beirut and southern Lebanon were rebuilt; it is difficult these days to find a building that shows damage from the war. According to a Lebanese security official, the reconstruction was financed largely by Iran, which bypassed the Lebanese government. In the months after the ceasefire, Hezbollah trucks pulled into devastated neighborhoods and handed out Iranian money to Lebanese who’d lost property and kin. The security official said that the Iranians poured between two and three billion dollars into the country; the money was transported by air to Syria, he said, and then “they brought American dollars on trucks from Damascus.”
As I drove through southern Lebanon with Dani, he pointed to freshly paved roads and newly built hospitals. “Iran paid for all of this,” he said. “If we had been forced to rely on the Lebanese government, this area would still be in ruins.” Iranian money is the crucial means by which Hezbollah militants have cemented support in the Shiite community. In southern Beirut, I met a man who identified himself as Ahmed Shah, a shop owner and father of two who lived a few blocks from Hezbollah’s headquarters. For fifteen days in 2006, Shah and his family rode out the Israeli bombardment, feeling the building shake day and night, until they finally decided—like hundreds of thousands of other Lebanese—to flee. Shah moved his family to an apartment on the Christian side of the city, which the Israelis spared. When he returned, three weeks later, he found his neighborhood demolished. “A missile cut my building in half,” he said.
Shah was seated at a picnic table, drinking tea with friends. Behind him was his rebuilt apartment, paid for almost entirely by Hezbollah. The day the war ended, Shah said, Hezbollah men began walking through the neighborhood, surveying the wreckage and handing out cash. A few days later, Shah met a group of Hezbollah administrators, who laid down the terms: at a cost of forty thousand dollars, they would rebuild his apartment, and they would give him five hundred dollars a month to rent an apartment for the next year and a half. The Hezbollah administrators gave Shah ten thousand dollars more to furnish the new place. Shah figured that the Lebanese government paid for perhaps a quarter of the reconstruction, but even that money was distributed by Hezbollah.
“Everyone supports Hezbollah here—it is the only government we have,” Shah said, as his friends at the table nodded. “We don’t mind that the Iranians are paying for everything.” I asked Shah if his allegiance to Hezbollah wasn’t costing him his neighborhood. Hezbollah started the war, after all. He shrugged. “It happened in 1982, 1985, 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2006,” he said. “Every few years, this neighborhood is destroyed, usually by Israel.” His friends nodded again. “It’s about that time again.”
In late January, the Israelis struck a convoy in Syria that they said was carrying anti-aircraft missiles to Hezbollah—missiles that could make it more difficult for Israeli aircraft to fly unhindered over Lebanon. Shortly after that, a senior commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard was killed as he crossed the border into Lebanon; no one claimed responsibility, but Hezbollah accused Israel. Both Hezbollah and Israel are preparing for the next war—and it promises to be far more devastating than the previous one. In 2006, Hezbollah fired an estimated four thousand rockets and missiles into Israel. This time, according to American officials, Hezbollah’s arsenal stands closer to fifty thousand projectiles, many of which have ranges long enough to strike every major city in Israel. The longer ranges have allowed Hezbollah to disperse its missiles across the country—all but insuring that an Israeli response would destroy areas far outside southern Lebanon.
Israelis expect that any war with Hezbollah is likely to be short. Foreign leaders, from the United States and elsewhere, will try to bring fighting to a quick end, which gives both sides an incentive to inflict as much damage as possible before a ceasefire. In Lebanon, I was told repeatedly that Hezbollah could be drawn into war if Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear-enrichment facilities. Last year, Nasrallah threatened that, if Israel struck Iran, American targets would be attacked. “A decision has been taken to respond, and the response will be very great,” he said in a television interview. “American bases in the whole region could be Iranian targets. . . . If Israel targets Iran, America bears responsibility.”
If Hezbollah joined in such attacks, it would be catastrophic for the state of Lebanon. After the 2006 war, Israel announced the Dahiya Doctrine, which an Israeli official explained as “Lebanon is Hezbollah and Hezbollah is Lebanon. Hezbollah shoots at us and we go to war against Lebanon.” Some Lebanese believe that Hezbollah is ultimately more loyal to the Ayatollah than to its home country. “It’s the third time in history that the Persians have been on the shores of the Mediterranean,” Joumblatt said. “You have a community dominated by Hezbollah, well entrenched in Lebanon, with a formidable arsenal, and supplies and ammunition and money that are huge. You have to sit and talk with them, but what do you say? They don’t decide. It’s Khamenei and Ghassem Soleimani who decide,” he said, referring to the Supreme Leader and a powerful Iranian official in the Revolutionary Guard. “It’s beyond Lebanon.”
Halutz, the Israeli commander, believes that Hezbollah’s leaders would not necessarily respond if Israel attacked Iran. “They will wait and see the first results,” he said. “If their partners are not successful, then they will not join. They will not bet on a losing horse.” When I asked Dani about this, he said his leaders assumed that they didn’t have to waste time wondering whether they would fight on Iran’s behalf. “If the Israelis attack Iran, then they will attack us, too,” he said.
Even if there is no war, Hezbollah could lose its main link to Iran if the Assad regime falls. Nearly all of Hezbollah’s war-making material—missiles, money, and ammunition—travels through Syria. The group is already scrambling to find new supply lines. Still, the Lebanese security official said that losing Assad would be a grave blow. “Right now, Hezbollah has enough missiles for one more war—a big war—but then all their weapons are gone,” he said. “When that happens, if Assad is gone, then life will be very hard for Hezbollah. They will have to change. They will have to moderate their behavior. They will have to put away their dreams.”
In the opaque world of Lebanese politics, one path to understanding lies in the study of Hassan Nasrallah’s face. When he was younger, Nasrallah gave off the hard stare of a soldier sure of his aim. As Hezbollah grew, his features softened; he donned wire-rimmed glasses and his beard turned gray, giving him the aspect of a slightly mischievous shopkeeper. Since the war in 2006, Nasrallah has lived almost entirely indoors, often in concrete bunkers, venturing out rarely, lest the Israelis try to kill him.
In October, Nasrallah appeared on Lebanese television, and the uprising in Syria seemed to have changed his face again. It was rounder, puffier, paler—the face of a man who is not only hunted but alone. Seated in front of a bright-blue background, he wore fashionable glasses, a trimmed beard, and the black turban that indicates presumed descent from the Holy Prophet. He started by talking about a pilotless drone that Hezbollah had sent over Israel. The drone, designed by Iran and assembled by Hezbollah technicians, had made it nearly to Dimona, a city in southern Israel that is believed to contain that country’s nuclear facilities, before it was shot down. Nasrallah broke into a smile. The Israelis, he said, were “perplexed” by Hezbollah’s ability to carry off such a sophisticated stunt. “The Lebanese should be proud that they have young men with such brains!” he said. For a moment, Nasrallah seemed his old self. Then his smile vanished, and he said he wanted to talk about reports in the Lebanese press that Hezbollah men were fighting in support of Assad.
The issue of Hezbollah’s role inside Syria raises fundamental questions about its identity and purpose. Is it really a “resistance” organization, dedicated only to fighting Israel? American and Lebanese officials say that Hezbollah fighters are indeed helping the Assad regime in Syria, mainly by advising Syrian fighters. The Hezbollah operatives are working close to the front lines and may be fighting themselves, the American official said. (He added that Iran prefers Hezbollah agents because they speak Arabic, as do the Syrian fighters.) Most Lebanese I talked to took it for granted that Hezbollah operatives were helping prop up Assad, for obvious reasons of self-interest.
Siding with the Assad government has already left Nasrallah alone in the Arab world. In 2011, an American official told me, he went to Damascus to try to persuade Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, to support the Syrian regime. Hamas had been an ally of Assad’s and, like Hezbollah, the recipient of extensive support from Syria and Iran. According to the official, who had knowledge of the meeting, Nasrallah reminded Meshal of their obligation to the Iranian government and pressed him to back Assad. Meshal refused, and shortly thereafter broke publicly with Syria.
In Nasrallah’s televised speech, he mentioned Lebanese news reports of secret Hezbollah funerals for fighters killed there; he spoke of one report saying that seventy-five of his fighters had been killed in a Syrian village called Ribleh. And he mentioned the Free Syrian Army’s claim that a Hezbollah commander had been killed inside Syria. Nasrallah spoke glowingly of the dead: “Dear, chaste holy martyrs!” Then he denied it all. The reports were cooked up by enemies, he said. A number of Hezbollah fighters had been killed, but they were actually Lebanese along the Syrian border, who had come under unprovoked attacks from the rebels. “This has nothing to do with fighting alongside the government,” he said. “This is truly what took place.”
The explanation seemed tortured, even ridiculous, but Nasrallah went on, his eyes narrowing and his mouth tightening. He said that the Lebanese government would not know how to protect its citizens. “What shall we do?” he said. “O our state, our government, our Lebanese parties, our political leaders, and our political and religious authorities!” By the time he brought his speech to an end, every trace of his boyish charm had departed. “Finally, I will say, Let no one bully us. Let no one try us.”
A few days later, I drove to the town of Arsal, on the Syrian border. As I approached, the civil war came into full view: a fight was on for possession of a border post held by the Syrian government. A Syrian gunship circled overhead. Explosions thundered in the distance.
The Masharia mosque, a half mile inside Lebanon, had Hezbollah flags flying, and an ambulance parked outside. Syrian refugees in Arsal told me that Hezbollah members were making regular trips across the border. “They pick up their wounded and bring them back here,” one refugee, who was camped nearby with his family, told me.
Not far from the scene of the battle, I met a mid-level commander in the Free Syrian Army, whose nom de guerre is Abu Bakr. He looked exhausted from months of fighting inside Syria, but his beard was neatly trimmed. Over coffee at his home in Arsal, Abu Bakr told me that he was a Lebanese Sunni—not a Syrian citizen. He was fighting out of solidarity with his fellow-Sunnis, who were resisting the Assad regime across the border. He said he felt confident that the rebels would prevail, but that the fighting he’d been in was horrendous. “They are being slaughtered,” he said of the rebels.
Abu Bakr understood Hezbollah operatives to be playing a significant role in helping the Assad regime, especially in training the shabiha, Assad’s brutal militia. He said that he had interrogated Hezbollah prisoners who were captured inside Syria, and that he had regularly tracked fighters as they crossed from Lebanon. A week before we spoke, comrades in Lebanon had radioed ahead that a Hezbollah convoy was heading to the border. As soon as the convoy crossed into Syria, Abu Bakr and his men struck. “We killed nine Hezbollah fighters,” he said.
The decision to wait until the convoy had entered Syria was an obvious one, Abu Bakr said. The fear of all Lebanese living along the border is that the war in Syria will spill over. So far, he said, it has not, but, the longer the war goes on, the greater the chances that it will. “We hope this will not happen, but everyone is worried about it,” he said.
On a recent Friday morning in Sidon, a crowd of three thousand Sunnis gathered at the Bilal bin Rabah mosque. They had come to hear Sheikh Ahmed al-Assir, one of the country’s best-known Sunni preachers. Sidon is a Sunni-majority city in a region dominated by Hezbollah. In recent months, as the Syrian civil war has taken on a sectarian character, Sunni-Shiite tensions have risen in Sidon, and Assir’s sermons have become inflamed. He is a striking figure: tall and thin, with an enormous wiry beard, which he sometimes sets off with black wraparound sunglasses.
Assir began by telling his listeners what was happening to Sunnis in Syria. “Just watch your television,” he said. “Children are being killed, mothers are crying, destruction is everywhere. Our people and our mosques are being destroyed in Syria.
“We should sympathize with the Syrian revolt on the basis of our religion,” Assir said. “For forty years, the Sunnis in Syria have been stepped on and humiliated. Ask yourself: What am I doing? We are asking you to support the Muslims of Syria.” Assir moved to a more delicate subject. “You know, Hassan Nasrallah says he is not involved in Syria,” he told the crowd. “And he is a liar! They rape women. They are slaughtering our children.” Hezbollah’s attempts to hide its role in Syria were preposterous, Assir said. “It is too big.”
Assir ended his sermon by turning to Lebanon. The struggle engulfing Syria was coming home, he said; the Sunnis of Lebanon have been oppressed no less than the Sunnis of Syria. Already, Assir said, Shiites under Hezbollah’s leadership have persecuted the Sunnis of Sidon, depriving them of municipal services and jobs, turning their neighborhoods into garbage dumps, attacking them and killing them without provocation. As the Sunnis rose against Assad, Assir said, so they will rise against Hezbollah. “Who has enslaved us in Lebanon for years? Who has been blackmailing us? Who killed Rafik Hariri?” he asked. “The same criminal!”
Since the civil war ended, in 1990, the Lebanese political system has relied on an exquisite balance among the main groups, and on a measure of self-restraint on the part of each. Hezbollah, with the help of its Iranian and Syrian benefactors, has pushed and sometimes broken the limits of the Lebanese system. The question for the future may be whether Hezbollah can restrain itself if it is threatened with a diminishment of its power.
The situation could come to a head during parliamentary elections in June, and many Lebanese predict that voters will return Saad Hariri’s anti-Syrian group to power. “If they win, and the Assad government is gone, then I imagine they will try to disarm Hezbollah,” Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a Lebanese writer close to Hezbollah’s leaders, said. “Hezbollah would be forced to defend itself.” When I asked Dani what the consequences might be, he didn’t hesitate: “There would be civil war.”
In the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, sectarian violence has broken out between Sunnis and an enclave of Alawites, killing dozens of people, but the fighting has not spread. For the moment, Joumblatt told me, a civil war is not likely, if only because Hezbollah is too strong to be challenged. “It would be suicidal to go to war with Hezbollah,” he said. Joumblatt believes that Hezbollah will one day transform itself entirely into a political party, but not anytime soon. “The calculation is that, once Bashar is gone, then Hezbollah will be weakened. But I don’t see it. They might be weakened, but, at the same time, they are still here, with their fifty thousand missiles. It took the British twenty years to persuade the I.R.A. to decommission its weapons. Here I think it will take centuries.” | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 82 | https://www.israelhayom.com/2021/05/09/rabbi-with-ties-to-late-syrian-president-hafez-assad-dies/ | en | [] | [] | [] | [
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wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 21 | https://ca.news.yahoo.com/assad-wins-syria-election-88-7-percent-votes-190506817.html | en | Assad wins Syria election with 88.7 percent of votes: speaker | [
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] | null | [] | 2014-06-04T19:16:40+00:00 | Bashar al-Assad won 88.7 percent of the vote in Syria's presidential election, parliament speaker Mohammad al-Laham said on Wednesday, securing a third term in office despite a raging civil war which grew out of protests against his rule. Assad's foes had dismissed the election as a charade, saying the two relatively unknown challengers offered no real alternative and that no poll held in the midst of civil war could be considered credible. "I declare the victory of Dr Bashar Hafez al-Assad as president of the Syrian Arab Republic with an absolute majority of the votes cast in the election," Laham said in a televised address from his office in the Syrian parliament. Syria's constitutional court earlier said that turnout in Tuesday's election and an earlier round of voting for Syrian expatriates stood at 73 percent. | en | https://s.yimg.com/rz/l/favicon.ico | Yahoo News | https://ca.news.yahoo.com/assad-wins-syria-election-88-7-percent-votes-190506817.html | BEIRUT (Reuters) - Bashar al-Assad won 88.7 percent of the vote in Syria's presidential election, parliament speaker Mohammad al-Laham said on Wednesday, securing a third term in office despite a raging civil war which grew out of protests against his rule. Assad's foes had dismissed the election as a charade, saying the two relatively unknown challengers offered no real alternative and that no poll held in the midst of civil war could be considered credible. "I declare the victory of Dr Bashar Hafez al-Assad as president of the Syrian Arab Republic with an absolute majority of the votes cast in the election," Laham said in a televised address from his office in the Syrian parliament. Syria's constitutional court earlier said that turnout in Tuesday's election and an earlier round of voting for Syrian expatriates stood at 73 percent. Syrian officials had described the predicted victory as vindication of Assad's three-year campaign against those fighting to oust him. Voting took place in government-controlled areas of Syria, but not in large parts of northern and eastern Syria held by rebels fighting to end 44 years of Assad family rule. The conflict has killed 160,000 people, driven nearly 3 million abroad as refugees and displaced many more inside Syria. (Reporting by Dominic Evans; editing by Ralph Boulton) | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 3 | 80 | https://www.omct.org/en/resources/urgent-interventions/syria-trial-against-prominent-and-awarded-syrian-human-rights-defender-continues | en | Syria: Trial against prominent and awarded Syrian human rights… | [
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wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 76 | https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/11/world/europe/nobel-opcw-dangers/index.html | en | Nobel recognizes risks faced by weapons inspectors | [
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] | 2013-10-11T00:00:00 | The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international chemical weapons watchdog helping to eliminate the Syrian army’s stockpiles of poison gas, recognizes the dangers and difficulties that the body faces. | en | /media/sites/cnn/apple-touch-icon.png | CNN | https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/11/world/europe/nobel-opcw-dangers/index.html | The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international chemical weapons watchdog helping to eliminate the Syrian army’s stockpiles of poison gas, recognizes the dangers and difficulties that the body faces.
A team from the OPCW and the U.N. has been in Syria since October 1, and oversaw the first destruction of chemical weapons equipment this week.
On Sunday, Syrian personnel used “cutting torches and angle grinders to destroy or disable a range of items,” the OPCW said. “This included missile warheads, aerial bombs and mixing and filling equipment.”
Given the danger the inspectors face, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon this week described the joint OPCW-U.N. mission in Syria as “an operation the likes of which, quite simply, have never been tried before.”
The joint mission is tasked with eliminating all chemical weapons in the country by midyear 2014.
“These developments present a constructive beginning for what will nonetheless be a long and difficult process,” OPCW Director-General Ahmet Uzumcu said.
Mission impossible? Securing Syria’s chemical weapons wouldn’t be easy
There are many more sites to inspect and the OPCW experts face significant dangers in working in a country riven by a protracted civil war.
The U.N. resolution that authorized the mission capped a month of dramatic diplomacy between the United States and Russia. That deal averted an American military strike over allegations the Syrian government used sarin nerve gas in an August 21 attack on a Damascus suburb. U.S. officials said at least 1,400 people died in the attack. Syria denied responsibility, blaming rebel forces.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee tweeted that the prize was awarded not because of Syria “but because of its long standing work.” However, in a statement it said that recent events had underlined the need to enhance the efforts to do away with such weapons.
It also pointed the finger at certain states for failing to observe an April 2012 deadline to destroy their chemical weapons. “This applies especially to the USA and Russia,” it added.
The need to rid the world of chemical weapons was underlined by events in Libya, said CNN’s Nic Robertson. Former dictator Moammar Gadhafi tried over many years to destroy his stocks under the terms of an international treaty, but after his removal from power in 2011 and the ensuring turmoil, Libya’s remaining weapons spread throughout the region.
Arms treaty
The OPCW, based in The Hague, in the Netherlands, is the implementing body for the Chemical Weapons Convention, an international arms control treaty.
The Chemical Weapons Convention entered into force in April 1997, at which point 87 states had ratified it – and the work of the OPCW to implement its provisions began at that point.
According to the treaty’s wording, signatories are “determined for the sake of all mankind, to exclude completely the possibility of the use of chemical weapons, through the implementation of the provisions of this Convention.”
Sixteen years later, more than 100 additional states have ratified the treaty. In September, Syria became the latest nation to ask to join the convention. It is due to enter into force in Syria on October 14, when it will become the 190th member state.
Aside from its work on disarmament, the OPCW aims to prevent the proliferation of chemical weapons through the inspection of chemical production facilities and monitoring of transfers of toxic chemicals and their precursors.
The OPCW’s experts have monitored the cataloguing and destruction of chemical weapons in countries ranging from the U.S. and Russia to Libya. They have also worked in Iraq, which was the first time its inspectors were sent into a live battlefield.
“We try to get as much information as we can about what we are doing,” Franz Ontal, OPCW’s head of inspector training, recently told CNN, during an exclusive visit to the organization’s lab and staging facility in the Netherlands.
“We want to know what the target site looks like; we want to know what we are after. The information we get is what’s going to inform the inspectors about the kind of protective equipment they are going to wear.”
Ontal showed CNN around the OPCW’s warehouse and explained the inspectors’ rules of operations. Once they have located the site of a possible chemical weapons attack, the inspectors use special electronic detectors to give them an initial readout of the type of chemicals they might be facing, and in what concentration. Two different machines, using different technologies, are used to increase confidence in the result.
In addition to chemical experts, the inspection team also includes munitions experts. That’s because they may be dealing with unexploded ordnance. In addition, shell remnants often contain traces of the chemical residue inspectors are looking for.
Ontal said inspectors rarely find chemical agents in their pure form, but, crucially, they can detect residues even if only fine traces are left.
“The holy grail for environmental sampling is the pure agent, the agent itself. [But] that might not be practical; we do not expect to find agent by the time we arrive. So we need to look for secondary evidence. That could be munitions fragments, or the delivery device itself, or whatever they used to deliver the agent. Munitions fragments can inform us of many things; they can still hold agent, if there is some liquid left.”
Identifying the munitions and the delivery device can also assist the investigative process, by providing clues about who might have been behind the attack.
Reactions
The European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, which won the peace prize last year, tweeted its backing, saying: “Congratulations @OPCW! #NobelPeacePrize is a powerful recognition of your important role in curbing the use of chemical weapons.”
And NATO’s Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen sent his support: “Congratulations to @OPCW for winning #NobelPeacePrize! OPCW doing difficult but essential work in eliminating #WMD #CW in #Syria”
Some took exception to the award though. Nadim Houry, deputy director of Human Rights Watch for Middle East/North Africa tweeted: “I would have thought 2013 would have been a year for soul searching at OPCW not accolades.”
And Blake Hounshell, deputy editor of Politico magazine, made a dig at the expense of U.S. President Barack Obama, a previous Peace Prize laureate: “OPCW owes this prize to the use of chemical weapons and the 2009 winner’s subsequent threat to bomb Syria.”
Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni human rights activist who won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, described how the award inspired her battle against injustice. “The peace prize meant so much for me and my Yemeni people and the youth of the Arab Spring who were fighting dictatorship and corruption,” she wrote in an email to CNN before the announcement was made.
“There will be no deviation or turning back no matter how much violence and suppressions we face and no matter how many bullets and bombs are directed towards the chest of peaceful activists who are full of love and peace.
No matter who wins the prize this year, I believe that both that person and his organization are worthy of respect and our trust. The Nobel Peace Prize has helped us to view the future with optimism.” | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 35 | https://www.cnn.com/2012/12/06/world/meast/bashar-al-assad---fast-facts/index.html | en | Bashar al-Assad Fast Facts | [
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] | 2012-12-06T00:00:00 | View the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad Fast Facts on CNN and learn more information about al-Assad and Syria. | en | /media/sites/cnn/apple-touch-icon.png | CNN | https://www.cnn.com/2012/12/06/world/meast/bashar-al-assad---fast-facts/index.html | Here’s a look at the life of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Personal
Birth date: September 11, 1965
Birth place: Damascus, Syria
Father: Hafez Assad, late Syrian President
Mother: Anisa Makhlouf al-Assad
Marriage: Asma (Akhras) al-Assad (2000-present)
Children: Karim, Zein and Hafez
Education: University of Damascus, Medicine, 1988; Ophthalmology residency, London, 1992-1994
Military service: Syrian Army, 1999, Colonel
Religion: Alawite Muslim
Timeline
1994 - Syrian President Hafez Assad’s oldest son and heir apparent, Basel, dies in a car accident. Second son Bashar, is called back from medical training in Britain and is groomed to take over his father’s role as president.
1999 - Assad becomes a colonel in the Syrian army.
June 10, 2000 - President Hafez Assad dies of a heart attack after 29 years in office.
July 10, 2000 - Assad is elected unopposed as president of Syria.
January 2006 - Assad and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hold a summit meeting in Damascus. Assad declares his support for Iran’s nuclear program.
April 2006 - Assad meets with the head of a United Nations panel investigating the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri.
May 29, 2007 - Runs unopposed for president and is elected to a second seven-year term.
October 14, 2008 - Assad signs a decree establishing diplomatic relations between Syria and Lebanon.
April 21, 2011 - In response to Arab Spring protests, Assad lifts the country’s 48-year-old state of emergency law. The law, which went into effect in 1963, restricted freedom of speech and gave the government broad power to detain people for perceived threats to national security.
May 19, 2011 - Assad is harshly criticized in a speech by US President Barack Obama. Obama says Syrians have displayed “courage in demanding a transition to democracy [but Assad’s regime] has chosen the path of murder and the mass arrests of its citizens…President Assad now has a choice: He can lead that transition, or get out of the way.”
August 18, 2011 - Both the United States and the European Union call for Assad to step down. US authorities also impose new economic sanctions against Damascus, freezing Syrian government assets in the United States, barring Americans from making new investments in Syria and prohibiting any US transactions relating to Syrian petroleum products, among other things.
October 10, 2011 - A statement issued after a meeting attended by all 27 foreign ministers in the European Union condemns “in the strongest possible terms the ongoing brutal repression led by the Syrian regime,” and declares that Syria’s leader must resign “to allow a political transition to take place in Syria.”
November 14, 2011 - Jordan’s King Abdullah calls on Assad to resign.
November 20, 2011 - In an interview with a British newspaper, Assad warns other countries that military intervention in Syria would have “very dire” repercussions and that his country “will not back down” in the face of international pressure and condemnation.
November 22, 2011 - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan calls on Assad to resign and warns that he faces the same fate as Benito Mussolini, Nicolae Ceausescu, and Moammar Gadhafi, all leaders killed by their own people.
December 7, 2011 - In an interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters, Assad denies responsibility for the violence in Syria and distances himself from the behavior of his armed forces.
March 10-11, 2012 - Assad meets twice with UN envoy Kofi Annan to discuss the bloodshed in Syria.
March 23, 2012 - European Union sanctions are placed on Assad’s wife, Asma, his mother, sister and sister-in-law. Their EU assets are frozen and a travel ban prevents them from traveling to any EU country. London-born Asma cannot be barred entry into Britain despite the EU ban.
July 18, 2012 - Syria’s Deputy Defense Minister Assef Shawkat – Assad’s brother-in-law is killed, along with two other regime officials, in an explosion at a national security building in Damascus.
April 17, 2013 - In an interview with Syria state TV network al Ekhbariya, Assad compares the support of rebels in Syria now to the backing of fighters in Afghanistan during their war with Soviet troops in the 1980s. He predicts that the rebel groups will one day turn against the United States and others.
June 3, 2014 - Is reelected with 88.7% of the vote, according to reports on state run television. It’s Syria’s first election since the start of civil war in 2011.
February 10, 2015 - In an interview with the BBC, Assad says his regime is apprised of US-led coalition efforts against ISIS in Syria – not by the Americans, but through third parties such as Iraq. Assad also says that Syria won’t join the international coalition trying to “degrade and destroy” ISIS.
December 1, 2015 - In an interview with Czech TV, Assad says that US-led airstrikes against ISIS have not slowed the terrorist organization, and that ISIS has only recently begun to shrink due to Russia’s direct involvement.
July 9, 2016 - Assad is named in a wrongful death lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, DC by the family of journalist, Marie Colvin, who was killed in 2012 while covering the war in Syria. According to the lawsuit, Colvin was targeted in a rocket attack by Syrian government agents because of her reporting. Days later, during an interview with NBC News, Assad denies that the government was responsible for Colvin’s death. He says she entered the country illegally, putting herself at risk.
April 11, 2017 - Russian president Vladimir Putin claims, without evidence, that a deadly chemical attack on April 4 in the town of Khan Sheikhoun was staged to frame Assad and his regime. Putin says that more chemical attacks are being planned by opponents of Assad to provoke action by the United States.
May 31, 2018 - Assad calls on America to leave Syria in an interview with Russia Today.
May 28, 2021 - Is reelected with 95.1% of the vote, although the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy issue a joint statement calling it a “fraudulent election.”
March 18, 2022 - Assad arrives in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and meets with Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, and Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. This is his first visit to an Arab country since the Syrian civil war began in 2011. | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 3 | 79 | https://peabodyawards.com/award-profile/cnn-coverage-battle-for-mosul-undercover-in-syria-isis-in-iraq-and-syria/ | en | CNN: ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Undercover in Syria, Battle for Mosul | [
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wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 7 | https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2020/08/10/hafez-al-assads-legacy-and-the-syrian-civil-war/ | en | Hafez al-Assad’s Legacy and the Syrian Civil War | [
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] | null | [] | 2020-08-10T00:00:00 | Here Jack Sargent argues that Hafez al-Assad's military policies in the 1970s-80s allowed the Ba'athist Syrian Arab Republic to survive the Syrian Civil War. | LSE International History | https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2020/08/10/hafez-al-assads-legacy-and-the-syrian-civil-war/ | In 2010 the Arab Spring and subsequent armed rebellions destabilised authoritarian regimes in the Middle-East and North Africa, causing the downfall of many long-standing dictators and oligarchs. Although Syria was engulfed by the movement and the Civil War that followed, unlike his counterparts, President Bashar al-Assad survived the onslaught and has since regained control of most of the nation. In this article Jack Sargent revisits Cold War Syria and argues that it was not just foreign support but the erstwhile President Hafez al-Assad’s military legacy that allowed the Ba’athist Syrian Arab Republic to weather the storm.
Coverage following the outbreak of protests in Syria in 2011 painted a uniformly bleak fate for Bashar al-Assad. Fresh from the fall of dictatorial regimes in Tunisia (Ben Ali), Egypt (Hosni Mubarak), and Libya (Muammar Qaddafi), some predicted collapse for the Baathist regime while others argued for Western intervention. US-led NATO and allied forces intervened comprehensively in Libya, with a United Nations Security Council Resolution permitting them ‘…to take all necessary measures…to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack’. The resulting no-fly zone and air strikes guaranteed Muammar Qaddafi’s defeat. Yet no such intervention ever came for Syria. This is because further military intervention in the Middle East was deeply unpopular in the US and UK where there was a desire not to replicate the chaos that followed the fall of Qaddafi.
Nine years after the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War, Bashar al-Assad has won. He controls most of the country, and key Western allies have reopened diplomatic ties and abandoned calls for his removal. Strong support from Iran and Russia in the early years of the Syrian Civil War was undoubtedly critical to Assad’s success. Since 2013, Iran has provided thousands of militiamen, and in 2015, Russia deployed a significant contingent of fighter jets and military forces. Prior to 2013, Russia and Iran gave much-needed financial and material aid. Russian and Iranian military intervention were key in guaranteeing victory in the face of refusal to uphold redlines, match policy with rhetoric, and apply appropriate pressure to Syria’s backers. However, the Syrian military was surprisingly durable and able to stave off immediate defeat until direct military intervention by Iran and Russia.
Outside support alone did not guarantee victory or ensure the durability of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. In seeking to understand Bashar al-Assad’s durability, scholars and pundits continually overlook the impact of Hafez al-Assad’s military policies in the 1970s and 1980s. The late Syrian dictator ensured his son, Bashar, inherited a military that was institutionally loyal, large, and home to multiple elite units that the Assad dynasty relies on for their survival.
Prior to Hafez al-Assad’s three-decade rule, Syria had been wracked by sixteen military coups; nine of which were successful. Despite this, there was never an attempt by the military to depose Hafez; he inculcated the military with intense loyalty. It was that same institutional loyalty which saved Bashar al-Assad during the Syrian Civil War. Despite some defections, the military as an institution remained largely loyal. Hafez al-Assad fostered this loyalty through genuine reform, lucrative incentives, and dictatorial surveillance.
As Kamal Alam notes, until 2011 the Syrian military was a popular institution, especially as a means of escaping economic vulnerability. Unlike the religious homogeneity of armed forces in the Middle East, the Syrian military is secular because Hafez al-Assad, himself a product of the military, recognised its importance and sought to maintain its secular nature, eliminating military interference in domestic politics. Hafez removed the risk of military coup through Ba’athist involvement in officer education and ensuring careful representation of socio-economic, religious, and ethnic groups. Ba’athist education indoctrinated the officer corps, and a careful social balance co-opted any would-be dissident groups.
In addition, Eyal Zisser shows how three policies made the military ‘a loyal and obedient watchdog’. Firstly, Hafez ensured his ethnic background (Alawaite) and tribe (Kalabiyya) were well represented – but not overwhelmingly so – in the officer corps. This gave him a network of trustworthy individuals linked by family and kinship. Secondly, he allowed senior officers to ‘turn their units into political and economic fiefdoms’ and generate large amounts of illicit revenue in return for loyalty. Lastly, Hafez established a labyrinth of brutal intelligence agencies to police the Syrian state and military. Within this system, ‘commanders…reported directly to Assad,’ and the services operate ‘in near total secrecy’ with ‘overlapping functions,’ to provide immediate information on possible dissent, allowing direct action by Assad.
The measures Hafez took to ensure military loyalty were effective in cementing genuine institutional loyalty. The following two examples demonstrate this. When Hafez’s brother Rifat attempted to seize control in 1984, Rifat’s offers of increased power were flatly rejected by the ‘all-Sunni [military] cast’ to whom Hafez had entrusted ‘day to day affairs’. Likewise, when Assad massacred an estimated 25,000 of Hama’s largely Sunni civilians in the 1982 Hama uprising, his carefully coordinated measures for complete military loyalty ensured the compliance of the mostly Sunni Syrian military.
Whether through loyalty or fear of non-compliance, Bashar al-Assad inherited a military institution that was loyal. He enjoyed the guaranteed support of the officer corps, the nervous system of any military. While defections still occurred, and occasionally in large numbers, they were mostly confined to low ranking enlisted personnel. Thus, facing an uncertain future in a post-Assad Syria and the increasingly sectarian nature of the conflict (a deliberate policy of Bashar al-Assad), the military had no incentive to abandon the Assad family. Moreover, the military had already proven under Hafez that it would be loyal to the Assad family even past the point of massacring its own citizens. This allowed Bashar al-Assad to brazenly pursue a policy which involved the commission of heinous war crimes without fear of losing military support. The military were well versed in ‘Hama rules’.
Upon his ascension to power, Hafez al-Assad oversaw an increase in military size from 87,000 thousand in 1970, to 316,000 total active military personnel in 2000, replete with thousands of vehicles and artillery pieces, as well as several hundred military aircraft. Thus, the pre-Civil War army under Bashar al-Assad had roughly 200,000 active duty soldiers and a large, aging air force. The SAA’s increase in size was an underacknowledged and incredibly impactful of Hafez’s nearly three-decade rule, which arguably prevented the total collapse of the regime in the Civil War. Syria’s intense rivalry with Israel was the catalyst for this build-up. Syria felt pressure to maintain ‘strategic parity,’ believing they would have to ‘go [at] it alone’ on account of Egyptian and Jordanian acceptance of Israel. The aim of this build up was to balance Israel with a ‘military parity in force numbers.’
While matching Israel was obviously important, this strategy was only made possible by massive shipments of Soviet arms on very favourable terms. The Soviet Union even provided Syria’s military with equipment superior to that shared with their Eastern Bloc allies. This newer, sophisticated military equipment required the deployment of over 1500 Soviet military advisors to Syria to provide technical instruction. Bashar did not question the need to maintain such a large force, likely owing to Syria’s inability to finance a dramatic reshaping of its military and the need to maintain his father’s intimate relationship with the armed forces for his own survival.
The military’s size was decisive in enabling the regime to absorb losses of roughly 150,000 personnel due to ‘desertion, defection, and combat attrition.’ Had Hafez al-Assad only sought to maintain a military similar in size to that which fought the 1973 War (which was roughly 112,000 active military personnel), the military Bashar inherited would’ve quickly collapsed. Likewise, (depending on estimates of opposition size) the manpower of the military allowed it to, at worst, match the size of opposition forces and, at best, enjoy a 2.5 to 1 soldier-to-insurgent force ratio. While still less than the ‘3:1 superiority [necessary] for victory’, it allowed the regime to stave off immediate defeat.
Furthermore, the Syrian Arab Air Force (SyAAF) maintained significant numbers of aircraft, despite its obsolescence and the minimal training of pilots. In total, the SyAAF operated 500 combat planes and helicopters at the outset of the war, almost all of which were procured under Hafez’s rule. When coupled with the West’s refusal to implement a no-fly zone and the limited air defences of Syrian opposition forces, this obsolete and poorly equipped force was able to, at times, conduct 50 to 100 missions a day, a capability unmatched by any opposition force.
Not only did Hafez create a military that was loyal and large, he ensured that it was home to well-trained and well-equipped units designed to act as a praetorian guard for the Assad regime. The first incarnation of these forces was the Defence Companies, commanded by Hafez’s brother Rifat al-Assad which, at their peak, allegedly constituted as much as ‘a full third of Syrian land forces’. Patrick Seale explains that Rifat acted as ‘…the shield of his brother’s regime’ and ‘built up his Defence Companies…into the best armed, best trained, and best paid units in the Syrian Army’ whose personnel were largely chosen for their ‘close tribal links to Hafez al-Assad’.
Following Rifat’s failed 1984 coup, the forces he commanded were integrated into existing Army Special Forces units or demobilised, leaving the Defence Companies with a single division (which can comprise 5-15,000 men), which became Syria’s now infamous 4th Armoured Division. Large numbers of special forces were a key feature of Hafez al-Assad’s army, providing a surprisingly effective fighting force extensively deployed to Lebanon and around Damascus. As Hafez relied on them for personal and regime protection he had to ensure they were competent. This entailed extensive training with Soviet and Russian special forces thus making it the most effective force in the army. The trust Hafez placed in the special forces allowed them to operate proactively and avoid the ‘unwillingness…to show initiative or react independently [of]…the usual chain of command’ that plagued the SAA. As a result, Syrian special forces enjoyed daunting successes. In the 1973 War, they captured a sensitive Israeli observation post in the Golan Heights. Niche elements of the Russian trained Syrian special forces have also frequently operated covertly in Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank, and on ‘very few occasions’ in Israel.
Hafez’s policies provided the blueprint for how Bashar uses the special forces in the Syrian Civil War – a fact overlooked in contemporary analysis of the Syrian military performance. Bashar al-Assad controlled roughly 65-75,000 Special Forces soldiers in 2011. The Syrian Arab Army has been heavily reliant on special forces as both a spearhead and quick reaction force. Testimony from a special forces commander outlined multiple deployments involving ‘ a year-and-a-half in Idlib, Khan el Asal and Aleppo for seven months, and the suburbs of Damascus for…16 months’. Identical to his father’s handling of Hama in 1982, Bashar al-Assad used (and continues to use) the special forces to deal with sensitive and direct challenges to his rule. Idlib and Aleppo were strongholds of resistance in the Civil War to which Bashar applied intense brutality starkly reminiscent of Hama. Additionally, Bashar preserved his father’s reliance on special forces to defend Damascus – the seat of his regime – where the units were heavily involved in fighting.
The Syrian military proved markedly durable between the outbreak of the Civil War and outright Iranian and Russian military intervention. While contemporary discourse tends to point to Iranian and Russian support as the main cause of regime survival, it overlooks the fact that Hafez al-Assad’s military legacy allowed the regime to survive the early years of the Syrian Civil War. This strong military legacy was unchanged by Bashar al-Assad, who inherited a vast military capable of sustaining considerable loss, that was resolutely loyal, and home to a significant number of elite, trustworthy units. Faced with the seemingly unstoppable tide of the Arab Spring, Bashar used the Syrian Arab Armed Forces to brutalise his way to pyrrhic victory.
Jack Sargent is a recent graduate of LSE’s History of International Relations MSc Programme. His research focuses on Middle Eastern regional security issues and nuclear proliferation. His dissertation examined the nuclear ambitions of the Shah of Iran.
Cover Image: Hafez al-Assad standing on the wing of a Fiat G.46-4B with fellow cadets at the Syrian Air Force Academy outside Aleppo. Between 1953-1954. Wikimedia Commons | ||||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 62 | https://adst.org/2015/06/like-father-like-son-tyranny-in-syria-a-massacre-in-hama/ | en | Like Father, Like Son — Tyranny in Syria, A Massacre in Hama – Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training | [
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] | null | [] | null | en | https://adst.org/2015/06/like-father-like-son-tyranny-in-syria-a-massacre-in-hama/ | As the civil war in Syria drags on with no end in sight, the humanitarian toll of the conflict becomes increasingly dire. The brutal crackdown carried out by Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s tyrannical president, initially targeted pro-democracy demonstrators but has since taken a sectarian turn as conservative Islamic groups fight the secular regime that prohibited groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood from operating.
The war has reopened old wounds as the regime and the Syrian army, which are composed mainly of the religious minority of Alawite Muslims, fear that if al-Assad, who is also Alawite, is ousted, they will be persecuted. This conflict between the Alawites and the rest of Syria’s citizens has existed since the reign of Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria as president in a similarly brutal manner from 1971-2000. During the 1980’s, Hafez al-Assad faced increasing dissent and violence from the Muslim Brotherhood as they sought to retaliate for government campaigns against their members. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood attacked the security forces with car bombs and assassinations while the government struggled to root out these terrorists.
The campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood and other fundamentalist Islamic groups culminated in February 1981, when security forces sealed the city of Hama, in northern Syria, for 27 days as tanks and Special Forces searched the city for insurgents. Civilians could not leave the city while tanks and planes bombarded sections of the city. The final death toll is estimated to be between 10,000 and 25,000 killed, with some estimates as high as 40,000 dead. The operation showed the world the way the Assads would deal with dissent, a precedent that — tragically – is still true today.
Haywood Rankin was a Political Officer at the Embassy in Damascus from 1984-1986, where he worked with the Alawi-controlled government of Hafez al-Assad. Norman Pratt worked as an Economic Officer in Damascus from 1963-1967, during which time he saw the first rumblings of Muslim Brotherhood dissent against the Assad regime. Talcott Seelye had many years of experience in dealing with Syria and Hafez al-Assad, first as the Director of the Arabian North Affairs desk from 1968-1972 and then as Ambassador to Syria from 1978-1981.
William Rugh served as the Deputy Chief of Mission in Damascus from 1981-1984, during which time the siege and destruction of Hama took place. Samuel Lewis served as the Ambassador to Israel for eight years, from 1977-1985. Edward Abington served in the Political Office in Damascus from 1979-1982, where he experienced the violence leading up to the siege, as well as its aftermath. Richard Undeland worked as a Political Affairs Officer at the Damascus embassy from 1979-1982.
Rankin, Seelye, Rugh, Abington, and Undeland were all interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy; Rankin beginning in July 1998, Seelye in September 1993, Rugh in March 1996, Abington in April 2000, and Undeland in July 1994. Pratt was interviewed by Dayton Mak beginning in November 1991, and Lewis was interviewed by Peter Jessup beginning August 1998.
Go here to read more about Hafez al-Assad and other Moments on the Middle East.
“There was a strong sense of ethnic unity and self-preservation”
Haywood Rankin, Political Officer, Damascus Embassy, 1984-1986
RANKIN: The country bumpkins from the mountains, the Alawi Mountains of the northwest…they are a minority. But they were a minority who even going back into the period of the French mandate had a presence in the armed forces far greater than their proportion of the population would have suggested. This was a way forward for the poor, illiterate mountaineers.
You could think of the Alawi Mountains as being the Appalachia of Syria. These “Appalachians” had seen the army as the natural way for them to get out of their mountains and to find work and a career. They are Ismaili. They are a type of Muslim which is different from the mainline Sunni Islam that had always dominated the country going back to the Turkish era. (Map: Stration)
The relationship between the Sunnis, particularly of Hama, and the Alawis had been masters toward servants and peasants. The Alawis had their own religion, effectively, and a strong sense of their own ethnicity. I think that has been the main secret to Assad’s holding power. Even though there have been tensions and competition within the Alawi community, they have known that the minute they lost power, there would be a bloodbath in which they would be the losers.
Despite all of the jostling within the Alawi community for power and the occasional rumors one would hear of coup plots against Hafez al-Assad, at the end of the day there was a strong sense of ethnic unity and self-preservation. They were very secretive. It was very difficult for me to get to the root of this. The Alawis were very strong in the military, very strong in the intelligence services and very hard to get at.
Norman Pratt, Economic Officer, Damascus Embassy, 1963-1967
PRATT: The Army started out as an underclass, particularly with the Alawites. This group lived up in the hills beyond Latakia and in the valley around Homs. They were poor peasants with little chance for advancement or education, except through military schools. As the minority, they found favor with the French Mandate authorities. They were encouraged to become non-coms [non-commissioned officers] and eventually go to officers’ candidate school at Homs. Thus, they emerged as a military caste devoted primarily to their own Alawite interests.
The Alawite are heterodox Muslims about whose beliefs we know little. Their dogma is considered secret. Their poverty as peasants showed up particularly because they were the tenant farmers for the wealthy, Sunni Moslems, and the conditions under which the Alawite lived were not good. There was a study done on rural hygiene back in the ’30s which described it vividly.
Thus when you get into situations like the one in the mid-’80s where you had the Sunni uprising in Hama against Alawite and the Baath Party, and the subsequent government bloody reprisals and suppression of the revolt, it is understandable that this is basically the working out of the Alawite antagonism against the Sunni landlord.
“The Alawites ruled by terror”
Talcott Seelye, Director, Arabian North Affairs, State Department 1968-1972
SEELYE: I had been in charge of what we call Arabian North Affairs in the Department which included Syria back in 1968-72, when Assad came to power, so I followed him very closely. However, I had never met him before. I think when one meets him you see an additional dimension to Assad.
If one hears about him from afar he comes across as a tough guy, shrewd, very adroit, who runs Syria with an armed fist. But when you meet him personally, as I did for the first time when I presented my credentials, you found a man very at ease, very laid back, very pleasant with a nice smile on his face, very responsive, with the appearance of having lots of time, a good sense of humor, a very attractive personality.
Just very low key and laid back, responsive and curious and bright. So that is what one learns by meeting him firsthand. I had the impression before I got there that there was a difference between him and Saddam. I had also followed Saddam Hussein closely because he came to power in Iraq about the same time, although at first he was the power behind the scenes. When Saddam came to power in Iraq I became aware of his ruthlessness. How he wiped out the intellectual elite of Baghdad and how bloody-minded and basically how brutal a person he was.
I had felt that Assad was much more calculating and much more discriminating when it came to the use of force and terror. And that was borne out when I was there. If the regime was challenged, Assad was ruthless.
William Rugh, Deputy Chief of Mission, Embassy Damascus, 1981-1984
RUGH: It seemed that he [Assad] was convinced that being a very strong, tough Arab nationalist was important to him and maintaining his power. He represented internally a minority group…. He had come up through the military. His hold on power depended partly on the control of the military and control of the Syrian Baath party. It was, to some extent, tenuous if you consider that he was representing a minority and that may have influenced his desire to preserve himself as a very tough Arab nationalist.
He was tough. He would talk about refusal to surrender, as he thought [Egypt’s Anwar] Sadat surrendered to the Israelis. But he was going to insist on no surrender. His control was fairly solid.
When I first arrived in 1981, there was some terrorist activity going on in Syria carried out by Islamic fundamentalists against the regime. During the first several months there were a few major car bomb explosions in Damascus and elsewhere. One of them was right behind the American school and caused a lot of damage to the Air Force headquarters as I recall. In the first months I was there, the Syrian government was able to put an end to that. They were able to arrest and eliminate the opposition. It was fairly stable.
The only exception being later when there was an uprising in Hama. It took a couple days for the Syrian army to put it down and they put it down very brutally, destroying a large section of Hama. The press said they destroyed the whole city, which of course wasn’t true. They did destroy a large section of it and it happened when I was there.
“The government decided that this was the last straw”
Samuel Lewis, Ambassador to Israel, 1977-1985
LEWIS: Towards the end of January, troubles erupted in Syria. Assad’s forces were attacked by Muslim fundamentalists in a number of cities. These were serious terrorist-guerrilla operations against the Syrian regime. The end result was that in a matter of a few weeks, Assad sent the Army into Homs, Hama and Aleppo. The Army shelled these towns and in Hama especially it leveled the town. In the process, according to the information we received, 20-25,000 people were killed by the Syrian Army–mostly, if not all, women and children–the families of the Muslims.
The Muslim Brotherhood was effectively squashed and their rebellion was over. The cities became ghost towns; they have never been rebuilt in the same way. It was an excellent illustration on how to extinguish a rebellion with cold-blooded brutality. Assad was in very bad health at the time and his regime was quite shaky, but he held on tenaciously.
SEELYE: [The siege of Hama] happened after I left, but it was building up while I was there because the Muslim Brotherhood was beginning to get up a head of steam while I was there. We could hear explosions right near the embassy resulting from an attack by some gang of the Muslim Brotherhood against some Baathist office or residence. We had reports that the Brotherhood was getting stronger, particularly up in the Hama, which has always been a bastion of Islamic conservatism. A couple of times even Soviet military advisers were attacked.
In Damascus members of the Mulchbarat (Security Service) which drove around in Land Rovers. Whenever you saw a Land Rover you knew it was the Mulchbarat, except that the Soviet advisers also drove Land Rovers. A total of 12 Soviet military advisers were killed in the course of time, either because the Brotherhood thought they were Mulchbarat or maybe because they knew they were Russians and felt that since the Russians were close to Assad they were legitimate targets.
I used to joke privately that here was the American Ambassador who is representing a country that was not enjoying good relations, and yet I didn’t feel really in danger. Although there was an incident once that indicated that this was not always the case. But here were the Russians who were close to Syria and got shot at and some were killed.
The Muslim Brotherhood movement was gaining strength and at first Assad tried to cut a deal with them. At the same time he threw a lot of them in jail, those he could get his hands on. But the situation still got worse.
Up in Aleppo at one point, while cadets in the Cadet Academy were in an auditorium, 90 were killed by machine guns fired through the windows. The Brotherhood was considered responsible and there was some evidence that Iraq was colluding with the organization.
In the fall of 1978, just after I got there, there was an effort to bring Iraq and Syria together and they met in Damascus, with the idea of unity. But it fell apart, it didn’t work out. As months went by tensions increased between the two countries. And the Syrians claimed to have evidence that the Iraqis were helping the Brotherhood, providing them with arms, and were behind some of these incidents like the cadet massacre. So things were building up.
At one point the Syrian government decided to teach the Brotherhood a lesson. There is a big prison up near Palmyra and a lot of the prisoners there were political prisoners, many who were members of the Brotherhood or suspected of being so. They were let out as if they were going to be freed, several hundred of them.
Then with helicopters and armored cars the Syrian police and military just mowed them down. One was aware of the bestiality in Assad, but it was not quite to the same degree as in the case of Saddam. Saddam did it every day. Assad did it only when he felt challenged. He felt challenged by this group and wanted to teach them a lesson.
Well, of course, that affair in Palmyra only incensed the Brotherhood even more. The uprising in Hama occurred after I left, in 1982. The Brotherhood in Hama rose up against the government and killed Assad’s officials in Hama. So the government decided that this was the last straw. It sent in elite troops who just wiped out half the city and killed 15,000-20,000 people — men, women and children. This was ruthless, but there hasn’t been a peep out of the Brotherhood ever since….That is Assad’s modus operandi. (At right, Hama Square)
RUGH: We heard about the Hama siege when it started. We tried to monitor it, but it was difficult because it was closed off by the Syrians. They didn’t allow our attachés or anybody to go up there and look at it. But we did get some people up there and looked at it while it was still going on. This was before the international press knew it was happening. There were lots of American and foreign journalists sitting in Beirut, but there weren’t any correspondents sitting in Damascus. The Syrians weren’t about to report it. So, it didn’t get into the international press until after it was just about over. But the embassy knew about it and was reporting on it.
What happened was that Hama is a very old city and the oldest parts of it have very narrow streets and it’s sort of a rabbit warren of little narrow alleys and houses piled on top of each other. The Islamic fundamentalists who were in revolt against the local government of Hama were able to resist being arrested by the local police and military because they holed up in these small houses and streets. That was a security problem for the Syrians because they couldn’t get them out of there. It was easier to be snipers in a window of a little old house than it was to arrest them, kill them. So the Army surrounded the city and they tried to root them out.
After a few days, they realized that they were failing to do so, so they began to bombard this particular residential section of the city which had the resisting Islamic fundamentalists in it. They pretty much leveled one section of town. It was a district of the city that they destroyed. It was all over. Then the press came in and discovered it and said that they had destroyed a whole town.
“A bomb blew up about 50 yards from my car”
Edward Abington, Political Officer, Embassy Damascus, 1979-1982
ABINGTON: Hafez El-Assad in consultation with the Alaoui [Alawite] military leaders – and the Alaoui were in all the key military positions, the intelligence units, the Special Forces, a group called the Defense Forces which was headed by Assad’s brother and was deployed in the Damascus area to defend the Alaoui regime – they decided that they had had enough of this uprising, of these assassinations.
One has to keep in mind that it was very much targeted against Alaouis. There were many Alaoui officials who were assassinated because they were Alaoui. There had been these brutal car bombings. The government decided that it was going to crush the situation once and for all. Assad’s brother, Rifaat El-Assad, deployed the Defense Forces equipped with T-72 tanks to Hama, closed off the area, went in and just leveled this area where the Muslim Brotherhood was holed up. It was a civilian area. Basically, they shelled it and then they brought in bulldozers and just bulldozed the whole thing. No one knows how many people were killed. I know that it’s become the common wisdom that 10,000 were killed. In fact, I don’t think anyone really knows.
But the Syrians sealed off the area. No one could get in or out for about a week until it was over. That really broke the back of the Muslim Brotherhood. There were assassinations, a few bombings, after that. In fact, once when I was going from where the embassy was to a meeting with some Australian colleagues in an area west of Beirut in a suburb called Mezzay, a bomb blew up about 50 yards from my car. It was incredibly frightening because it was a bomb on one of these three-wheel Suzuki vans.
The Syrian security people immediately came out and started stopping cars. There was a car in front of me, a white Peugeot. There were three people in it. They panicked and they just were yelled at by the security people to stop. They kept going. This must have been 10-15 yards from me. The security people just opened up with AK-47s and killed all three people in the car. And they turned around and started pointing their guns at me. I was in a little Volkswagen Rabbit and stopped, held my hands in the air, and kept shouting in Arabic that I was a diplomat. They came over and looked at me and told me to get out of there. I haven’t been frightened that much many times. You could see how this terrorism really had the regime on edge.
“The destruction was staggering”
Richard Undeland, Political Affairs Officer, Embassy Damascus, 1979-1982
UNDELAND: This bloody retaking of the city was the work of the President’s brother, Rifaat al Assad, and his Special Forces. A standard tactic was to level with artillery fire any building from which so much as a single shot came, taking no prisoners and killing all who were inside. I drove north to Aleppo – it was a previously planned trip – only a few days after the fighting ended, and on the way up was routed by security forces to the east of Hama on back roads, so I did not see anything of the city.
However, on the way back three or four days later, all traffic was directed through its center on the main road. The destruction was staggering. The large blue domed mosque you had had to make a little loop around in the middle of the city had been totally leveled and the adjacent cemetery laid waste. Where there had been the buildings of the old city, you now had a clear view through to the Orontes River. A historic, big water wheel, one of the noria, was gone. I had been to Hama several times before and had trouble believing what had happened, how much I had known that was just no longer there. | |||||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 19 | https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/15/rami-makhlouf-bashar-war-has-arrived-inside-the-assad-family/ | en | The War Has Arrived Inside the Assad Family | [
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"Anchal Vohra",
"Craig Singleton",
"Stephen M. Walt",
"Salil Tripathi",
"Julia Kazdobina",
"Jakob Hedenskog",
"Andreas Umland",
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] | 2020-06-15T00:00:00 | Syria’s dictator crushed an uprising—but the ground may be crumbling beneath his feet. | en | Foreign Policy | https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/15/rami-makhlouf-bashar-war-has-arrived-inside-the-assad-family/ | In the 1920s, Ali Sulayman al-Wahhish earned the nickname Al-Assad, or The Lion, for entreating the French to protect the minority sect of Alawites in a Syria dominated by Sunni Muslims. “Al-Assad” had a ring to it, so Ali made it his last name. Little did he know that his progeny would not only rule the country but one day squabble over the spoils of a state lying in ruins.
The rift was visible in the early 1980s as Ali’s son Rifaat allegedly tried to dethrone his elder brother and then-president, Hafez al-Assad, who himself had usurped power in a coup a decade earlier. Hafez successfully sidelined Rifaat and taught his son Bashar al-Assad how to stop rebellions—familial and otherwise—in their tracks. Bashar paid close attention, as attested by his bombing of cities across Syria and the killing and displacing of millions who stood against him in the uprising that began in 2011. He also kept a tight grip on his dozens of cousins through a combination of monetary incentives and an ever-lurking threat to their lives.
Last month, however, the unthinkable happened. Rami Makhlouf, Bashar’s maternal cousin and one of the family’s richest members, challenged the president’s decision to charge him $230 million in back taxes, shredding the frail veneer of family solidarity. Since then, several Assad cousins have publicly questioned the efficacy of Bashar’s government, indirectly taking aim at him. Makhlouf’s criticism seems to be an inflection point for the Bashar regime. If Bashar loses the loyalty of his family and other co-religionists, it’s fair to wonder whether he can survive in power at all.
While Makhlouf seems to have interpreted the imposition of back taxes as a provocation, Bashar may have seen it as a demand for reciprocity. Makhlouf is estimated today to be worth $5 billion, wealth he only acquired because his businesses—which include Syriatel, the country’s biggest telecom company—had the blessing of the regime. Now that the Syrian state has been plunged into crisis by economic sanctions—the Syrian pound devalued from 50 pounds per U.S. dollar in 2011 to more than 3,000 pounds per U.S. dollar in 2020, and 90 percent of people are believed to be living in dire poverty—it wants Makhlouf’s assistance to keep it afloat. But that rationale has not proved persuasive for Makhlouf.
In May, Makhlouf published several amateur video clips online that, while wrapped in courtesies, warned Bashar that he risked losing the support of the broad swathe of Alawites—including militiamen—on the tycoon’s payroll. Makhlouf exploited old sectarian tensions as he insinuated that the fault lied with the president’s Sunni wife, Asma, who he alluded was trying to steal Alawite money, thus casting doubt on Bashar’s own commitment to his sectarian group.
The dispute has given fresh hope to Bashar’s challengers within the regime. They hope that Makhlouf may have weakened him irreparably among Alawites and opened space for challenging his role atop the regime, even as it is widely taken for granted that Bashar would violently resist any direct opposition from within his family.
Indeed, that has been a consistent pattern. Ribal al-Assad, the 45-year-old first cousin of the president and his uncle Rifaat’s son, is one of those who have been at the receiving end of Bashar’s ire. In 1994, outside the Sheraton Hotel in Damascus, Bashar called him names and the altercation turned ugly. Frightened, Ribal’s father booked him a flight and asked him to leave. At the airport, gun-toting presidential guards fired shots and hung around for two and a half hours to arrest Ribal. He was apprehended but let go after Rifaat threatened Hafez al-Assad that he would fight in every street in Damascus “if a hair on his son’s body was harmed,” Ribal told Foreign Policy.
Ribal now lives in Spain in self-imposed exile and was at home in lockdown when he got a text with Makhlouf’s first video clip. He described it as a “menacing gimmick” and said he laughed when he first saw it. “I personally know Rami; he is a coward. He won’t go against the regime. He is nothing without Bashar,” Ribal said. “You can lose your life for much less, let alone challenging Bashar on social media. This is just a show. Bashar is using Rami to tell the Russians that he will lose support among the Alawites and that it would affect their interests in the coastal area where the Russians have their naval base and airport.”
Ribal recounted the events on Oct. 20, 1999, when his family home on the shores in Latakia came under attack by soldiers of the regime to ensure that Bashar—and not Ribal’s father, Rifaat—succeeded Hafez as national leader. “My uncle, Hafez, was ill, and succession was a matter of time. The regime wanted to pass the baton to Bashar and make sure there was no opposition to his ascendency and that they would crush anyone who would oppose it. That is why they attacked our house and supporters.”
Many of Rifaat’s children swore allegiance to Bashar and continued to live in Syria but still nurse grievances. One of them, Douraid al-Assad, was known to toe the regime line and sing Bashar’s praises—until recently. In a scathing tweet May 7, soon after Makhlouf released his videos, Douraid asked Bashar to meet the hundreds of relatives who share his last name but have not enjoyed his privileged life. “They say Syria is ruled by the Assad family,” Douraid tweeted. “I have a request. 100 to 200 members of the family have never met you and they want to see you. Many of them have grown up, had children but only seen you on TV.”
Bassam Barabandi, a former Syrian diplomat now based in the United States, said Douraid’s newfound courage has an ulterior motive. “Such brazenness was never tolerated,” Barabandi said. “Now Douraid is challenging Bashar openly to present his father, Rifaat al-Assad, as an alternative. If Douraid did not feel the community was angry at Bashar, he would not dare say this.”
Ribal and Douraid’s opposition is partly motivated by their family’s claim to political power. But other family members, including cousin Gen. Adnan al-Assad simply feel left out of the family business and deprived of the wealth it has brought to the likes of Makhlouf. Adnan ran a militia and fought on the side of Hafez against the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982 in what has come to be known as the Hama massacre, in which thousands of brothers and civilians were killed. But in a letter he wrote to Makhlouf recently, he suggested that he felt inadequately compensated for his loyalty.
While he opposed the tycoon for crying wolf and described him as “the blue whale among the whales of money,” he painted himself as the real victim of a corrupt regime and took a careful dig at his cousin the president. “I have been selling my properties to meet the needs of my family, as my salary is just about $50 after 42 years of military service,” the letter said. It read like a sycophantic ode interspersed with a litany of complaints of how he had repeatedly been taken advantage of by the regime.
Back in October, Arab media reported on a more open challenge to Bashar’s government by the family of his aunt Bahija. Her son Ghaydaq fought for Bashar in Deir Ezzor during the uprising and yet was killed afterward in Latakia in clashes with a regime soldier who had come to arrest him on obscure criminal charges. Ghaydaq’s family vowed revenge in a Facebook post, but fearing repercussions, they later deleted it.
As the economy tumbles, average Assad supporters are beginning to wonder if their sacrifices have been worth it. Loyalists have paid for Bashar’s survival in blood, losing hundreds and thousands of men during the uprising. At the end of the war, they expected to reap some material profit—more jobs, promotions, or preferential treatment in government-awarded business contracts. Instead, the bankrupt government has left them poorer and hungry. Barabandi, the former Syrian diplomat, said that the Alawites are flabbergasted at the Makhlouf-Bashar saga. “They think they lost so much and there was no reward in the end,” Barabandi said. “They are fuming when they see these two cousins fight over billions as the common man struggles for pennies.”
Several Syrian experts told Foreign Policy that there is no doubt that Bashar al-Assad is losing support among Alawites. But they also say that the regime continues to control the country with an iron fist and it is premature to count on Bashar’s vulnerability. It is no secret that Ribal and Douraid al-Assad wished that their father, Rifaat, and not Bashar, had succeeded Hafez. But the old man’s past is stained with allegations of participation in the Hama massacre and, now at 82 years old, it is likely too late for him to fight his way down a bloody road to Damascus. Ribal, however, is young and admits he would like to be active in Syrian politics. “I want to, of course, but as opposition and not be part of any government at this stage,” he told Foreign Policy.
The other family that has been itching to make a comeback is that of Mustafa Tlass, long-time regime loyalists who defected during the uprising. Tlass’s son Manaf was in Bashar’s inner circle and a top military commander. Now based in Paris, Manaf has suggested in Russian media that there are alternatives to Bashar if Russia was interested in backing them. Manaf’s brother, Firas Tlass, who is a Syrian businessman currently based in the United Arab Emirates, thinks that Manaf is an alternative to Bashar and wants to play a role in Syrian politics, but he would return to Syria “only when Bashar leaves.”
For now, Russia seems more interested in controlling rather than replacing Bashar al-Assad. Going forward, he will find it harder to control the country—but it will be easier than ever for Russia to control him. | |||||
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wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 41 | https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/21/middleeast/mohammad-faris-syria-astronaut-obit-intl-latam/index.html | en | Mohammad Faris: ‘Armstrong of the Arab World’ and Syria’s first astronaut dies in exile | [
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"Eyad Kourdi"
] | 2024-04-21T00:00:00 | In 1987, Faris spent eight days in space with the Soviet Union’s Interkosmos spaceflight program becoming the first and only Syrian astronaut and second Arab to make it to space. | en | /media/sites/cnn/apple-touch-icon.png | CNN | https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/21/middleeast/mohammad-faris-syria-astronaut-obit-intl-latam/index.html | Mohammad Faris, known as the “Armstrong of the Arab World” and Syria’s only astronaut, died at the age of 72 in exile in the Turkish city of Gaziantep on Friday, from complications of a heart attack he suffered a month ago, according to a close friend who spoke to CNN over the phone.
In 1987, Faris, a pilot in the Syrian Air Force, spent eight days in space with the Soviet Union’s Interkosmos spaceflight program. Faris flew with a Soviet crew to Mir space station becoming the first and only Syrian astronaut and second Arab to make it to space.
Syrians gathered to watch the moment when the former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, father of current President Bashar, spoke with Faris during a phone call broadcast live on state TV, while Faris was in space, and asked him what he could see. Faris responded, “I see my beloved country, I see it wonderful and beautiful as it truly is.” These words, though seemingly innocuous, marked the beginning of his downfall.
In a 2023 documentary aired on news network Al Jazeera, Faris revealed he had chosen not to read a pre-written speech during the live phone call and ad-libbed instead, irking the Syrian dictator who was not used to sharing the limelight with another Syrian.
Upon his return to Syria, Faris was celebrated as a national hero by tens of thousands of Syrians. However, Hafez al-Assad took a different view. During a medal ceremony, where the protocol was for the president to hang the medal around the recipient’s neck, Faris was instead handed the medal in a box.
Faris said in an interview in his later years that he had asked the president to fund a national space program to help educate more Syrians to follow his footsteps into space, but Assad refused because – according to Faris – he was not interested in helping his countrymen to develop themselves.
Faris said the “curtain fell” in his dealings with Hafez al- Assad during their last meeting attended by Saudi astronaut Prince Sultan bin Salman. Assad reminded Faris of a moment during takeoff when he exclaimed “Ya Allah”, which literally translates as “Oh God” but in colloquial Arabic is akin to saying, “let’s go,” which Assad claimed was offensive to the Russians. Faris countered, “The Russians were not upset; it was a normal thing for them.”
Faris lived a quiet life in Aleppo following his return to Earth. Following Hafez’s death and the ascension of his son Bashar al-Assad to the presidency, Faris was supportive of the Syrian revolution that started in 2011. Faris decided in 2012 to defect and publicly oppose the Syrian regime, putting his family and himself in life-threatening danger.
“When we decided to leave Syria, I scattered my children in different neighborhoods of Aleppo to meet at a particular point. We left in a car with the person who helped us escape,” Faris told Al Jazeera in 2023.
“There was a helicopter overhead, but as soon as we entered a town where the Free Syrian Army had machine guns, they withdrew,” Faris added.
Days later, Faris moved to Turkey to live as a refugee. He became very popular among the Syrian refugee community in Istanbul. In 2020, Faris was granted Turkish citizenship, as reported by the Turkish state broadcaster TRT.
Faris, who had lived in Russia between 1985-1987 for training in the closed Star City in the Moscow region ahead of his space journey and was later awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, was critical of Russia’s support of the Syrian regime. In a March 2016 interview with AP, Faris said he regretted Moscow propping up the dictatorship in Syria, saying: “I am very sorry about the Russian interference, which has stood on the side of dictator Bashar al-Assad, and has begun to kill the Syrian people with their planes.” | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 3 | 14 | https://www.brookings.edu/articles/assads-normalization-and-the-politics-of-erasure-in-syria/ | en | Assad's normalization and the politics of erasure in Syria | [
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] | null | [
"Mark Lowcock",
"Daniel L. Byman",
"Elizabeth G. Ferris",
"Kemal Kirişci",
"Omer Karasapan",
"Sajjad Shah",
"Steven Heydemann",
"Jihad Yazigi",
"Jeffrey Feltman",
"Hrair Balian"
] | 2022-01-13T16:58:21+00:00 | Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has recently achieved significant diplomatic victories, with several Arab governments normalizing relations with Damascus. Steven Heydemann writes that this trend, should it continue, will produce the erasure of the regime's accountability for Syria's destruction. | en | https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/themes/brookings/assets/images/favicons/favicon.ico | Brookings | https://www.brookings.edu/articles/assads-normalization-and-the-politics-of-erasure-in-syria/ | Yet even in the face of this grim assessment, President Bashar al-Assad has notched significant diplomatic wins over the past year. Beginning with overtures from Jordan’s King Abdullah II last July, the normalization of Assad and his regime has quickly gathered steam throughout the region. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have reopened their embassies in Damascus. Senior officials in several Arab states are pressing to reinstate Syria’s membership in the Arab League, including Algeria, which will host an upcoming League summit in March. Syria has already been designated to host a 2024 Arab energy conference. The United States has extended sanctions relief to permit an Egyptian pipeline to deliver natural gas to Lebanon via Syria, though the project has hit snags. This trend is only likely to accelerate in the coming year. Although the Biden administration insists it opposes normalizing ties with Assad and will keep economic sanctions in place, it has not pushed back forcefully on U.S. regional allies that have reached out to Damascus, even as they undermine the stated objectives of American policy.
Described as a shift from punitive isolation to “step-for-step” diplomacy, Arab regimes have advanced any number of justifications for Assad’s normalization. It is presented as giving Syria an Arab counterweight to Iran; a way to relieve the economic hardship of Syrian civilians; a step toward the return of Syrian refugees; and insurance against a further outpouring of refugees that might threaten the stability of neighboring states. The most frequent refrain, however, is that engagement will create incentives for the Assad regime to accept the reforms necessary to pry open the taps of reconstruction funding from the European Union and move Syria toward the political transition called for in United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254.
If sanctions have failed to change the Assad regime’s behavior, this reasoning goes, perhaps it is time to show the regime what it might gain from cooperation. This possibility is what led the U.N.’s special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, to endorse normalization under the banner of engagement. “With each passing month,” he commented in December, “I have sensed a wider realization than before that political and economic steps are needed — and that these can really only happen together — step-by-step, step-for-step.”
As a rationale for concessions to Damascus, however, this approach, which rehabilitates Assad diplomatically, is little short of delusional. The idea that the Assad regime will respond to normalization with concessions of its own flies in the face of everything we know about how the Assads have ruled Syria for more than 50 years. Not only has this “step-for-step” engagement already failed to produce even the slightest hint of a shift in regime behavior, it is having the opposite effect.
Seen as evidence that recalcitrance works, “step-for-step” is legitimating and empowering the Assad regime, reinforcing its determination to reject compromises, and pushing a political settlement of Syria’s conflict even further out of reach. Nor are Syrians likely to see the purported economic gains of normalization. Predation and corruption have defined the regime’s management of humanitarian assistance throughout the civil war. Economic openings have invariably been captured by the Assads and their cronies, who monopolize their benefits with utter disregard for the well-being of ordinary citizens. There is no reason to imagine that normalization will produce any other result.
No less troubling, the advocates of normalization are indifferent to its failure. They have shown no interest in making further “steps” contingent on a positive response to earlier overtures. In effect, “step-for-step” has become a framework for unilateral diplomatic disarmament.
Normalization will also have deeply corrosive effects on sanctions, despite U.S. claims to the contrary. The Biden administration has shown less willingness than its predecessor to make use of existing sanctions under the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act. For other states, including regional actors, “step-for-step” is a convenient excuse to disregard sanctions and deepen economic ties to the regime. Jordan and the United Arab Emirates are already in discussions with Damascus about how to revitalize trade and investment. Russia’s special envoy for Syria has predicted further easing of sanctions in the coming year.
Critics of sanctions might welcome this possibility, arguing that they have failed to achieve their purpose and cause harm to Syrian civilians, while imposing little hardship on regime elites. In making such claims, however, critics often disregard the many other factors that collectively contribute far more than sanctions to the suffering of the Syrian people. | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 16 | https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/international/200418/syrias-assad-returns-legion-honour-award-france | en | Syria's Assad returns legion of honour award from France | [
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"La rédaction de Mediapart"
] | 2018-04-20T21:16:00+02:00 | Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has returned his Legion d'honneur award, France's highest recognition of civil merit which was given to him in 2001, in retaliation for French participation in airbor… | en | /icon-news.ico | Mediapart | https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/international/200418/syrias-assad-returns-legion-honour-award-france | Managing cookies
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wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 97 | https://english.enabbaladi.net/archives/2024/03/rifaat-al-assad-to-face-trial-in-switzerland-for-war-crimes/ | en | Assad to face trial in Switzerland for war crimes | [
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"enab10 Ula",
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] | 2024-03-12T13:18:03+00:00 | Syria News by Syrians | en | Enab Baladi | https://english.enabbaladi.net/archives/2024/03/rifaat-al-assad-to-face-trial-in-switzerland-for-war-crimes/ | The Swiss Attorney General’s office has announced the referral of the Syrian president’s uncle, Rifaat al-Assad, to trial.
The office issued a statement today, Tuesday, March 12, calling for al-Assad’s trial before the Federal Criminal Court, on charges of committing war crimes.
The statement accused Rifaat al-Assad of committing crimes of murder, torture, cruel treatment, and illegal arrests in Syria, in February 1982.
It noted that at the time, Rifaat was the commander of the Defence Companies and the military operations in the city of Hama.
The brother of Hafez al-Assad is accused of committing the crimes and charges directed against him during the battles that took place between the Syrian regime forces and the Fighting Vanguard organization.
According to the statement, the armed conflict between the two parties resulted in the death of between three thousand and 60,000 people, the majority of whom were civilians.
The forces entered the city, located in central Syria, in February 1982, and civilians fell victim to various violations ranging from summary execution to detention and torture.
The statement clarified that the Trial International organization filed a complaint in 2013, and the Attorney General’s Office began criminal proceedings against Rifaat al-Assad in December.
The organization announced in August 2023, a decision by the Swiss Federal Court to arrest al-Assad.
The organization called on the Swiss authorities to “quickly bring an indictment against the man nicknamed the butcher of Hama, who is 85 years old, and to bring him to trial.”
In addition to leading the Defence Companies, Rifaat al-Assad held the position of Vice President of the Syrian Republic between 1984 and 1998.
Rifaat al-Assad ordered his forces to sweep the city of Hama and execute its inhabitants and violated the laws of war, according to “Article 109” (paragraph 1), of the Military Criminal Law, in addition to “Article 3”, common to the Geneva Conventions.
The Swiss Federal Criminal Court (FCC) and the Federal Office of Justice (FOJ) issued an international arrest warrant against Rifaat al-Assad for his role in the “serious war crimes” committed in the city of Hama in February 1982.
Who is Rifaat al-Assad?
Rifaat al-Assad was born in Qardaha on August 22, 1937, with a Ph.D. in history from the University of Damascus, and he is the younger brother of Hafez al-Assad.
In 1963, Rifaat was among the officers who graduated from the military academy and after graduation, he participated in the coup of February 23, 1966, and joined in 1969 a command course for armored and infantry guards, which qualified him to lead military units and brigades in the army.
Rifaat played a major role in military and political life in Syria since his brother Hafez took executive power in 1970. He was seen as his brother’s successor in rule, but the sibling rivalry did not lead to this scenario, and exile was the choice.
Rifaat was exiled by his brother to Paris in the mid-eighties after he attempted a coup during his illness, according to Firas Tlass, the son of former Defence Minister Mustafa Tlass.
Tlass said during an interview on November 4, 2019, with Russia Today channel, that Rifaat gathered the officers during Hafez al-Assad’s illness and called them to unite because Hafez’s health was not suitable, and Rifaat’s group began to spread his pictures widely in the streets, in addition to setting up barriers at the entrances to Damascus.
Hafez al-Assad contacted Defence Minister Mustafa Tlass and told him that Rifaat wanted to take control of Damascus, and asked him to take action, which led to the formation of a war council and the termination of Rifaat’s coup, according to Tlass.
Since then, Rifaat al-Assad has settled in Paris until he returned to Damascus in 2021, enjoying funds he is accused of having transferred from the contents of the Central Bank of Syria’s coffers to begin inflating his wealth, followed by allegations against him of tax evasion and embezzlement of public funds, which led in March 2017, to a decision to confiscate his real estate properties in France.
His assets in Paris include two palaces, one measuring three thousand square meters, and a horse farm, as well as a palace near the French capital, in addition to 7300 square meters in Lyon.
His wealth in France is estimated at approximately 90 million euros, through companies with some of their headquarters located in Luxembourg. In March 2018, the French-Spanish customs also seized Rifaat al-Assad’s properties on Spanish land.
His assets there amount to 600 million euros, represented in 503 establishments, including restaurants, hotels, and luxury possessions, he owned in the city of Marbella.
In 2023, activists circulated via social media pictures bringing together the President of the regime, Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma, and his brother Maher, and their children, in addition to Rifaat al-Assad, with a picture of Hafez al-Assad behind them, said to be in Syria. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 61 | https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-struggle-for-syria-chapter-two/ | en | The struggle for Syria, Chapter Two | [
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"William B. Quandt",
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"Yael Mizrahi-Arnaud",
"Kemal Kirişci",
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] | 2018-02-20T18:23:04+00:00 | Seven years after what began as a peaceful uprising transformed into a vicious civil war, there is fierce competition between regional and international actors over Syria's future. And as the internal dimension seems to be abating, the regional and international conflicts have been exacerbated. | en | https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/themes/brookings/assets/images/favicons/favicon.ico | Brookings | https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-struggle-for-syria-chapter-two/ | In Seale’s history of Syria, the two Hashemite monarchies in Iraq and Jordan sought to take control of the Syrian state while their Arab rivals, the Egyptian-Saudi axis, fought to frustrate these efforts. Britain and France, the former colonial powers, intervened in Syrian politics directly or through their Arab partners. The United States intervened in Syrian politics when the CIA collaborated with Syria first military dictator, Husni Zaim. The Soviet Union was not yet an actor in this arena, and Turkey was looking west rather than south. The Syrian state was controlled by the old nationalist urban Sunni elite that had fought the French for the unity and independence of a country whose boundaries were arbitrarily established by the European colonial powers. The process of integrating the outlying areas, the Alawite and Druze regions in the west and the south and the Jazeera in the northeast, proved difficult. The parliamentary system did not function well, and the rise of radical ideological parties and the military’s intervention in politics further fragmented and radicalized the country’s politics. Finally, the Syrians found refuge by merging their country with Egypt in the United Arab Republic.
Syria seceded from that failed union in 1961 and struggled for several years to consolidate its renewed independent existence. The Ba’ath party was brought to power in March 1963 by a military cabal affiliated with the party. A member of that cabal, Hafez al-Assad, finally took over in November 1970 and ruled Syria for 30 years until his death in June 2000. Assad built the Syrian state and turned it into a major regional actor. He also excelled in exploiting the Soviet-American rivalry and in presenting himself as the champion of “resistance” (muqawama) to both Israel and the West. Under the patina of a revolutionary Arab regime, Assad built a neo-patrimonial system, with his family and Alawite community as its core. The epitome of this neo-patrimonialism was the succession: When Assad died, his son Bashar succeeded him. Hafez al-Assad’s ability to control Syria for 30 years and his son’s ability to stay in power for 11 years, to date, derive also from the fact that their power did not rely exclusively on the Alawite minority. Hafez al-Assad built a patronage system, as well as bridges to the Sunni bourgeoisie, and also enjoyed the support of other minority groups, such as the Christians and the Druze.
Bashar maintained, with some slight modifications, the system his father built. He was unwilling, and in some cases unable, to introduce political and economic reforms. When the “Arab Spring” broke out in late 2010, toppled three dictatorial regimes and threatened others, Bashar al-Assad deluded himself into believing that his image as the symbol of “resistance” would enable him and his regime to survive the storm. He was wrong, and the Syrian rebellion broke out in March 2011 and became the dominant issue in Middle Eastern politics for the next seven years.
Ironically, the outbreak of the Syrian rebellion pushed Syria back into the situation it had faced between 1945 and 1958. The domestic conflict between regime and opposition was soon compounded by regional and international conflicts over Syria’s future.
In the region, the core of the conflict has been an Iranian-Saudi or Shiite-Sunni conflict, with Iran and its proxies (the Lebanese Hezbollah and other Shiite militias) protecting the regime and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states supporting different opposition groups. Turkey has played its own important role: in hosting the headquarters of the opposition, allowing transit of foreign fighters into Syria, and occupying parts of northern Syria in order to check the Kurdish ambitions for autonomy and continuity. Israel, until recently, played a modest role in the Syrian crisis.
Internationally, Russia has played a crucial role by giving Assad diplomatic support and, as of 2015, via a military intervention, primarily through its air force. It was this Russian intervention that enabled the regime to recapture the city of Aleppo in December 2016 and to turn the tide of the domestic conflict. The United States under both Presidents Obama and Trump chose to play a more limited role by extending some support to opposition groups and by investing its most important efforts in fighting the Islamic State.
In March 2018, seven years after the outbreak of the Syrian rebellion, Assad is in control of at least half of Syria’s territory, and with Russian and Iranian support seeks to grind down the remaining opposition strongholds and to gradually extend his control over most, if not all, of Syria’s national territory. The jihadi opposition is still in control of the city and region of Idlib in northwestern Syria. The Kurds dominate some 15 to 20 percent of the country’s territory along the Turkish and Iraqi borders. The United States has supported the Kurds, maintaining at least 2,000 special forces in their territory; Turkey opposes them, occupying several areas along its border with Syria in order to deny the Kurds territorial continuity. In the southwestern part of the country, Iran is trying to install its own troops and bases, as well as Shiite militias, in order to extend the line of confrontation with Israel from the Mediterranean along the Lebanese-Israeli border into the Golan. Israel is determined to check this process and collided with both Iran and the regime’s forces in mid-February. Saudi Arabia and the other conservative Sunni states share Israel’s opposition to Iran’s presence and influence in Syria, and act to counter it primarily by continuing their support for Sunni Islamist groups. Meanwhile, the Islamic State has been militarily defeated in Syria, but not eradicated.
The struggle for Syria will continue. Russia will continue to support the regime and keep its military—primarily naval and aerial bases—in the country. Iran’s ambitions go further. In addition to military support and the importation of Shiite militias from Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Iranians are seeking to expand their influence on Syrian society, economy, and politics. America’s European allies are committed, in principle, to a political and diplomatic solution to the Syrian crisis and to Assad’s eventual departure, but their influence is limited and they are likely to seek a role for European cooperation in the reconstruction of Syria. Financing this reconstruction could be provided by the Gulf Sunni states, but they are likely to use the resources only in the service of their political ends. Israel realizes that it is on a collision course with Iran and that its delicate coordination with Russia that has thus far prevented a Russian-Israeli collision could collapse at any time.
A key question concerns the Trump administration’s policy. The president’s tough anti-Iranian rhetoric has so far not translated into real anti-Iranian action in Syria. America’s limited military presence in northeastern Syria and its alliance with the Kurds gives it limited influence in the struggle over shaping Syria’s future. Secretary of State Tillerson, in a speech he delivered in mid-January, presented Washington’s strategy in Syria, but the goals he set for his country’s policies are not realistic. As the Syrian crisis enters its eighth year, its most horrific aspects—the mass killing, the destruction, and the waves of refugees—seem to be over. Now, the conflict focuses more and more on the country’s future as a pawn in the struggle between the principal regional and international actors. | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 95 | https://truestoryaward.org/story/46 | en | Desaparecidos – The Ghosts of Syria | [
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Raqqa – It is a torrid day in late June. For long stretches the road that leads to northern Syria is tortuous and unpaved. From Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, you cross the rolling ochre hills, extending as far as the eye can see. Through the dirty window, you can see rows of white tents enclosed within a metal fence. Although more than seven years have gone by since the start of the conflict, thousands of Syrians still live in refugee camps, right by the Syrian border. Without a visa from the Syrian government, the only way to reach Raqqa is to navigate the natural border provided by the Tigris. We enter the Jazira region, which together with the city of Kobanî is under the control of the Syrian Kurds, whose offices issue the permits needed to reach Raqqa.
This was the last stop of Father Paolo Dall’Oglio’s journey. A journey that had begun more than thirty years earlier in his beloved Syria. A stop that he had chosen, but that became his last station. A sense of mission had led the priest, in late July 2013, to the first city liberated from the rule of the Bashar al-Assad regime. This city was in fact the first to be taken, in March of the same year, by rebel groups, including both Salafist and secular formations. It is also where local committees and forms of self-government were started. Padre Paolo wanted to meet with the locals, the activists, and see how they were organizing. He also wanted to engage in dialogue with the heads of the jihadi militias to convince them not to betray the spirit of the revolution, which he hoped would remain non-violent. He knew the risks he was facing, but he was undeterred. His faith and his lifelong commitment to Syria and its people, as well as the radical Gospel that he was living on the border, led him to travel to the dusty city on the Euphrates.
It was almost noon when Padre Paolo knocked on the gate of the palace of the Raqqa governorate, occupied by rebel groups. He asked the guards at the elegant brick building whether he could meet with the emir. They told him to come back after evening prayer. The priest showed up for the appointment. This time he was told to come back the next day, July 29, 2013. Five years have gone by since then, and he hasn’t been heard from again.
It is hard to visualize the building where Father Paolo was last seen. Rubble and dust are all that’s left of it today. Raqqa, a majority Arab city that became the ISIS capital in January 2014, was ruled for more than three years by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s men. Last October, after a four-month siege, it was taken back by the coalition of Syrian democratic forces under Kurdish leadership and American air power. Piles of debris and junk mark the entrance to an annihilated city. The buildings are crumbling, perforated by shards of protruding metal and dangling electric wires. What used to be homes are now little more than cement skeletons, gray and decrepit. The burnt carcasses of cars are strewn all along the dusty streets. Most of the city, which used to be home to some 200 thousand people, has been levelled by the fury of the bombings. But the endless piles of rubble that mark the landscape are not the only legacy of the war. The acrid odor of decomposing bodies hovers in the air. Thousands of civilians were killed during the fighting and equal numbers were displaced in the war years. Among them is Father Paolo Dall’Oglio.
Loving Islam, Believing in Christ
Word got out quickly when Padre Paolo arrived in Raqqa in late June, 2013. Many citizens were surprised that an Italian priest would travel to the city in that moment. “Abuna Paolo?” says an elderly man, affectionately, wearing a dishdasha, the traditional white robe of Arab men. He is looking at the remains of the Islamic Court of Isis. “Everyone knew him. He was like a prophet, who had come here to spread the principles of peace between societies.”
As a young Jesuit priest, Padre Paolo travelled to Syria the first time in the 1980s to study Arabic, a language he would eventually speak fluently with a Syrian accent. In 1982 he discovered the mission of his life in the ruins of the sixth-century monastery of Saint Moses the Abyssinian (Deir Mar Musa), in the hills north of Damascus. He fell in love with the arid beauty of the parched mountains and the ancient frescoes of the crumbling chapel. Inspired by the centuries-old experience of coexistence in Muslim-Christian society, he decided to restore the monastery and found an ecumenical community. Deir Mar Musa became a destination for international pilgrimage that welcomed people of every faith. Many described Padre Paolo not only as a priest but also as an activist for dialogue between Christians and Muslims. For him it was not religious beliefs that enter into dialogue but rather the believers, who placed themselves before God. He fasted during Ramadan with his Muslim brothers and sisters and in 2011 he wrote a memoir titled In Love with Islam, Believing in Christ. From his idyllic retreat in the Qalamun mountains, Father Dall’Oglio could not, however, ignore the political situation in Syria. In March 2011 and from the first days of the revolution, he sided with the protesters against tyranny. He appealed to the United Nations, requesting the protection of Syrian civilians from indiscriminate attacks by the regime. In June 2012 he was expelled from Syria, but his love of the country to which he had dedicated his life drove him to return twice. In July 2013, during Ramadan, Padre Paolo crossed the border from Gaziantep. He sent a final email to his Italian friends, to whom he confided his wish to travel to Raqqa to meet with the ISIS leadership.
In a house that has remained miraculously intact after the bombing of Raqqa, Mona Fraig remembers Padre Paolo’s arrival in the city. “When he arrived, he came to see us right away. He participated in our protests and in the meetings of civil society,” the activist explains at the headquarters of the non-governmental organization, Civil Society Support Centre, which organizes seminars on the fight against violent extremism and radicalization. “He also participated in the last protest in front of the church, where the al-Nusra Front had removed and destroyed the cross. Padre Paolo supported our peaceful revolution and hoped that it would not turn into a military conflict. This is why he wanted to speak with the people who wanted to create an Islamic State, in an attempt to establish dialogue and convey a message of peace,” Mona adds. Friends of Padre Paolo are sitting next to her. You can immediately sense the deep affection that ties these young Syrians to the Italian priest. Many of them escaped from Syria during the occupation of the Daesh militants but chose to return to Raqqa, trying to keep alive the spiritual legacy preached by Padre Paolo. “His disappearance affected the whole society. For us it was even more painful because we were so close to him,” explains Basheer al-Huwaidi, visibly upset. “Today we try to spread the same message of peace of Islam and Christianity. This is one of the main reasons that encouraged us to return to the city: to work with the community to rebuild that dialogue of peace and tolerance, and put the radicalism and violence behind us.”
Without a body to mourn, it is hard to accept that Padre Paolo is dead. Most of the people met and interviewed during this trip believe that he was murdered and thrown into the river, others claim that he was taken by the regime, while still other sources report that he was arrested by Emir Abdulrahman Al-Faysal, a prominent leader of ISIS and the last person to see Padre Paolo alive. Today the Emir lives freely in Raqqa but every attempt to approach him comes up against a wall of silence. Like Padre Paolo, thousands of people have been disappeared, swallowed up by the quicksand of the Syrian night. In these seven years, the revolution, which began peacefully in 2011, turned into an atrocious civil war that today counts more than 400 thousand dead and 11 million refugees outside the border (one and half million in Lebanon alone), out of a population of 20 million. Not to mention an unspecified number of young people who have fled the country to avoid military service, a million and a half people wanted by the authorities, and thousands of disappeared. The Syrian cities are piles of rubble, the militias and the warlords dictate law over a good part of the territory and, while the Astana “guarantors” – Russia, Iran, and Turkey – have begun to talk about reconstruction and the return of refugees, the theme of justice and the desaparecidos has been all but forgotten.
Desaparecidos in Syria: the Fight of the Women
“It was an emotional and rather unique meeting: an Italian priest kidnapped in Syria and his family affected by the Syrian question. In the tragedy, we succeeded in doing great things together, as Italians and Syrians. If Padre Paolo were alive, he would be happy.” The person who is speaking, at her “second” home in Beirut, is human rights lawyer and expert in enforced disappearances, Noura Ghazi Safadi. It is not easy to get an appointment to see her.
She spends her days alternating between conferences, meetings with the European Commission, and talks with survivors of the government prisons. Since 2011, she has met with more than 2,000 detainees, including peace activists, political prisoners, and opponents of the government. She has gathered testimony and reports of the physical and psychological tortures suffered inside the prisons of the Bashar al-Assad regime. She has spent thousands of hours inside prisons.
As the spokesperson of “Families for Freedom,” and the wife of one of the desaparecidos, Noura has met with various members of the Dall’Oglio family in recent years. Her husband, Bassel Kharabil Safadi, a software engineer and well-know activist, was one of the founding fathers of the Syrian revolution. Arrested in March 2012, he disappeared without a trace in 2015. Noura was forced to leave Syria: too many risks and threats from the regime’s security apparatus.
In Lebanon she joined with other women to create “Families for Freedom,” a movement of mothers, wives, daughters and sisters of disappeared detainees and civilians. Founded in 2017, it brings together the Syrian diaspora in exile in Lebanon, Turkey, France, Germany, and England.
Like in Argentina during the dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla, when the Abuelas gathered in the Plaza de Mayo to demand truth and justice for their disappeared children, today it is the turn of the Syrian women. London, Berlin, Paris, Brussels. They rent a bus, covered with photographs of their family members, and travel to the European capitals to draw the governments’ attention to the issue of the desaparecidos in Syria.
“We are not a political group. We represent neither the opposition nor the regime. We are families: we are mothers, sisters, wives. What we are demanding is the right to truth,” Safadi explains.
The women belong to different ethnic and religious groups. They are Arabs and Alawites, Christians and Muslims, and they come from various regions of Syria. They organize using Skype and WhatsApp. “We want to know where our loved ones are. Where are their bodies?” the lawyer affirms resolutely. “We are afraid that many have been cremated to hide proof of the violence and avoid trials in the future.”
According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, an independent British organization, more than 95 thousand Syrians have been disappeared since the start of the conflict. It is estimated that most of the disappearances were at the hands of the Syrian regime, but at least 11 thousand are attributed to armed groups such as ISIS or Jabhat Fateh al-Sham. Enforced disappearances are not a new phenomenon. According to Leen Hashem, head of Amnesty International’s campaign for Syria, this is a method that has been used in Syria in the past three decades, starting with Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, to silence the political opposition. She explains, however, that the phenomenon intensified in 2011. “We are witnessing the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of people. In general, they are arrested at check-points or taken directly from their homes. The families of the disappeared live in a perennial state of anxiety, not knowing where their loved ones are or if they are still alive. And their relatives, when they try to learn the truth, risk their lives.”
Fadwa Mahmoud is another founder of Families for Freedom. She had to leave Syria on account of her activities to find her husband, Abdelaziz, and her son, Maher, both of whom disappeared on 20 September 2012. Abdelaziz belonged to the Communist Party and had been to China to seek potential peaceful solutions to the conflict. Her son had gone to the airport to pick him up.
“We’re in the car, we’re almost home. I just picked dad up from the airport, he told me. A few minutes later I called him back to ask if he wanted tabbouleh. His phone was out of service. Since that moment I have not known what happened to them. Even if the regime has always denied that they were in the Syrian prisons, I am certain it was the Mukhābarāt (secret services) that took them,” she states without hesitation.
Fadwa, an Alawite like the Assad family, is quite familiar with the regime’s methods of detention and torture. Arrested in 1991 for belonging to a party of opposition to Baath, she served an eighteen-month prison sentence, while she was pregnant with her son Maher. Her husband was imprisoned for 14 years. She recalls that time with a mysterious veil of nostalgia, listing the names of her arrested companions, of the disappeared, and the ideals that led them to hide in damp shacks to read the books of Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci, prohibited by the regime. The phenomenon of enforced disappearances, in fact, has existed in Syria since the 1980s and 90s. Disappearing thousands of people into thin air was the most effective method for repressing opponents and dissidents. Then and now.
Today Fadwa lives in Berlin, but she alternates her time between Germany and Lebanon. Together with Noura Ghazi Safadi, she is one of the promoters of Families for Freedom.
In recent weeks, hundreds of Syrian families have learned that the government has issued death certificates for disappeared relatives, most of whom were summarily executed inside the regime’s prisons. Many human rights observers and experts argue that Bashar al-Assad is convinced he has won the war. Cushioned by international impunity, Assad is confident that there will be no regime change and that the revolutionary spirit of thousands of civilians and activists has been crushed.
“We must work to assure that the ideals for which Abuna Paolo and thousand of young Syrians fought were not in vain,” adds Noura. “Our fight will help future generations, who can one day live in a democratic and civil country.” | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 36 | https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/6/17/france-sentences-syrian-leaders-uncle-to-four-years-in-prison | en | France sentences Syrian leader’s uncle to four years in prison | [
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Wednesday’s ruling came in a trial that found Rifaat al-Assad guilty of acquiring millions of euros worth of French property using funds diverted from the Syrian state.
According to the ruling, the younger brother of late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad – father of the incumbent president – committed the crimes, including aggravated tax fraud and misappropriation of Syrian funds, between 1984 and 2016. He denies the charges.
Rifaat al-Assad’s trial opened on December 9 last year. He has been under investigation in France since 2014.
This came the year after anti-corruption group Sherpa filed a suit accusing Assad of using ill-gotten gains from corruption in Syria to build a real estate fortune in the country.
Rifaat al-Assad’s real estate holdings were valued at 90 million euros ($99.5m).
Formerly Syria’s vice president, al-Assad left his home country in 1984 after mounting a failed coup against his brother Hafez, who led Syria from 1971 to 2000.
He was dubbed the “Butcher of Hama” for allegedly commanding troops who put down an uprising in central Syria in 1982.
Currently, he describes himself as an opponent of his nephew’s regime.
Lavish lifestyle
After he arrived in Europe, Rifaat al-Assad’s lavish lifestyle, four wives, and 16 children soon raised eyebrows.
His reported French fortune includes two Paris townhouses, one measuring 3,000 square metres (32,000 square feet), as well as a stud farm, a chateau and 7,300 square metres (78,500 square feet) of office space in Lyon.
He and his family also built up a huge portfolio of 507 properties in Spain, valued at about 695 million euros ($782m), Spanish legal documents show. All his properties in that country were seized by the authorities in 2017.
Al-Assad, awarded France’s Legion of Honour in 1986 for “services rendered”, insists his lifestyle was made possible by gifts from the Saudi royal family amounting to more than $1m per month.
But while his lawyers claimed to document gifts of almost $25m between 1984 and 2010, French investigators registered transfers from Saudi Arabia totalling only $10m. | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 3 | 75 | https://globalnews.ca/news/6598751/syrian-refugee-regina-high-school-student-loran-scholarship/ | en | Syrian refugee and high school student in Regina awarded prestigious Loran Award | [
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"Jonathan Guignard"
] | 2020-02-26T13:28:44-05:00 | A Syrian refugee and high school student living in Regina has been awarded the Loran Award, one of Canada’s most prestigious merit-based awards. | en | https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/134ef81f5668dc78080f6bd19ca2310b?s=32 | Global News | https://globalnews.ca/news/6598751/syrian-refugee-regina-high-school-student-loran-scholarship/ | Forced to flee Syria when bombs started to fall in her community, Sabah Sharif and her family moved to Canada about four years ago.
Up until that point, Sharif said she lived a “beautiful life” and had a “nice childhood.”
Sharif spoke no English when she landed in Regina, but was determined to make the best out of the situation.
“I’ll always be positive and try to forget what happened in the past — not forget, but embrace what happened in the past and take it along with me in my journey,” Sharif said.
The F.W. Johnson Collegiate student began volunteering at the Regina Open Door Society shortly after her move. Through hard work and determination, her efforts began to be noticed.
Now, she is being recognized as a 2020 Loran Award — one of Canada’s most prestigious merit-based awards — for her “unwavering” leadership.
“I remember when she first came to our program she needed help and now she’s helping. It’s really such a great accomplishment,” said Roberto Misterio, Regina Open Door Society’s youth program co-ordinator.
Sharif, part of the Kurdish minority back in Syria, took a keen interest in reconciliation.
“I connected with it because as a marginalized community in Syria, my culture was stripped away from me as well and so I kind of felt that connection that we are in this similar path and we’re both healing, so why not do it all together,” Sharif said.
The award covers Sharif’s university tuition and provides her with mentorship opportunities.
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“This is possibly one of the greatest humans I have ever met,” said Colin Neufeld, one of Sharif’s teacher at F.W. Johnson Collegiate.
“I don’t quite know how to explain my pride for this young lady. She inspires me as much as she claims me or any other teacher in this building inspire her.”
Sharif hopes to study science and one day become a pediatrician. She hopes her story can inspire others in situations like hers.
“If you’re feeling like you’re struggling [to] take that pain as a motivation instead of taking it as ‘Oh it’s pulling me down and I can’t get up,’” Sharif said.
“Instead say ‘I’m going to embrace that pain. I’m going to become a better person.’”
Sharif is one of four Saskatchewan students being awarded this year’s Loran Award. | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 20 | https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/in-assads-syria-there-is-no-imagination/ | en | Anthony Shadid: "In Assad's Syria, There Is No Imagination" | [
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] | null | [
"Anthony Shadid"
] | 2011-11-08T16:06:20+00:00 | The country is "rendered in their image, haunted by their phobias and ordered by their machinations," Anthony Shadid writes of the Assad regime. | en | FRONTLINE | https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/in-assads-syria-there-is-no-imagination/ | The House of Assad evokes an imperial sense of power, or at least its trappings, with iconography that one scholar described as infused with “laudatory slogans and sempiternal images.”
But my first impression of Rami Makhlouf, President Bashar al-Assad’s cousin and one-time confidante, was of his unassuming quality. Here was a tycoon, a figure as rich as he was loathed, who eschewed formalities and ceremony. I had seen it before, in men like Saad Hariri, a former prime minister in Lebanon, lavished with so much privilege and so much wealth that pretensions become unnecessary. Even his most brazen threats seemed more pleading than menacing, as if I should understand the logic behind them. Don’t the Israelis know that they will suffer if we do; don’t the Europeans; don’t the Americans realize that we are the bulwark before forces that they can’t imagine — Islamists, chaos, wars roiling an already combustible region?
It was [Hafez al-Assad’s] ability to inculcate a suffocating cult of personality, buttressed by fear, often the most visceral sort, the kind that once led Egyptians to quip that the only place where it was safe to open your mouth was the dentist’s office.
By the end of several hours interviewing Makhlouf in May, it was not pomp, not imagery and not detachment that denoted the imperium. It was the pronouns. The way he used them said much about how power has been exercised in the Arab world and why it has finally begun to crumble.
“We believe there is no continuity without unity,” he told me. “As a person, each one of us knows we cannot continue without staying united together.”
He echoed an Arabic proverb – alaya wa ala aadai’i ya rab.
Translated loosely, it means that we won’t go down alone.
“We will not go out, leave on our boat, go gambling, you know,” he told me at his plush, wood-paneled headquarters in Damascus. “We will sit here. We call it a fight until the end.” He added later: “They should know when we suffer, we will not suffer alone.”
What Makhlouf, a businessman with no title, no official capacity save his membership in the president’s family, suggested was that Syria belonged to them: its property and people, their aspirations and fate, their history and their future. In essence, consciously or not, he gave voice to the sign that has long marked the crossing for visitors across the rocky wadis dividing Lebanon and Syria.
“Assad’s Syria,” it reads.
Deprived of a popular mandate, or even consent, Arab leaders have long searched for the instruments to show their power was an entitlement. Sometimes they are symbols, meant to convey legitimacy. Anwar Sadat mined the 1973 war, when Egyptian troops overwhelmed Israeli defenses on the Suez Canal. He turned to Islam, casting himself as “The Believer President.” His successor, Hosni Mubarak, tedious and taciturn, saw the very notion of stability as legitimizing his rule. Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, looked far and wide, too. His rule was meant to seem eternal, as his images were omnipresent. “The Leader Forever,” his portraits read. But his success relied not on his regime’s ability to end a volatile chapter of Syrian history that saw dozens of attempted coups over more than 20 years, or the modernization of infrastructure and education, or his service to the poor and rural, like him, who represented his base. It was his ability to inculcate a suffocating cult of personality, buttressed by fear, often the most visceral sort, the kind that once led Egyptians to quip that the only place where it was safe to open your mouth was the dentist’s office.
Hafez al-Assad was sophisticated, and the dour visage that he fostered was supposed to suggest a certain cunning, an understanding of how pervasive fear could be. He built the wall brick after demolished brick in Hama, where his regime’s crushing of an uprising in 1982 is one of the bloodiest chapters of the modern Arab world. He tended to that wall, too, with the machinations of an inveterate plotter who understood the sectarian dynamics of the country — he ensured that every sect shared in the bloodletting in Hama — and who knew that loyalty was best fostered by reliance on family and sect, namely his own Alawite clan, a heterodox Muslim group that accounts for about 10 percent of the population.
This was Syria of the Assads: rendered in their image, haunted by their phobias and ordered by their machinations.
Bashar seemed to think he was different. With his Sunni Muslim wife, education abroad and upbringing in the privileged circles of Damascus, where the children of poor Alawite officers from the countryside mixed with those of the moneyed elite, he lacked his father’s edge. He seemed to take pride in an everyman quality, frequenting restaurants and driving his own car. He made it clear that he wanted to be liked. Rare is an official who visits Bashar and doesn’t find him amiable, even humble. And so he presided over a brief opening after taking power in 2000, called the Damascus Spring. (His regime soon crushed it). He inaugurated a veneer of consumerism in the capital Damascus and Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city. He dismantled the façade of the grim police state in both those cities and promised the bromide of every authoritarian leader: a China-style economic liberalization whose very success would mitigate the need for political reform.
For a time, his seeming humility brought a measure of support his father never enjoyed. Even today Turkish officials, once his admirers and now plotting against him, rue what they see as a missed opportunity. Had he introduced sweeping reform and held elections before the uprising erupted in March, they say, he surely would have won. But Bashar believed his own aura. In those days, he declared his state immune from the upheavals of Egypt and Tunisia. He insisted that his foreign policy, built rhetorically on enmity with Israel, opposition to American hegemony and support for the kind of resistance preached by Lebanon’s Hezbollah, reflected the sentiments of an Arab world long humiliated by its impotence.
His father, a poor boy who proved he was more, would have known better. Sheltered by a royal court, Bashar seemed oblivious to a drought-stricken countryside seething under the sway of utterly unaccountable security forces. He overlooked crimes that his family and the state had committed. He had forgotten that in the calculus of the imperium his father created, the instrument through which Bashar really exercised power, fear made more sense than adulation, whatever his modernizing pretensions. Even today, eight months after an uprising and a ferocious crackdown that, by the United Nations’ count, has killed more than 3,000 people and, by the Arab League’s estimate, put more than 70,000 in jail, people who have seen Bashar contend that he still doesn’t recognize the severity of the challenge. This summer, Turkish officials actually offered him their own intelligence to persuade him that the information coming from his people was bad, incomplete and misleading. They were telling him what he wanted to hear. But since then, the old truths have returned, and his regime has fallen back on the premise of his father’s rule. It has sought to restore the wall of dread between ruler and ruled.
Syria is still subsumed in the logic of fear, which forces once diverse societies to hew to their smaller parts, obliterating the ability to imagine broader communities and other identities.
“What support today it enjoys is almost entirely of a negative sort,” the International Crisis Group wrote this month. “Fear of sectarian retribution, Islamism, foreign interference, social upheaval or, more simply, anxiety about the unknown.”
As in Iraq, Syria’s neighbor to the east, the clichés of superficial analysis that preceded tumult now threaten to come true: Us or chaos. The regime posed as the guardian of Syria’s diversity, even as the House of Assad and its lieutenants relentlessly stirred that diversity so as to divide and rule. Pitting community against community, never in a more pronounced way than now, it may finally bring forth the civil war that it long claimed it was the bulwark against.
In their ambition at least, the Arab revolts and revolutions were about a positive sort of legitimacy: democracy, freedom, social justice and individual rights. They remain an unfulfilled promise, but no one in Egypt, Tunisia or Libya is really afraid to speak anymore. The cacophony that has ensued is the most liberating feature of rejuvenated societies. It already echoes in parts of Syria. When I was in Hama this summer, a city still scarred by memory and for a brief moment freed from security forces, youths embraced their new space by protesting every couple of hours in streets made kinetic by the allure of self-determination. They demonstrated simply because they could. In Homs, a city whose uprising could prove Syria’s demise or salvation, youths drawn from an eclectic array of leftists, liberals, nationalists, Islamists and the simply pissed-off articulated the essence of courage: They had come too far to go back.
“In the end, I’m a person now,” a young activist named Iyad told me in Homs. “I can say what I want. I love you if I want to love you, I hate you if I want to hate you. I can denounce your beliefs or I can support them. I can agree with your position or disagree with it. But I’m a person now.” He dragged on his cigarette, and we shared more tea. “We’re not waiting to live our lives until after the fall of the regime,” he went on. “We started living them the first day of the protests.”
His country, though, is not yet liberated. Not in the sense of a dictator’s fall, or a coup vanquishing the family, or a rebel army entering Damascus or Makhlouf sailing off in the boat he swore never to board. Syria is still subsumed in the logic of fear, which forces once diverse societies to hew to their smaller parts, obliterating the ability to imagine broader communities and other identities. Beyond a set of principles, or promises so vague as to inspire more fear, no one has described the Syria of tomorrow. Not Assad, who offers his people a path back to the 1980s, when a stern government presided over a dreary economy with the grimace of a police state. But the opposition hasn’t really either, and that lack of vision has left frightened minorities more aligned with the regime.
There may someday be a vision for Syria and the Middle East that draws on their past, where ancient trajectories of the Ottoman Empire stitched together a landscape that often embraced its many identities. There is probably a future in which loyalties are less to the state and more to those antique metropoles like Aleppo, Tripoli, Mosul or Beirut, which often answered questions of community better than the contrived countries that absorbed them. The term might be post-Ottoman, where borders that never made all that much sense are encompassed by connections from Cairo to Istanbul, Maydan to Basra, and Marjayoun to Arish, in which people can imagine themselves as Alawite, Levantine, Arab, Syrian, Eastern — or some hybrid that transcends them all.
But none of that is possible until the smallest identities are protected. A Tunisian Islamist named Said Ferjani told me a few weeks ago that such safeguards and guarantees would require what he called “a charismatic state.” It was the antithesis of all those sempiternal leaders, presiding over imperiums with hollow slogans and manipulating society’s components with cynicism portrayed as principle. A charismatic state could mend itself, reform, adapt and heal when it failed in its fundamental task, delivering the rights and duties of citizenship. And only in citizenship, he told me, could diversity be preserved and protected. Citizenship, he seemed to suggest, would permit us to become greater than our parts. It would allow us to imagine.
Toward the end of the interview with Makhlouf, over a dinner of fish, he warned of a zero-sum future, Syria falling into the hands of militant Islamists, infused with intolerance and bent on vengeance.
“We won’t accept it,” he told me, his words blending notions of entitlement, ownership, power and fear. “And we have a lot of fighters.”
In Assad’s Syria, it still seems, there is no imagination. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 39 | https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/11/22/inenglish/1574438478_193298.html | en | Spanish court wants to try Syrian leader’s uncle for money laundering | [
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"Juan Carlos Espinosa"
] | 2019-11-22T00:00:00 | Rifaat al-Assad, who once served as vice-president of his country, is thought to have masterminded a plan to conceal nearly €700m in assets by buying hundreds of properties | en | https://static.elpais.com/dist/resources/images/favicon.ico | EL PAÍS English | https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/11/22/inenglish/1574438478_193298.html | Spain’s High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, wants to try Rifaat Ali al-Assad, the uncle of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and 13 other people for money-laundering activities.
Judge José de la Mata is targeting Rifaat Ali al-Assad, a former vice-president of Syria, eight of his children and two of his wives, among others.
After ending his probe, the investigating judge believes the group may have laundered more than €600 million in Spain, besides other amounts in various European countries, chiefly France and the United Kingdom. The funds have allegedly been siphoned from Syria’s state coffers.
In 1986, al-Assad purchased 244 parking spots through a company registered in Gibraltar
De la Mata is recommending to proceed against these 14 individuals, whom he describes as having acted in a concerted manner, following a preconceived plan that goes back to the 1980s.
Rifaat Ali al-Assad left Syria in 1984, and allegedly agreed with his brother Hafez al-Assad, who was then the president, that he would take around $300 million of public money with him (around €270 million in today’s values).
De la Mata’s investigation also adds that in the 1970s, Rifaat al-Assad obtained unlawful gains from criminal activities ranging from extortion and threats, to smuggling, archeological plunder, real estate appropriation and drug trafficking.
Wealth in Spain
The al-Assads’ first acquisitions in Spain took place in 1986, when they purchased 244 parking spots through a company registered in Gibraltar. The money plundered from Syria was invested in real estate and business ventures in Málaga province, especially at strategic locations along the Costa del Sol.
In Benahavís, Rifaat al-Assad purchased a property covering 33 million square meters. The court investigation believes he owns 507 properties in Spain worth €695 million.
The assets were concealed by putting them to the name of various companies whose administrators were his eight children and two of his wives
In Spain, these assets were concealed by putting them in the name of various companies whose administrators were his eight children and two of his wives.
De la Mata’s investigation details the role played by each of the individuals within the criminal group, and underscores “the determining support by legions of advisors at all stages of implementation, with the goal of concealing, transforming and laundering all that capital.”
The key to the strategy’s success, the judge believes, was “the sharing out of tasks and the perfect coordination between all the members of the organization: the father and leader, Rifaat Ali al-Assad, was concealed behind all the others.”
The group used tax havens, corporate instruments and hundreds of businesses administered by family members and frontmen for a prolonged period of time, the investigation finds. These activities have recently been blocked, in Spain and in other European countries. In 2017, the Spanish High Court confiscated more than €600 million in assets thought to be linked to Rifaat al-Assad.
De la Mata rejects the family’s claim that their assets are the result of gifts from the royal family of Saudi Arabia. The investigation has determined that the real estate purchases did not originate in Saudi donations.
Al-Assad, who is already facing trial in France for embezzling Syrian state funds, is additionally under investigation in Switzerland for war crimes allegedly perpetrated in Syria in the 1980s. | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 81 | https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/09/23/553138494/mother-and-daughter-who-opposed-bashar-al-assad-regime-brutally-murdered-in-turk | en | Mother And Daughter Who Opposed Bashar Assad Regime Killed In Turkey | [
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] | null | [
"Ruth Sherlock"
] | 2017-09-23T00:00:00 | Police found the bodies of Orouba Barakat and her daughter, Halla, a U.S. citizen, in their Istanbul apartment. Their deaths have left family and the wider dispersed Syrian community in fear. | en | NPR | https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/09/23/553138494/mother-and-daughter-who-opposed-bashar-al-assad-regime-brutally-murdered-in-turk | The killing of two opponents of President Bashar Assad's regime has left their family and the wider relocated Syrian opposition community reeling in shock and fearing for their lives.
Police discovered the bodies of Orouba Barakat, 60, and her daughter, Halla, 23, who is a U.S. citizen, on Thursday night in their Istanbul apartment, reportedly after friends and colleagues were unable to reach them for several days.
Orouba was a member of the Syrian National Coalition, the political opposition group that has participated in internationally brokered peace talks to bring an end to the Syrian war.
Her daughter, Halla, who spent her childhood in Raleigh, N.C., was a journalist who worked with opposition station Orient TV.
Even on her personal Facebook page, the younger Barakat documented the violence taking place in her country, with posts about children killed in airstrikes and photos of victims of mass killings.
Turkish media outlets, citing police sources, reported that the women had been repeatedly stabbed. There were also other, unconfirmed reports that their throats had been slit.
Politically motivated killing?
A police investigation is underway, and as of Saturday, there have not been any official statements about circumstances of their deaths or any suspects.
But relatives and opposition activists immediately characterized this as a politically motivated killing.
Shaza Barakat, Orouba's sister, said Saturday that she suspected the Syrian government is to blame.
"Because Hafez al-Assad had been displacing us since the 1970s," she told NPR, referring to the former Syrian president and father to Bashar Assad. "We paid a high price — displacement, torture, suffering — we don't have a country."
"Orouba was always standing against all that, defending people's rights and demanding justice. We are people, we have human rights, and we deserve justice."
In an earlier post on Facebook mourning her sister, Shaza wrote: "The oppressor chases the good everywhere."
Ghassan Aboud, the founder of Orient TV, wrote on Facebook: "No truce and no reconciliation with the monsters."
Fear of retribution spreading
Thousands of opponents of the Assad regime have been tortured or killed in jails in Syria. In the course of the Syrian war, many have fled to Turkey and other neighboring countries and have sought to organize a political opposition that could force the Assad family from power.
But with the Syrian government, backed by Iran and Russia, now gaining the upper hand in the country's civil war, fear of retribution is spreading among this community.
That is why so many reacted to these killings by blaming the Syrian government, explained Rami Jarrah, a Syrian journalist who supports the opposition.
"It's too early a stage to determine whether the regime have begun a targeting campaign against Syrians dissidents abroad," he said Saturday. "But the fact that so many activists believe it was the regime is a sign of the genuine fear in this community now."
The Committee to Protect Journalists cited a local journalist, whom it did not name to protect the person's safety, who said that the Barakats had received death threats on social media and in emails from supporters of the Syrian government, but that they had not paid the messages much attention.
The CPJ has documented four other incidents of Syrian journalists being targeted in Turkey since 2015. In all of these cases, the militant group ISIS claimed responsibility.
The Barakat women had been close friends of Kayla Mueller, the American aid worker who was kidnapped by ISIS in 2013 and died while still being held hostage 18 months later.
Kayla's parents, Carl and Marsha Mueller, said in a statement to ABC News that "Orouba and Halla were like a mother and sister to Kayla."
"How many more?"
The shock of their deaths reached the United States, where the Barakat family has already suffered.
Extended family members Deah Barakat, wife Yusor Abu-Salha and her sister Razan Abu-Salha were shot dead in their home in Chapel Hill, N.C., in 2015. Their neighbor was charged, and authorities suggested during a preliminary investigation that the killings were not related to politics or religion.
"How many more beloved family members will I lose to hatred and violence?" Suzanne Barakat, a relative in North Carolina, wrote on Facebook. "We are not safe anywhere."
NPR's Peter Kenyon contributed to this report. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 15 | https://mesana.org/awards/awardee/mesa-academic-freedom-award/radwan-ziadeh | en | MESA Academic Freedom Award | [
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""
] | null | [] | 2018-03-13T17:49:55-04:00 | MESA awarded its 2009 Academic Freedom Award to Dr. Radwan Ziadeh, founder and director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies. Ziadeh has frequently given talks in and outside Syria on the status of human rights and democratic reform in Syria. | en | Middle East Studies Association | https://mesana.org/awards/awardee/mesa-academic-freedom-award/radwan-ziadeh | Radwan Ziadeh
2009 Recipient
Dr. Radwan Ziadeh is a founder and director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies. A prominent advocate for human rights and reform in Syria, Ziadeh has frequently given talks in and outside Syria on the status of human rights and democratic reform in Syria, Ziadeh was editor of Tayarat magazine in 2001–2002 and served as secretary of the Syrian Organization for Transparency. In 2004, he was named the best political science researcher in the Arab world by Jordan’s Abdulhameed Shoman Foundation. He was also a principal figure and activist in the Damascus Spring, a period of intense debate about politics and social issues and calls for reform in Syria after the death of President Hafez al-Assad in 2000.
Following an extended period of intensive surveillance by Syrian security agencies, and based on indications that he was about to be detained, Ziadeh fled Syria in mid-2007. He received a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellowship from the U.S. Institute of Peace for the 2007-2008 academic year, and was then selected as a “Scholar at Risk,” by Harvard University where he spent the 2008-2009 academic year in residence at the Kennedy School. Having left Syria without government permission, Ziadeh is not able to return to his home country.
MESA is pleased to honor Dr. Radwan Ziadeh with its 2009 Academic Freedom Award. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 2 | https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/international/200418/syrias-assad-returns-legion-honour-award-france | en | Syria's Assad returns legion of honour award from France | [
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"La rédaction de Mediapart"
] | 2018-04-20T21:16:00+02:00 | Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has returned his Legion d'honneur award, France's highest recognition of civil merit which was given to him in 2001, in retaliation for French participation in airbor… | en | /icon-news.ico | Mediapart | https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/international/200418/syrias-assad-returns-legion-honour-award-france | Managing cookies
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wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 54 | https://75podcasts.org/episode/1/91/ | en | S1E5: The House of Assad | [
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] | null | [] | null | <p style='margin-left:0px;'>The violence that Syrians have witnessed and suffered since 2011 did not come out of nowhere - there is a history, a background and a basis to it. And so, if we want to better understand what has happened in the country in the past 11 years, | en | https://75podcasts.org/images/favicon.ico | 75 Podcasts | https://75podcasts.org/episode/1/91 | Kristina Kaghdo: One of the things that really stayed with me until now was how in the beginning of each school year I would go to the stationery shop that was located in my street. And in all stationery shops you could find pictures of the symbol of the party, pictures of the ruling family, namely Hafez al-Assad. Because it was him in power at the time.
And we were supposed to get some of those pictures and glue them into our notebooks and on the covers of our notebooks, namely the Civic Education Notebook. And the Civic Education's a whole different story because it was one hour, 2 hours a week that were dedicated to learning about the power and beauty and how great and amazing the ruling party is. The ruling family, the ruling father - who was Hafez al-Assad at the time.
Fritz Streiff: Kristina Kaghdo is a translator and podcast producer, and she also presents the Arabic series of The Syria Trials. Kristina grew up in the Syrian capital, Damascus.
Kristina: And I remember that we had this teacher who would skip civic education classes. I have no idea why. We used to have something called like an inspection committee. And it's a committee that comes from the Ministry of Education to check on different schools. And I think it was one of the tools of surveillance as well, to make sure that the school looks like and sounds like and behaves like it should. So she would skip those classes, and whenever there was an inspection, she would make us sit for like a couple of days and fill in our Civic Education notebooks with whatever she was writing on the board, without going through it, without really learning it, just to make sure that then when the inspection comes, they can see our notebooks filled. Obviously, I didn't feel comfortable asking, why are we doing this? Because it was an order and we executed orders.
Fritz: It must have been a risk for her, too. I mean, you were just saying how schools were one of the clear institutional examples of where the state surveillance system could really have an impact structurally. And, you know, it's kind of like a small but potentially impactful example of civil disobedience, really.
Kristina: I totally agree, especially that we were 50 kids in class and kids talk. You know, we could just go home and say, you know what we did today? We were filling in our Civic Education notebook with stuff that we haven't learned anything about. And that would definitely be an alarming thing for many parents.
Fritz: Alarming indeed, because by the time Kristina was growing up in the 1990s, Syrians had become used to the cost of disobeying the Assad regime. So far in the series, we've mainly heard about the crimes committed in Syria since 2011 - the violent suppression of the Revolution and the devastation of the ensuing war. But this violence did not come out of nowhere. There's a history, a basis to it. Since the beginning of Assad family rule in 1970, when Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father, seized power of Syria, the regime had been built upon one key founding principle: eliminate any opposition, any threat to the family's rule, no matter the cost. By the time 2011 came around and huge numbers of Syrians began to call for a change of regime, Bashar al-Assad followed this guiding principle to the letter. Ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam, the protesters chanted, which means something like “the people want to bring down the regime”. To the Assad family, this was a clear and unacceptable threat to their power. And so in order to really understand the violence and the criminality that has occurred in Syria since 2011, we need to go back to the beginning and uncover how the Assads built a regime with them at the centre and how they have held onto power for over half a century. Welcome to The Syria Trials. Episode Five - The House of Assad.
Ugur Umit Ungor: My name is Ugur Ungor. I'm a sociologist and historian at the University of Amsterdam, and I'm mostly interested in the modern and contemporary history of mass violence, mostly mass violence against civilians.
Fritz: After centuries of occupation by the Ottoman Empire, the modern Syrian state emerged after the end of the First World War.
Ugur: The Ottoman Empire lost the war. So there were a number of states that emerged from it. Syria is one of them. Iraq, Jordan, are of course, others. And then Syria became part of the French mandate. And mandate is basically a fancy word for colonisation. And this is important because in this period from 1923 to 1946, it wasn't Syrians who decided their own fate. If we want to understand some of the practices of the Assad regime later in 1970s, 1980s and up to now, the roots of some of that violence, of course, they stretch back into the Ottoman Empire, but a lot of that violence escalated during the French colonisation of Syria. And then after independence, 1946, Syria saw almost a dozen coup d'états in a period of not longer than maybe a decade, decade and a half. So that political instability also deeply destabilised the society. And then, of course, in the 1960s, the Ba’ath Party seized power. And then in 1970, we have Hafez coup d'état.
Fritz: Hafez al-Assad was amongst a group of Ba’ath supporters in the Syrian army who seized control of Syria in 1963, before seizing power himself in 1970. Hafez was elected President in 1971, the only candidate in the running.
Rime Allaf: Hafez Assad, who was an Air Force officer and a Minister of Defence, took power with a group of his army and Air Force buddies. And, you know, we never got rid of the Assad dynasty. It's been now 52 years, so we've entered the second half century of Assad's rule and they have merely managed to entrench themselves.
My name is Rime Allaf. I'm a Syrian born writer and researcher who's been working on Syria for the greater part of the last 25 years. I would say.
Ugur: What defines really the state and the regime in Syria is the way that it uses violence and the threat of violence against its own citizens as a pillar of its governance, of its functioning.
Rime: Hafez Assad was at the beginning what one might call a benign dictator or so people hoped, because they were a little bit tired of the coups and the counter coups. And he tried to show himself as somebody who was listening to his people at the very beginning. So that's in the early seventies. But very quickly, things disintegrated.
Fritz: After Hafez took power, any other political parties had to come under the umbrella of the National Progressive Front, a political alliance headed by his party, the ruling Ba’ath Party. It was a dangerous game to be politically active outside of this alliance.
Faraj Bayrakdar VO: My name is Faraj Bayrakdar. If arrest and exile were occupations, that means that I have worked for 14 years as a detainee and 17 years as an exile. I hold a university degree in Arabic literature. But I did not have the chance to ever use the certificate. As for poetry, I do not consider it a job, but a hobby.
Fritz: Faraj is a Syrian journalist and award winning poet. He was a young adult in 1970 when Hafez al-Assad became the president of Syria.
Faraj VO: The regime started displaying the maximum possible brutality. Even though I knew I was just a poet, I could not morally and purposefully ignore this anymore. My friends were being killed or they were being locked up in a prison left and right until God knows when. I knew that poetry on its own could not create any change. Collective work had to be done. And so I found myself involved in the Communist Labour Party.
Fritz: The Communist Labour Party operated basically illegally outside of the National Progressive Front Alliance.
Faraj VO: You do not get a whirlwind in a clear sky. There must be a reason for it. Under Hafez al Assad, killing and massacres became normal. Well, not normal, but not a big deal. Assad's predecessors were bad. And he stopped down to the level and to an even lower one with his repression. It turned from bad to worse until he got to the point where he was ready to massacre anyone to protect his throne.
Fritz: Just how far the Assad regime was willing to go to hold on to power. Became shockingly clear in 1982.
Rime: There was a kind of insurrection, you know, a kind of defiance of the Assad regime with the only real political force that was fortifying and making itself visible on the Syrian scene. And that was the Muslim Brotherhood. And that ended in the terrible massacre in Hama in 1982, when Hafez Assad sent his brother, Rifaat Assad, who was the head of the Fourth Division, the army at the time. They entered the old part of Hama. They went from house to house. They took out many leaders of the Muslim Brothers. 30,000 people, if we take that as the most accurate number of people killed, there were not 30,000 Muslim brothers. There were civilians, there were women, there were children. There were doctors and teachers and professors. And the artillery bombed its way through Hama. The city was demolished. It was raised and rebuilt. Syrians understood the message very well. Any defiance of the regime would be brutally, violently repressed. That was the Assad regime's sign to the people. You stay quiet, you show us docility and we will not bother you. But if you even dream that any other system is even allowed, you are wrong.
Kristina: It's a very interesting case to talk about because what happened in Hama stayed with people for generations. After the Revolution started, I realised that a lot of people went onto the streets because they felt like they didn't want to be those bystanders that their parents were during the massacre in Hama. They felt like they wanted to be on the right side of history. And I found it truly amazing because people from very different backgrounds have been mentioning this as one of the motivations to actually go on the streets. It felt like there's this deep sense of guilt that they wanted to wash.
Fritz: Hearing this from you now only makes it more concrete to me, why it's such an incredibly, you know, really dumb failure of justice. The justice system in this case of the French, to let go of Rifaat al-Assad, the uncle of the current President who was in charge at the time of the Army operation against Hama. And who was in Paris and had multiple cases against him, but one criminal case. And was able to flee the country, was able to return to Syria and is now out of the reach of the French justice system. And there was also a case pending in Switzerland against him. Still is. And the likelihood that that will lead to actual justice is now extremely low. While when he was still in Paris, it could have been done. I think it's an example of how a significance of a certain case can be so underestimated by international legal systems that don't have a good grip on the cultural context of the case.
Rime: Hafez Assad depended on his family and Rifaat Assad himself was very enamoured with, you know, being in a position of power. And in fact, that's what led to his downfall. Because when Hafez Assad became quite ill in the mid-eighties, Rifaat Assad attempted to take power. And that did not succeed. And they made a deal that he said, okay, you know, you leave Syria immediately.
Fritz: Which is how Rifaat happened to be in France in the first place, within the reaches of the French justice system.
Ugur: If we take a look at the structure of the regime, of the Assad regime since 1970, and we focus only on people with the last name Assad, then there are a significant number of people who are in very influential positions. Starting, of course, with Hafez Assad, who appointed his own brother, Rifaat Assad as Head of the Praetorian Guard, head of the Defence Brigades in the 1970s. That's not nothing. And in many other societies you wouldn't be able to do that. You know, you can't appoint a first degree family member to a highly influential military or paramilitary position. But he could and he did. And that, of course, then led to the kind of the growth or the development of the power of the family inside the, especially the security forces, the intelligence agencies, the army, the elite troops. This is where the Assad family built their power base, including, of course, the in-laws. So Assad's mother is from the Makhlouf family. The Makhlouf family, too, was and remains in Syria, a deeply influential family. There is a disproportionate number of people from these two families, from Assad and Makhlouf that are in exceptionally sensitive and powerful positions. And that was the case since the 1970s.
Rime: You know, the Assads have often been described as a family in power. But I think that is a little bit too simplistic, to put it that way, because it became much more than a family. So you can describe it as clan, as a clique, and there were others, and they happened to be people that Hafez Assad trusted. They happen to be part of the Alawite community, it’s a small community in Syria. But Hafez Assad did build a lot of the army and the intelligence, the officers came from there. It really is a pyramid of power. You had the Ba’ath indoctrinating young Syrians from school onwards and young Syrians learned very quickly that if you wanted to be part of anything and have any of the fringe benefits of being openly loyal to the regime, well, you know, you became an active member of the Ba’ath Party.
Fritz: The Assads knew that in order to maintain their rule, they could not only rely on indoctrination and placing family members and trusted allies in top positions. Anyone could turn on you as Rifaat’s bid for power had shown Hafez. More pillars of power were needed to keep the Assad regime standing. And so, as with many authoritarian regimes, the intelligence system came to play a key role in Syria. The Syrian intelligence system is more commonly referred to by its shorthand the mukhabarat. The mukhabarat held and holds its tentacles tight around Syrian society.
Rime: Of course, the intelligence branches, their main role was to terrify the population. The fear of any Syrian. You know, when you hear the word “al amen”, which is the security, you're terrified and you begin to rethink, you know, everything you've done and said and, you know, did you make a faux pas and did you dare to provoke anyone?
Ugur: There are four major intelligence agencies, Military Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, Political Security and the State Security, in order of influence. And the Branch, in Syrian Arabic, the “fera”, is generally a grim grey building in the middle of the city where everybody walks around and nobody even dares to look at. It is a building that often is a couple of stories above ground, for the administration staff who work there. Sometimes the archives of the Branch. And then under the ground very often three or four or five stories under the ground, there are the cells. In the cells, that's exactly where they keep individuals that they have arrested. And very often, the torture chamber also is under the ground. So these four agencies - sometimes do work together, but sometimes they also compete - they are like a vacuum cleaner. So the way that they go into Syrian society and extract people from that society on whatever grounds. Maybe you posted something on Facebook against the regime. Maybe you wanted to set up a political party, basically any, or maybe it’s a completely random reason, maybe you didn't do anything. As soon as that happens, the intelligence agencies, they extract you from society. They take you to the Branch. They torture you there. You stay there sometimes a couple of days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months. And then after that, you are either released or you are processed and sent to the next phase, which is often ending up in the second dimension of the gulag, which is one of the three major prison camps.
Fritz: In 1976, Faraj Bayrakdar was spending some time back home in Syria after studying in Budapest on a scholarship from the Syrian Ministry of Higher Education.
Faraj VO: During that time, Syria invaded Lebanon and my stance was clear and public. I was against the Syrian invasion. They took their revenge on me by cancelling my scholarship and dragging me into the military. During my first referendum in the military in 1978 I said no to Hafez al Assad and so I was arrested by the Air Force Intelligence Directorate. I was completely cut off from everything for four and a half months and then eventually I was released. Because they could not pinpoint anything on me, they let me go. But then on my second day of freedom, I was arrested again by the internal branch of the State Security Intelligence. I was not for a long time, though. My third arrest occurred later by the Military Intelligence Directorate. This was my longest arrest. I was locked up for 14 continuous years. For the first six and a half years, I was completely isolated from the outside world. I was not allowed any visitors, and my family did not know anything about me or who I was with.
Fritz: Faraj continued to compose poetry throughout his detention, using any tools available. After an international campaign on his behalf, he was finally released from prison in 2000, during a brief period of political respite known as the Damascus Spring.
Ugur: In Syria imprisonment by the mukhabarat, and a journey through the prison system is what people fear the most. It spreads fear and spreads terror. It spreads trauma for those people who have suffered the violence in the prisons, who were tortured and released. But even people who haven't, you know, also people who, for example, have nothing to fear, even ifvthey also think, they know that this country has in every city a couple of these intelligence branches. They know that people are under the ground and being tortured, and they know that they will have to behave in a way that will avoid them landing in one of these torture chambers. So the regime and its prison system are like a finger and a nail. They're so grown and they've kind of welded together that it's going to be very difficult to extricate these two.
Kristina: In Syria, we had the saying that “Elhitan laha athan” that “walls have ears”. And I've been brought up with this notion. And it was something that was just implicit that whatever you hear at home, you can never, ever repeat it outside. Do not dare, because it's dangerous. What I remember thinking back then is that but well, it means that people are not safe, that the world is not a safe place to be. And obviously, it created a lot of problematic connections with trust and perceiving others and perceiving myself with others. And until now, I'm working on, you know, this capacity to trust the world, that the world can bring a lot of good things and that not every person has some evil plan to destroy you. And obviously I'm exaggerating now a little bit, but it's just to show that the impact of such very tiny things, like small expressions that keep being repeated to you day after day, year after year, how much they really shape you from within as a human being within a society.
Fritz: I would be interested to hear from you having first grown up under Assad senior, Hafez, and then growing into the age where his son Bashar Assad took over. Do you remember that time when that happened?
Kristina: I remember the day when Hafez al-Assad died. Maybe an important contextual information is that Hafez used to be called the eternal or the “khaled” . So obviously what that means is that he's going to be there forever. That's what a child understands, and that's what it was in my head. When Hafez al Assad died, I was visiting my mother's family in Lithuania, and I remember they had this very big TV and I was standing in front of it hearing the news that Hafez al Assad, the President of Syria, died. And I remember thinking that this is the end of the world now, because what will happen to the country? I mean, he was supposed to be there forever. Okay. Now he's not going to be there anymore. And I remember spending that summer away and then coming back to Syria. And I could hear a lot of adults in my surroundings talking about the fact that Bashar al Assad is coming into power and that he was different, that he was young, that he was educated. You know, these very cliché things that were said about and still are said about Bashar al Assad.
Rime: I was there the day Hafez Assad died. I was there when Bashar Assad came to power. I knew, like most Syrians, that there was no other option than Bashar Assad. The original heir was Bassel Assad, who was, you know, the eldest son of Hafez Assad and who everyone understood was being groomed for power. He was killed in a car crash in January 1994. And Bashar Assad, who nobody ever had thought about, was beginning his studies in the UK and was brought back. So we all understood by seeing Bashar Assad being suddenly promoted to very high ranks in the army and suddenly becoming active and appearing in the media and only in the Syrian media, of course - we all understood that, you know, this was going to be the future leader.
Rime: At the beginning, in the first few months of Bashar Assad's reign, and I always call it reign. There was a lot of positivity for a lot of Syrians, not from me, but from a lot of Syrians who dared to hope against hope that, you know, finally this was our time. Syrians finally were going to live a better life. Nobody imagined that it was going to be like living in Switzerland or, you know, or the EU or the U.S.. No, everybody was you know, we know how things work. But they hope that it would be like a different Arab country where they also had dictatorships, but where daily life was easy. This was the hope that Syrians had with Bashar Assad. And very quickly, it became clear that even that was absolutely not to be even imagined for most of them.
Bashar Assad from very early on, it was clear that he had a very, very huge ego. Not that Hafez Assad was by any means somebody who was modest. But Hafez Assad, you know, ruled the old way. Bashar Assad wanted to be everything at the same time, he wanted to be the modern, cool guy with a, you know, educated Western wife. He was young, like, you know, a number of the new young rulers in the region. And he wanted to be admired.
Fritz: From Sam Dagher’s book “Assad or We Burn the Country”.
VO: Bashar craved the rewards of engagement with the West, but also fully embraced Iran, Hezbollah and the so-called axis of resistance against the West. He was the moderate Muslim and protector of Christians and minorities, but also the one who mobilised Islamist extremists when it suited him and his regime. He urged the mukhabarat to be less intrusive, but also expected them to crush any hint of threat to his power. He wanted to be seen as legitimately elected and a non-sectarian president for all Syrians, but accepted the reality that his survival depended on his clan and sect. Core elements of the system bequeathed to him by Hafez.
Fritz: And then came 2011. With the violent suppression of the peaceful Revolution and the ensuing war in Syria, Bashar reused his father's playbook with its central tenant: you do anything to hold onto power.
Bashar archive clip
Rime: You know that the expression “Assad or we burn the country” was created by the loyalists from the beginning. In Arabic it’s “Al Assad aw nahrek al balad”. That was reminding them that you know that we will do anything and the country be damned. We will burn the country in order to keep Assad. Well, in the end it was Assad and we burn the country.
Kristina: Often, especially in the first two years of the revolution, I would not be able to sleep at night thinking, what is Bashar thinking at the moment? What does he do in his day to day life? How does he wake up and decide that today I'm going to kill people who are saying no to me, who dare to have an idea of a different society and a different country, that doesn't include me in the picture. What does that mean? Because often we think about Bashar and all the people in power as very distant creatures, as if they were not human beings. But they are human beings with their fears and their will to prove things. One of my theories is that, you know, Bashar has been trying to prove to his mother that he's worthy of power, just like his father was. It might be as simple as that, but it was always considered the least powerful or the least potentially powerful member of the family. And, you know, one day he has power. And then there is his mother who's saying, you know, you need to be a man, man up, you know, live up to the responsibility that your father has left you with. It might be as simple as that, but of course, with a lot and a lot of other layers, I think these are really important questions to ask if you really want to understand the nature of violence that has been happening in the country.
Fritz: You know, one of the family layers that definitely we know now played a huge role next to Bashar’s mother is his brother Maher, who as maybe the most important figure in the army, has played a huge role in actually executing a lot of the violence. Right. So that maybe also enabled Bashar to at least sort of keep up this face of the more civil, the more emotional, the more sensitive face of this criminal regime. So if we talk about violence as important factors of how this regime has been able to stay in power. Another one that we definitely shouldn't forget is the response or lack of response to incredibly violent actions such as the chemical attacks of 21st of August 2013 on the suburbs of Damascus. That kind of attack will 100% come from the absolute highest top of the hierarchy of responsibility. Something like that will not be decided by a low level commander, except in the unlikely, very unlikely event that it was an accident, which the evidence does not point to at all. So that was a decision made to execute this attack. I think, at that moment, Bashar al-Assad and his inner circle realised that they can go really far with the violence that they were ready to employ in order to stay in power. We're now in 2022 and the methods have worked. The regime is in power. Not going anywhere.
Kristina: I really think that all these years of Assad's rule were basically a constant struggle between the people of Syria, to whom this land belongs, and one family. And it's crazy when you look at it in that very simplistic way, like it's a whole people versus a family.
Faraj VO: The responsibility for mine and everyone else's arrest lies with no one other than the Assad regime. Its prison system was not well known during our time. Some people even questioned our opposition. No one does now. Assad's dirty laundry is out in the open.
Fritz: One of the, I think, main reasons why so many people that we work with that we've we've heard from also, the absolute top priority and overarching goal of this whole effort for justice and accountability for Syria is to have Bashar al Assad and the inner circle on trial. That's the ultimate goal.
Rime: I think most Syrians, even though they do not dare to say it anymore, know that there can be no justice as long as the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity remain in power and remain free because it just teaches everybody else, even if we were to turn a blind eye to that, I think it just teaches everybody else that you take the expression in the literal form that you know you can get away with murder.
Faraj VO: The regime is ultimately a hellish machine that crushes everyone in its way. I believe it will crush the largest head as well. The same hellish machine will crush Bashar al Assad. But for now, it seems it will happen later rather than sooner.
Fritz: It is theoretically possible that at some point Bashar's own regime could turn on him and arrest him. They could then either put him on trial in Syria or extradite him to stand trial at the ICC or at a specialised tribunal for Syria. Although neither of these are options at the moment. It could happen, but for now, the more likely scenario is that Bashar will stay in power and as a serving head of state, he enjoys immunity from national prosecution, which means another country's legal system cannot prosecute him in their courts. Even if he may be holding onto his presidency through illegal means, even if his regime is a dictatorship, as long as he is the president of Syria, Bashar al Assad is pretty much untouchable. But despite the complications to hold the highest ranking regime members accountable, those working in the justice and accountability space are trying to get as close to the top as possible. One example is the chemical weapons case we heard about last episode. Other examples are the arrest warrants against Jamil Hassan and Ali Mamlouk, the former head of the Air Force Intelligence Directorate and the former head of the National Security Bureau. And then there is an interesting case that barrister Toby Cadman is working on against Asma al Assad, Bashar's wife.
Asma al Assad Archive clip
Toby Cadman: It came out as a result of trying to identify ways in which accountability can be pursued. One of the areas that we looked at was those individuals that were either encouraging, inciting or glorifying acts of atrocity crimes. And so we started to look at the role of the first lady, Asma Assad, as a British national. She was born in the United Kingdom. Her parents live there, in West London. That's where she met Bashar. And she's a dual British-Syrian national. I don't want to see her stripped of her citizenship. I want her to go to prison for the rest of her life for crimes that we say that she has committed.
Asma al Assad Archive Clip
Toby: What we had argued is what's called conventional offences. So chemical weapons is a particular category of convention offences and it's all to do with encouragement, incitement into those acts. So we started to look into conduct that she had been involved with as a result of being the First Lady, where she had met members of the military who had subsequently carried out chemical weapons attacks and where there had been statements of glorification as to the military's conduct in carrying out bombardment and, again, chemical weapons attacks. So these are all matters that are within the jurisdiction of English law. The finding was made last year, 2021. Additional evidence has been provided and we continue to investigate. The challenge is going to be if the Crown Prosecution Service that has jurisdiction to prosecute, if they consider that there's a sufficient evidential basis to prosecute, of course we need to get her before an English court. And, you know, I'm aware of the challenges of that, but I'm also confident and hopeful that one day there'll be a Syria without Bashar and Asma Assad at the helm. And they may leave the country at some point. And then they will be arrested, and hopefully brought before an English court.
Fritz: Despite the stories and the evidence, the cases and the trials, the Assad regime is not only still in power in Syria, it almost appears to be making a slow return to international politics. Paul Conroy is a war photographer who was in Homs with his colleague, the war correspondent Marie Colvin in 2012. The makeshift media centre they were staying in was attacked by the regime, killing Marie and others, although the regime denies it was involved. This is from a testimony Paul gave this year in 2022 at the People's Tribunal for the Murder of Journalists.
Paul Conroy archive: There's this creeping rehabilitation of this murderous regime back into the international community as if, you know collective amnesia is coming over the world and we're going, Oh, well, maybe they're not so bad. You know, maybe we could do business. Damn right he’s bad. They are murderous animals and they should not be rehabilitated by anybody into any international bodies organisations. They should be where they belong with the Russians as outcasts and pariahs until they stop the killing and they acknowledge the killing. And there's justice for the people who were killed. | ||||
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] | 2012-12-18T00:00:00 | One powerful, tight-knit family has controlled Syria for four decades. | en | /favicon_aje.ico | Al Jazeera | https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2012/12/18/the-assads-an-iron-fisted-dynasty | For four decades, the Assad family has ruled Syria, and while the popularity of the family among some sections in the country is undeniable, its run in power has not been without turmoil.
Hafez al-Assad, a military man, rose through the ranks and became Syria’s president in 1971 after a bloodless coup which saw a military takeover of the dominant Baath party. By all accounts, Assad tightened the state’s dictatorial grip on the population, focusing on strengthening the country’s military and intelligence forces.
A staunch nationalist, he is lauded by loyalists for modernising and industrialising Syria, strengthening not only its military but also its economy.
However, Hafez al-Assad’s legacy cannot be discussed without mention of the 1982 Hama massacre, in which the Muslim Brotherhood party was targeted for a spate of assassinations of high-profile Baathists.
The massacre, carried out allegedly under the supervision of Hafez’s younger brother, Rifaat, involved a bombing campaign as well as door-to-door operations, which, by some accounts, resulted in nearly 40,000 deaths.
According to a Syrian Human Rights Committee report, while the Hama raid was the most deadly assault, it was not the first of its kind:
Of these massacres was the massacre on Jisr Alshaghoor, which took place on the 10th of March 1980. Some sources said that mortars bombed the city and 97 people were shot dead, after being taken from their homes, and 30 houses were demolished there. The massacres of Sarmadah which saw 40 citizens killed, and the massacre of the village Kinsafrah, which took place at the same time as the massacre of Jisr Alshaghoor…. Few months later, the massacre of Palmyra prison was committed on the 26th of June 1980, when around 1,000 detainees were killed in their cells…. And the massacre at the Sunday market where 42 citizens were killed and 150 were injured. Also the massacre of Al-Raqah, that killed tens of citizens who were held captive in a secondary school and burnt to death.
In the year following the massacre, Hafez al-Assad fell ill with cardiac problems. He appointed a temporary ruling committee to run the country while he recovered, but excluded Rifaat from this group.
This caused a rift between the brothers, which resulted in Rifaat ultimately being exiled from the country twice, even though at times he was given temporary posts, once as vice-president of security affairs in 1984 and then as vice-president in 1998.
Hafez’s second choice
Meanwhile, Hafez al-Assad was grooming Basil, the eldest of this four sons, to take over the presidency.
Basil, a major in the Syrian army, was a dominant personality who was reported to have disapproved of his sister’s choice for a husband. Bushra al-Assad was being courted by Assef Shawkat, a man 10 years her senior – too old and too poor for Basil’s liking.
He felt it was improper for his sister to marry Shawkat, so he had him jailed several times.
But Basil’s death in a car accident in Damascus in 1994 at the age of 33 (after his death, Shawkat and Bushra eloped) threw the issue of succession into a tailspin.
Bashar, the second eldest, was considered bookish, more interested in medical school and specialising in becoming an ophthalmologist than running the country. Majd, the youngest of the four Assad boys, was not a suitable candidate as he was rumoured to have suffered from drug addiction and depression.
The next natural choice seemed to be Maher, who was in the military and by all accounts seemed ambitious.
However, Maher’s uneven temper, coupled with his youth, saw him sidelined in favour of Bashar, who never seemed to display much in terms of political acumen or ambition (Majd died at the age of 43 in 2009 from an undisclosed “chronic illness”).
Nonetheless, after Basil’s death, Bashar was brought back from the UK and put through a course of preparation in order to take over from his father. He was steadily awarded a series of military promotions and was given a high public profile by being presented as the face of an anti-corruption campaign.
This “allowed Bashar to be seen as someone on the right side of a true ‘hot button’ issue for most ordinary Syrians,” writes Flynt Leverett in his book, Inheriting Syria – Bashar’s Trial by Fire.
The Syrian constitution had to be amended to allow 34-year-old Bashar to become president – the minimum age for presidency prior to that had been 40, the age at which Hafez had taken office.
Like father, like sons
Images of tanks rolling into what appear to be often unarmed protesters and reports of towns under siege have drawn parallels between how the Assad brothers (Bashar and Maher) are responding to the uprising to how their father, Hafez and uncle, Rifaat, dealt with the the Muslim Brotherhood party in the early 80s.
Indeed, the actions of the younger Assad brothers appear to closely mirror those of the elder Assad siblings 30 years ago.
The Assad family’s response to the months of constant and sustained protest in Syria starting in March 2011 has garnered international criticism.
The European Union in May announced sanctions against 13 Syrian officials, and the list includes Maher as well as several cousins and other relatives.
Indeed, Maher’s leadership of the Presidential Guard’s 4th Armoured Division is seen as the driving force behind the violent crackdowns against the protesters.
In June, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he hads pressed Bashar to change course on his government’s response to the protests, saying that the state’s brutality was “unacceptable” and constituted an “atrocity.”
“The savagery right now… think about it, the images they are playing in the heads of the women they kill is so ugly, these images are hard to eat, hard to swallow,” Erdogan told the Turkish Anatolia news agency.
Bashar has kept a relatively low profile during the months of unrest, speaking in public only a handful of times, when he’s blamed the uprising on foreign elements and compared the protesters to “germs.”
In December 2011, Assad denied culpability for his government’s crackdown on protests, saying he had never given an order for security forces of whom he was commander-in-chief “to kill or be brutal”.
“They’re not my forces,” Assad told the US’s ABC television network when asked about the crackdown.
“They are military forces [who] belong to the government. I don’t own them. I’m president. I don’t own the country. No government in the world kills its people, unless it is led by a crazy person.” | ||||
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] | null | [] | null | en | https://adst.org/2013/09/the-more-things-change-a-look-back-at-syrias-hafez-al-assad/ | “You know I have my ups and downs, but I have a pact with God. The pact is that no matter what problems I have, wherever there is a challenge, I will have all my strength,” asserted a sickly Hafez al-Assad to George Shultz, who grimaced at the firmness of Assad’s grip. Despite Hafez al-Assad’s constant ailing health, the Syrian leader’s tenure in office spanned some 30 years. Political Officer Edward G. Abington, Ambassador David Ransom and wife, Deputy Chief of Mission, Marjorie Ransom, highlight Assad’s most criticized political power plays, Syria’s problems with Iraq and its reluctant reliance on the USSR, as well as provide insights about the man who reluctantly readied his son, Bashar al-Assad, to later assume power.
Charles Stuart Kennedy interviewed them in 1999 and 2000 respectively, during Assad’s final days as president of Syria.
Read about al-Assad’s brutal 1981 attack on the city of Hama. Go here to read about the rise of Hezbollah.
Striking Similarities
ABINGTON: In early 1981, there was serious concern that the Syrian government was about to invade Jordan. Assad was a very cautious person and knew that if he were to actually make a threatening move against Jordan it would inevitably lead to an Israeli military action. It was our assessment that Assad was not going to invade Jordan but was merely try to carry on a war of nerves and threaten the Jordanians. One of the options being looked at – and being recommended by ideologues… – was that the U.S. should carry out air strikes against Syria not only to protect Jordan but indirectly to send a message to the Soviets that the United States would not tolerate Soviet surrogates, which Syria was looked upon as, threatening America’s friends in the region.…
Assad was viewed as hostile to American interests. He certainly had no defenders in Washington at the time, still doesn’t. But this lack of understanding of what was really going on and the predilection to credit Israeli assessments much more than was warranted, that was 20 years ago and we still see it today.…
Problems with the Muslim Brotherhood and Iraq
You had an internal situation in Syria that was very complicated because the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni organization, was carrying out major attacks of terrorism and assassinations against the Alaoui [aka Alawite — a branch of Shia Islam which originated in Syria] Baathist regime of Syria. You had a break in relations between Syria and Iraq because of the rivalry between Hafez al-Assad and Saddam Hussein, two different factions of the Baath Party, each saying that they were the legitimate party, not recognizing the other. It was an incredibly complex mix of a lot of different issues and it was very difficult to figure out what was going on in Damascus because of the nature of this regime.
When I got to Damascus, there was the announcement that Syria and Iraq were going to unite. This had been spurred by the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. But within a matter of a couple of months, the whole process of discussing unification between Syria and Iraq broke down into tremendous acrimony which led eventually to a break in diplomatic relations between Syria and Iraq. It was during this period that the Muslim Brotherhood attacks against the Syrian regime started intensifying. There was intelligence and we knew that the Syrian government felt that the Muslim Brotherhood attacks were being assisted by the Iraqis in terms of providing explosives, arms, [and ] infiltrating people across the Iraqi-Syrian border. There also was some evidence that Muslim Brotherhood types in Saudi Arabia were sending money and providing guidance to people inside Syria.…
When I first got there in ’79 for the next year to year and a half there was a mounting internal crisis over this challenge to the Alaoui regime. This took the form of assassination of Alaoui political and military figures. The Muslim Brotherhood started assassinating Soviet military advisors and carrying out bombing attacks against Soviet military compounds and very brutal bombing attacks against Syrian government facilities as well.…They tried to cover up the attacks. It was very difficult to get accurate information about who had been killed and so forth.
It was during the spring or summer of 1981 that this section of Hamas, the old section of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, really rose up against the government forces in the area. Hafez al-Assad, in consultation with the Alaoui military leaders…decided that they had had enough of this uprising, of these assassinations. One has to keep in mind that it was very much targeted against Alaouis. There were many Alaoui officials who were assassinated because they were Alaoui. There had been these brutal car bombings.
The government decided that it was going to crush the situation once and for all. Assad’s brother, Rifaat al-Assad, deployed the Defense Forces equipped with T-72 tanks to Hamas, closed off the area, went in and just leveled this area where the Muslim Brotherhood was holed up. It was a civilian area. Basically, they shelled it and then they brought in bulldozers and just bulldozed the whole thing. No one knows how many people were killed. I know that it has become the common wisdom that 10,000 were killed. In fact, I don’t think anyone really knows. But the Syrians sealed off the area. No one could get in or out for about a week until it was over.
That really broke the back of the Muslim Brotherhood. There were assassinations, a few bombings, after that. In fact, once when I was going from where the embassy was to a meeting …in an area west of Beirut, […] a bomb blew up about 50 yards from my car.…The Syrian security people immediately came out and started stopping cars. There was a car in front of me, a white Peugeot. There were three people in it. They panicked and they just were yelled at by the security people to stop. They kept going. This must have been 10-15 yards from me. The security people just opened up with AK-47s and killed all three people in the car. And they turned around and started pointing their guns at me. I was in a little Volkswagen Rabbit and stopped, held my hands in the air, and kept shouting in Arabic that I was a diplomat. They came over and looked at me and told me to get out of there. I haven’t been frightened that much. You could see how this terrorism really had the regime on edge. …
Syria’s Relations with the U.S.
The Assad regime was a very secretive regime. We opened the embassy in Damascus after the 1974 Israel-Syria disengagement agreement which had been brokered by Henry Kissinger. The Syrian regime was very heavily dependent upon the Soviet Union for economic assistance and especially for military assistance. The Soviets were the principal supplier of military equipment to the Syrians. There was a very large Soviet presence in Syria, Soviet military advisors there. The stated goal of President Assad was to achieve military parity with Israel. The relationship between Israel and Syria continued to be very tense. The Egyptian embassy was around the corner from the American embassy. Syria had broken relations with Egypt over the Camp David summit and the Egyptian-Israeli agreement. The Egyptian Embassy had been broken into by a Syrian mob.
Demonstrations like that in Syria only took place at the instigation of the Syrian government. The Egyptian Embassy was basically ransacked and was pretty much in ruin. That was a clear sign by President Assad that he disapproved of Sadat’s policies. There was a lot of tension between the United States and the Syrian government because the U.S. government was trying to promote the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. We had very little official access to Syrian officials and to the Baath Party.
They kept us at arm’s length and when we did have discussions with them they were fairly pro forma, a very heavy dose of Syrian propaganda. It was quite difficult to figure out what was going on in Syria [and] you had an incredibly unstable situation.…There was a lot of tension between the United States and Syria during this period.…We had relatively limited contacts with political figures in the regime. The ambassador would see Assad from time to time when there were visitors, the Secretary of State or congressional delegations. But in general, the American ambassador did not have access to President Assad for meetings or for appointments to discuss issues.
The American Dream
DAVID RANSOM: [T]he Syrians are perfectly capable of pursuing a dual process if it serves their purposes. In the case of the United States, we may have wanted, on one hand, to punish and on the other hand, to attract. They found it perfectly acceptable to excoriate us in political channels, but to encourage us in cultural and educational channels.
Our relationship was also complicated by the fact that the Soviet Union was a great friend of Syria, yet one would have been hard put to find Syrians who liked Soviets — whereas every Syrian family had immigrants to the United States who sent home letters, money, and accounts of life in America that made it natural and desirable for everyone to be a friend of American society. …Everybody wanted visas to America.
The stories about getting visas were legion. One of the funniest was that one day Hafez al-Assad was driving to his office and saw this big long line in front of the American embassy. He didn’t know what that was so he asked his driver. He stopped and got out and went up to the end of the line and said, “What are you here for?” They said, “Oh, Mr. President, we’re just here because we’re trying to get a temporary visa to the United States. Of course, we want to come back.” He kept asking people and he noticed the line was melting away. He got up to the head of the line rather quickly and asked the guard “Why did all these people leave?” He said, “Well, Sir, when they saw you were getting a visa, they decided to stay.”…
“Our difficulties with the Israelis were nothing compared to the Soviet problems with Syria”
Q: Did you feel that the Soviets were pulling any strings or were they just the deep pockets into which Syria would reach and take out what it needed?
The Soviets were seen by the government of Syria as the great strategic ally against both us and against Israel. But the two countries had many deep differences, particularly on debt issues. The Syrians had an insatiable appetite for Soviet military equipment even though they didn’t make very good use of it and they lost a lot of it. They blamed the equipment and the manufacturer rather than the way it was used. So, American equipment in the hands of Israel made us look very powerful and made the Soviets look bad.…
Our difficulties with the Israelis were nothing compared to the Soviet problems with Syria — a situation that I pointed out again and again to my Syrian friends and interlocutors. I pointed out that we got something from our relationship with Israel while Syria was getting less and less from their Soviet relationship.
Relations with Iran
The Syrians had a very bad relationship with Iraqis. The border was closed and there was nothing but enmity between the two leaders, Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad. When the Iraqis went to war with Iran, the Syrians cut the pipeline of Iraqi oil coming across Syria, a blow that was very painfully to Iraq. They closed the border and refused supplies and support. The Iranians had agreed to supply Syria with free oil. So Syria had become a kind of Iranian surrogate against Iraq. That made for some very bitter relationships.…
The Syrian view of such activity inside their neighbors’ borders was that “We are weak, you are strong, and we will therefore do things that make your life miserable and eventually force you to come to us to ask for our help. Then we will extract our pound of flesh but not give you everything that you want in the way of expulsion, etc. of terrorist elements.”…The Syrian government got directly involved in terrorism while I was in Damascus. They were caught trying to blow up an El-Al airplane — a very clever plot that went awry. That led to a British decision to break relationships with Syria. While we did not break relationships, we withdrew the ambassador and cut the mission in one half as an indication of our displeasure.…
Assad’s Power Play
Assad really was Syria in terms of the way power was wielded in the country and how decisions were made, particularly on foreign policy. Assad at that time was embarked on a scheme that has now been reduced to ruin. He has had to abandon it. We told them at the time that this was going to happen, but he persisted in this grandiose notion of rejecting all effort at negotiation until a strategic balance with Israel had been created. That basically meant drawing the Soviet Union in to support Syria, building up Syrian military strength so that they would be able to meet and counter any Israeli military threat. Assad understood power very well. He didn’t pay much attention to economics and he didn’t seem to understand that his country was in the grips of a downward economic spiral where per capita income was decreasing every year while no new economic dynamics were being created.…He thought that socialism was bringing benefits to all the people and that nothing needed to be changed.
A Ruthless Man and His Sons
MARJORIE RANSOM: [Assad] was pretty tough. He was quite active in those days. Over the course of two years, we might have seen him slow down somewhat. But he was very much running things and certainly running peace negotiations. There was tremendous respect for Assad’s political acumen, but he was obstructionist to any attempt to make progress on the Arab-Israeli situation.
He would not hesitate to use radical groups based in Syria to support actions against Israel. Within the country he and his government were viewed as dictatorial, cruel, and tough. He was seen as a very tough-minded leader who would not hesitate to be ruthless in achieving his goals. The country was very hard up economically. People couldn’t get their basic foodstuffs. It was a very hard time for the citizenry. Socialism was failing. He was viewed as a very isolated person who relied on his close circle of advisors to tell him what was going on.
He was obviously a man who felt under threat. Whenever he moved anywhere in the city, there was extraordinary security. He traveled to the coast, to Latakia and to Cardaha, his birthplace, but to few other places even in Syria, let alone the rest of the world. He never went to Aleppo, the other big city in Syria. He had a public mystique, not as bad as Saddam Hussein’s, but he was a comparable figure.
People blamed him for their economic hardships, especially people who were not Alawite. Don’t forget that the Alawites were only 11-15% of the population. They, and perhaps some of the Christians and the Druze, supported the regime, but the Sunnis were and are roughly 70% of the population. His regime was one that was imposed on them. So, it was a tough dictatorship that advantaged Alawites and people from other minorities. He imposed such severe economic restrictions on the farms and the merchants that Syrians were never able to develop their country. What industry existed was government-run and highly inefficient, your classic example of a socialist-run public sector.
Q: What was the wisdom of the period on who was going to replace him?
At that time, it wasn’t clear. They were just starting to groom Bashar after Bassel died the year before I got there. They withdrew Bashar from England. He was studying to be an ophthalmologist. They brought him back and started grooming him in different jobs. It became apparent that they were testing him to prepare him for leadership. They were doing it in a rather gradual way. They thought they had a few years to do so.
Assad’s oldest son Bassel died in an automobile crash racing in his sports car to the airport. Not a very noble end. Nevertheless, he was elev ated to some sort of martyrdom after his death.…We watched in Syria the change in the pictures that would appear around town of Assad. There were many pictures of Bassel and then there was some gradual transition to a trilogy. You would have a picture of Assad, the dead son Bassel, and the upstart Bashar.
The word was that [Bashar] was a very nice guy and perhaps lacked the steel will, and so-called “killer eyes,” of his late brother, Bassel, and his younger brother Maher. He was considered smart, having been educated in England. He spoke English fluently, was quite Westernized, and expressed interest in opening up Syrian society to the outside world. He was instrumental in starting a computer society and tried before he became president to put Syria on the Internet, but the security services got in his way at that time. He was viewed as a very nice person, but people doubted his ability to lead Syria, considering the strength of the security services and the military. | |||||||
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A Broken House Discussion Guide
Background Information
Arab Spring
In the Spring of 2011, an act of defiance by a Tunisian street vendor prompted the beginning of almost two years of political uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. This period was labeled ‘Arab Spring’ in reference to the People’s Spring of1848 when political uprisings spread across Europe. Protests and uprisings were rooted in the demand for more cultural and political freedom. Activists and protestors filled the streets to demand a voice in their governments. The impact of these uprisings varied. In Egypt, early success ousting authoritarian leaders was later followed by a controversial election, a coup and the installation of a new authoritarian regime. In Tunisia, uprisings brought some humanitarian advancements and created a fragile democracy.
In Syria, the uprisings came in response to the arrest of several young people in the small border town of Dara’a. After a long and difficult period of iron-fisted rule by Hafez al-Assad, the rise of his son Bashar al-Assad in 2000 brought with it hope of change. For the people of Dara'a, this hope evaporated with the installment of security chief Atef Najib. Najib was a controlling force in the region, inspiring unrest and discontent among Dara’a citizens. When graffiti messages defaming President Bashar al-Assad were found on a wall of a local high school, more than 15 teenagers were arrested, tortured and confined for more than a month. On March 15, 2011, protesters in Dara’a, Damascus and Aleppo filled the streets in response. Uprisings continued as efforts to suppress rebellion turned violent. By July military defectors had named themselves the Free Syrian Army, as the uprisings evolved into a Civil War.
The Syrian Civil War
During the ten years of open conflict, control of Syria has remained divided with several different groups gaining and losing power at different times. Free Syrian Army took control of areas within Idlib in Northwest Syria. ISIL/ISIS took control of a large area from 2014 to 2019. They declared the creation of a “caliphate” or area of land lead by a politico-religious Muslim leader called a “caliph.” During their time in power, ISIL forces executed thousands, prompting many others to flee in search of safety. The Syrian government has taken and retaken control over large portions of Syria by force with the support of outside forces who have a vested interest in the region, primarily the United States of America, Russia and Iran.
Thousands have lost their lives in conflict or as casualties of war. Of those who are alive, millions have been displaced and millions more don’t have access to food and necessities. In cities of conflict, over 100,000 buildings have been destroyed. Several sacred and culturally significant spaces have been destroyed. These include: Temple of Bel, the Temple of Baal Shamin, the Arch of Triumph, and columns in the Valley of the Tombs.
The Current State of Syria
After 10 years of armed conflict in Syria, 5.6 million refugees have been displaced outside Syria, with another 6 million displaced within Syria - the number of people who have been displaced is roughly half of Syria’s total population. Outside intervention from the United States, Russia, Turkey and Iran continue to exacerbate the conflict with outside forces bringing in their own agendas and deepening the crisis in the region. Control in Syria remains split with large portions still functioning under Syrian government rule. President Bashar al-Assad continues in the role he inherited from his father. His rule is marked by violence against dissidents, the use of chemical weapons against his own people and the arrest, imprisonment and torture of thousands. Kurdish forces, Turkish forces and rebel factions control the rest of the country. The UN called Syria “the worst man-made disaster since World War II.” Resources are scarce as prices for food and other necessities rise. 4.5 million children are hungry and a third of all refugees worldwide are from Syria.
About Mohamed Hafez
Mohamed Hafez is a Syrian American artist and architect. Born in Damascus, Hafez was raised in Saudi Arabia and educated in the Midwestern United States. Hafez uses found objects, scrap metal and paint to create “surrealistic Middle Eastern streetscapes that are architectural in their appearance yet politically charged in their content” (mohamedhafez.com). He weaves recordings of street sounds, music and readings from the Qur’an into the landscape of the streetscapes to offer a multisensory experience of a city in crisis. Hafez’s work challenges our tendency to turn away from the lost lives and cultural destruction of war in Syria and beyond. He is an artist-in-residence at the Keller Center of Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago. He has been profiled in The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker and National Public Radio.
Source Referenced: http://www.mohamadhafez.com/
FILM SUMMARY
Mohamad Hafez received a one-way ticket to the United States. Missing his homeland, he decided to create a stand-in. A story of love, loss and creating pathways home.
USING THIS GUIDE
This guide is an invitation to dialogue. It is based on a belief in the power of human connection and designed for people who want to use A Broken House to engage family, friends, classmates, colleagues, and communities in conversation and understanding. In contrast to initiatives that foster debates in which participants try to convince others that they are right, this document envisions conversations undertaken in a spirit of openness in which people try to understand one another and expand their thinking by sharing viewpoints and actively listening.
The discussion prompts are intentionally crafted to help a wide range of audiences think more deeply about the issues in the film. Rather than attempting to address them all, choose one or two that best meet your needs and interests. And be sure to leave time to consider taking action. Planning next steps can help people leave the room feeling energized and optimistic, even in instances when conversations have been difficult.
For more detailed event planning and facilitation tips, visit https://communitynetwork.amdoc.org/.
To screen the film ahead of conversation you can stream it here.
A Letter from the Filmmaker, Jimmy Goldblum
I originally wanted to tell a story about refugees that my wife could watch. I had noticed a disturbing trend in this genre of films: documentarians were increasingly relying on graphic violence as a way to build empathy for the victims of conflict. These images are devastating and re-traumatizing to viewers like my wife, who developed c-PTSD while reporting on drone attack survivors in her home country of Pakistan. I wondered, for her and immigrant audiences like her, who deserved to see their stories told on-screen, what would it look like to create a film about the aftermath of war with neither blood nor bodies in it; to instead focus on the other things lost in conflict: our connection to our families, our culture, our ways of being in the world?
Then I met the architect Mohamad Hafez. I saw so much of myself in him. We’re both art and movie lovers, our parents shared similar professions; and we both grew up running around our neighborhoods with sketchbooks, living in the world of our doodles. The major difference between us is that Mohamad was born—according to George W. Bush and his NSEERS program —in the wrong type of country: Syria. For that reason, he was issued a single-entry visa to the United States and could no longer return home. He missed weddings, funerals, and births. He started to make miniatures as a way to soothe his homesickness; art therapy that he didn’t know was art therapy.
Mohamad’s lonely nostalgia turned to rage when the Syrian war broke out. He watched the thousand-year-old minarets, arches and porticoes that inspired him to become an architect— ancient doorways with their Hellenic, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic influences—come crashing down. His world came crashing down with them: his family became refugees, fleeing to five countries amongst the six of them; and his parents eventually separated, unable to reconcile their competing attachments to Syria. And yet, Mohamad was one of the lucky ones: that, even as he endured the dissolution of the country he loved, he, along with his loved ones, survived.
I finished “A Broken House” a few months before the global pandemic forced us all inside for 18-months. As quarantine continued and we all missed weddings, funerals, and births, we experienced the slightest taste of Mohamad’s tragedy. But unlike Mohamad, travel bans have never prevented me from returning home; and I still have a home to which I can return.
This film asks, for those who survive war and arrive on our shores, what gets left behind? For Mohamad, all he has left of Syria and his family are memories. Damascus is irreparably changed, and our immigration laws have made it so, in the nearly two decades since Mohamad arrived in the United States, his once close-knit family has not been together under a single roof.
Even though they survived war and the life of a refugee without becoming another casualty or bloody statistic, this reality is agonizing, untenable, and yes, violent, enough.
Key Participants
Mohamed Hafez - Syrian artist and architect living in the United States who creates miniature landscapes that reflect the homes and lives in war-torn in Syria
Key Issues
A Broken House is an excellent tool for outreach and will be of special interest to people who want to explore the following topics:
Syrian War
Art as Healing Practice
Refugee Experiences
Immigration
Middle East/North African History and Politics
Art as Activism
Costs of War
Arab Spring
In the Spring of 2011, an act of defiance by a Tunisian street vendor prompted the beginning of almost two years of political uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. This period was labeled ‘Arab Spring’ in reference to the People’s Spring of1848 when political uprisings spread across Europe. Protests and uprisings were rooted in the demand for more cultural and political freedom. Activists and protestors filled the streets to demand a voice in their governments. The impact of these uprisings varied. In Egypt, early success ousting authoritarian leaders was later followed by a controversial election, a coup and the installation of a new authoritarian regime. In Tunisia, uprisings brought some humanitarian advancements and created a fragile democracy.
In Syria, the uprisings came in response to the arrest of several young people in the small border town of Dara’a. After a long and difficult period of iron-fisted rule by Hafez al-Assad, the rise of his son Bashar al-Assad in 2000 brought with it hope of change. For the people of Dara'a, this hope evaporated with the installment of security chief Atef Najib. Najib was a controlling force in the region, inspiring unrest and discontent among Dara’a citizens. When graffiti messages defaming President Bashar al-Assad were found on a wall of a local high school, more than 15 teenagers were arrested, tortured and confined for more than a month. On March 15, 2011, protesters in Dara’a, Damascus and Aleppo filled the streets in response. Uprisings continued as efforts to suppress rebellion turned violent. By July military defectors had named themselves the Free Syrian Army, as the uprisings evolved into a Civil War.
The Syrian Civil War
During the ten years of open conflict, control of Syria has remained divided with several different groups gaining and losing power at different times. Free Syrian Army took control of areas within Idlib in Northwest Syria. ISIL/ISIS took control of a large area from 2014 to 2019. They declared the creation of a “caliphate” or area of land lead by a politico-religious Muslim leader called a “caliph.” During their time in power, ISIL forces executed thousands, prompting many others to flee in search of safety. The Syrian government has taken and retaken control over large portions of Syria by force with the support of outside forces who have a vested interest in the region, primarily the United States of America, Russia and Iran.
Thousands have lost their lives in conflict or as casualties of war. Of those who are alive, millions have been displaced and millions more don’t have access to food and necessities. In cities of conflict, over 100,000 buildings have been destroyed. Several sacred and culturally significant spaces have been destroyed. These include: Temple of Bel, the Temple of Baal Shamin, the Arch of Triumph, and columns in the Valley of the Tombs.
The Current State of Syria
After 10 years of armed conflict in Syria, 5.6 million refugees have been displaced outside Syria, with another 6 million displaced within Syria - the number of people who have been displaced is roughly half of Syria’s total population. Outside intervention from the United States, Russia, Turkey and Iran continue to exacerbate the conflict with outside forces bringing in their own agendas and deepening the crisis in the region. Control in Syria remains split with large portions still functioning under Syrian government rule. President Bashar al-Assad continues in the role he inherited from his father. His rule is marked by violence against dissidents, the use of chemical weapons against his own people and the arrest, imprisonment and torture of thousands. Kurdish forces, Turkish forces and rebel factions control the rest of the country. The UN called Syria “the worst man-made disaster since World War II.” Resources are scarce as prices for food and other necessities rise. 4.5 million children are hungry and a third of all refugees worldwide are from Syria.
About Mohamed Hafez
Mohamed Hafez is a Syrian American artist and architect. Born in Damascus, Hafez was raised in Saudi Arabia and educated in the Midwestern United States. Hafez uses found objects, scrap metal and paint to create “surrealistic Middle Eastern streetscapes that are architectural in their appearance yet politically charged in their content” (mohamedhafez.com). He weaves recordings of street sounds, music and readings from the Qur’an into the landscape of the streetscapes to offer a multisensory experience of a city in crisis. Hafez’s work challenges our tendency to turn away from the lost lives and cultural destruction of war in Syria and beyond. He is an artist-in-residence at the Keller Center of Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago. He has been profiled in The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker and National Public Radio.
Source Referenced: http://www.mohamadhafez.com/
STARTING THE CONVERSATION
Immediately after the film, we suggest giving people a moment to stop and reflect. You could play some soft instrumental music or let people enjoy the silence. You could pose a general question (examples below) and give people some time to themselves to jot down or think about their answers before opening the discussion. Alternatively, you could ask participants to share their thoughts with a partner before starting a group discussion.
Warm up:
What does ‘home’ mean to you? Has the feeling of ‘home’ evolved over the course of your lifetime? If so, what changed? If so, how have you been changed?
What are your initial thoughts/feelings after watching the film?
Impact:
How does proximity and shared experience define community or family?
What do you do to establish a sense of home in a place where you work or live?
What part of the film did you identify with most? Why?
Which aspect of the film caused feelings of estrangement/discomfort? Why?
Did any moment in the film inspire you? If so, which part?
Did anything surprise you while watching the film?
What was the most challenging part of the film to watch?
Did this film make you think differently about the ideas of “home” and or “family?” If so, in what ways?
Going deeper:
What impact does Hafez’s art work have on you when you see it?
How did Hafez use art as a mode of processing and towards healing the personal impacts of war?
How do you relate to Hafez’s use of artistic creation to process personal loss? In what ways have you used creativity to process difficult circumstances or emotions?
How does creativity help Hafez heal? How does it help you?
Describe a time when you “made home.”
How did this film make you think differently about the impact of war?
This is a film about war that shows no violence against human beings. How does that affect how you experience the imagery of war? Does seeing violence make you feel more empathetic to the subject matter or less? Why?
How did this film make you think differently about the importance of cultural memory? Of familial memory?
In what ways do national border policies complicate the resettlement process for refugees fleeing persecution or war?
Mohamed’s urges his mother to leave Damascus and come to the United States to live. She refuses. Do you identify with Mohamed or his mother?
How did this film invite you to reflect on assumptions you/we make about refugees and the lives they’ve lived? How does this film inspire you to resist assumptions about the lives of refugees, specifically about the lives they lived before becoming refugees?
What can we do to create a sense of community when we are displaced or when we are welcoming someone who has been displaced?
How do you hold onto a place when you leave? How would this change if you knew you couldn’t return?
What did you learn that you had not heard of before?
Is there anything you’re hoping to learn more about?
In what ways, if any, does this film inspire you towards action?
What does this film have to teach us about what all is lost in political conflict? What are the personal, cultural, emotional, spiritual, and familial costs of war?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kimmothy Cole is an educator, activist, organizer and multi-disciplinary artist based in so-called Austin, TX. Their work has been featured in festivals, conferences, venues and events across the United States. Their use of deep community building and the development of shared culture serves them in the work of ritual activism. They currently work as the Director of Family Ministries for Servant Church Austin, working with families and staff in imagining intergenerational points of connection for spiritual growth. Their upcoming book The Rooted Ritual is a ritual resource for creating ritual in community and their latest ritual performance piece The Sacrament of Fatness (working title) is set to premier in late 2021 or early 2022.
Credits & Acknowledgments
Discussion Guide Producer | POV
Courtney B. Cook, PhD, Education Manager | ||||||
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wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 55 | https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/reliable-no-more-the-current-state-of-the-syrian-armed-forces/ | en | Reliable no more? The current state of the Syrian armed forces | [
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"Holly Dagres"
] | 2020-09-22T14:52:39+00:00 | The current conflict has truly impacted the configuration of the Bashar al-Assad regime as well as the structure and orientation of its military institution, putting the latter’s loyalty in question. | en | Atlantic Council | https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/reliable-no-more-the-current-state-of-the-syrian-armed-forces/ | By Abdulrahman al-Masri
Throughout the past nine years of conflict, the Syrian military has been instrumental in ensuring the survival of the Bashar al-Assad regime—not because of its performance on the battlefield, but rather due to its consistent loyalty. Unlike other state militaries that faced regime challenges by the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, the Syrian armed forces maintained institutional loyalty. Since the Assad family took power in the 1970s, the military underwent a structural transformation that, through control mechanisms and the Alawite minority’s hegemonic position, ensured force loyalty and upheld the military’s central role in the durability of Syria’s authoritarian regime.
However, the current conflict has truly impacted the configuration of the Assad regime as well as the structure and orientation of its military institution, putting the latter’s loyalty in question. Today’s Syrian armed forces are fragmented, decision-making is contested and increasingly decentralized, and the circle of loyalty has widened in an unprecedented manner. Furthermore, a multiplication of security actors and entrenched foreign involvement have only complicated the Syrian security and defense sector’s precarious condition, rendering civil-military relations less predictable and more vulnerable to regime challenges.
The pre-2011 Syrian military
Before discussing the changes, one ought to understand the Assad regime’s pre-2011 military force. When Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970, Syria’s civil-military relations were already at an acute degree of imbalance, where the military had a strong political orientation and a magnitude of authority. When building his regime, Assad was able to end the military’s notorious business in instigating regime change via coup d’états. But he did so not by ending its political role, but by institutionalizing it so that it formed the backbone of the regime’s power structure. Thus, the armed forces underwent a drastic transformation under Hafez, changing its character from a historically regime-challenging force into a pillar of regime security. The military’s role germinated to support Assad’s Baathist rule and secure his family’s tight control over the state’s power structures.
To rearrange the military to befit his regime’s objectives, Hafez significantly expanded its size. The total number of active armed personnel grew by around 162 percent in the first ten years of his rule and by around 264 percent upon his death in 2000, according to estimates compiled by the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Assad also infused a parallel chain of command and imposed overlapping mandates and institutional redundancy on key military formations. In this way, the various organs of the regime’s coercive apparatus were designed with several layers of allegiance to compete and conjoin for regime survival.
Additionally, and arguably most importantly, Assad took advantage of the deeply divided condition of Syrian society. He elevated the number and role of the Alawites—the minority community to which the Assad family’s social and religious roots belong. Hafez—and later Bashar al-Assad—recognized the impact ethnic inclusion in the military could have on the loyalty among its ranks. As a result, the Alawite were disproportionately represented in the armed forces and the wider security sector. While this posed a legitimacy problem with regards to the public’s perception of the military’s national defense character, it also produced an institutionalized cycle of fear and distrust in Syrian society that not only provided the Assad regime with a loyal and hegemonized group in the military, but also made the Alawites dependent on the regime in a hostile and deeply divided country. As the Assad regime consolidated power, the military’s chief mission became clear: securing regime continuity above all national defense and security considerations.
Today’s Syrian military: Fragmentation and foreign penetration
Prior to 2011, the Assad regime faced formidable domestic challenges—such as the Muslim Brotherhood rebellion in Hama in 1982 and Rifat Assad’s failed coup attempt in 1984—in which the military played a central role in repelling. However, none were like the ongoing challenge that started in 2011, which, forced Bashar to rearrange and surrender some sovereignty over key power structures to maintain regime survival. While the structures that Hafez designed proved useful in standing against widespread public dissatisfaction in the first few years of the conflict, the increased capability of major rebel formations and the consequent battlefield ineffectiveness of Assad’s military prompted the inadvertent expansion of local security forces and import of foreign actors, such as Russia and Iran. Today, this has proven to be a tumorous growth in the Syrian military institution, causing loyalty dilemmas, diversification in funding sources, regional and ideological segmentation, parallel decision-making processes, and dependence on foreign patrons.
To adapt to evolving conflict dynamics, a kaleidoscope of unregulated militias and paramilitary forces with various funding sources and scopes of involvement emerged—particularly after 2013 with Legislative Decree 55—to supplement the Syrian army. While some militias, such as the Local Defense Forces, were institutionalized in the regular army as an auxiliary force, many pro-regime militias remain in a grey legal and operational area contingent on what the post-war structure will look like. Some militias reportedly receive funding from shady pro-regime businessmen, while others are funded exclusively by foreign actors, such as Iran and Russia. As some of these militias took domestic security roles, their recruitment patterns became segmented along regional, religious, and ideological lines, which can indicate growing localized autonomies and a widened circle of loyalty, as well as security and defense incoherence.
This hybrid structure of the Syrian security sector forced de-centralization on military decision-making in a system that had long been ultra-centralized. Armed pro-regime militias have influence to affect key defense decisions, including resource distribution, mobilization, and deployment. Clashes among these militias have been reported throughout the Syrian conflict and across different frontlines. Moreover, the state-militia relationship is precarious, where militias have a patronage relationship with competing organs of the military-intelligence community. In light of engrained corruption and transactional interests, this can lead to conflicts within the military institution.
On the other hand, Russia and Iran have invested high stakes in the Syrian army and the wider security sector and currently exercise considerable influence over the military. While Moscow and Tehran improved the Syrian army’s battlefield effectiveness and reversed its territorial losses, such victory came at a high price as the Assad regime’s sole monopoly over the military decreased. Both foreign powers are increasingly involved in even the appointment of senior officers, unit commanders, and the leadership of intelligence commands. They also worked—sometimes competitively—towards institutionalizing and integrating the many militias into the Syrian army’s command structure. Decision-making with regards to operational strategies is almost completely controlled by Russia and, to a lesser extent, Iran; Syrian army units associated with either foreign power increasingly take part in battles planned and conducted by their foreign ally’s troops or advisors. As a result, it can be assumed that Moscow also has influence over the allocation of resources within the military and can award loyal units and officers.
The other key aspect of the Syrian military is the presence and loyalty of the Alawites. While the Alawites’ hegemonic occupancy of the army heightened after 2011 due to Sunni defections, the community’s relationship with the military institution—and the regime by extension—changed. Their military support of the Assad regime came at an immense cost; they disproportionally lost much of their youth on the battlefield while their community continues to be hurt by the growing deterioration of living conditions. As the Alawites sacrifice for a regime that is unable to provide them with basic necessitates, their circle of loyalty is widening to include emerging notables who are substituting risky military service with safer militia membership and state services with local charities.
Perhaps the recent crackdown on businessman and regime financier Rami Makhlouf—seizing his assets, disbanding militias he financed, and shutting down his charity—can attest to his growing influence among the Alawites and the increasing vulnerability Assad is feeling with regards to his community’s support. However, the Alawites remain entrapped in the cycle of fear that the Assad regime created, which has isolated the minority community from the rest of Syrian society. This has made Assad—for the time being at least—a necessity for the community’s survival.
While the Syrian military played a key role in securing the Assad regime’s survival, the structures that were once designed to keep its forces loyal have gradually shattered in the past nine years. Although the forced de-centralization, multiplication of security actors, and foreign involvement saved the Syrian regime from military defeat, Assad measures the quality of his forces by their consistent loyalty and willingness to use force for his regime’s defense, not by their performance on the battlefield. While a coup against Bashar al-Assad or a collapse of his rule are unlikely, he no longer has the reliability that existed in the past fifty years.
Abdulrahman al-Masri is an independent analyst, focusing on politics and security issues in the Middle East. Follow him on Twitter: @AbdulrhmanMasri.
Image: Syrian President Bashar al Assad visits Syrian army troops in war-torn northwestern Idlib province, Syria, in this handout released by SANA on October 22, 2019. SANA/Handout via REUTERS | |||||
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"Nadim Houry"
] | 2010-07-16T00:00:00 | This 35-page report reviews al-Asad's human rights record in five key areas: repression of political and human rights activism; restrictions on freedom of expression; torture; treatment of the Kurds; and Syria's legacy of enforced disappearances. The verdict is bleak. | en | /sites/default/files/favicon.ico | Human Rights Watch | https://www.hrw.org/report/2010/07/16/wasted-decade/human-rights-syria-during-bashar-al-asads-first-ten-years-power | Executive Summary
After Bashar al-Asad succeeded his father as president in July 2000, many people in Syria hoped that the human rights situation would improve. In his first inaugural speech on July 17, al-Asad spoke of the need for “creative thinking,” “the desperate need for constructive criticism,” “transparency,” and “democracy.”[1] A human rights lawyer summed up his initial feelings on the succession, reflecting the mood and aspirations of many others in the country: “Bashar’s inaugural speech provided a space for hope following the totalitarian years of President [Hafez] Asad. It was as if a nightmare was removed.”[2]
Ten years later, these initial hopes remain unfulfilled, and al-Asad’s words have not translated into any kind of government action to promote criticism, transparency, or democracy. This report reviews Syria’s human rights situation in five key areas and proposes concrete recommendations to the Syrian President that are essential to improving Syria’s human rights record.
The Damascus Spring that followed al-Asad’s ascent to power, during which a number of informal groups began meeting in private homes to discuss political reform, was a short-lived experiment; its highpoint was the shutting down of Mazzeh prison in November 2000 and the release of hundreds of political prisoners shortly thereafter. It came to an abrupt end in August 2001; Syria’s prisons are filled again with political prisoners, journalists, and human rights activists (Annex 1 lists 92 political and human rights activists detained since al-Asad’s ascent to power).
Syria’s opaque decision-making process and the lack of public information on policy debates within the regime make it very difficult to know the real reasons that drove Bashar al-Asad to loosen some of the existing restrictions early on, only to clamp down a few months later and to maintain a tight grip ever since. Was al-Asad a true reformer who did not have the capacity early in his reign to take on an entrenched “old guard” that refused any political opening? If so, why has he not implemented these reforms in the ensuing years after he had consolidated his power base and named his own people to key positions? Or was al-Asad’s talk of reform a mere opportunistic act to gain popularity and legitimacy that he never intended to translate into real changes?
There is not enough publicly available information to answer these questions definitively. However, it is clear that after a decade in power, Bashar al-Asad has not taken the steps necessary to truly improve his country’s human rights record. He has focused his efforts on opening up the economy without broadening public freedoms or establishing public institutions that are accountable for their actions. So while visitors to Damascus are likely to stay in smart boutique hotels and dine in shiny new restaurants, ordinary Syrians continue to risk jail merely for criticizing their president, starting a blog, or protesting government policies.
The state of emergency, enacted in 1963, remains in place, and the government continues to rule by emergency powers. Syria’s security agencies, the feared mukhabarat, continue to detain people without arrest warrants, frequently refuse to disclose their whereabouts for weeks and sometimes months, and regularly engage in torture. Special courts set up under Syria’s emergency laws, such as the Supreme State Security Court (SSSC), sentence people following unfair trials. Syria is still a de facto single-party state with only the Ba`ath Party holding effective power.
Bashar al-Asad has permitted Syrians to access the internet but his security services detain bloggers and censor popular websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Blogger (Google’s blogging engine). On September 22, 2001, one year after al-Asad assumed power, the Syrian government adopted a new Press Law (Decree No. 50/2001), which provided the government with sweeping controls over newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals, as well as virtually anything else printed in Syria, from books to pamphlets and posters.
Despite statements by First Lady Asma al-Asad in January 2010 that the government “wanted to open more space for civil society to work,” Syria’s security services continue to deny registration requests for independent non-governmental organizations and none of Syria’s human rights groups are licensed.
The Kurdish minority, estimated to be 10 percent of the population, is denied basic group rights, including the right to learn Kurdish in schools or celebrate Kurdish festivals, such as Nowruz (Kurdish New Year). Official repression of Kurds increased further after Syrian Kurds held large-scale demonstrations, some violent, throughout northern Syria in March 2004 in order to voice long-simmering grievances. Since then, security forces have dispersed Kurdish political and cultural gatherings, sometimes with lethal force, and have detained a number of leading Kurdish political activists, who they have referred to military courts or the SSSC for prosecution under charges of “inciting strife,” or “weakening national sentiment.” Despite repeated promises by al-Asad, an estimated 300,000 stateless Kurds are still waiting for the Syrian government to solve their predicament by granting them citizenship. Most of these had their Syrian citizenship stripped by the Syrian government after an exceptional census in 1962 or are their descendants.
Promises by al-Asad for new laws that would broaden political and civil society participation have not materialized. In March 2005 he promised while speaking to Spanish journalists that “the coming period will be one of freedom for political parties in Syria.”[4] In June 2005 the Ba`ath Party Congress recommended the establishment of a new political party law that would allow the creation of new non-ethnic and non-religious political parties.[5] To date, no new draft law has been officially introduced.
Repression in Syria today may be less severe than during Syria’s darks years in the early 1980s, when security forces carried out large-scale disappearances and extrajudicial killings. But that is hardly an achievement or measure of improvement given the different circumstances. As a prominent dissident told Human Rights Watch recently, “In the 1980s, we went to jail without trial. Now, we get a trial, but we still go to jail.”[6]
In public interviews and speeches, al-Asad has justified the lack of political reforms by either arguing that his priority is economic reform, or by stating that regional circumstances have interfered with his reform agenda. In his second inaugural speech in July 2007, following an endorsement for a second term with 97.6 percent of the vote, al-Asad noted that:
Numerous circumstances hindered some of the political developments which we wanted to achieve. Our supreme objective, amidst the chaos certain parties have been exporting to our region—and which surrounds us now—was to preserve the safety and security of our citizens and maintain the stability our people enjoys.[7]
While there is no doubt that Syria has faced numerous foreign policy challenges in the last decade, from the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 to Syria’s forced withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005 and its subsequent isolation by Western powers, these do not explain, let alone justify, the Syrian government’s repressive behavior toward its own citizens.
A review of Syria’s record shows a consistent policy of repressing dissent regardless of international or regional developments. Al-Asad’s crackdown on dissidents began in August 2001, before the United States invaded Iraq, and continued throughout the decade, irrespective of the state of Syria’s relations with the international community. Syria’s emergence from its Western-imposed isolation since 2007 has not improved the situation for Syria’s political and human rights activists.
In March 2007, the European Union reopened its dialogue with Damascus, after it had suspended talks on an EU association agreement in 2005 following the murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The US followed suit, with House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi meeting al-Asad in Damascus in April 2007, followed by a visit to Syria in May 2007 by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Yet, in May 2007, Syrian courts sentenced leading dissident Kamal Labwani and prominent political writer Michel Kilo to long jail terms for their peaceful activities, only weeks after jailing human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni.
More recently, Europe’s, and particularly France’s, extensive engagement with Syria following al-Asad’s visit to Paris in July 2008 has not eased Syria’s repression of human rights activism. On July 28, 2009, the government detained Muhanad al-Hasani, a human rights lawyer and the foremost monitor of the State Security Court. Three months later, on October 14, 2009, it detained Haytham al-Maleh, 78, a human rights lawyer who criticized the regime’s policies on an opposition TV station.
Writing ten years ago in June 2000, Riad al-Turk, a prominent Syrian opposition leader and the former secretary general of the Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau), asked in an article whether Syria will remain a “Kingdom of Silence”—a country where criticism of government policies is banned. His question still resonates today. Without reform in the five areas outlined in this report, al-Asad’s legacy will merely extend that of his father: government by repression.
I. Repression of Political and Human Rights Activism
In the early months of his rule, Bashar al-Asad emphasized the principle of openness. Sensing a possible opportunity, many political and human rights activists began to raise their voices to demand the introduction of greater freedoms and political reforms in Syria. A number of informal groups began meeting in private homes to discuss human rights and reform efforts. The authorities allowed these forums to take place, leading to a period of relative openness often referred to as the “Damascus Spring.” By early 2001, 21 such informal groups functioned across Syria.[8]
However, al-Asad’s brief promotion of tolerance came to an abrupt end. On January 29, 2001, Syrian Information Minister Adnan `Omran declared that civil society is an “American term” that had recently been given “additional meanings” by “groups that seek to become (political) parties.”[9] A month later, al-Asad repeated the warnings to the civil society movement:
When the consequences of an action affect the stability of the homeland, there are two possibilities: either the perpetrator is a foreign agent acting on behalf of an outside power, or else he is a simple person acting unintentionally. But in both cases a service is being done to the country’s enemies, and consequently both are dealt with in a similar fashion, irrespective of their intentions or motives.[10]
The crackdown began in August 2001. On August 9 the security services detained Ma’mun al-Homsi, a deputy in the People’s Assembly known for his criticism of the regime. Subsequent arrests of prominent political and rights activists soon followed, and within a month, Syrian authorities had arrested 10 opposition leaders, including two members of parliament, and cracked down on civil society advocacy groups. The two lawmakers, al-Homsi and Seif, were convicted of “attempting to change the constitution by illegal means” and “inciting racial and sectarian strife,” and sentenced by the Damascus Criminal Court to five years in jail. The other eight activists, Riad al-Turk, `Aref Dalilah, Walid al-Bunni, Kamal al-Labwani, Habib Salih, Hasan Sa`dun, Habib `Isa, and Fawwaz Tello, were referred to the Supreme State Security Court, which issued prison sentences of between two to ten years.[11]
There is virtually no information from Syria to explain why al-Asad initially promised an expansion of freedom only to subsequently reverse his policy. Al-Asad may have feared that what he had planned as a controlled and superficial opening would gain momentum and translate into a wider challenge to his regime. Some analysts argued that by demanding free elections, opposition members and civil society activists had directly challenged a yet-untested al-Asad which forced him to clamp down.[12] Other analysts focused on the role of the “old guard” that surrounded al-Asad, who never looked kindly on any political opening that could challenge their authority. In the words of Eyal Zisser, author of multiple books on Syria, “the old guard forced him [al-Asad] to reverse gears” and pushed him into “leading a counterattack against the supporters of reform.”[13] Regardless of the underlying reasons, the crackdown on the Damascus Spring in the absence of any real threat to the regime seems to indicate that al-Asad was not truly committed to political reforms.
Since then, the Syrian authorities have regularly detained political and human rights activists. Human Rights Watch has documented the arrest of at least 92 political and human rights activists since al-Asad came to power (See Annex 1). However, the actual number is likely much higher, given that it is hard to obtain information about the detention of less prominent political activists, especially Kurds and Islamists.
In detaining and prosecuting activists, Syrian authorities rely on the emergency law, which gives the security services broad powers of arrest, as well as broadly worded “security” provisions in Syria’s Penal Code, such as “issuing calls that weaken national sentiment or awaken racial or sectarian tensions while Syria is at war or is expecting a war” (Article 285 of Syrian Penal Code), “spreading false or exaggerated information that weakens national sentiment while Syria is at war or is expecting a war” (Article 286 of Syrian Penal Code), or undertaking “acts, writings or speech that incite sectarian, racial, or religious strife” (Article 307 of Syrian Penal Code).
Arrests and trials are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Syria’s harassment of dissidents. Syrian security services routinely prohibit or interrupt meetings and press conferences by political activists, civil society, and human rights groups.[16]
The Syrian Bar Association has also harassed human rights lawyers by initiating disciplinary measures to disbar lawyers who criticize the government or the president’s policies. On November 10, 2009, the bar association’s disciplinary tribunal issued a decision to permanently disbar Muhanad al-Hasani, President of the Syrian Human Rights Organization (Swasiah), because he “headed an unlicensed human rights organization without obtaining the prior approval of the bar association” and “attended sessions of the State Security Court to monitor its proceedings without being appointed as a defense lawyer by the accused.”[17]
Syrian authorities also use travel bans as punishment for activists and dissidents. The use of such bans has expanded dramatically since 2006. The Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, an unlicensed non-governmental organization (NGO), issued a report in February 2009 listing 417 political and human rights activists banned from traveling. In some cases, the ban extended to the families of the activists.[18] The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which Syria ratified in 1969, requires all states to ensure that everyone has the right to leave any country, including their own. The only permissible restrictions are those “provided by law” and that “are necessary to protect national security, public order (ordre public), public health or morals or the rights and freedoms of others, and are consistent with the other rights recognized in the present Covenant” (including the right to freedom of expression and association).[19] In this case, the bans imposed on these activists are tied simply to their political expression, and not based on any defined security interests.
Syrian authorities deny all requests by human rights groups to register, and accordingly none are officially authorized to exist. The main impediments to their registration is the 1958 Law on Associations and Private Societies (Law No. 93), which governs the establishment of any type of association or organization in Syria and authorizes the security services to refuse the registration request of these groups.[20] The systematic denial of registration of human rights groups has direct negative implications on their activities, allowing the government to arrest members for participation in an “illegal organization,” and to ban meetings or events. A human rights lawyer told Human Rights Watch that the “lack of registration is like a sword over our necks. The mukhabarat [secret services] can act on it whenever they want.”[21]
In 2005 the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, the ministry officially responsible for administering Law No. 93, said that it would review the law with an eye toward liberalizing its provisions.[22] However, the drive to reform the existing law came to a complete stop shortly thereafter, without any explanation. Were the Syrian authorities responding to outside pressure to open up, or were there elements inside the government pushing for reforms? Syria’s opaque politics and lack of public debate about policy choices make it impossible to really know what drove these decisions.
Five years later, First Lady Asma al-Asad opened a conference in Damascus in January 2010 by declaring that the state “wanted to open more space for civil society to work, develop and partner with the government and implement development-oriented policies.” She said, “We will learn from our mistakes and a law will be passed soon—after consultation with civil society—to provide non-governmental organizations (NGOs) the safeguards they need to operate effectively.”[23] However, no draft law has been made public, and it is not clear whether the Syrian authorities will allow independent and human rights NGOs to officially register or whether they will limit any easing of the law to NGOs that assist the government in its “development-oriented policies.”
The combination of these laws and practices has kept Syria’s human rights activists in constant fear of being detained. As one human rights lawyer told Human Rights Watch recently, “I cannot go on like this. I keep getting called in for interrogation. Every time I go, I don’t know if I will be detained or not.”[24]
Political activists in Syria are also still awaiting a new law for political parties following al-Asad’s March 2005 declaration to a group of Spanish journalists that “the coming period will be one of freedom for political parties” in Syria.”[25] In June 2005, the Ba`ath Party Congress recommended the passing of a new political party law that would allow the creation of non-ethnic and non-religious political parties.[26] However, to date, there is still no new draft law for the creation of political parties.
Accordingly, we urge President al-Asad to:
Lift the state of emergency and repeal Syria’s Emergency Law. The continued application of the Emergency Law since 1963 violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Syria is a party. The Syrian government has failed to show that the state of emergency is strictly necessary for its security. Release all individuals currently deprived of their liberty for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression, association, or assembly.
Order the security services to cease detaining activists and banning them from traveling abroad merely for exercising their legitimate right to freedom of expression and association.
Enact a political parties law in compliance with international human rights norms, and establish an independent electoral commission to register new political parties.
Amend the 1958 Law on Associations and Private Societies (Law No. 93) to ensure that groups formed for any legal purpose are allowed to acquire legal personality by making registration of associations automatic once these associations fulfill the formal requirements and by abolishing penalties for participation in unregistered associations if such associations are not otherwise breaking the law.
II. Restrictions on Freedom of Expression
The Ba`ath party banned all independent publications after it came to power in 1963, and for the following 40 years only three newspapers existed in Syria, all of which were affiliated with the party: al-Ba`ath (the party’s official mouthpiece since 1947), al-Thawra (a 1963 Ba`ath daily meaning “revolution”), and Tishreen (a 1973 Ba`ath daily).[27]
After Bashar al-Asad assumed power, he removed the outright ban on independent publications, but introduced a new Press Law (Decree No. 50/2001), promulgated on September 22, 2001, which provided the government with sweeping control over newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals, as well as virtually anything else printed in Syria, from books to pamphlets and posters. Provisions apply to publishers, editors, journalists, authors, printers, distributors, and bookstore owners, and subject them to imprisonment and steep fines for violations of the law.[28]
Initially, the authorities mostly granted licenses to economic and cultural publications, or to political newspapers issued by individuals or parties close to the Ba`ath party, such as the Communist Party which received a license to publish a weekly entitled Sawt al-Shaab (Voice of the People) in February 2001.[29] The most promising development was the granting that same month of a license to Addomari (the Lamp Lighter), a satirical publication published by renowned Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat. The newspaper was an instant success as it was the first Syrian newspaper in 40 years that printed something different from the views of the Ba`ath party or those of its close allies. With a circulation of 75,000, it sold many times more than the three “official” dailies, but the government closed it down in 2003 after officials told its founder, Ali Farzat, that he “went too far.”[30] His publication had criticized Saddam Hussein by showing him and his generals stuffing the Iraqi people as cannon fodder in the face of the impending US invasion, at a time when the Syrian government’s policy was to oppose the invasion of Iraq.[31]
Censorship remains widespread. The Arab Establishment for Distribution of Printed Products, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Information, vets all newspapers prior to distribution. Syria’s two private daily newspapers covering political topics that have succeeded in staying open are owned by businessmen closely tied to the regime: al-Watan, launched in November 2006, is a daily political newspaper widely reported to be published by President al-Asad’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf; Baladna, a social affairs newspaper, is published by Majd Suleiman, son of security chief General Bahjat Suleiman.[32]
On July 13, 2005, Nizar Mayhoob, a spokesman for the Syrian Ministry of Information, told Human Rights Watch that Syria would issue a new media law, “which will enhance the [press] law issued in 2001 by overcoming its inadequacies.” Al-Asad himself, in his second inaugural speech on July 18, 2007, noted that:
On the media law, the subject has been raised many times. There is a recent proposal by the Ministry of Information on the need to amend the media law. I heard many complaints from journalists and others that they are not happy with the existing law. There could be proposals from the Ministry of Information in this regard which could be studied by the People’s Assembly, and the law could be passed.[33]
As of July 6, 2010, no new law had been introduced and there is still no independent press in Syria.
Instead, the government has extended restrictions it imposes on print media to online outlets, reversing early hopes that al-Asad’s role as chairman of the Syrian Computer Society (SCS) prior to his appointment as president would make him more receptive to freedom of expression online. OpenNet Initiative, a partnership of four leading universities in the US, Canada, and the UK, which monitors government filtration and surveillance of the internet, says that filtering of political websites in Syria is “pervasive.” Internet censorship extends to popular websites such as Blogger (Google’s blogging engine), Facebook, and YouTube.[34]
The authorities have also prosecuted journalists, bloggers, and citizens who dare criticize the authorities or the president. The vast majority of journalists and bloggers have been tried before the State Security Court (SSSC), an exceptional court with almost no procedural guarantees. In 2009, the Committee to Protect Journalists named Syria number three on a list of the ten worst countries in which to be a blogger based on the arrests, harassments, and restrictions that online writers in Syria have faced.[35] Human Rights Watch found that between January 2007 and June 2008, the SSSC sentenced at least 10 writers and bloggers who had criticized the authorities, and that overall the court convicted 153 defendants on the basis of overbroad security provisions (described in Section 1 above) that violate basic rights to freedom of expression. In one case, the SSSC sentenced Muhamad Walid al-Husseini, 67, to three years in prison because a member of the security services overheard him insult the Syrian president and criticize the country’s corruption while sitting at a popular café in Syria.[36]
Table 1. Known Journalists and Bloggers Detained During Bashar al-Asad’s First Decade in Power[37]
Accordingly, we urge President Bashar al-Asad to:
Immediately and unconditionally release all those imprisoned or detained solely for exercising their right to free expression, online or otherwise.
Stop blocking websites for their content.
Introduce a new media law that would remove all prison penalties for defamation and libel; stop government censorship of local and foreign publications; and remove government control over newspapers and other publications.
Amend or abolish the vague provisions of the Syrian Penal Code that permit the authorities to arbitrarily suppress and punish individuals for peaceful expression, in breach of its international legal obligations, on grounds that “national security” is being endangered, including the following provisions: Article 278 (undertaking “acts, writings, or speech unauthorized by the government that expose Syria to the danger of belligerent acts or that disrupt Syria’s ties to foreign states”), Article 285 (“issuing calls that weaken national sentiment or awaken racial or sectarian tensions while Syria is at war or is expecting a war”), Article 286 (spreading “false or exaggerated information that weaken national sentiment while Syria is at war or is expecting a war”), Article 307 (undertaking “acts, writings or speech that incite sectarian, racial or religious strife”), and Article 376 (which imposes a sentence from one to three years on anyone who insults the president).
III. Torture, Ill-Treatment, and Enforced Disappearances
Bashar al-Asad raised hopes for change with respect to the treatment of detainees when he took two significant steps: closing the Mazzeh prison in November 2000, which held numerous political prisoners, and transferring approximately 500 political detainees during July-August 2001 from the notorious Tadmor prison, in Syria’s eastern desert, to Sednaya prison, north of Damascus, which was considered to offer better facilities.
Al-Asad never explained his decision to transfer political prisoners out of Tadmor, but Syrian activists saw the move as a hopeful sign given Tadmor’s association with government repression of the 1980s. Human Rights Watch has documented extensive human rights abuse, torture, and summary executions in Tadmor prison, a facility used to detain thousands of political prisoners in the 1980s; it was also the scene in June 1980 of the extrajudicial killings of an estimated 1,000 prisoners by commando units loyal to Rif`at al-Asad, Hafez al-Asad’s brother (see more on Tadmor prison massacre in Section 5).[38] Faraj Beraqdar, a Syrian poet and five-year inmate in Tadmor, described the prison as “the kingdom of death and madness.”[39]
But while closing Tadmor prison was a promising sign of detention reform, it has not led to other positive improvements. Bashar al-Asad has done nothing to get rid of the practices of incommunicado detention, ill-treatment, and torture during interrogation, which remain common in Syria’s detention facilities.
Syria’s security services regularly hold detainees incommunicado—cut off from all contact with family, a lawyer, or any other link with the outside world— for days, months, and in some cases, years. For example, in August 2008, Syrian security forces detained a group of 13 young men from the northeastern district of Deir al-Zor suspected of having ties to Islamists. To this day, the authorities have not disclosed where they are holding at least 10 of the men, why they arrested them, or whether they will charge them and put them on trial. Prison officials returned the body of one of those detained in Deir al-Zor, Muhammad Amin al-Shawa, 43, to his family on January 10, 2009, but they allowed them to see only his face before burying him. Three Syrian human rights activists told Human Rights Watch that they believe that al-Shawa died due to torture.[40]
Human Rights Watch and other human rights groups have also documented a frequent pattern of torture and other ill‐treatment by Syria’s security services of political and human rights detainees as well as criminal suspects.[41] Out of 30 former Kurdish detainees held after 2004 and interviewed by Human Rights Watch following their release, 12 said that security forces tortured them.[42] Human Rights Watch has also documented the torture of bloggers and beatings of prominent political activists by government security agents. For example, eight of the twelve detainees from the Damascus Declaration for Democratic Change, an umbrella group of opposition and pro-democracy groups, detained in December 2007, told their investigative judge that state security agents had beaten them during detention.[43]
The UN Committee against Torture, which is tasked with monitoring compliance with the Convention against Torture, said in May 2010 that it was “deeply concerned about numerous, ongoing and consistent allegations concerning the routine use of torture by law enforcement and investigative officials…”[44] An official Canadian Commission of Inquiry into the 2002 US deportation to Syria of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, concluded that “the SMI [Syrian Military Intelligence] tortured Mr. Arar while interrogating him during the period he was held incommunicado at the SMI’s Palestine Branch facility.”[45]
In an encouraging step in detainee practices, Bashar al-Asad’s government ratified the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment on July 1, 2004. However, it has not followed the ratification with concrete measures to end the practice of torture, such as investigations of allegations of torture or permission for independent observers to visit Syria’s prisons and detention facilities.
According to the Syrian submission to the Committee Against Torture (CAT), the Syrian Minister for Internal Affairs issued Circular No. 10 dated December 16, 2004, requesting members of the police to hold meetings to “familiarize themselves with the prohibitions on the use of violence against persons on remand and prisoners and to receive instructions on performing their duties in a responsible manner. Successful investigators can arrive at the desired result using proper scientific and technical methods to establish the facts of a case without needing to resort to illegal methods.”[46] In their submission, the Syrian delegation mentioned six cases where police were held liable for torturing people.[47]
However, such cases remain exceptions; they are limited to the police force and not the security services, which benefit from extensive legal immunity for acts of torture. Legislative Decree No. 14, of January 15, 1969, which established the General Intelligence Division (Idarat al-Mukhabaraat al-`Ama), one of Syria’s largest security apparatuses, provides that “no legal action may be taken against any employee of General Intelligence for crimes committed while carrying out their designated duties … except by an order issued by the Director.” To Human Rights Watch’s knowledge, the director of General Intelligence has issued no such order to date. On September 30, 2008, al-Asad issued Legislative Decree 69, which extended this immunity to members of other security forces, by requiring a decree from the General Command of the Army and Armed Forces to prosecute any member of the internal security forces, Political Security, and customs police.[48]
Syria’s courts continue to accept confessions obtained under torture. For example, Human Rights Watch’s review of trials in the SSSC in 2007 and 2008 revealed that 33 defendants alleged before the judge that they had been tortured and that the security services had extracted confessions from them by force, but in no case did the SSSC take any measure to open an investigation into these claims.[49]
When human rights lawyers allege that their clients have been tortured, they risk being prosecuted for “spreading false information,” a criminal charge. For example, on April 24, 2007, a Damascus criminal court sentenced human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni to five years in prison for alleging that a man had died in a Syrian jail because of its inhumane conditions.[50] More recently, on June 30, 2010, a Damascus criminal court sentenced another prominent human rights lawyer, Muhanad al-Hasani, to three years in prison because he publicly denounced the alleged death of a detainee under torture and criticized the SSSC.[51]
Syria’s prison facilities are still off-limits to independent observers, and Syrian authorities continue to impose a blackout on information concerning the deadly shooting of as many as 25 inmates by military police in Sednaya prison on July 5, 2008.
Accordingly, we urge President Bashar al-Asad to:
Order an independent investigation into torture allegations and make public the results of the investigation. Discipline or prosecute, as appropriate, officials responsible for the mistreatment of detainees, including those who gave orders or were otherwise complicit, and make public the results of the punishment.
Adopt effective measures to ensure that all detainees have prompt access to a lawyer and an independent medical examination.
Allow independent outside observers access to prisons and detention facilities.
Order an independent investigation into the deadly shooting of inmates by military police at Sednaya prison and make the findings public.
Ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT), and invite its Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture to visit and inspect Syria’s places of detention.
IV. Repression of Kurds
Kurds are the largest non-Arab ethnic minority in Syria; estimated at approximately 1.7 million, they make up roughly 10 percent of Syria’s population. Since the 1950s, successive Syrian governments have pursued a policy of repressing Kurdish identity because they perceived it to be a threat to the unity of an Arab Syria. Under Bashar al-Asad, Syrian authorities have continued to suppress the political and cultural rights of the Kurdish minority, including banning the teaching of Kurdish in schools and regularly disrupting gatherings to celebrate Kurdish festivals such as Nowruz (the Kurdish New Year).
Harassment of Syrian Kurds increased further after they held large-scale demonstrations, some violent, throughout northern Syria in March 2004 to voice long-simmering grievances. Syrian authorities reacted to the protests with lethal force, killing at least 36 people, injuring over 160, and detaining more than 2,000, amidst widespread reports of torture and ill-treatment of detainees. Most detainees were eventually released, including 312 who were freed under an amnesty announced by al-Asad on March 30, 2005. However, since then, the Syrian government has maintained a policy of banning Kurdish political and cultural gatherings. Human Rights Watch has documented the repression of at least 14 Kurdish political and cultural gatherings since 2005. The security forces also have detained a number of leading Kurdish political activists and referred them to military courts or the SSSC for prosecution under charges of “inciting strife” or “weakening national sentiment.”[53]
In addition, large numbers of Kurds are stateless and consequently face a range of difficulties, from getting jobs and registering weddings to obtaining state services. In 1962, an exceptional census stripped some 120,000 Syrian Kurds—20 percent of the Syrian Kurdish population—of their Syrian citizenship. By many accounts, the special census was carried out in an arbitrary manner. Brothers from the same family, born in the same Syrian village, were classified differently. Fathers became foreigners while their sons remained citizens. The number of stateless Kurds grew with time as descendants of those who lost citizenship in 1962 multiplied; as a result, their number is now estimated at 300,000.[54]
Al-Asad has repeatedly promised Kurdish leaders a solution to the plight of the stateless Kurds, but a decade later, they are still waiting. He first promised to tackle the issue when he visited the largely Kurdish-populated region of al-Hasaka on August 18, 2002, and met with a number of Kurdish leaders.[55] In his second inaugural speech on July 17, 2007, he mentioned the promise he made in 2002, but noted that political developments had prevented progress in this area:
I visited al-Hasaka governorate in August 2002 and met representatives of the community there. All of them without exception talked about this issue [the 1962 census]. I told them, “we have no problem, we will start working on it.” That was the time when the United States was preparing to invade Iraq.… We started moving slowly, the Iraq war happened, and there were different circumstances which stopped many things concerning internal reform. In 2004, the riots in al-Qamishli governorate happened, and we did not exactly know the background of the riots, because some people took advantage of the events for non-patriotic purposes.… We restarted the process last year on the government’s initiative since the events have gone and it was shown that there were no non-patriotic implications.[56]
Later in his speech, al-Asad referred to a draft law that would solve the problem for some stateless Kurds, namely those who became stateless even though other members of their family obtained citizenship.[57] He concluded by saying that “the consultations continue…and when we are done with those…the law is ready.” Three years later, and despite the fact that the political justifications for the delays have long ceased to exist, there is no new law, and no steps have been taken to address Kurdish grievances.
Accordingly, we urge President Bashar al-Asad to:
Set up a commission tasked with addressing the underlying grievances of the Kurdish minority in Syria and make public the results of its findings and recommendations. The commission should include members of Syria’s Kurdish political parties.
Redress the status of all Kurds who were born in Syria but are stateless by offering citizenship to any person with strong ties to Syria by reason of birth, marriage, or long residence in the country and who is not otherwise entitled to citizenship in another country.
Identify and remove discriminatory laws and policies on Kurds, including reviewing all government decrees and directives that apply uniquely to the Kurdish minority in Syria or have a disproportionate impact on them.
Ensure that Syria’s Kurds have the right to enjoy their own culture and use their own language; likewise, ensure freedom of expression, including the right to celebrate cultural holidays and learn Kurdish in schools.
Invite the UN Independent Expert on Minority Issues to visit Syria.
V. Legacy of Enforced Disappearances
Bashar al-Asad inherited a country with a legacy of abusive practices, but to date he has not taken any concrete steps to acknowledge and address these abuses or shed light on the fate of thousands of people who have disappeared since the 1980s.
Syria’s security forces were involved in gross human rights violations in the late 1970s and 1980s in an effort to quell opposition to Hafez al-Asad’s regime, including armed opposition by certain segments of the Muslim Brotherhood. The security forces detained and tortured thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, communist and other leftist parties, the Iraqi Ba`ath party, Nasserite parties, and different Palestinian groups—many of whom subsequently disappeared. While no exact figures exist, various researchers estimate the number of the disappeared to be 17,000 persons.[58] Syria’s armed forces and security services also detained and abducted Lebanese, Palestinians, and other Arab nationals during Syria’s military presence in Lebanon, hundreds of whom are still unaccounted for.
On June 27, 1980, commandos from the Defense Brigades under the command of Rif`at al-Asad, Hafez al-Asad’s brother, killed an estimated 1,000 unarmed inmates, mostly Islamists, at Tadmor military prison, in retaliation for a failed assassination attempt against Hafez al-Asad.[59] The names of those killed were never made public. Less than two years later, from February to March 1982, commandos from the Defense Brigades and units of the Special Forces circled the city of Hama, Syria’s fourth largest town and an opposition stronghold, and engaged in heavy fighting against Islamists opposed to the regime. The Syrian security troops committed large scale human rights violations during the fighting, including the killing of hundreds of people in a series of mass executions near the municipal stadium and other sites. While estimates of the number killed in Hama vary widely, the most credible reports put the number at between five and ten thousand people.[60]
Table 2. Major Incidents of Human Rights Violations in the early 1980s[61]
While many political detainees from the 1980s were released pursuant to various amnesties, some under Hafez al-Asad and others under Bashar, the fate of thousands of disappeared remains unknown, and it is still dangerous to raise these issues inside Syria.
Lebanese groups have lobbied hard to shed light on the fate of the disappeared from Lebanon. In May 2005, a joint Lebanese-Syrian committee was finally formed to address the issue. However, five years after beginning its work, it has yet to produce any concrete results or publish any findings.
Accordingly, we urge President Bashar al-Asad to:
Set up an independent national commission for truth and justice that includes representatives of the victims’ families, independent civil society activists, and international organizations with experience working on the issue of disappearances such as the ICRC. The commission’s mandate will be to resolve the issue of the missing and the disappeared in Syria, and those abducted from Lebanon and suspected of being detained in Syria.
Support the ratification of the United Nations Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances.
VI. Annex: List of Political and Human Rights Activists Detained during Bashar al-Asad’s First Decade in Power
(This is not an exhaustive list, but rather represents cases that Human Rights Watch was able to document) | ||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 14 | https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/07/world/meast/syria-house-of-assad/index.html | en | Syria’s shaky dynasty has survived on a pattern of loyalty, brutality | [
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"Brian Todd"
] | 2013-09-07T00:00:00 | Part of the story behind the Syrian crisis: Bashar al-Assad has had trouble changing the old ways of his father. | en | /media/sites/cnn/apple-touch-icon.png | CNN | https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/07/world/meast/syria-house-of-assad/index.html | For Hafez al-Assad, the calculation was clear.
He had won power in Syria by outmaneuvering rivals and, when necessary, using force. His son would not have to repeat those steps to win power – but likely would have to emulate his father to remain as president.
Al-Assad groomed his son, gave him a military pedigree, toughened him. The path was set.
The son in question was not Bashar al-Assad, the man now leading Syria in a spiraling civil war and toward a possible military strike by the United States.
The son Hafez wanted to be president was his first-born, Bassel. Analysts say Hafez al-Assad was closest to Bassel. Bashar, as a child, was shy and modest. The father had a distant relationship with him.
First on CNN: Videos of chemical attack effects
That changed in 1994, when Bassel al-Assad, always known to be reckless as well as cruel, was killed while driving at a high speed toward the Damascus airport to see his girlfriend.
Syria would not have the strongman Hafez envisioned. It would fall to Bashar, the reluctant heir who really wanted to be an ophthamologist.
When Hafez al-Assad died of a heart attack in June 2000, Bashar inherited a regime built on fierce loyalty – to family and religious sect. Hafez had been born into a poor family from the Alawite mountains in northwestern Syria. The Alawites had often been looked down upon by the wealthier, majority Sunnis in Syria, and Hafez al-Assad was determined to break the mold.
He shattered it.
He joined the Ba’ath Party and then rose through the ranks of the Syrian air force. But it was hardly that straightforward. The man thrived in the backrooms of Syrian palace intrigue where, according to most accounts, betraying friends and killing or banishing enemies put you on the fast track to success.
Elder al-Assad was careful with U.S.
In Syria, analysts say, there were more than 20 successful and unsuccessful coups between 1949 and 1970, when Hafez al-Assad took power. He was involved in three of them himself.
Once in power, Hafez al-Assad proved to be one of the most cunning, ruthless dictators in a region full of them. He crushed a 1982 rebellion by the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama by laying siege to the city and killing more than 10,000 of his own people. At different times he waged war against, and negotiated peace with Israel.
EU urges strong response; Kerry seeks support for military action
He made fast friends with Hezbollah, which the United States considers a terrorist group. But he also made sure the United States was never a full-fledged enemy. In the 1970s and ’80s he did that by sending his forces to the aid of embattled Christians in Lebanon.
And in 1990 and 1991, when President George H.W. Bush was building a coalition against Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad committed 2,000 troops to the coalition side.
Bashar followed that lead. The administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have, at different periods, engaged in diplomacy with Bashar’s regime and pushed away from it. The Bush team reached out in 2003 when it needed an ally against Iraq.
In the early years of the Obama administration, Sen. John Kerry – the man now calling Bashar al-Assad a “thug and a murderer” – was the point man in the administration’s efforts to cultivate the Syrian dictator.
There is a telling image from that period: a photograph taken in early 2009 of Kerry and his wife, Teresa, having an intimate dinner in Damascus with Bashar al-Assad and his glamorous, London-born wife, Asma.
Several scenarios possible
How did it all unravel?
Analysts say the civil war is partially the result of old resentments. Much of the majority Sunni population is embittered after decades under the rule of a despotic family from a small minority, the Alawites.
But Bashar al-Assad also had trouble changing the old ways of his father.
“Hafez al-Assad stabilized Syria through a closed system. People couldn’t travel. They couldn’t communicate very well. International news was very limited”, says Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Chemical weapons: The desperate army’s escape from stalemate
Tabler, who wrote an inside account of the al-Assad regime entitled “In the Lion’s Den,” says, “When Bashar came to power, he lifted the restrictions on travel, allowed people to read international newspapers, satellite television and the Internet. And it opened Syrians’ minds. But how do you control this system? And how do you basically perpetuate authoritarian and tyrannical rule?”
Obama has called on Congress to back plans to punish al-Assad militarily for an alleged chemical weapons attack in his own country.
Meanwhile, his regime is locked in a bloody fight with rebels. More than 100,000 Syrians have died, according to the United Nations.
How does it end for the House of Assad? There are several possibilities.
Bashar al-Assad could fight to the end, lose and be killed. He could eventually flee the country and be given refuge in Iran, Russia or Venezuela.
Or he could prevail. Tabler says if he does, Syria won’t look the same.
“I think at the moment, what’s likely to happen is that the Assad family will rule over part of Syria for the foreseeable future,” says Tabler. “But they’re never going to rule over all of geographic Syria again.” | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 3 | 23 | https://taskandpurpose.com/news/us-military-purple-hearts/ | en | 5 US troops awarded Purple Hearts since latest Iraq, Syria attacks began in October | [
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"Jeff Schogol"
] | 2023-12-15T15:17:31-05:00 | Three soldiers and two Marines have received Purple Hearts since October, when Iranian proxies started attacking US troops in Iraq and Syria. | en | Task & Purpose | https://taskandpurpose.com/news/us-military-purple-hearts/ | Five U.S. troops have been awarded Purple Hearts after being wounded in the latest surge of attacks against American forces in Iraq and Syria that began on Oct. 17, service officials confirmed.
Three active-duty soldiers have received the Purple Heart since Oct. 1, said Army spokeswoman Heather J. Hagan.
No information has been publicly released yet about the severity of these soldiers’ injuries or in which country they were wounded.
Additionally, two Marines have received Purple Hearts since October according to the Marine Corps. Further information on the circumstances for which the two Marines received the award was not immediately available on Friday.
Military.com first reported that three soldiers and two Marines had received Purple Hearts for the recent attacks in Iraq and Syria.
Subscribe to Task & Purpose Today. Get the latest military news and culture in your inbox daily.
No airmen or Space Force Guardians have been awarded Purple Hearts since Oct. 1, and the Navy had no record of sailors receiving Purple Hearts during that same time period, service officials told Task & Purpose.
The recent spate of attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria began after Hamas, which is backed by Iran, launched its Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel. U.S. government officials have repeatedly warned that Iran is trying to escalate the conflict by having its proxies target American troops in the Middle East.
Since Oct. 17, U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria have been attacked 98 times by rockets, drones, mortars, and close-range ballistic missiles, according to the Pentagon. Forty-six of those attacks took place in Iraq and 52 in Syria.
The attacks have resulted in 66 American service members being wounded, of which nearly 30 have been diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury so far, according to the Pentagon.
The U.S. military has conducted at least six airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since the attacks by Iranian proxies began, including an AC-130 strike against militants that had launched a ballistic missile at Al Asad Air Base in Western Iraq.
With the drastic increase of attacks against U.S. troops in the region by Iranian proxies, the United States and Iran have come the closest to open hostilities since January 2021, when an American drone killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the former head of the IRGC, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the commander of Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia.
Iran retaliated by firing ballistic missiles at bases in Iraq that host U.S. troops. Of 110 service members at Al Asad Air Base who were diagnosed with mild Traumatic Brain Injury following the ballistic missile attack, 29 soldiers were awarded Purple Hearts.
Currently, about 2,500 U.S. troops are deployed to Iraq and another 900 are in Syria to fight the remnants of. the Islamic State group, which became an insurgency after it lost its last enclave in 2019.
Despite the uptick in attacks by Iranian-backed proxies, U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria carried out 40 missions against ISIS during November, killing four suspected ISIS fighters and detaining another 33.
“Even in the midst of complex challenges within the region, CENTCOM remains steadfast to the region and the enduring defeat of ISIS,” Army Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, head of CENTCOM, said in a Dec. 7 statement.
The latest on Task & Purpose | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 21 | https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2022/04/11/the-assad-familys-anticorruption-playbook-patronage-and-pruning/ | en | The Assad Family’s (Anti)Corruption Playbook: Patronage and Pruning | [
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"Sandy Alkoutami"
] | 2022-04-11T00:00:00 | The Syrian civil war is an unfathomable and ongoing tragedy. In addition to the direct destruction and loss of life, the war has plunged Syria’s already troubled economy into an even deeper crisis. A shocking 90% of the Syrian population lives in extreme poverty, and roughly 60% of the country does not have adequate food.… | en | https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico | GAB | The Global Anticorruption Blog | https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2022/04/11/the-assad-familys-anticorruption-playbook-patronage-and-pruning/ | The Syrian civil war is an unfathomable and ongoing tragedy. In addition to the direct destruction and loss of life, the war has plunged Syria’s already troubled economy into an even deeper crisis. A shocking 90% of the Syrian population lives in extreme poverty, and roughly 60% of the country does not have adequate food. Since 2010, the economy has contracted by 60%, while inflation has increased by over 300% and the value of the Syrian lira has depreciated by over 700%. Yet President Bashar al-Assad and his loyal networks of regime insiders and elite businessmen continues to profit, thanks in large part to rampant corruption. Assad and his friends have diverted tens of millions in humanitarian aid, forced families of detainees to pay bribes to visit them or win their release, and pocketed and re-sold rationed wheat on black markets. Most recently, the Syrian regime and its business partners have turned the country into a narcostate. In a damning investigation released at the end of 2021, the New York Times found that the Fourth Armored Division of the Syrian Army—commanded by Assad’s younger brother, Maher al-Assad—is behind the production and distribution of the amphetamine captagon.
This story sounds depressingly familiar: In all too many countries, a tiny elite of privileged insiders gets rich from corrupt practices, while ordinary people suffer extreme deprivation. But in Syria there is a twist: In the last two years, the Assad regime has also been carrying out a ruthless anticorruption campaign, one that has targeted some of his own loyalists. For example, in 2020 Assad went after his cousin and close friend Rami Makhlouf, a once-untouchable business tycoon who at one point was estimated to control 60% of the Syrian economy. More recently, Assad detained and seized the assets of five loyal executives at Syria’s second-largest cellphone company.
This seems like a paradox: Assad’s anticorruption campaign is unfolding alongside his circle’s ongoing abuses of power. But in fact this is true to form. Starting during the reign of Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez Al-Assad (henceforth Hafez), the Assad regime has followed a pattern of “patronage and pruning” to manage the inherent tension between, on the one hand, cultivating elite support by allowing loyal elites to exploit public power for private gain, and, on the other hand, preventing public discontent with corruption from getting so out of hand that it threatens the regime’s stability and authority.
Understanding Assad’s playbook requires a discussion of how patronage became the prevailing mode of political organization in Syria under Hafez. Before his presidential reign, Hafez founded a Secret Military Committee that conspired to build an underground Ba’ath party behind the previous regime. Hafez leaned on friends and relatives in minority sects (Alawites, Christians, and Druze) for over a decade to build control across the government. These personal networks ushered him into his appointment as defense minister in 1966, setting the stage for his military coup in 1970. After seizing power, Hafez then employed an extensive patronage system to further legitimize his authority. Hafez, an Alawite himself, appointed hundreds of Alawites and friends from minority sects to command a variety of political institutions, including military intelligence services, elite military units, the Regional Command, and various other bureaus. These bureaus were then tasked with winning over elites in Syria beyond Hafez’s close circle, such as businessmen and large corporations. To court the elite, Hafez’s regime used state resources to give these private actors government appointments, loans, land grants, and off-the-record relief from state regulations. As these patronage networks proliferated, government contracts were awarded almost entirely based on familiarity and cronyism. Heavy-handed distribution of patronage to supporters solidified a corrupt bureaucracy that made simple administrative tasks a “Kafkaesque torment” that couldn’t be performed without under-the-table bribes.
By 1980, corruption was getting out of control. Considerable government resources were being drained and public resentment was growing—with this resentment sometimes manifesting in uprisings, most notably an insurgency in the city of Hama. Hafez feared that citizen unrest was weakening his grip on power. Part of his response involved violent repression, including the near-levelling of Hama and the indiscriminate massacre of thousands of Syrians in 1982. But after Hafez managed to quell the immediate unrest with violence, he turned to mitigating the underlying tensions that had contributed to this regime-threatening crisis. Recognizing corruption as one of the main causes of citizen anger, in 1985 Hafez launched an anticorruption campaign targeting his own cronies. Over the course of several years, Hafez’s anticorruption drive took down multiple businessmen (liquidating their assets in the process), as well as officials at the Ministry of the Treasury. The campaign also urged military divisions of notable officers, and even derogated and exiled Hafaz’s brother and vice president Rif’at al-Assad.
But Hafez’s anticorruption campaign had to have its limits. Turning away from patronage completely was impossible for a regime built on patronage, and attempting to do so would risk upsetting too many of Hafaz’s various friends in high places, thereby posing as much or more of a threat to his rule as citizen anger over corruption. So, rather than genuinely seeking to uproot patronage, Hafaz adopted a strategy of “pruning”: He trimmed the edges of the patronage system, attacking some of the most egregious and high-profile abuses, while allowing the overall system to continue to operate. Indeed, when Hafaz removed corrupt officials, he would promote replacements from minority sects who were also selected on the grounds of familiarity and political loyalty rather than merit.
The patronage-and-pruning cycle recurred in 2000 when Bashar al-Assad took over as president. At that time, the Syrian public was increasingly angry about the widespread corruption in the country. Assad saw this anger as a threat to his power. Hoping to appease the public and mitigate threats to his regime, Assad launched his own anticorruption campaign, pruning the regime of many Hafez-era Alawite and minority loyalists across military and political bureaus. Taking after his father, even as he took these high-profile actions to demonstrate the seriousness of his crackdown on corruption, Assad in fact kept the patronage machine rolling along, appointing new friends to high-level positions. Indeed, despite public removals of several old-guard cronies, reports from the early 2000s show that, on balance, the number of Alawite and minority friends in official positions may have actually increased, and by 2005, levels of corruption surpassed those of the Hafez era. The Assad family and friends siphoned off roughly 85% of oil revenues that year, government “mafias” controlled most of the economy and entrepreneurial environment, and bribes became a public, normal part of daily life.
Assad’s anticorruption efforts waned in the build-up to the conflict in 2011. Faced with a revolution, Assad leaned heavily on the patronage system to ensure loyalists remained on his side, locking in a status quo of corruption among political and military elites that’s considered even worse than before the war.
This brings us back to 2022. Assad’s circumstances today are different in key areas than Hafez’s. Assad faces a protracted war, heavier sanctions, and pressure from foreign allies in Russia, Iran, and Lebanon. Despite these new circumstances, Assad’s recent actions align with what we’ve seen before. With corruption getting out of hand and society increasingly disgruntled—as demonstrated by major street demonstrations in the city of Sweida earlier this year—Assad is again employing a “pruning” strategy, announcing high-profile actions against corruption and patronage, and sacrificing some loyalists in the process, to try to tamp down public anger and keep the citizens quiescent. Viewing in historical perspective, Assad’s current anticorruption moves represent the use of a standard play in a five-decade-old playbook.
For Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, anticorruption efforts—in the form of targeted pruning—are implemented when their rich and powerful friends become too rich and too powerful, provoking a dangerous level of public anger and resentment. At that point, old loyalists get purged and replaced with new ones. But the system doesn’t change, and ordinary Syrian citizens remain left to fend for themselves. | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 38 | https://www.visapourlimage.com/en/festival/exhibitions/syrie-dans-homs | en | Syria, inside Homs | [
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] | null | [] | null | Syria, inside Homs, Visa pour l’image | en | /themes/VPITheme/static/favicons/apple-touch-icon.png | Visa pour l’image | https://www.visapourlimage.com/en/festival/exhibitions/syrie-dans-homs | Winner of the 2012 ICRC Humanitarian Visa d’or Award – International Committee of the Red Cross
Shortly before the Syrian uprising, the first people to sense that revolution was on the way were the most determined opponents of Bashar el-Assad’s régime. They could still remember 1982 and the Hama massacre, the cruel epilogue to crush an Islamist revolt that had been going on for three years. At the time, the régime was led by Hafez el-Assad, the father of the current president, who had no qualms about firing heavy weapons on the fourth largest city in the country, leaving thousands dead, although no official figures were ever released. (According to estimates, the number of dead was between 10 000 and 20 000.)
The opponents were right. Since March 17, 2011, and the first killings in Deraa in the south of the country, the Syrian regime has again opted for a military response, plus a few purely cosmetic reforms on the side. When massive crowds gained control of the streets, peacefully, the régime was faced with a challenge, and attempted to push part of the opposition movement into armed confrontation, an area where it believed it held the advantage.
Under this pressure, the Free Syrian Army formed, their ranks filled with deserters and civilians, and the angry demonstrations still continued every Friday. Bashar el-Assad’s calculation turned out to be short-sighted, as a classical guerilla force took shape, prepared to concede terrain when concentrated forces sent in by the regime from time to time proved to be too powerful, and then quick to return once the armored vehicles had set off for another rebel stronghold. | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 3 | 1 | https://www.airandspaceforces.com/secret-air-force-cross-syria/ | en | Airman Earned an Air Force Cross. His Name Remains Secret. | [
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"Greg Hadley"
] | 2024-06-04T20:41:20+00:00 | A combat controller from the 24th Special Tactics Squadron was secretly awarded an Air Force Cross in 2020 for his actions in Syria. | en | Air & Space Forces Magazine | https://www.airandspaceforces.com/secret-air-force-cross-syria/ | Share Article
An Air Force combat controller was awarded the Air Force Cross—the second-highest decoration for valor in combat behind the Medal of Honor—for actions during a fierce battle in Syria in 2018. His identity, however, remains a well-kept secret.
The Airman, a member of the 24th Special Tactics Squadron, was awarded the medal in September 2020, but the Air Force didn’t disclose it until it answered Washington Post reporter Kyle Rempfer’s Freedom of Information Act request seeking the citation and order. An Air Force spokeswoman confirmed the citation to Air & Space Forces Magazine and said the combat controller’s identity was redacted under a FOIA exemption covering personnel in overseas, sensitive, or routinely deployable units.
Rempfer wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, May 31 that his FOIA request was related to the Battle of Khasham, which took place Feb. 7-8, 2018, near Dewr Az Zewr, Syria, the time and place included in the Airman’s citation.
“On this date, [redacted] exposed himself to artillery, rocket, and mortar bombardment, and direct fire from main battle tanks, rocket-propelled grenades, and heavy automatic weapons during the hasty defense of a United States Special Operations Forces operating location,” the citation reads. “His actions prevented an isolated force of American and coalition personnel from being overrun by a professionally trained and technically proficient combined-arms enemy assault comprised of main battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, heavy artillery tubes, and a battalion of infantry soldiers.”
At the time, U.S. officials said their troops faced an “unprovoked attack” by forces associated with the regime of leader Bashar al-Assad. U.S. forces have been in Syria since 2014 as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, its defeat-ISIS mission, and were embedded with the Syrian Democratic Forces, who oppose al-Assad in the Syrian civil war.
U.S. troops watched for about a week as “pro-regime” forces built up a battalion-sized force complete with artillery, tanks, and mortars near their position, officials said. The forces fired up to 30 artillery and tank rounds on the SDF and U.S. position, prompting a response by U.S. aircraft, including F-22s and MQ-9s, as well as artillery on the ground.
Air Force combat controllers deploy with special operations units into combat or hostile environments and help direct aircraft and provide command and control. According to a subsequent New York Times report based on interviews and documents, USAF combat controllers helped direct B-52 bombers where to strike, helping stop an intense barrage of tank fire, artillery, and mortar rounds.
The Air Force Cross citation notes that the Airman showed “extraordinary heroism, superb airmanship, and aggressiveness in the face of the enemy.”
Despite being significantly outnumbered, U.S. forces suffered no casualties in the battle.
There have been conflicting subsequent reports as to whether members of Russian private military companies were part of the formation that attacked U.S. forces. Officials have said they maintained deconfliction lines with the Russian military before and during the battle. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 94 | https://www.uri.edu/news/2023/04/uri-junior-lina-al-taan-al-hariri-wins-truman-scholarship-for-r-i/ | en | URI junior Lina Al Taan Al Hariri wins Truman Scholarship for R.I. | [
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] | null | [] | 2023-04-12T18:00:01+00:00 | KINGSTON, R.I. – April 12, 2023 – Lina Al Taan Al Hariri, a University of Rhode Island junior triple majoring in international studies, global language and area studies, and gender and women’s studies, was in Amman, Jordan, when she joined a Zoom meeting Friday afternoon that delivered some big news. URI President Marc Parlange, Kathleen […] | en | https://www.uri.edu/news/2023/04/uri-junior-lina-al-taan-al-hariri-wins-truman-scholarship-for-r-i/ | KINGSTON, R.I. – April 12, 2023 – Lina Al Taan Al Hariri, a University of Rhode Island junior triple majoring in international studies, global language and area studies, and gender and women’s studies, was in Amman, Jordan, when she joined a Zoom meeting Friday afternoon that delivered some big news.
URI President Marc Parlange, Kathleen Maher, assistant director of the Honors Program who runs the office of national fellowships and academic opportunities, and several of Al Hariri’s professors were on the screen to tell her she was awarded a Harry S. Truman Scholarship. The award is one of the premier graduate fellowships in the United States for public service leadership. She is URI’s 16th Truman Scholar.
Al Hariri, a student in URI’s Honors Program, is the only Truman Scholarship recipient from Rhode Island this year, and she is one of just 62 recipients nationwide. Al Hariri was chosen from 705 applicants representing 275 institutions.
Truman Scholars receive up to $30,000 for graduate or professional school, participate in leadership development activities, and have special opportunities for internships and employment with the federal government.
Upon completing her graduate education with a specialization in human rights law, Al Hariri said she aspires to use her legal expertise “to advocate for the protection and promotion of the rights of forcibly displaced people, including refugees, internally displaced persons, asylum seekers, and stateless individuals, to ensure access to fundamental rights. My goal is to see to the implementation of policies and resources which will allow them to integrate into their new communities and make meaningful changes in their lives.”
“I am honored that the notification email was sent to the president (Parlange), which meant that it was big news for the whole URI community and not just me. I was also dazzled by my adviser Kathleen Maher’s excitement,” said the Cranston resident, who is interning with the Refugee Service teaching English to refugees. “The Zoom call was such a sweet and thoughtful moment, especially given that I am currently abroad and couldn’t be surprised in person. I truly appreciate it.”
“Lina represents the very best of what we aim to instill in all our students: leadership in and out of the classroom, passion for service, and commitment to our community and the greater good,” Parlange said. “Since joining URI as a transfer student, Lina has been a powerful voice for cultural change, an advocate for refugees, and an integral part of URI’s development of the world’s largest human rights dataset, CIRIGHTS, which will be used by researchers, NGOs, policymakers, and others as a tool to track human rights globally. Lina is a model Truman Scholar, and we celebrate this well-deserved recognition.”
Al Hariri said her internship teaching refugees in Amman “has been an incredible experience, holding conversation classes and helping those who are learning English, especially since I was once in their position not too long ago.”
Established by Congress in 1975 as the living memorial to President Harry S. Truman and national monument to public service, the Truman Scholarship carries the legacy of the 33rd president by supporting and inspiring the next generation of public service leaders. The Truman Foundation identifies aspiring leaders when they are college juniors and recognizes their commitment to careers in public service. Today, Truman scholars work at the White House, sit on the Supreme Court and serve in federal and state legislatures. They are transforming nonprofits, delivering crucial services and organizing for change in local communities. They are also leaders in academia, research, health care and the armed services.
Al Hariri, is grateful to URI for all of its support, including flying her back to New York from Jordan so she could complete her 20-minute interview with a seven–person panel at the Truman Foundation.
“The Truman scholarship is all about the investment in students,” Al Hariri said. “Even if I hadn’t been selected, I was so happy that Kathleen Maher had believed in me and invested in my education. She met with me on weekends, after work hours, even when she had COVID-19, meeting with me on Zoom.”
Given those criteria, it’s no wonder the Truman Foundation selected Al Hariri. Not only is she serving refugees in Amman, at the same time she is taking 18 credits through the Council on Educational Exchange in the Middle Eastern Studies program. She is also enrolled in a global economics class with URI economics professor Richard McIntyre. Al Hariri’s semester abroad in Jordan is partially funded by the Benjamin Gilman International Scholarship, a U.S. Department of State initiative to increase access to study abroad to students from lower-income backgrounds. She has also been selected for the U.S. Foreign Service Internship Program, and has been placed for the summer of 2023 in the Secretary of State’s Office of Global Women’s Issues in Washington, D.C.
The plight of refugees, and particularly that of women and children, is personal to Al Hariri, who fled to the Jordanian border as her home village was stormed by (Bashar Hafez) al-Assad’s troops. Three years later her family became the second family to be resettled in Rhode Island.
Even prior to her study-abroad work, she volunteered with refugee organizations, served as an officer in the URI Muslim Student Association, and she is an active member of her community and the Masjid Al-Kareem in Providence, Rhode Island, regularly volunteering at events and participating in various activities organized by the mosque. She was given the top role for a new volunteer, regional vice chair for the New England team, for the annual Charity Week Campaign in 2022. This effort annually brings together Muslim youth worldwide to raise money for orphans and children in need.
Al Hariri coordinated and organized events and activities, and served as primary liaison between the team and the participation, finance and event organizers. She and her team recruited 33 institutions, including URI’s Muslim Student Association, local mosques and the Harvard Muslim Student Association. Her team’s work and her contributions led to a 57% increase in the participation of Muslim student organizations. The team raised $42,123, which contributed to the overall international total of $2.3 million.
Al Hariri was part of the launch of CIRIGHTS, developed by URI and Binghamton University researchers as the world’s largest global human rights dataset. As part of the project, she was asked to present her findings on women’s rights before a large crowd of scholars and administrators.
“During the Q&A that followed, Lina was able to calmly and fearlessly refute suggestions that religious faiths themselves were responsible for human rights offenses,” Maher said. “She reminded the audience that those who misuse and misrepresent religious faiths for their own gains are culpable.”
Brendan Skip Mark, director of URI’s Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies and co-director of CIRIGHTS, said in his recommendation letter to the Truman Foundation that Al Hariri scored women’s rights for every country in the world for the dataset.
“Lina completed her work with a level of detail I ascribe to graduate students,” he said. “It is rare to find a student with as much drive and ambition as Lina. … She is a natural leader who is committed to engaging in public service to make the world a better place.”
With this lengthy record of public service and human rights work, it’s not surprising that she has a strong, global position on the need to advocate for refugee and immigrant rights.
“My interest in helping refugees extends to all asylum seekers and displaced people, regardless of their origin,” Al Hariri said. Regarding U.S. immigration policy, she noted that changes to asylum policies have made it more challenging for migrants to seek protection in the U.S.
She said finding a solution is not easy, but it is, in her opinion, a responsibility of the international community.
“The U.S should play its part in supporting those who are fleeing persecution, violence, and other forms of hardship. We need to approach this issue with empathy and respect, recognizing the humanity of all those involved.” | ||||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 96 | https://www.cbc.ca/news2/background/middleeast-crisis/assad.html | en | CBC News In Depth: Middle East in Crisis | [
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] | null | Middle East in Crisis | en | null | Syrian President Bashar al-Assad speaks at the opening of the 4th General Conference of Arab Parties in Damascus in March. (Associated Press/Bassem Tellawi)
He has no tanks or soldiers in the battle. But in Western and, it appears, in Arab eyes, Syria is very much on the front lines as far as the conflict in Lebanon goes.
What's more, its young president, Bashar al-Assad — diffident, publicly reticent and, in his mind at least, reform-minded — is very much in the diplomatic crosshairs.
That's because both Syria and Iran are, to varying degrees, the principal backers of the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah, which sparked this conflict by killing 10 Israeli soldiers and taking three others for hostage purposes.
Western intelligence sources say Iran gives Hezbollah about $100 million US a year in military supplies and is the prime source of the Lebanese group's estimated 15,000 rockets. Syria is the conduit through which much of this equipment makes it way to southern Lebanon; it is also said to provide training camps in its Bekaa Valley for Hezbollah militia and safe havens for Hamas and Hezbollah leaders.
But Syria is very much the junior partner in this arrangement and al-Assad, at 40, a seemingly reluctant leader: A British-trained eye doctor, he took over following the death of his strongman father Hafez al-Assad six years ago but only because his older brother, Bassel, who was being groomed for the presidency, was killed in an accident a few years earlier.
RELATED: The key players
As a result, and because he painted himself early on as a Western-styled reformer, seeking economic if not political change, Bashar al-Assad is seen as the weak link in this partnership. That has now made him the object of intense international pressure.
In recent days, the leaders of Italy, Egypt and Turkey have all called urging him to do something to rein in Hezbollah and convince it to give up its hostages. Washington has been turning up the heat, witness George W. Bush's open mic remark to Tony Blair at the recent G8 summit: "We just need to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's all over."
All this helps explain why Iran stepped up its own counter-pressure on its smaller ally, to stiffen al-Assad's backbone. Iran's foreign minister visited Damascus a few days ago to pledge that if Israel or anyone else attacked Syria over the latest crisis Iran would rush to its aid. Iran's controversial President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad drove the point home with an open letter, reiterating the promise, the very next day
All this pressure perhaps explains, too, why al-Assad has been so quiet, seeming to straddle the fence, while next door, Lebanon, a country that was virtually a client state of Syria until just last year, roils under Israeli bombs.
True, al-Assad has allowed several large pro-Hezbollah rallies to take place in Damascus. He has also opened his doors to tens of thousands of refugees (including Americans fleeing Lebanon, the state news agency has reported), and he is desperately trying to get water and other humanitarian supplies into Lebanon.
But he has assiduously said almost nothing publicly about the conflict itself, other than to chastise Western nations for not sending an international peacekeeping contingent to southern Lebanon — which is the Tony Blair idea and not something that seems very high on Ahmadinejad's agenda.
What can al-Assad do?
What the West would like al-Assad to do is force Hezbollah to stop shelling Israeli villages and agree to give up its Israeli hostages, presumably by threatening to cut off his support for their bases if the Shia militia group won't play ball.
That would be a huge step and it would clearly break the alliance with Iran, which in many respects is one of the more unusual ones in all of the Middle East.
Iran, of course, is a fundamentalist Shia theocracy and part of what Blair has called the "arc of extremism" cutting through the Shia and Sunni divide in the Muslim world.
Syria, on the other hand, is usually considered a secular state run by the al-Assads' Baathist party (though a much different version than Saddam Hussein's in Iraq). Its leadership has been predominantly Sunni, save for the al-Assad family, who belong to a minority sect.
Still, Syria backed Iran in the war with Iraq in the early 1980s and has been a mostly close ally since, benefiting economically by their ties, analysts say.
Many Middle East observers, however, see the relationship between the two countries as essentially a marriage of convenience between two pariahs. Each sees itself as a state under siege, particularly from the U.S.
Neither wants to be the next Iraq — Tehran especially given the current furor over its nuclear ambitions — and al-Assad likely feels he needs Iran's Shia legitimacy to help maintain the internal coalition his father cobbled together over 30 years ago.
But given Syria's close ties with neighbouring Lebanon, al-Assad can at this point probably rationalize turning his back on Hezbollah as a way of helping the Lebanese government control its own destiny. And his prize, should he dare to swing his support, could be something like the Golan Heights, which Israel won from Syria over the course of two wars in 1967 and 1973.
The Golan is extremely important to both Syria and Israel because it controls much of their fresh water supply through the Sea of Galilee. Israel values the plateau as well as a strategic lookout on Syrian military build-ups. So it would never be dealt without a series of safeguards.
Syria's cipher
Israelis don't want to give up the Golan, opinion polls show. But it has been on the table before, as recently as seven years ago during a potential peace deal that Bill Clinton was trying to broker, and conceivably it could be again if the price was right. Like, say, a peace deal with Syria and the end of Hezbollah's influence in southern Lebanon.
The big questions, of course, are how would you get to that kind of negotiation from where things are now and would al-Assad seize the moment? In his six years in power he's been very much a cipher.
He began his presidency as a reformer, loosening restrictions on international business, the internet and the media. But since then there has been a noticeable tightening of the media rules, in particular, and a crackdown on dissidents.
Three years ago he said he would be interested in restarting peace talks with Israel, but then he refused the offer to visit Jerusalem and take them up in earnest.
At the same time, though, he has been going out of his way to patch up relations with Turkey, a NATO member and backer of Israel.
His six years in power have been marked by extreme caution — he has been very slowly easing out the old guard functionaries who were loyal to his father — and very little in the way of telling public pronouncements.
He may well be trying to just ease his way through this crisis as well, feeling it is not worth the internal dissension, and maybe an attempt on his life, that a role in resolving it would bring. But if he passes on this opportunity, he will likely have sealed his reputation with the West and it is extremely doubtful another like it will come his way again. | ||||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashar_al-Assad | en | Bashar al | [
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] | 2003-11-12T20:38:57+00:00 | en | /static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashar_al-Assad | President of Syria since 2000
Bashar al-Assad[a][b] (born 11 September 1965) is a Syrian politician who is the current and 19th president of Syria since 17 July 2000. In addition, he is the commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces and the secretary-general of the Central Command of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, which nominally espouses a neo-Ba'athist ideology. His father and predecessor was General Hafiz al-Assad, whose presidency in 1971–2000 marked the transfiguration of Syria from a republican state into a de facto dynastic dictatorship, tightly controlled by an Alawite-dominated elite composed of the armed forces and the Mukhabarat (secret services), who are loyal to the al-Assad family.
Born and raised in Damascus, Bashar graduated from the medical school of Damascus University in 1988 and began to work as a doctor in the Syrian Army. Four years later, he attended postgraduate studies at the Western Eye Hospital in London, specialising in ophthalmology. In 1994, after his elder brother Bassel died in a car accident, Bashar was recalled to Syria to take over Bassel's role as heir apparent. He entered the military academy, taking charge of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon in 1998. On 17 July 2000, Bashar al-Assad became president, succeeding his father Hafiz, who had died on 10 June 2000. A series of crackdowns in 2001–02 ended the Damascus Spring, a period of cultural and political activism marked by calls for transparency and democracy. Although Bashar inherited the power structures and personality cult nurtured by Hafiz al-Assad, he lacked the loyalty received by his father, which led to rising discontent against his rule. As result, many members of the Old Guard resigned or were purged; and the inner-circle were replaced by staunch loyalists from Alawite clans. Bashar al-Assad's early economic liberalisation programs worsened inequalities and centralized the socio-political power of the loyalist Damascene elite of the Assad family; alienating the Syrian rural population, urban working classes, businessmen, industrialists and people from once-traditional Ba'ath strongholds. The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in February 2005, triggered by the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, forced Bashar al-Assad to end Syrian occupation of Lebanon.
Assad's regime is a highly personalist dictatorship,[c] which governs Syria as a totalitarian police state.[d] Bashar al-Assad's reign has been characterised by numerous human rights violations and severe repression. While the Assad government describes itself as secular, various political scientists and observers note that his regime exploits sectarian tensions in the country. The first decade in power was marked by intense censorship, summary executions, forced disappearances, discrimination of ethnic minorities and extensive surveillance by the Ba'athist secret police. The United States, the European Union, and majority of the Arab League called for Assad's resignation from the presidency in 2011 after he ordered a violent crackdown on Arab Spring protesters during the events of the Syrian revolution, which led to the Syrian civil war. The civil war has killed around 580,000 people, of which a minimum of 306,000 deaths are non-combatant, with pro-Assad forces causing more than 90% of the civilian deaths.[7] The war has also forcibly displaced 14 million Syrians, with over 7 million refugees, causing the largest refugee crisis in the world. An additional 154,000 civilians have been forcibly disappeared or subject to arbitrary detentions; with over 135,000 individuals being tortured, imprisoned, or dead in government detention centres as of 2023.[e]
The Assad regime's perpetration of numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity during the civil war has led to international condemnation and isolation.[f] The Syrian military is estimated to have conducted over 300 chemical attacks, with UN investigations confirming at least nine chemical attacks conducted by pro-Assad forces.[13] The deadliest incident was a chemical attack in Ghouta on 21 August 2013, which caused the deaths of 1,100–1,500 civilians. In December 2013, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay stated that findings from an inquiry by the UN implicated Assad in war crimes. Investigations by the OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism and OPCW-UN IIT concluded that the Assad government was responsible for the 2017 Khan Shaykhun sarin attack and 2018 Douma chemical attack respectively.[g] In June 2014, the American Syrian Accountability Project included Assad on a list of war crimes indictments of government officials and sent it to the International Criminal Court. In 2023, Canada and the Netherlands filed a joint lawsuit at the International Court of Justice accusing the Assad government of infringing UN Convention Against Torture.[h] On 15 November 2023, France issued an arrest warrant against Assad over the use of banned chemical weapons against civilians in Syria.[14] Assad has categorically denied the allegations of these charges and has accused foreign countries, especially the American-led intervention in Syria, of purportedly attempting regime change.[15][16]
Early life, family and education
Further information: Al-Assad family
Bashar al-Assad was born in Damascus on 11 September 1965, as the second son and third child of Anisa Makhlouf and Hafiz al-Assad. "Al-Assad" in Arabic means "the lion". Assad's paternal grandfather, Ali Sulayman al-Assad, had managed to change his status from peasant to minor notable and, to reflect this, in 1927 he had changed the family name from "Wahsh" (meaning "Savage") to "Al-Assad".
Assad's father, Hafiz, was born to an impoverished rural family of Alawite background and rose through the Ba'ath Party ranks to take control of the Syrian branch of the Party in the Corrective Movement, culminating in his rise to the Syrian presidency. Hafiz promoted his supporters within the Ba'ath Party, many of whom were also of Alawite background.[20] After the revolution, Alawite strongmen were installed while Sunnis, Druze, and Ismailis were removed from the army and Ba'ath party. Hafiz al-Assad's 30-year military rule witnessed the transformation of Syria into a dynastic dictatorship. The new political system was led by the Ba'ath party elites dominated by the Alawites, who were fervently loyal to the Assad family and controlled the military, security forces and secret police.[22][23]
The younger Assad had five siblings, three of whom are deceased. A sister named Bushra died in infancy.[24] Assad's youngest brother, Majd, was not a public figure and little is known about him other than he was intellectually disabled,[25] and died in 2009 after a "long illness".[26]
Unlike his brothers Bassel and Maher, and second sister, also named Bushra, Bashar was quiet, reserved and lacked interest in politics or the military.[25][28] The Assad children reportedly rarely saw their father,[29] and Bashar later stated that he only entered his father's office once while he was president.[30] He was described as "soft-spoken",[31] and according to a university friend, he was timid, avoided eye contact and spoke in a low voice.[32]
Assad received his primary and secondary education in the Arab-French al-Hurriya School in Damascus. In 1982, he graduated from high school and then studied medicine at Damascus University.
Medical career and rise to power
In 1988, Assad graduated from medical school and began working as an army doctor at the Tishrin Military Hospital on the outskirts of Damascus.[34][35] Four years later, he settled in London to start postgraduate training in ophthalmology at the Western Eye Hospital. He was described as a "geeky I.T. guy" during his time in London.[37] Bashar had few political aspirations, and his father had been grooming Bashar's older brother Bassel as the future president. However, he died in a car accident in 1994 and Bashar was recalled to the Syrian Army shortly thereafter. State propaganda soon began elevating Bashar's public imagery as "the hope of the masses" to prepare him as the next patriarch in charge of Syria, to continue the rule of the Assad dynasty.[40][41]
Soon after the death of Bassel, Hafiz al-Assad decided to make Bashar the new heir apparent. Over the next six and a half years, until his death in 2000, Hafiz prepared Bashar for taking over power. General Bahjat Suleiman, an officer in the Defense Companies, was entrusted with overseeing preparations for a smooth transition,[43][29] which were made on three levels. First, support was built up for Bashar in the military and security apparatus. Second, Bashar's image was established with the public. And lastly, Bashar was familiarised with the mechanisms of running the country.
To establish his credentials in the military, Bashar entered the military academy at Homs in 1994 and was propelled through the ranks to become a colonel of the elite Syrian Republican Guard in January 1999.[34][46] To establish a power base for Bashar in the military, old divisional commanders were pushed into retirement, and new, young, Alawite officers with loyalties to him took their place.
In 1998, Bashar took charge of Syria's Lebanon file, which had since the 1970s been handled by Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam, who had until then been a potential contender for president. By taking charge of Syrian affairs in Lebanon, Bashar was able to push Khaddam aside and establish his own power base in Lebanon. In the same year, after minor consultation with Lebanese politicians, Bashar installed Emile Lahoud, a loyal ally of his, as the President of Lebanon and pushed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri aside, by not placing his political weight behind his nomination as prime minister. To further weaken the old Syrian order in Lebanon, Bashar replaced the long-serving de facto Syrian High Commissioner of Lebanon, Ghazi Kanaan, with Rustum Ghazaleh.
Parallel to his military career, Bashar was engaged in public affairs. He was granted wide powers and became head of the bureau to receive complaints and appeals of citizens, and led a campaign against corruption. As a result of this campaign, many of Bashar's potential rivals for president were put on trial for corruption.[34] Bashar also became the President of the Syrian Computer Society and helped to introduce the internet in Syria, which aided his image as a moderniser and reformer. Ba'athist loyalists in the party, military and the Alawite sect were supportive of Bashar al-Assad, enabling him to become his father's successor.[51]
Presidency
Before civil war: 2000–2011
After the death of Hafiz al-Assad on 10 June 2000, the Constitution of Syria was amended. The minimum age requirement for the presidency was lowered from 40 to 34, which was Bashar's age at the time.[52] Assad contested as the only candidate and subsequently confirmed president on 10 July 2000, with 97.29% support for his leadership.[53][54][55] In line with his role as President of Syria, he was also appointed the commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces and Regional Secretary of the Ba'ath Party.[51] A series of state elections have since been held regularly every seven years which Assad won with overwhelming majority of votes. The elections are unanimously regarded by independent observers as a sham process and boycotted by the opposition.[i][j] The last two elections - held in 2014 and 2021 - were conducted only in areas controlled by the Syrian government during the country's ongoing civil war and condemned by the United Nations.[65][66][67]
Damascus Spring
See also: Damascus Spring
Immediately after he took office, a reform movement known as Damascus Spring led by writers, intellectuals, dissidents, cultural activists, etc. made cautious advances, which led to the shut down of Mezzeh prison and the declaration of a wide-ranging amnesty releasing hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood affiliated political prisoners. However, security crackdowns commenced again within the year, turning it into the Damascus Winter.[69][70] Hundreds of intellectuals were arrested, targeted, exiled or sent to prison and the state of emergency was continued. The early concessions were rolled back to tighten authoritarian control, censorship was increased and the Damascus Spring movement was banned under the pretext of "national unity and stability". The regime's policy of a "social market economy" became a symbol of corruption, as Assad loyalists became its sole beneficiaries.[51][71][72][73] Several discussion forums were shut down and many intellectuals were abducted by the Mukhabarat to get tortured and killed. Many analysts believe that initial promises of opening up were part a government strategy to find out Syrians who were not supportive of the new leadership.[70]
During a state visit by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Syria in October 2001, Bashar publicly condemned the United States invasion of Afghanistan in a joint press conference, stating that "[w]e cannot accept what we see every day on our television screens - the killing of innocent civilians. There are hundreds dying every day." Assad also praised Palestinian militant groups as "freedom fighters" and criticised Israel and the Western world during the conference. British officials subsequently described Assad's political views as being more conciliatory in private, claiming that he criticized the September 11 attacks and accepted the legitimacy of the State of Israel.[74]
During the war on terror, Assad played realpolitik with the United States, at-times co-operating and other times clashing with the American government. Syria's prison networks were a major site of extraordinary rendition by the CIA of al-Qaeda suspects, who were interrogated in Syrian prisons.[75][76][77] Soon after Assad assumed power, he "made Syria's link with Hezbollah—and its patrons in Tehran—the central component of his security doctrine",[78] and in his foreign policy, Assad adopted a belligerent stance towards the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.[79] During the Iraqi insurgency against American occupation, Syrian intelligence trained Al-Qaeda militants, turning Syria into a transit hub for Jihadists travelling into Iraq. AQI would subsequently evolve into the Islamic State group, which sent its fighters from Iraq to join the Syrian Civil War.[80][81]
Killing of Rafic Hariri and Cedar Revolution
On 14 February 2005, Rafic Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon, was assassinated in a massive truck-bomb explosion in Beirut, killing 22 people. The Christian Science Monitor reported that "Syria was widely blamed for Hariri's murder. In the months leading to the assassination, relations between Hariri and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad plummeted amid an atmosphere of threats and intimidation."[83] Bashar promoted his brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, a key figure suspected of orchestrating the terrorist attack, as the chief of Syrian Military Intelligence Directorate immediately after Hariri's death.[84]
The killings caused massive uproar, triggering an intifada in Lebanon and hundreds of thousands of protestors poured on the streets to demand total withdrawal of Syrian military forces. After mounting international pressure that called Syria to implement the UNSC Resolution 1559, Bashar al-Assad declared on 5 March that he shall order the departure of Syrian soldiers. On 14 March 2005, more than a million Lebanese protestors - Muslims, Christians, Druze - demonstrated in Beirut, marking the monthly anniversary of Hariri's murder. UN Resolution 1595, adopted on 7 April, send an international commission to investigate the assassination of Hariri. By 5 May 2005, United Nations had officially confirmed the total departure of all Syrian soldiers, ending the 29-year old military occupation. The uprisings that occurred in these months came to be known as Lebanon's "independence intifada" or the "Cedar Revolution".[85]
UN investigation commission's report published on 20 October 2005 revealed that high-ranking members of Syrian intelligence and Assad family had directly supervised the killing.[86][87][88] The BBC reported in December 2005 that "Damascus has strongly denied involvement in the car bomb which killed Hariri in February".[89]
On 27 May 2007, Assad was approved for another seven-year term in a referendum on his presidency, with 97.6% of the votes supporting his continued leadership.[90][91][92] Opposition parties were not allowed in the country and Assad was the only candidate in the referendum.[55] Syria's opposition parties under the umbrella of Damascus Declaration denounced the elections as illegitimate and part of the regime's strategy to sustain the "totalitarian system".[93][94] Elections in Syria are officially designated as the event of "renewing the pledge of allegiance" to the Assads and voting is enforced as a compulsory duty on every citizen. Announcement of the results are followed by pro-government rallies conducted across the country extolling the regime, wherein citizens declare their "devotion" to the President and celebrate "the virtues" of the Assad dynasty.[95][96][97]
Syria began developing a covert nuclear weapons programme with assistance of North Korea during the 2000s, but its suspected nuclear reactor was destroyed by the Israeli Air Force during Operation Outside the Box in September 2007.[98][99][100]
During the Syrian civil war
2011–2015
Protests in Syria began on 26 January 2011 following the Arab Spring protests that called for political reforms and the reinstatement of civil rights, as well as an end to the state of emergency which had been in place since 1963.[101] One attempt at a "day of rage" was set for 4–5 February, though it ended uneventfully.[102] Protests on 18–19 March were the largest to take place in Syria for decades, and the Syrian authority responded with violence against its protesting citizens.[103] In his first public response to the protests delivered on 30 March 2011, Assad blamed the unrest on "conspiracies" and accused the Syrian opposition and protestors of seditious "fitna", toeing the party-line of framing the Ba'athist state as the victim of an international plot. He also derided the Arab Spring movement, and described those participating in the protests as "germs" and fifth-columnists.[104][105][106]
The U.S. imposed limited sanctions against the Assad government in April 2011, followed by Barack Obama's executive order as of 18 May 2011 targeting Bashar Assad specifically and six other senior officials.[108][109][110] On 23 May 2011, the EU foreign ministers agreed at a meeting in Brussels to add Assad and nine other officials to a list affected by travel bans and asset freezes.[111] On 24 May 2011, Canada imposed sanctions on Syrian leaders, including Assad.[112]
On 20 June, in response to the demands of protesters and international pressure, Assad promised a national dialogue involving movement toward reform, new parliamentary elections, and greater freedoms. He also urged refugees to return home from Turkey, while assuring them amnesty and blaming all unrest on a small number of saboteurs.[113]
In July 2011, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Assad had "lost legitimacy" as president.[109] On 18 August 2011, Barack Obama issued a written statement that urged Assad to "step aside".[114][115][116] In August, the cartoonist Ali Farzat, a critic of Assad's government, was attacked. Relatives of the humourist told media outlets that the attackers threatened to break Farzat's bones as a warning for him to stop drawing cartoons of government officials, particularly Assad. Farzat was hospitalised with fractures in both hands and blunt force trauma to the head.[117][118]
Since October 2011, Russia, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, repeatedly vetoed Western-sponsored draft resolutions in the UN Security Council that would have left open the possibility of UN sanctions, or even military intervention, against the Assad government.[119][120][121]
By the end of January 2012, it was reported by Reuters that over 5,000 civilians and protesters (including armed militants) had been killed by the Syrian army, security agents and militia (Shabiha), while 1,100 people had been killed by "terrorist armed forces".[122]
On 10 January 2012, Assad gave a speech in which he maintained the uprising was engineered by foreign countries and proclaimed that "victory [was] near". He also said that the Arab League, by suspending Syria, revealed that it was no longer Arab. However, Assad also said the country would not "close doors" to an Arab-brokered solution if "national sovereignty" was respected. He also said a referendum on a new constitution could be held in March.[123]
On 27 February 2012, Syria claimed that a proposal that a new constitution be drafted received 90% support during the relevant referendum. The referendum introduced a fourteen-year cumulative term limit for the president of Syria. The referendum was pronounced meaningless by foreign nations including the U.S. and Turkey; the EU announced fresh sanctions against key regime figures.[124] In July 2012, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov denounced Western powers for what he said amounted to blackmail thus provoking a civil war in Syria.[125] On 15 July 2012, the International Committee of the Red Cross declared Syria to be in a state of civil war,[126] as the nationwide death toll for all sides was reported to have neared 20,000.[127]
On 6 January 2013, Assad, in his first major speech since June, said that the conflict in his country was due to "enemies" outside of Syria who would "go to Hell" and that they would "be taught a lesson". However, he said that he was still open to a political solution saying that failed attempts at a solution "does not mean we are not interested in a political solution."[128][129] In July 2014, Assad renewed his third term of presidency after voting process conducted in pro-regime territories which were boycotted by the opposition and condemned by the United Nations.[65][66][67] According to Joshua Landis: "He's (Assad) going to say: 'I am the state, I am Syria, and if the West wants access to Syrians, they have to come through me.'"[66]
After the fall of four military bases in September 2014,[130] which were the last government footholds in the Raqqa Governorate, Assad received significant criticism from his Alawite base of support.[131] This included remarks made by Douraid al-Assad, cousin of Bashar al-Assad, demanding the resignation of the Syrian Defence Minister, Fahd Jassem al-Freij, following the massacre by the Islamic State of hundreds of government troops captured after the IS victory at Tabqa Airbase.[132] This was shortly followed by Alawite protests in Homs demanding the resignation of the governor,[133] and the dismissal of Assad's cousin Hafez Makhlouf from his security position leading to his subsequent exile to Belarus.[134] Growing resentment towards Assad among Alawites was fuelled by the disproportionate number of soldiers killed in fighting hailing from Alawite areas,[135] a sense that the Assad regime has abandoned them,[136] as well as the failing economic situation.[137] Figures close to Assad began voicing concerns regarding the likelihood of its survival, with one saying in late 2014; "I don't see the current situation as sustainable ... I think Damascus will collapse at some point."[130]
In 2015, several members of the Assad family died in Latakia under unclear circumstances.[138] On 14 March, an influential cousin of Assad and founder of the shabiha, Mohammed Toufic al-Assad, was assassinated with five bullets to the head in a dispute over influence in Qardaha—the ancestral home of the Assad family.[139] In April 2015, Assad ordered the arrest of his cousin Munther al-Assad in Alzirah, Latakia.[140] It remains unclear whether the arrest was due to actual crimes.[141]
After a string of government defeats in northern and southern Syria, analysts noted growing government instability coupled with continued waning support for the Assad government among its core Alawite base of support,[142] and that there were increasing reports of Assad relatives, Alawites, and businessmen fleeing Damascus for Latakia and foreign countries.[143][144] Intelligence chief Ali Mamlouk was placed under house arrest sometime in April and stood accused of plotting with Assad's exiled uncle Rifaat al-Assad to replace Bashar as president.[145] Further high-profile deaths included the commanders of the Fourth Armoured Division, the Belli military airbase, the army's special forces and of the First Armoured Division, with an errant air strike during the Palmyra offensive killing two officers who were reportedly related to Assad.[146]
Since Russian intervention 2015–present
On 4 September 2015, when prospects of Assad's survival looked bleak, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia was providing the Assad government with sufficiently "serious" help: with both logistical and military support.[147][148][149] Shortly after the start of direct military intervention by Russia on 30 September 2015 at the formal request of the Syrian government, Putin stated the military operation had been thoroughly prepared in advance and defined Russia's goal in Syria as "stabilising the legitimate power in Syria and creating the conditions for political compromise".[150] Putin's intervention saved the Assad regime at a time when it was on the verge of a looming collapse. It also enabled Moscow to achieve its key geo-strategic objectives such as total control of Syrian airspace, naval bases that granted permanent martial reach across the Eastern Mediterranean and easier access to intervene in Libya.[149]
In November 2015, Assad reiterated that a diplomatic process to bring the country's civil war to an end could not begin while it was occupied by "terrorists", although it was considered by BBC News to be unclear whether he meant only ISIL or Western-supported rebels as well.[151] On 22 November, Assad said that within two months of its air campaign Russia had achieved more in its fight against ISIL than the U.S.-led coalition had achieved in a year.[152] In an interview with Česká televize on 1 December, he said that the leaders who demanded his resignation were of no interest to him, as nobody takes them seriously because they are "shallow" and controlled by the U.S.[153][154] At the end of December 2015, senior U.S. officials privately admitted that Russia had achieved its central goal of stabilising Syria and, with the expenses relatively low, could sustain the operation at this level for years to come.[155]
In December 2015, Putin stated that Russia was supporting Assad's forces and was ready to back anti-Assad rebels in a joint fight against IS.[156]
On 22 January 2016, the Financial Times, citing anonymous "senior western intelligence officials", claimed that Russian general Igor Sergun, the director of GRU, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, had shortly before his sudden death on 3 January 2016 been sent to Damascus with a message from Vladimir Putin asking that President Assad step aside.[157] The Financial Times' report was denied by Putin's spokesman.[158]
It was reported in December 2016 that Assad's forces had retaken half of rebel-held Aleppo, ending a 6-year stalemate in the city.[159][160] On 15 December, as it was reported government forces were on the brink of retaking all of Aleppo—a "turning point" in the civil war, Assad celebrated the "liberation" of the city, and stated, "History is being written by every Syrian citizen."[161]
After the election of Donald Trump, the priority of the U.S. concerning Assad was unlike the priority of the Obama administration, and in March 2017 U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley stated the U.S. was no longer focused on "getting Assad out",[162] but this position changed in the wake of the 2017 Khan Shaykhun chemical attack.[163] Following the missile strikes on a Syrian airbase on the orders of President Trump, Assad's spokesperson described the U.S.' behaviour as "unjust and arrogant aggression" and stated that the missile strikes "do not change the deep policies" of the Syrian government.[164] President Assad also told the Agence France-Presse that Syria's military had given up all its chemical weapons in 2013, and would not have used them if they still retained any, and stated that the chemical attack was a "100 percent fabrication" used to justify a U.S. airstrike.[165] In June 2017, Russian President Putin said "Assad didn't use the [chemical weapons]" and that the chemical attack was "done by people who wanted to blame him for that."[166] UN and international chemical weapons inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) found the attack was the work of the Assad regime.[167]
On 7 November 2017, the Syrian government announced that it had signed the Paris Climate Agreement.[168] In May 2018, it recognized the independence of Russian-occupied separatist republics of Abhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, leading to backlash from the European Union, United States, Canada and other countries.[169][170][171] On 30 August 2020, the First Hussein Arnous government was formed, which included a new Council of Ministers.[172]
In the 2021 presidential elections held on 26 May, Assad secured his fourth 7-year tenure; by winning 95.2% of the eligible votes. The elections were boycotted by the opposition and SDF; while the refugees and internally displaced citizens were disqualified to vote; enabling only 38% of Syrians to participate in the process. Independent international observers as well as representatives of Western countries described the elections as a farce. United Nations condemned the elections for directly violating Resolution 2254; and announced that it has "no mandate".[173][174][175][176][177]
On 10 August 2021, the Second Hussein Arnous government was formed.[178] Under Assad, Syria became a strong supporter of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and was one of the five countries that opposed the UN General Assembly resolution denouncing the invasion, which called upon Russia to pull back its troops. Three days prior to the invasion, Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad was dispatched to Moscow to affirm Syria's recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk separatist republics. A day after the invasion, Bashar al-Assad praised the invasion as "a correction of history and a restoration of balance in the global order after the fall of the Soviet Union" in a phone call with Vladimir Putin.[179][180][181] Syria became the first country after Russia to officially recognize the "independence and sovereignty" of the two breakaway regions in June 2022.[182][183][184]
On the 12th anniversary of beginning of the protests of Syrian Revolution, Bashar al-Assad held a meeting with Vladimir Putin during an official visit to Russia. In a televised broadcast with Putin, Assad defended Russia's "special military operation" as a war against "neo-Nazis and old Nazis" of Ukraine.[185][186] He recognised the Russian annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts and ratified the new Russian borders, claiming that the territories were "historically Russian". Assad also urged Russia to expand its military presence in Syria by establishing new bases and deploying more boots on the ground, making its military role permanent.[k]
In March 2023, he visited the United Arab Emirates and met with UAE's President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.[192] In May 2023, he attended the Arab League summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he was welcomed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.[193] In September 2023, Assad attended the Asian Games opening ceremony in Hangzhou and met with Chinese President Xi Jinping.[194] They announced the establishment of a China–Syria strategic partnership.[195]
Controversies
Corruption
Main article: Corruption in Syria
See also: Economy of Syria
At the onset of the Syrian revolution, corruption in Syria was endemic, and the country was ranked 129th in the 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index.[196] Since the 1970s, Syria's economy has been dominated by the patronage networks of Ba'ath party elites and Alawite loyalists of the Assad family, who established control over Syria's public sectors based on kinship and nepotism. The pervasive nature of corruption had been a source of controversy within the Ba'ath party circles and the wider public; as early as the 1980s.[197]
Bashar al-Assad's economic liberalization programme during the 2000s became a symbol of corruption and nepotism, as the beneficiaries of the scheme were Alawite loyalists who seized much of the privatized sectors and business assets. This alienated the government from the vast majority of the Syrian public, particularly rural Syrians and urban working classes, who widely loathed the ensuing economic disparities, which became overtly visible.[22][71] Assad's cousin Rami Makhlouf was the regime's most favored oligarch during this period, marked by the institutionalization of corruption, handicapping of small businesses and casting down private entrepreneurship.[198] The persistence of corruption, sectarian bias towards Alawites, nepotism and widespread bribery that existed in party, bureaucracy and military led to popular anger that resulted in the eruption of the 2011 Syrian Revolution. The protests were the most fierce in working-class neighbourhoods, which had long bore the brunt of the regime's exploitation policies that privileged its own loyalists.[199][200]
According to ABC News, as a result of the Syrian civil war, "government-controlled Syria is truncated in size, battered and impoverished."[201] Economic sanctions (the Syria Accountability Act) were applied long before the Syrian civil war by the U.S. and were joined by the EU at the outbreak of the civil war, causing disintegration of the Syrian economy.[202] These sanctions were reinforced in October 2014 by the EU and U.S.[203][204] Industry in parts of the country that are still held by the government is heavily state-controlled, with economic liberalisation being reversed during the current conflict.[205] The London School of Economics has stated that as a result of the Syrian civil war, a war economy has developed in Syria.[206] A 2014 European Council on Foreign Relations report also stated that a war economy has formed:
Three years into a conflict that is estimated to have killed at least 140,000 people from both sides, much of the Syrian economy lies in ruins. As the violence has expanded and sanctions have been imposed, assets and infrastructure have been destroyed, economic output has fallen, and investors have fled the country. Unemployment now exceeds 50 percent and half of the population lives below the poverty line ... against this backdrop, a war economy is emerging that is creating significant new economic networks and business activities that feed off the violence, chaos, and lawlessness gripping the country. This war economy – to which Western sanctions have inadvertently contributed – is creating incentives for some Syrians to prolong the conflict and making it harder to end it.[207]
A UN commissioned report by the Syrian Centre for Policy Research states that two-thirds of the Syrian population now lives in "extreme poverty".[208] Unemployment stands at 50 percent.[209] In October 2014, a $50 million mall opened in Tartus which provoked criticism from government supporters and was seen as part of an Assad government policy of attempting to project a sense of normalcy throughout the civil war.[210] A government policy to give preference to families of slain soldiers for government jobs was cancelled after it caused an uproar[135] while rising accusations of corruption caused protests.[137] In December 2014, the EU banned sales of jet fuel to the Assad government, forcing the government to buy more expensive uninsured jet fuel shipments in the future.[211]
Taking advantage of the increased role of the state as a result of the civil war, Bashar and his wife Asma have begun annexing Syria's economic assets from their loyalists, seeking to displace the old business elites and monopolize their direct control of the economy. Maher al-Assad, the brother of Bashar, has also become wealthy by overseeing the operations of Syria's state-sponsored captagon drug industry and seizing much of the spoils of war. The ruling couple currently owns vast swathes of Syria's shipping, real estate, telecommunications and banking sectors.[212][213] Significant changes have been happening to Syrian economy since the government's confiscation campaigns launched in 2019, which involved major economic assets being transferred to the Presidential couple to project their power and influence. Particularly noteworthy dynamic has been the rise of Asma al-Assad, who heads Syria's clandestine economic council and is thought to have become "a central funnel of economic power in Syria". Through her Syria Trust NGO, the backbone of her financial network, Asma vets the foreign aid coming to Syria; since the government authorizes UN organizations only if it works under state agencies.[214]
Corruption has been rising sporadically in recent years, with Syria being considered the most corrupt country in the Arab World.[215][216] As of 2022, Syria is the ranked second worst globally in the Corruption Perceptions Index.[217][218]
Sectarianism
Hafiz al-Assad's government was widely counted amongst the most repressive Arab dictatorships of the 20th century. As Bashar inherited his father's mantle, he sought to implement "authoritarian upgrading" by purging the Old Guard and staffing party and military with loyalist Alawite officers, further entrenching the sectarianism within the system.[219][80] While officially the Ba'athist government adheres to a strict secularist doctrine, in practice it has implemented sectarian engineering policies in the society to suppress dissent and monopolize its absolute power.[220]
The regime has attempted to portray itself to the outside world as "the protector of minorities" and instills the fear of the majority rule in the society to mobilize loyalists from minorities.[222] Assad loyalist figures like Michel Samaha have advocated sectarian mobilization to defend the regime from what he labelled as the “sea of Sunnis.” Assad regime has unleashed sectarian violence through private Alawite militias like the Shabiha, particularly in Sunni areas. Alawite religious iconography and communal sentiments are common themes used by Alawite warrior-shaykhs who lead the Alawite militias; as justification to commit massacres, abductions and torture in opposition strongholds.[223] Various development policies adopted by the regime had followed a sectarian pattern. An urbanization scheme implemented by the government in the city of Homs led to expulsions of thousands of Sunni residents during the 2000s, while Alawite majority areas were left intact.[224]
Even as Syrian Ba'athism absorbed diverse communal identities into the homogenous unifying discourse of the state; socio-political power became monopolized by Alawite loyalists. Despite officially adhering to non-confessionalism, Syrian Armed Forces have also been institutionally sectarianized. While the conscripts and lower-ranks are overwhelmingly non-Alawite, the higher ranks are packed by Alawite loyalists who effectively control the logistics and security policy. Elite units of the Syrian military such as the Tiger Forces, Republican Guard, 4th Armoured Division, etc. regarded by the government as crucial for its survival; are composed mostly of Alawites. Sunni officers are under constant surveillance by the secret police, with most of them being assigned with Alawite assistants who monitor their movements. Pro-regime paramilitary groups such as the National Defense Force are also organized around sectarian loyalty to the Ba'athist government. During the Syrian Revolution uprisings, the Ba'athist government deployed a securitization strategy that depended on sectarian mobilization, unleashing violence on protestors and extensive crackdowns across the country, prompting opposition groups to turn to armed revolt. Syrian society was further sectarianized following the Iranian intervention in the Syrian civil war, which witnessed numerous Khomeinist militant groups sponsored by Iran fight in the side of the Assad government.[225][221]
Human rights
See also: Human rights in Syria
Ba'athist government has been ruling Syria as a totalitarian state, policing every aspect of Syrian society for decades. Commanders of government's security forces – consisting of Syrian Arab Army, secret police, Ba'athist paramilitaries – directly implement the executive functions of the state, with scant regard for legal processes and bureaucracy. The surveillance system of the Mukhabarat is pervasive, with the total number of agents working for its various branches estimated to be as high as 1:158 ratio with the civilian population. Security services shut down civil society organizations, curtail freedom of movement within the country and bans non-Ba'athist political literature and symbols.[99][226] In 2010, Human Rights Watch published the report "A Wasted Decade" documenting repression during Assad's first decade of emergency rule; marked by arbitrary arrests, censorship and discrimination against Syrian Kurds.[226][227]
Throughout the 2000s, the dreaded Mukhabarat agents carried out routine abductions, arbitrary detentions and torture of civilians. Numerous show trials were conducted against dissidents, filling Syrian prisons with journalists and human rights activists. Members of Syria's General Intelligence Directorate had long enjoyed broad privileges to carry out extrajudicial actions and they have immunity from criminal offences. In 2008, Assad extended this immunity to other departments of security forces.[227] Human Rights groups, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have detailed how the Assad government's secret police tortured, imprisoned, and killed political opponents, and those who speak out against the government.[228][229] In addition, some 600 Lebanese political prisoners are thought to be held in government prisons since the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, with some held for as long as over 30 years.[230] Since 2006, the Assad government has expanded the use of travel bans against political dissidents.[231] In an interview with ABC News in 2007, Assad stated: "We don't have such [things as] political prisoners," though The New York Times reported the arrest of 30 Syrian political dissidents who were organising a joint opposition front in December 2007, with 3 members of this group considered to be opposition leaders being remanded in custody.[232]
The government also denied permission for human rights organizations and independent NGOs to work in the country.[227] In 2010, Syria banned face veils at universities.[233][234] Following the protests of Syrian Revolution in 2011, Assad partially relaxed the veil ban.[235]
Foreign Affairs journal released an editorial on the Syrian situation in the wake of the 2011 protests:[236]
During its decades of rule... the Assad family developed a strong political safety net by firmly integrating the military into the government. In 1970, Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father, seized power after rising through the ranks of the Syrian armed forces, during which time he established a network of loyal Alawites by installing them in key posts. In fact, the military, ruling elite, and ruthless secret police are so intertwined that it is now impossible to separate the Assad regime from the security establishment. Bashar al-Assad's threat to use force against protesters would be more plausible than Tunisia's or Egypt's were. So, unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, where a professionally trained military tended to play an independent role, the regime and its loyal forces have been able to deter all but the most resolute and fearless oppositional activists... At the same time, it is significantly different from Libya, where the military, although brutal and loyal to the regime, is a more disorganized group of militant thugs than a trained and disciplined army.
Between 2011 and 2013; the state security apparatus is believed to have tortured and killed over 10,000 civil activists, political dissidents, journalists, civil defense volunteers and those accused of treason and terror charges, as part of a campaign of deadly crackdown ordered by Assad.[237] In June 2023, UN General Assembly voted in favour of establishing an independent body to investigate the whereabouts of hundreds of thousands of missing civilians who have been forcibly disappeared, killed or languishing in Assad regime's dungeons and torture chambers. The vote was condemned by Russia, North Korea and Iran.[238][239][240]
In 2023, Canada and Netherlands filed a lawsuit against Syria at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), charging the latter with violating the United Nations Convention Against Torture. The joint petition accused the Syrian regime of organizing "unimaginable physical and mental pain and suffering" as a strategy to collectively punish the Syrian population.[241][242][243] Russia vetoed UN Security Council efforts to prosecute Bashar al-Assad at the International Criminal Court.[244]
Repression of Kurds
Ba'athist Syria had long banned Kurdish language in schools and public institutions; and discrimination against Kurds steadily increased during the rule of Bashar al-Assad. State policy officially suppressed Kurdish culture; with more than 300,000 Syrian Kurds being rendered stateless. Kurdish grievances against state persecution eventually culminated in the 2004 Qamishli Uprisings, which were crushed down violently after sending Syrian military forces. The ensuing crackdown resulted in the killings of more than 36 Kurds and injuring at least 160 demonstrators. More than 2000 civilians were arrested and tortured in government detention centres. Restrictions on Kurdish activities has been further tightened following the Qamishli massacre, with the Assad regime virtually banning all Kurdish cultural gatherings and political activism under the charges of “inciting strife” or “weakening national sentiment.” During 2005–2010, Human Rights Watch verified security crackdowns on at least 14 Kurdish political and cultural gatherings.[227][226] In March 2008, Syrian military opened fire at a Kurdish gathering in Qamishli that marked Nowruz, killing three and injuring five civilians.[245]
Censorship
On 22 September 2001, Assad decreed a Press Law that tightened government control over all literature printed or published in Syria; ranging from newspapers to books, pamphlets and periodicals. Publishers, writers, editors, distributors, journalists and other individuals accused of violating the Press Law are imprisoned or fined. Censorship has also been expanded into the cyberspace, and various websites are banned. Numerous bloggers and content creators have been arrested under various "national security" charges.[227]
A 2007 law requires internet cafés to record all the comments users post on chat forums.[246] Another decree in 2008 obligated internet cafes to keep records of their customers and notify them routinely to the police.[247] Websites such as Arabic Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook were blocked intermittently between 2008 and February 2011.[248][249][250] Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) ranked Syria as the third dangerous country to be an online blogger in 2009. Individuals are arrested based on a wide variety of accusations; ranging from undermining "national unity" to posting or sharing "false" content.[227][247]
Syria was ranked as the third most censored country in CPJ's 2012 report. Apart from restrictions for international journalists that prohibit their entry, domestic press is controlled by state agencies that promote Ba'athist ideology. From 2011, the Syrian government has issued a complete media blackout and foreign correspondents were quickly detained, abducted or tortured. As a result, the outside world is able to know of situations happening inside Syria only through videos of independent civilian journalists. The Assad government has shut down internet coverage, mobile networks as well as telephone lines in areas under its control to prevent any news that has its attempts to monopolize information related to Syria.[251]
Crackdowns, ethnic cleansing, and forced disappearances
The crackdown ordered by Bashar al-Assad against Syrian protestors was the most ruthless of all military clampdowns in the entire Arab Spring. As violence deteriorated and death toll mounted to the thousands; the European Union, Arab League and United States began imposing wide range of sanctions against Assad regime. By December 2011, United Nations had declared the situation in Syria to be a "civil war".[252] By this point, all the protestors and armed resistance groups had viewed the unconditional resignation of Bashar al-Assad as part of their core demands. In July 2012, Arab League held an emergency session demanding the "swift resignation" of Assad and promised "safe exit" if he accepted the offer.[253][254] Assad rebuffed the offers, instead seeking foreign military support from Iran and Russia to defend his embattled regime through scorched-earth tactics, massacres, sieges, forced starvations, ethnic cleansing, etc.[255]
The crackdowns and extermination campaigns of Assad regime resulted in the Syrian refugee crisis; causing the forced displacement of 14 million Syrians, with around 7.2 million refugees.[256] This has made the Syrian refugee crisis the largest refugee crisis in the world; and UNHCR High Commissioner Filippo Grandi has described it as "the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time and a continuing cause for suffering."[256][257]
Ethnic cleansing
Eva Koulouriotis has described Bashar al-Assad as the "master of ethnic cleansing in the 21st century".[258] During the course of the civil war, Assad ordered depopulation campaigns throughout the country to re-shape its demography in favour of his regime, and the military tactics have been compared to the persecutions of the Bosnian war. Between 2011 and 2015, Ba'athist militias are reported to have committed 49 ethno-sectarian massacres for the purpose of implementing its social engineering agenda in the country. Alawite loyalist militias known as the Shabiha have been launched into Sunni villages and towns; perpetrating numerous anti-Sunni massacres. These include the Houla, Bayda and Baniyas massacres, Al-Qubeir massacre, Al-Hasawiya massacre, etc. which have resulted in hundreds of deaths; with hundreds of thousands of residents fleeing under threats of regime persecution and sexual violence. Pogroms and deportations were pronounced in central Syrian regions and Alawite majority coastal areas, where the Syrian military and Hezbollah view as a priority to establish strategic control by expelling Sunni residents and bringing in Iran-backed Shia militants.[259][260][258][261] In 2016, UN officials criticized Bashar al-Assad for pursuing demographic engineering and ethnic cleansing in Darayya district in Damascus, under the guise of de-escalation deals.[262]
Syrian government forces have pursued mass-killings of civilian populations as part of its war-strategy throughout the conflict; and is responsible for inflicting more than 90% of the total civilian deaths in the Syrian civil war.[7] Between 2011 and 2021, a minimum of 306,000 civilian deaths are estimated to have occurred by the UN.[105][106] As of 2022, total death toll has risen to approximately 580,000.[263] An additional 154,000 civilians have been forcibly disappeared or subject to arbitrary detentions across Syria, between 2011 and 2023. As of 2023, more than 135,000 individuals are being tortured, incarcerated or dead in Ba'athist prison networks, including thousands of women and children.[264]
War crimes
Numerous politicians, dissidents, authors and journalists have nicknamed Assad as the "butcher" of Syria for his war-crimes, anti-Sunni sectarian mass-killings, chemical weapons attacks and ethnic cleansing campaigns.[266][267][268][269] The Federal Bureau of Investigation has stated that at least 10 European citizens were tortured by the Assad government while detained during the Syrian civil war, potentially leaving Assad open to prosecution by individual European countries for war crimes.[270][167] UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay stated in December 2013 that UN investigations directly implicated Bashar al-Assad guilty of crimes against humanity and pursuing an extermination strategy developed "at the highest level of government, including the head of state."[271]
Stephen Rapp, the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, stated in 2014 that the crimes committed by Assad are the worst seen since those of Nazi Germany.[272] In March 2015, Rapp further stated that the case against Assad is "much better" than those against Slobodan Milošević of Serbia or Charles Taylor of Liberia, both of whom were indicted by international tribunals.[273] Charles Lister, Director of the Countering Terror and Extremism Program at Middle East Institute, describes Bashar al-Assad as "21st century's biggest war criminal".[177]
In a February 2015 interview with the BBC, Assad dismissed accusations that the Syrian Arab Air Force used barrel bombs as "childish", claiming that his forces have never used these types of "barrel" bombs and responded with a joke about not using "cooking pots" either.[274] The BBC Middle East editor conducting the interview, Jeremy Bowen, later described Assad's statement regarding barrel bombs as "patently not true".[275][276] As soon as demonstrations arose in 2011–2012, Bashar al-Assad opted to implement the "Samson option", the characteristic approach of the neo-Ba'athist regime since the era of Hafiz al-Assad; wherein protests were violently suppressed and demonstrators were shot and fired at directly by the armed forces. However, unlike Hafiz; Bashar had even less loyalty and was politically fragile, exacerbated by alienation of the majority of the population. As a result, Bashar chose to crack down on dissent far more comprehensively and harshly than his father; and a mere allegation of collaboration was reason enough to get assassinated.[277]
Nadim Shehadi, the director of The Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, stated that "In the early 1990s, Saddam Hussein was massacring his people and we were worried about the weapons inspectors," and claimed that "Assad did that too. He kept us busy with chemical weapons when he massacred his people."[278][279] Contrasting the policies of Hafiz al-Assad and that of his son Bashar, former Syrian vice-president and Ba'athist dissident Abdul Halim Khaddam states:
"The Father had a mind and the Son has a loss of reason. How could the army use its force and the security appartus with all its might to destroy Syria because of a protest against the mistakes of one of your security officials. The father would act differently. Father Hafiz hit Hama after he encircled it, warned and then hit Hama after a long siege... But his son is different. On the subject of Daraa, Bashar gave instructions to open fire on the demonstrators."[280]
Human rights organizations and criminal investigators have documented Assad's war crimes and sent it to the International Criminal Court for indictment.[281] Since Syria is not a party to the Rome Statute, International Criminal Court requires authorization from the UN Security Council to send Bashar al-Assad to tribunal. As this gets consistently vetoed by Assad's primary backer Russia, ICC prosecutions have not transpired. On the other hand, courts in various European countries have begun prosecuting and convicting senior Ba'ath party members, Syrian military commanders and Mukhabarat officials charged with war crimes.[282] In September 2015, France began an inquiry into Assad for crimes against humanity, with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius stating "Faced with these crimes that offend the human conscience, this bureaucracy of horror, faced with this denial of the values of humanity, it is our responsibility to act against the impunity of the killers".[283]
In February 2016, head of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, Paulo Pinheiro, told reporters: "The mass scale of deaths of detainees suggests that the government of Syria is responsible for acts that amount to extermination as a crime against humanity." The UN Commission reported finding "unimaginable abuses", including women and children as young as seven perishing while being held by Syrian authorities. The report also stated: "There are reasonable grounds to believe that high-ranking officers—including the heads of branches and directorates—commanding these detention facilities, those in charge of the military police, as well as their civilian superiors, knew of the vast number of deaths occurring in detention facilities ... yet did not take action to prevent abuse, investigate allegations or prosecute those responsible".[284]
In March 2016, the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs led by New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith called on the Obama administration to create a war crimes tribunal to investigate and prosecute violations "whether committed by the officials of the Government of Syria or other parties to the civil war".[285]
In June 2018, Germany's chief prosecutor issued an international arrest warrant for one of Assad's most senior military officials, Jamil Hassan.[286] Hassan is the head of Syria's powerful Air Force Intelligence Directorate. Detention centers run by Air Force Intelligence are among the most notorious in Syria, and thousands are believed to have died because of torture or neglect. Charges filed against Hassan claim he had command responsibility over the facilities and therefore knew of the abuse. The move against Hassan marked an important milestone of prosecutors trying to bring senior members of Assad's inner circle to trial for war crimes.
In an investigative report about the Tadamon Massacre, Professors Uğur Ümit Üngör and Annsar Shahhoud, found witnesses who attested that Assad gave orders for the Syrian Military Intelligence to direct the Shabiha to kill civilians.[287]
2023-2024 Arrest Warrant and Legal Proceedings
On 15 November 2023, France issued an arrest warrant against Syrian President Bashar Assad over the use of banned chemical weapons against civilians in Syria.[14] In May 2024, French anti-terrorism prosecutors requested the Paris appeals court to consider revoking Assad's arrest warrant, asserting his absolute immunity as a serving head of state.[288]
On 26 June 2024, the Paris appeals court determined that the international arrest warrant issued by France against Assad for alleged complicity in war crimes during the Syrian civil war remains valid. This decision was confirmed by attorneys involved in the case.[288]
According to the lawyers, this ruling marked the first instance where a national court acknowledged that the personal immunity of a serving head of state is not absolute, as reported by The Associated Press.[288]
Chemical attacks
The Syrian military has deployed chemical warfare as a systematic military strategy in the Syrian civil war, and is estimated to have committed over 300 chemical attacks, targeting civilian populations throughout the course of the conflict.[289][290] Investigation conducted by the GPPi research institute documented 336 confirmed attacks involving chemical weapons in Syria between 23 December 2012 and 18 January 2019. The study attributed 98% of the total verified chemical attacks to the Assad's regime. Almost 90% of the attacks had occurred after the Ghouta chemical attack in August 2013.[291][292]
Syria joined the Chemical Weapons Convention and OPCW member state in October 2013, and there are currently three OPCW missions with UN mandates to investigate chemical weapons issues in Syria. These are the Declaration Assessment Team (DAT) to verify Syrian declarations of CW Programme; OPCW Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) tasked to identify the chemical attacks and type of weapons used; and the Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) which investigates the perpetrators of the chemical attacks. The conclusions are submitted to the United Nations bodies.[293]
In April 2021, Syria was suspended from OPCW through the public vote of member states, for not co-operating with the body's Investigation Identification Team (IIT) and violating the Chemical Weapons Convention.[294][295][296] Findings of another investigation report published the OPCW-IIT in July 2021 concluded that the Syrian regime had engaged in confirmed chemical attacks at least 17 times, out of the reported 77 chemical weapon attacks attributed to Assadist forces.[297][298] As of March 2023, independent United Nations inquiry commissions have confirmed at least nine chemical attacks committed by forces loyal to the Assad government.[299][300]
The deadliest chemical attack have been the Ghouta chemical attacks, when Assad government forces launched the nerve agent sarin into civilian areas during its brutal Siege of Eastern Ghouta in early hours of 21 August 2013. Thousands of infected and dying victims flooded the nearby hospitals, showing symptoms such as foaming, body convulsions and other neurotoxic symptoms. An estimated 1,100-1,500 civilians; including women and children, are estimated to have been killed in the attacks.[301][302][303] The attack was internationally condemned and represented the deadliest use of chemical weapons since the Iran-Iraq war.[304][305] On 21 August 2022, United States government marked the ninth anniversary of Ghouta Chemical attacks stating: "United States remembers and honors the victims and survivors of the Ghouta attack and the many other chemical attacks we assess the Assad regime has launched. We condemn in the strongest possible terms any use of chemical weapons anywhere, by anyone, under any circumstances... The United States calls on the Assad regime to fully declare and destroy its chemical weapons program... and for the regime to allow the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ Declaration Assessment Team."[306]
In April 2017, there was a sarin chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun that killed more than 80 people.[308][237] The attack prompted U.S. President Donald Trump to order the U.S. military to launch 59 missiles at the Syrian Shayrat airbase.[309][310] Several months later, a joint report from the UN and international chemical weapons inspectors concluded that the attack was the work of the Assad regime.[167][311]
In April 2018, a chemical attack occurred in Douma, prompting the U.S. and its allies to accuse Assad of violating international laws and initiated joint missile strikes at chemical weapons facilities in Damascus and Homs. Both Syria and Russia denied the involvement of the Syrian government at this time.[312][313] The third report published on 27 January 2023 by the OPCW-IIT concluded that the Assad regime was responsible for the 2018 Douma chemical attack which killed at least 43 civilians.[l]
See also: Holocaust denial
In a speech delivered at the Ba'ath party's central committee meeting in December 2023, Bashar al-Assad claimed that there was "no evidence" of the killings of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Emphasizing that Jews were not the sole victims of Nazi extermination campaigns, Assad alleged that the Holocaust was "politicized" by Allied powers to facilitate the mass-deportation of European Jews to Palestine, and that it was used as an excuse to justify the creation of Israel. Assad also accused the U.S. government of financially and militarily sponsoring the rise of Nazism during the inter-war period.[314][315]
Public image
Domestic opposition and support
Further information: Syrian opposition
The secular resistance to Assad rule is mainly represented by the Syrian National Council and National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, two political bodies that constitute a coalition of centre-left and right-wing conservative factions of the Syrian opposition. Military commanders and civilian leaders of Free Syrian Army militias are represented in these councils. The coalition represents the political wing of the Syrian Interim Government and seeks the democratic transition of Syria through grass-roots activism, protests and armed resistance to overthrow the Ba'athist dictatorship.[316][317][318] A less influential faction within the Syrian opposition is the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change (NCC), a coalition of left-wing socialist parties that seek to end the rule of Assad family but without foreign involvement. Established in June 2011, major parties in the NCC coalition are the Democratic Arab Socialist Union, Syrian Democratic People's Party and the Communist Labour Party.[319]
National Democratic Rally (NDR) was an older left-wing opposition coalition of socialist parties formed in 1980, but banned by the Baathist government. NDR was active during the nation-wide protests of the 1980s and the Damascus Spring of the 2000s.[320] During the early years of the civil war, the Druze in Syria primarily sought to remain neutral, "seeking to stay out of the conflict". Druze-Israeli politician Majalli Wahabi claimed in 2016 that over half support the Assad government despite its relative weakness in Druze areas.[321] The "Sheikhs of Dignity" movement, which had sought to remain neutral and to defend Druze areas,[322] blamed the government after its leader Sheikh Wahid al-Balous was assassinated and organized large scale protests which left six government security personnel dead.[323] Druze community became fervently opposed to the Assad government over time and has been vocal about its opposition to increasing Iranian interference in Syria.[324] In August 2023, mass protests against Assad regime erupted in the Druze-majority city of Suweida,[325][326] which eventually spread to other regions of Southern Syria.[327][328][329] Druze cleric Hikmat al-Hajiri, religious leader of Syrian Druze community, has declared war against "Iranian invasion of the country".[330] Syrian Sufi scholar Muhammad al-Yaqoubi, a fervent opponent of both the Ba'athist regime and Islamic State group, has described Assad's rule as a "reign of terror" that wreaked havoc and enormous misery on the Syrian populace.[331]
Central to the regime's support base is the Ba'athist loyalists who dominate Syrian politics, trade unions, youth organizations, students unions, bureaucracy and armed forces.[332] Ba'ath party institutions and its political activities form the "vital pillars of regime survival". Family networks of politicians in the Ba'ath party-led National Progressive Front (NPF) and businessmen loyal to the Assad family form another pole of support. Electoral listing is supervised by Ba'ath party leadership which expels candidates not deemed "sufficiently loyal".[333][334][335] Although it has been reported at various stages of the Syrian civil war that religious minorities such as the Alawites and Christians in Syria favour the Assad government because of its secularism,[336][337] opposition exists among Assyrian Christians who have claimed that the Assad government seeks to use them as "puppets" and deny their distinct ethnicity, which is non-Arab.[338] Although Syria's Alawite community forms Bashar al-Assad's core support base and dominate the military and security apparatus,[339][340] in April 2016, BBC News reported that Alawite leaders released a document seeking to distance themselves from Assad.[341]
Kurdish Supreme Committee was a coalition of 13 Kurdish political parties opposed to Assad regime. Before its dissolution in 2015, the committee consisted of KNC and PYD.[319] Circassians in Syria have also become strong opponents of the regime as Ba'athist crackdowns and massacres across Syria intensified viciously; and members of Circassian ethnic minority have attempted to escape Syria, fearing persecution.[342] In 2014, the Christian Syriac Military Council, the largest Christian organization in Syria, allied with the Free Syrian Army opposed to Assad,[343] joining other Syrian Christian militias such as the Sutoro who had joined the Syrian opposition against the Assad government.[344] Abu Muhammad al-Joulani, commander of the Tahrir al-Sham rebel militia, condemned Assad regime for converting Syria "into an ongoing earthquake the past 12 years", in the context of the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes.[345]
"In June 2014, Assad won a disputed presidential election held in government-controlled areas (and boycotted in opposition-held areas[346] and Kurdish areas governed by the Democratic Union Party[347]) with 88.7% of the vote. Turnout was estimated to be 73.42% of eligible voters, including those in rebel-controlled areas.[348] The regime's electoral commission also disqualified millions of Syrian citizens displaced outside the country from voting.[349] Independent observers and academic scholarship unanimously describe the event as a sham election organized to legitimise Assad's rule.[350][351][352] In his inauguration ceremony, Bashar denounced the opposition as "terrorists" and "traitors"; while attacking the West for backing what he described as the "fake Arab spring".[353]
Times of Israel reported that although various individuals interviewed in a "Sunni-dominated, middle-class neighborhood of central Damascus" exhibited fealty for Assad; it was not possible to discern the actual support for the regime due to the ubiquitous influence of the secret police in the society.[354] Ba'athist dissident Abdul Halim Khaddam who had served as Syrian Vice President during the tenures of both Hafiz and Bashar, disparaged Bashar al-Assad as a pawn in Iran's imperial scheme. Contrasting the power dynamics that existed under both the autocrats, Khaddam stated:
"[Bashar] is not like his father.. He never allowed the Iranians to intervene in Syrian affairs.. During Hafez Assad's time, an Iranian delegation arrived in Syria and attempted to convert some of the Muslim Alawite Syrians to Shia Islam... Assad ordered his minister of foreign Affairs to summon the Iranian ambassador to deliver an ultimatum: The delegation has 24 hours to exit Syria.... They had no power [during Hafez's rule], unlike Bashar who gave them [Iranians] power and control."[355][356]
International opposition
Foreign journalists and political observers who travelled to Syria have described it as the most "ruthless police state" in the Arab World. Assad's violent repression of Damascus Spring of the early 2000s and the publication of a UN report that implicated him in the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, exacerbated Syria's post-Cold War isolation.[357][358] Following global outrage against Assad regime's deadly crackdown on the Arab Spring protestors which led to the Syrian civil war, scorched-earth policy against the civilian populations resulting in more than half a million deaths, mass murders and systematic deployment of chemical warfare throughout the conflict; Bashar al-Assad became an international pariah and numerous world leaders have urged him to resign.[359][358][360][361]
Since 2011, Bashar al-Assad has lost recognition from several international organizations such as the Arab League (in 2011),[362] Union for the Mediterranean (in 2011)[363] and Organization of Islamic Co-operation (in 2012).[364][365] United States, European Union, Turkey, Arab League and various countries began enforcing broad sets of sanctions against Syrian regime from 2011, with the objective of forcing Assad to resign and assist in a political solution to the crisis.[366] International bodies have criticized one-sided elections organized by Assad government during the conflict. In the 2014 London conference of countries of the Friends of Syria group, British Foreign Secretary William Hague characterized Syrian elections as a "parody of democracy" and denounced the regime's "utter disregard for human life" for perpetrating war-crimes and state-terror on the Syrian population.[367] Assad's policy of holding elections under the circumstances of an ongoing civil war were also rebuked by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.[368]
Georgia suspended all relations with Syria following Bashar al-Assad's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, condemning his government as a "Russian manipulated regime" that supported Russian occupation and "ethnic cleansing".[m] Following Assad's strong backing of Russian invasion of Ukraine and recognition of the breakaway separatist republics, Ukraine cut off all diplomatic relations with Syria in June 2022. Describing Assad's policies as "worthless", Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky pledged to expand further sanctions against Syria.[372][373] In March 2023, National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine put into effect a range of sanctions targeting 141 firms and 300 individuals linked to Assad regime, Russian weapons manufacturers and Iranian dronemakers. This was days after Assad's visit to Moscow, wherein he justified Russian invasion of Ukraine as a fight against "old and new Nazis". Bashar al-Assad, Prime Minister Hussein Arnous and Foreign Minister Faisal Mikdad were amongst the individuals who were sanctioned.[n] Sanctions also involved freezing of all Syrian state properties in Ukraine, curtailment of monetary transactions, termination of economic commitments and recision of all official Ukrainian awards.[377] Syria formally broke its diplomatic ties to Ukraine on July 20, citing the principle of reciprocity.[379]
In April 2023, a French court declared three high-ranking Ba'athist security officials guilty of crimes against humanity, torture and various war-crimes against French-Syrian citizens. These included Ali Mamlouk, director of National Security Bureau of Syrian Ba'ath party and Jamil Hassan, former head of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence Directorate.[380][381] France had issued international arrest warrants against the three officers over the case in 2018.[382] In May 2023, French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna publicly demanded the prosecution of Bashar al-Assad for engaging in chemical warfare and killing hundreds of thousands of people; branding him as "the enemy of his own people".[383][384] On 15 November 2023, France issued an arrest warrant against Assad for use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria.[14]
Left-wing
Bashar al-Assad is widely criticised by left-wing activists and intellectuals world-wide for appropriating leftist ideologies and its socialist, progressive slogans as a cover for his own family rule and to empower a loyalist clique of elites at the expense of ordinary Syrians. His close alliance with clergy-ruled Khomeinist Iran and its sectarian militant networks; while simultaneously pursuing a policy of locking up left-wing critics of Assad family has been subject to heavy criticism.[385]
Egyptian branch of the Iraqi Ba'ath movement has declared its strong support to the Syrian revolution; denouncing Ba'athist Syria as a repressive dictatorship controlled by the "Assad gang". It has attacked Assad family's Ba'athist credentials, accusing the Syrian Ba'ath party of acting as the borderguards of Israel ever since its overthrowal of the Ba'athist National Command during the 1966 coup d'état. Describing Bashar al-Assad as a disgraceful person for inviting hostile powers like Iran to Syria, Egyptian Ba'athists have urged the Syrian revolutionaries to unite in their efforts to overthrow the Assad regime and resist foreign imperialism.[386]
Describing Assad's regime as a mafia state that thrives on corruption and sectarianism, Lebanese socialist academic Gilbert Achcar stated:
"Bashar Assad's cousin became the richest man in the country, controlling – it is widely believed – over half of the economy. And that's only one member of the ruling clan... The clan functions as a real mafia, and has been ruling the country for several decades. This constitutes the deep root of the explosion, in combination with the fact that the Syrian regime is one of the most despotic in the region. Compared to Assad's Syria, Mubarak's Egypt was a beacon of democracy and political freedom!... What is specific to this regime is that Assad's father has reshaped and reconstructed the state apparatus, especially its hard nucleus – the armed forces – in order to create a Pretorian guard for itself. The army, especially its elite forces, is tied to the regime itself in various ways, most prominently through the use of sectarianism. Even people who had never heard of Syria before know now that the regime is based on one minority in the country – about 10% of the population; the Alawites."[387]
The Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) in Lebanon has taken an anti-Assad stance and organised mass-protests in support of the Syrian revolution. In August 2012, PSP publicly denounced the Assad government as a "killing machine" engaged in slaughtering Syrian people. PSP leader Ayman Kamaleddine demanded the expulsion of the Syrian ambassador from Lebanon, describing him as "the representative of the murderer regime in Lebanon".[14][15]
International support
Far-right support
Bashar al-Assad's regime has received support from prominent white nationalist, neo-Nazi and far-right figures in Europe, who were attracted by his "war on terror" discourse against Islamists during the period of European refugee crisis. Assad's bombings of Syrian cities are admired in the Islamophobic discourse of far-right circles, which considers Muslims as a civilizational enemy. American white supremacists often praise Assad as an authoritarian bulwark against what they view as the forces of "Islamic extremism" and globalism; and several pro-Assad slogans were chanted in the neo-Nazi Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville in 2017.[o][388]
Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National Party (BNP), was formerly an official ambassador and guest of the Syrian government;[389] due to public controversy, the Assad government publicly disassociated itself from him after his trip to Syria in 2014.[390] After the 2014 Syrian presidential elections, Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko sent a cable of congratulations to Bashar, expressing his "confidence" in the "leadership" of Bashar al-Assad, and depicted the Ba'athist government's military campaign as part of "the fight against terrorism and foreign interference".[391]
Left-wing
Left-wing support for Assad has been split since the start of the Syrian civil war;[needs update] the Assad government has been accused of cynically manipulating sectarian identity and anti-imperialism to continue its worst activities.
Some heads of state or governments have declared their support for Assad, including North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.[394] After declaring victory in the 2014 elections, Assad received congratulations from President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro,[395] President of Algeria Abdelaziz Bouteflika,[396] President of Guyana Donald Ramotar,[397] President of South Africa Jacob Zuma,[398] President of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega,[399] and Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah and President of the State of Palestine.[400][401][402] Palestinian Marxist-Leninist militant group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) supported Bashar al-Assad during the Syrian civil war. As a result of this stance, Iranian government increased its military and financial funding to PFLP.[403][404]
International public relations
In order to promote their image and media-portrayal overseas, Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma al-Assad hired U.S. and UK based PR firms and consultants.[405] In particular, these secured photoshoots for Asma al-Assad with fashion and celebrity magazines, including Vogue's March 2011 "A Rose in the Desert".[406][407] These firms included Bell Pottinger and Brown Lloyd James, with the latter being paid $5,000 a month for their services.[405][408]
At the outset of the Syrian civil war, Syrian government networks were hacked by the group Anonymous, revealing that an ex-Al Jazeera journalist had been hired to advise Assad on how to manipulate the public opinion of the U.S. Among the advice was the suggestion to compare the popular uprising against the regime to the Occupy Wall Street protests.[409] In a separate e-mail leak several months later by the Supreme Council of the Syrian Revolution, which were published by The Guardian, it was revealed that Assad's consultants had coordinated with an Iranian government media advisor.[410] In March 2015, an expanded version of the aforementioned leaks was handed to the Lebanese NOW News website and published the following month.[411]
After the Syrian civil war began, the Assads started a social media campaign which included building a presence on Facebook, YouTube, and most notably Instagram.[408] A Twitter account for Assad was reportedly activated; however, it remained unverified.[412] This resulted in much criticism, and was described by The Atlantic Wire as "a propaganda campaign that ultimately has made the [Assad] family look worse".[413] The Assad government has also allegedly arrested activists for creating Facebook groups that the government disapproved of,[131] and has appealed directly to Twitter to remove accounts it disliked.[414] The social media campaign, as well as the previously leaked e-mails, led to comparisons with Hannah Arendt's A Report on the Banality of Evil by The Guardian, The New York Times and the Financial Times.[415][416][417]
In October 2014, 27,000 photographs depicting torture committed by the Assad government were put on display at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.[418][419] Lawyers were hired to write a report on the images by the British law firm Carter-Ruck, which in turn was funded by the Government of Qatar.[420]
In November 2014, the Quilliam Foundation reported that a propaganda campaign, which they claimed had the "full backing of Assad", spread false reports about the deaths of Western-born jihadists in order to deflect attention from the government's alleged war crimes. Using a picture of a Chechen fighter from the Second Chechen War, pro-Assad media reports disseminated to Western media outlets, leading them to publish a false story regarding the death of a non-existent British jihadist.[421]
In 2015, Russia intervened in the Syrian civil war in support of Assad, and on 21 October 2015, Assad flew to Moscow and met with Russian president Vladimir Putin, who said regarding the civil war: "this decision can be made only by the Syrian people. Syria is a friendly country. And we are ready to support it not only militarily but politically as well."[422]
2024 - WHY isn't Assad in Prison? [423]
Personal life
Assad speaks fluent English and basic conversational French, having studied at the Franco-Arab al-Hurriyah school in Damascus.[424]
In December 2000, Assad married Asma Akhras, a British citizen of Syrian origin from Acton, London.[425][426] In 2001, Asma gave birth to their first child, a son named Hafez after the child's grandfather Hafiz al-Assad. Bashar al-Assad's son Hafez graduated from Moscow State University in the summer of 2023 with a master's thesis in number theory.[427] Their daughter Zein was born in 2003, followed by their second son Karim in 2004.[24] In January 2013, Assad stated in an interview that his wife was pregnant;[428][429] however, there were no later reports of them having a fourth child.[citation needed]
Bashar al-Assad is an Alawite Muslim.[430] Bashar performed the hajj pilgrimage twice in 1999 and in 2000.[431]
Assad's sister, Bushra al-Assad, and mother, Anisa Makhlouf, left Syria in 2012 and 2013, respectively, to live in the United Arab Emirates.[24] Makhlouf died in Damascus in 2016.[432]
Awards and honours
Revoked and returned awards and honours.
Ribbon Distinction Country Date Location Notes Reference Grand Cross of the National Order of the Legion of Honour France 25 June 2001 Paris Highest rank in the Order of the Legion of Honor in the Republic of France. Returned by Assad on 20 April 2018[433] after the opening of a revocation process by the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, on 16 April 2018. [434][435] Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise Ukraine 21 April 2002 Kyiv Revoked on 18 March 2023, as part of sanctions issued by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy which revoked all previous Ukrainian state awards to Assad government[377] [436][377] Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Francis I Two Sicilies 21 March 2004 Damascus Dynastic order of the House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies; Revoked several years later[when?] by Prince Carlo, Duke of Castro. [437][438] Order of Zayed UAE 31 May 2008 Abu Dhabi Highest civil decoration in the United Arab Emirates. [439] Order of the White Rose of Finland Finland 5 October 2009 Damascus One of three official orders in Finland. [440] Order of King Abdulaziz Saudi Arabia 8 October 2009 Damascus Highest Saudi state order. [441] Knight Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic Italy 11 March 2010 Damascus Highest ranking honour of the Republic of Italy. Revoked by the President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, on 28 September 2012 for "indignity". [442][443] Collar of the Order of the Liberator Venezuela 28 June 2010[444] Caracas Highest Venezuelan state order. [445] Grand Collar of the Order of the Southern Cross Brazil 30 June 2010 Brasília Brazil's highest order of merit. [446] Grand Cordon of the National Order of the Cedar Lebanon 31 July 2010 Beirut Second highest honour of Lebanon. [447] Order of the Islamic Republic of Iran Iran 2 October 2010 Tehran Highest national medal of Iran. [448][449] Uatsamonga Order South Ossetia 2018 Damascus State award of South Ossetia. [450]
See also
List of international presidential trips made by Bashar al-Assad
Presidency of Hafiz al-Assad
Foreign Policy of Bashar al-Assad
Explanatory notes
References
Citations
General and cited references
Further reading
Abboud, Samer (2015). Syria (Hot Spots in Global Politics). Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-9797-0.
Belhadj, Souhaïl (2013). La Syrie de Bashar Al-Asad : Anatomie d'un régime autoritaire [Bashar's Syria: Anatomy of an Authoritarian Regime] (in French). Belin. ISBN 978-2-7011-6467-0.
Hinnebusch, Raymond (2002). Syria: Revolution From Above. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-28568-1.
Perthes, Volker (2005). Syria Under Bashar Al-Asad: Modernisation and the Limits of Change. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-19-856750-9.
Tabler, Andrew (2011). In the Lion's Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle with Syria. Zephyr Press. ISBN 978-1-56976-843-3.
Reports
Yossi Baidatz (August 2001). Bashar's First Year: From Ophthalmology to a National Vision (PDF) (Report). Washington Institute for Near East Policy. ASIN B0006RVLNM. Archived from the original (PDF) on 25 December 2016 .
Annette Büchs (March 2009). The Resilience of Authoritarian Rule in Syria under Hafez and Bashar Al-Asad (PDF) (Report). German Institute of Global and Area Studies. 97. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 October 2017 .
Articles
Abdelnour, Ziad K. (12 April 2003). "Syria's Proxy Forces in Iraq". Al-Hayat.
"Profile: Syria's Bashar al-Assad". BBC News. 10 March 2005.
Harris, William (Summer 2005). "Bashar al-Assad's Lebanon Gamble". Middle East Quarterly.
Pan, Esther (10 March 2006). "Syria's Leaders". Council on Foreign Relations. Archived from the original on 19 July 2006.
"Interview With Syrian President Bashar al-Assad". The Wall Street Journal. 31 January 2011.
"Profile: Bashar al-Assad". Al Jazeera. 25 March 2011.
Rose, Charlie (9 September 2013). "Interview with Bashar Hafez al-Assad". PBS. Archived from the original on 18 November 2016 .
Official website
Biography
Decrees
Speeches
Interviews
Press releases
Appearances on C-SPAN
Bashar al-Assad collected news and commentary at The Guardian
Bashar al-Assad collected news and commentary at The New York Times
Bashar al-Assad at IMDb | ||||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 17 | https://mesana.org/awards/awardee/mesa-academic-freedom-award/radwan-ziadeh | en | MESA Academic Freedom Award | [
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] | null | [] | 2018-03-13T17:49:55-04:00 | MESA awarded its 2009 Academic Freedom Award to Dr. Radwan Ziadeh, founder and director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies. Ziadeh has frequently given talks in and outside Syria on the status of human rights and democratic reform in Syria. | en | Middle East Studies Association | https://mesana.org/awards/awardee/mesa-academic-freedom-award/radwan-ziadeh | Radwan Ziadeh
2009 Recipient
Dr. Radwan Ziadeh is a founder and director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies. A prominent advocate for human rights and reform in Syria, Ziadeh has frequently given talks in and outside Syria on the status of human rights and democratic reform in Syria, Ziadeh was editor of Tayarat magazine in 2001–2002 and served as secretary of the Syrian Organization for Transparency. In 2004, he was named the best political science researcher in the Arab world by Jordan’s Abdulhameed Shoman Foundation. He was also a principal figure and activist in the Damascus Spring, a period of intense debate about politics and social issues and calls for reform in Syria after the death of President Hafez al-Assad in 2000.
Following an extended period of intensive surveillance by Syrian security agencies, and based on indications that he was about to be detained, Ziadeh fled Syria in mid-2007. He received a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellowship from the U.S. Institute of Peace for the 2007-2008 academic year, and was then selected as a “Scholar at Risk,” by Harvard University where he spent the 2008-2009 academic year in residence at the Kennedy School. Having left Syria without government permission, Ziadeh is not able to return to his home country.
MESA is pleased to honor Dr. Radwan Ziadeh with its 2009 Academic Freedom Award. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 59 | https://www.martinennalsaward.org/hrd/aktham-naisse/ | en | Martin Ennals Award Aktham Naisse | [
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] | null | [] | 2016-07-18T14:17:28+00:00 | Aktham Naisse - Martin Ennals Award 2005 laureate. Aktham Naisse co-founded the Committee for the Defense of Democratic Liberties and Human Rights (CDF). | en | Martin Ennals Award | https://www.martinennalsaward.org/hrd/aktham-naisse/ | After more than a decade struggling for human rights in Syria, on December 1989, Aktham Naisse co-founded the Committee for the Defense of Democratic Liberties and Human Rights (CDF). The first of its kind in Syria, CDF quickly began defending political prisoners, denouncing Syria’s longstanding 1963 Emergency Law and calling for political reforms.
The same year, Naisse took matters a step further and began publicizing a newsletter under the name Sawt ad-Dimuqratiya (Voice of Democracy). Naisse would earn the ire of the Syrian authorities – running an illegal NGO and publishing a newsletter critical of the regime.
Working between the lines was by no means ‘new territory’ for Naisse – for nearly 15 years he had been seeking permission from the government to work openly and freely on human rights issues in Syria.
On 18 December 1991, only a few days after the CDF’s 2nd anniversary, Naisse was arrested. The torture sessions ensued and following a categorically ‘unfair’ trial, he was sentenced to nine years imprisonment. He was provisionally released in 1996, however he continued to agitate the Syrian authorities over democratic and human rights, maintained his fervent criticism of the State of Emergency, landing him in jail a further five times between 1996 and 1998.
Immediately after his final release in 1998, he would further bolster the CDF’s efforts by launching a campaign to lift the State of Emergency and allow all exiled Syrian to return.
Almost a year later in 2000, then-president Hafez Al-Assad died, his son Bashar, taking over the reins while making promises of ‘political reforms’. With the release of 600 political prisoners in November 2000 and a renewed tolerance for civil society groups, Syria seemed to be approaching a new era under its new youthful President. But as more than 60 discussion forums would emerge, hope was short-lived, as the previous darkness Syrians knew all too well came to settle once again.
By 2001 the vast majority of the new-founded discussion fora and civil society groups had once again disappeared and in June 2002, the European parliament adopted a resolution condemning the imprisonment of Syrian intellectuals and political opponents.
On 27 August 2003, the CDF was told to shut down, despite the threats, Naisse’s didn’t back down, rather leading the CDF in doubling its efforts.
In early 2004 the CDF published a petition signed by 7000 intellectuals calling for an end to the Emergency Law. The same year, on 8 March the anniversary of the 41st of Baath party rule, Naisse organized a peaceful sit-in outside the Damascus parliament, during which protestors made calls for democratic reforms and the release of political prisoners.
An alleged 700 demonstrators were arrested, but released the following day. A month later, Naisse was summoned by the military security services in Latakia, west Syria and arrested.
He was charged with “opposing the objectives of the revolution” and “disseminating false information aiming at weakening the State” – charges that could land him 15-years in jail.
By now Naisse was used to the Syrian authorities’ draconian tactics, having been the target of threats and harassment over the last 10 years, escalating to an incident when his mother was beaten by security services in 2003.
The international human rights community instantly mobilized as the FIDH, OMCT, Frontline and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Right Network amongst others issued appeals on Naisse’s behalf.
While in custody, Naisse was awarded the Ludovic Trarieux international human rights prize for 2004
While in custody, awaiting trial, Naisse suddenly suffered a stroke after being denied medication for his kidney and heart problems. Fearing he might die, Syria’s Supreme State Security Court (SSSC) conditionally released Naisse on 17 August 2004 for 10,000 Syrian Pounds, and called on the authorities to drop all charges.
After successive postponements in his trial – culminating on 24 April 2005 during a hearing with a protest of more than 200 demonstrators outside the SSSC in Damascus – Aktham Naisse was acquitted by SSSC on 26 June 2005.
News of his release was welcomed across the globe and a few days before his trial Naisse wrote to the Martin Ennals Foundation saying,
“I feel more motivated and happy because there are people interested in our problem, people that care for us and support us in our fight for human liberty. I have a great belief now that I know we are not struggling alone against human rights violations.”
On 12 October 2005, Naisse was awarded the 2005 Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders during a ceremony at the Bâtiment des Forces Motrices in Geneva, Switzerland.
Naisse was until recently under constant surveillance in Syria, in internal exile since a travel ban was imposed on him in October 2008. In 2011 the Syrian government launched a bloody repression against the opposition. In August 2011 the city of Latakia was bombarded by land and sea, fortunately Aktham Naisse was able to escape and take refuge in Europe. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 40 | https://adst.org/2015/06/like-father-like-son-tyranny-in-syria-a-massacre-in-hama/ | en | Like Father, Like Son — Tyranny in Syria, A Massacre in Hama – Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training | [
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] | null | [] | null | en | https://adst.org/2015/06/like-father-like-son-tyranny-in-syria-a-massacre-in-hama/ | As the civil war in Syria drags on with no end in sight, the humanitarian toll of the conflict becomes increasingly dire. The brutal crackdown carried out by Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s tyrannical president, initially targeted pro-democracy demonstrators but has since taken a sectarian turn as conservative Islamic groups fight the secular regime that prohibited groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood from operating.
The war has reopened old wounds as the regime and the Syrian army, which are composed mainly of the religious minority of Alawite Muslims, fear that if al-Assad, who is also Alawite, is ousted, they will be persecuted. This conflict between the Alawites and the rest of Syria’s citizens has existed since the reign of Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria as president in a similarly brutal manner from 1971-2000. During the 1980’s, Hafez al-Assad faced increasing dissent and violence from the Muslim Brotherhood as they sought to retaliate for government campaigns against their members. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood attacked the security forces with car bombs and assassinations while the government struggled to root out these terrorists.
The campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood and other fundamentalist Islamic groups culminated in February 1981, when security forces sealed the city of Hama, in northern Syria, for 27 days as tanks and Special Forces searched the city for insurgents. Civilians could not leave the city while tanks and planes bombarded sections of the city. The final death toll is estimated to be between 10,000 and 25,000 killed, with some estimates as high as 40,000 dead. The operation showed the world the way the Assads would deal with dissent, a precedent that — tragically – is still true today.
Haywood Rankin was a Political Officer at the Embassy in Damascus from 1984-1986, where he worked with the Alawi-controlled government of Hafez al-Assad. Norman Pratt worked as an Economic Officer in Damascus from 1963-1967, during which time he saw the first rumblings of Muslim Brotherhood dissent against the Assad regime. Talcott Seelye had many years of experience in dealing with Syria and Hafez al-Assad, first as the Director of the Arabian North Affairs desk from 1968-1972 and then as Ambassador to Syria from 1978-1981.
William Rugh served as the Deputy Chief of Mission in Damascus from 1981-1984, during which time the siege and destruction of Hama took place. Samuel Lewis served as the Ambassador to Israel for eight years, from 1977-1985. Edward Abington served in the Political Office in Damascus from 1979-1982, where he experienced the violence leading up to the siege, as well as its aftermath. Richard Undeland worked as a Political Affairs Officer at the Damascus embassy from 1979-1982.
Rankin, Seelye, Rugh, Abington, and Undeland were all interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy; Rankin beginning in July 1998, Seelye in September 1993, Rugh in March 1996, Abington in April 2000, and Undeland in July 1994. Pratt was interviewed by Dayton Mak beginning in November 1991, and Lewis was interviewed by Peter Jessup beginning August 1998.
Go here to read more about Hafez al-Assad and other Moments on the Middle East.
“There was a strong sense of ethnic unity and self-preservation”
Haywood Rankin, Political Officer, Damascus Embassy, 1984-1986
RANKIN: The country bumpkins from the mountains, the Alawi Mountains of the northwest…they are a minority. But they were a minority who even going back into the period of the French mandate had a presence in the armed forces far greater than their proportion of the population would have suggested. This was a way forward for the poor, illiterate mountaineers.
You could think of the Alawi Mountains as being the Appalachia of Syria. These “Appalachians” had seen the army as the natural way for them to get out of their mountains and to find work and a career. They are Ismaili. They are a type of Muslim which is different from the mainline Sunni Islam that had always dominated the country going back to the Turkish era. (Map: Stration)
The relationship between the Sunnis, particularly of Hama, and the Alawis had been masters toward servants and peasants. The Alawis had their own religion, effectively, and a strong sense of their own ethnicity. I think that has been the main secret to Assad’s holding power. Even though there have been tensions and competition within the Alawi community, they have known that the minute they lost power, there would be a bloodbath in which they would be the losers.
Despite all of the jostling within the Alawi community for power and the occasional rumors one would hear of coup plots against Hafez al-Assad, at the end of the day there was a strong sense of ethnic unity and self-preservation. They were very secretive. It was very difficult for me to get to the root of this. The Alawis were very strong in the military, very strong in the intelligence services and very hard to get at.
Norman Pratt, Economic Officer, Damascus Embassy, 1963-1967
PRATT: The Army started out as an underclass, particularly with the Alawites. This group lived up in the hills beyond Latakia and in the valley around Homs. They were poor peasants with little chance for advancement or education, except through military schools. As the minority, they found favor with the French Mandate authorities. They were encouraged to become non-coms [non-commissioned officers] and eventually go to officers’ candidate school at Homs. Thus, they emerged as a military caste devoted primarily to their own Alawite interests.
The Alawite are heterodox Muslims about whose beliefs we know little. Their dogma is considered secret. Their poverty as peasants showed up particularly because they were the tenant farmers for the wealthy, Sunni Moslems, and the conditions under which the Alawite lived were not good. There was a study done on rural hygiene back in the ’30s which described it vividly.
Thus when you get into situations like the one in the mid-’80s where you had the Sunni uprising in Hama against Alawite and the Baath Party, and the subsequent government bloody reprisals and suppression of the revolt, it is understandable that this is basically the working out of the Alawite antagonism against the Sunni landlord.
“The Alawites ruled by terror”
Talcott Seelye, Director, Arabian North Affairs, State Department 1968-1972
SEELYE: I had been in charge of what we call Arabian North Affairs in the Department which included Syria back in 1968-72, when Assad came to power, so I followed him very closely. However, I had never met him before. I think when one meets him you see an additional dimension to Assad.
If one hears about him from afar he comes across as a tough guy, shrewd, very adroit, who runs Syria with an armed fist. But when you meet him personally, as I did for the first time when I presented my credentials, you found a man very at ease, very laid back, very pleasant with a nice smile on his face, very responsive, with the appearance of having lots of time, a good sense of humor, a very attractive personality.
Just very low key and laid back, responsive and curious and bright. So that is what one learns by meeting him firsthand. I had the impression before I got there that there was a difference between him and Saddam. I had also followed Saddam Hussein closely because he came to power in Iraq about the same time, although at first he was the power behind the scenes. When Saddam came to power in Iraq I became aware of his ruthlessness. How he wiped out the intellectual elite of Baghdad and how bloody-minded and basically how brutal a person he was.
I had felt that Assad was much more calculating and much more discriminating when it came to the use of force and terror. And that was borne out when I was there. If the regime was challenged, Assad was ruthless.
William Rugh, Deputy Chief of Mission, Embassy Damascus, 1981-1984
RUGH: It seemed that he [Assad] was convinced that being a very strong, tough Arab nationalist was important to him and maintaining his power. He represented internally a minority group…. He had come up through the military. His hold on power depended partly on the control of the military and control of the Syrian Baath party. It was, to some extent, tenuous if you consider that he was representing a minority and that may have influenced his desire to preserve himself as a very tough Arab nationalist.
He was tough. He would talk about refusal to surrender, as he thought [Egypt’s Anwar] Sadat surrendered to the Israelis. But he was going to insist on no surrender. His control was fairly solid.
When I first arrived in 1981, there was some terrorist activity going on in Syria carried out by Islamic fundamentalists against the regime. During the first several months there were a few major car bomb explosions in Damascus and elsewhere. One of them was right behind the American school and caused a lot of damage to the Air Force headquarters as I recall. In the first months I was there, the Syrian government was able to put an end to that. They were able to arrest and eliminate the opposition. It was fairly stable.
The only exception being later when there was an uprising in Hama. It took a couple days for the Syrian army to put it down and they put it down very brutally, destroying a large section of Hama. The press said they destroyed the whole city, which of course wasn’t true. They did destroy a large section of it and it happened when I was there.
“The government decided that this was the last straw”
Samuel Lewis, Ambassador to Israel, 1977-1985
LEWIS: Towards the end of January, troubles erupted in Syria. Assad’s forces were attacked by Muslim fundamentalists in a number of cities. These were serious terrorist-guerrilla operations against the Syrian regime. The end result was that in a matter of a few weeks, Assad sent the Army into Homs, Hama and Aleppo. The Army shelled these towns and in Hama especially it leveled the town. In the process, according to the information we received, 20-25,000 people were killed by the Syrian Army–mostly, if not all, women and children–the families of the Muslims.
The Muslim Brotherhood was effectively squashed and their rebellion was over. The cities became ghost towns; they have never been rebuilt in the same way. It was an excellent illustration on how to extinguish a rebellion with cold-blooded brutality. Assad was in very bad health at the time and his regime was quite shaky, but he held on tenaciously.
SEELYE: [The siege of Hama] happened after I left, but it was building up while I was there because the Muslim Brotherhood was beginning to get up a head of steam while I was there. We could hear explosions right near the embassy resulting from an attack by some gang of the Muslim Brotherhood against some Baathist office or residence. We had reports that the Brotherhood was getting stronger, particularly up in the Hama, which has always been a bastion of Islamic conservatism. A couple of times even Soviet military advisers were attacked.
In Damascus members of the Mulchbarat (Security Service) which drove around in Land Rovers. Whenever you saw a Land Rover you knew it was the Mulchbarat, except that the Soviet advisers also drove Land Rovers. A total of 12 Soviet military advisers were killed in the course of time, either because the Brotherhood thought they were Mulchbarat or maybe because they knew they were Russians and felt that since the Russians were close to Assad they were legitimate targets.
I used to joke privately that here was the American Ambassador who is representing a country that was not enjoying good relations, and yet I didn’t feel really in danger. Although there was an incident once that indicated that this was not always the case. But here were the Russians who were close to Syria and got shot at and some were killed.
The Muslim Brotherhood movement was gaining strength and at first Assad tried to cut a deal with them. At the same time he threw a lot of them in jail, those he could get his hands on. But the situation still got worse.
Up in Aleppo at one point, while cadets in the Cadet Academy were in an auditorium, 90 were killed by machine guns fired through the windows. The Brotherhood was considered responsible and there was some evidence that Iraq was colluding with the organization.
In the fall of 1978, just after I got there, there was an effort to bring Iraq and Syria together and they met in Damascus, with the idea of unity. But it fell apart, it didn’t work out. As months went by tensions increased between the two countries. And the Syrians claimed to have evidence that the Iraqis were helping the Brotherhood, providing them with arms, and were behind some of these incidents like the cadet massacre. So things were building up.
At one point the Syrian government decided to teach the Brotherhood a lesson. There is a big prison up near Palmyra and a lot of the prisoners there were political prisoners, many who were members of the Brotherhood or suspected of being so. They were let out as if they were going to be freed, several hundred of them.
Then with helicopters and armored cars the Syrian police and military just mowed them down. One was aware of the bestiality in Assad, but it was not quite to the same degree as in the case of Saddam. Saddam did it every day. Assad did it only when he felt challenged. He felt challenged by this group and wanted to teach them a lesson.
Well, of course, that affair in Palmyra only incensed the Brotherhood even more. The uprising in Hama occurred after I left, in 1982. The Brotherhood in Hama rose up against the government and killed Assad’s officials in Hama. So the government decided that this was the last straw. It sent in elite troops who just wiped out half the city and killed 15,000-20,000 people — men, women and children. This was ruthless, but there hasn’t been a peep out of the Brotherhood ever since….That is Assad’s modus operandi. (At right, Hama Square)
RUGH: We heard about the Hama siege when it started. We tried to monitor it, but it was difficult because it was closed off by the Syrians. They didn’t allow our attachés or anybody to go up there and look at it. But we did get some people up there and looked at it while it was still going on. This was before the international press knew it was happening. There were lots of American and foreign journalists sitting in Beirut, but there weren’t any correspondents sitting in Damascus. The Syrians weren’t about to report it. So, it didn’t get into the international press until after it was just about over. But the embassy knew about it and was reporting on it.
What happened was that Hama is a very old city and the oldest parts of it have very narrow streets and it’s sort of a rabbit warren of little narrow alleys and houses piled on top of each other. The Islamic fundamentalists who were in revolt against the local government of Hama were able to resist being arrested by the local police and military because they holed up in these small houses and streets. That was a security problem for the Syrians because they couldn’t get them out of there. It was easier to be snipers in a window of a little old house than it was to arrest them, kill them. So the Army surrounded the city and they tried to root them out.
After a few days, they realized that they were failing to do so, so they began to bombard this particular residential section of the city which had the resisting Islamic fundamentalists in it. They pretty much leveled one section of town. It was a district of the city that they destroyed. It was all over. Then the press came in and discovered it and said that they had destroyed a whole town.
“A bomb blew up about 50 yards from my car”
Edward Abington, Political Officer, Embassy Damascus, 1979-1982
ABINGTON: Hafez El-Assad in consultation with the Alaoui [Alawite] military leaders – and the Alaoui were in all the key military positions, the intelligence units, the Special Forces, a group called the Defense Forces which was headed by Assad’s brother and was deployed in the Damascus area to defend the Alaoui regime – they decided that they had had enough of this uprising, of these assassinations.
One has to keep in mind that it was very much targeted against Alaouis. There were many Alaoui officials who were assassinated because they were Alaoui. There had been these brutal car bombings. The government decided that it was going to crush the situation once and for all. Assad’s brother, Rifaat El-Assad, deployed the Defense Forces equipped with T-72 tanks to Hama, closed off the area, went in and just leveled this area where the Muslim Brotherhood was holed up. It was a civilian area. Basically, they shelled it and then they brought in bulldozers and just bulldozed the whole thing. No one knows how many people were killed. I know that it’s become the common wisdom that 10,000 were killed. In fact, I don’t think anyone really knows.
But the Syrians sealed off the area. No one could get in or out for about a week until it was over. That really broke the back of the Muslim Brotherhood. There were assassinations, a few bombings, after that. In fact, once when I was going from where the embassy was to a meeting with some Australian colleagues in an area west of Beirut in a suburb called Mezzay, a bomb blew up about 50 yards from my car. It was incredibly frightening because it was a bomb on one of these three-wheel Suzuki vans.
The Syrian security people immediately came out and started stopping cars. There was a car in front of me, a white Peugeot. There were three people in it. They panicked and they just were yelled at by the security people to stop. They kept going. This must have been 10-15 yards from me. The security people just opened up with AK-47s and killed all three people in the car. And they turned around and started pointing their guns at me. I was in a little Volkswagen Rabbit and stopped, held my hands in the air, and kept shouting in Arabic that I was a diplomat. They came over and looked at me and told me to get out of there. I haven’t been frightened that much many times. You could see how this terrorism really had the regime on edge.
“The destruction was staggering”
Richard Undeland, Political Affairs Officer, Embassy Damascus, 1979-1982
UNDELAND: This bloody retaking of the city was the work of the President’s brother, Rifaat al Assad, and his Special Forces. A standard tactic was to level with artillery fire any building from which so much as a single shot came, taking no prisoners and killing all who were inside. I drove north to Aleppo – it was a previously planned trip – only a few days after the fighting ended, and on the way up was routed by security forces to the east of Hama on back roads, so I did not see anything of the city.
However, on the way back three or four days later, all traffic was directed through its center on the main road. The destruction was staggering. The large blue domed mosque you had had to make a little loop around in the middle of the city had been totally leveled and the adjacent cemetery laid waste. Where there had been the buildings of the old city, you now had a clear view through to the Orontes River. A historic, big water wheel, one of the noria, was gone. I had been to Hama several times before and had trouble believing what had happened, how much I had known that was just no longer there. | |||||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 0 | 56 | https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/assad-spoiler-russias-challenge-syria | en | Assad the Spoiler: Russia's Challenge in Syria | [
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] | null | [] | null | en | /core/misc/favicon.ico | Wilson Center | https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/assad-spoiler-russias-challenge-syria | Russia’s military success in Syria over the past four years has shined a most unfavorable light on the assertion – made routinely by United Nations, US, and other Western diplomats – that there was “no military solution” to Syria’s brutal civil war. Less clear is whether Russia will be able to translate gains on the battlefield into a stable political solution. On this front, dark clouds are gathering.
On April 17, Aleksandr Aksenenok, former Russian ambassador to Syria and now vice president of the Russian International Affairs Council, published a remarkably bleak assessment of the situation in Syria and the ability of that country’s leadership to resolve it. “Damascus is not particularly interested in displaying a far-sighted and flexible approach,” he wrote, adding that “a sustainable settlement is impossible unless the fundamental socio-economic causes of the conflict and the mentality that triggered it are eliminated.” Although Russia’s military operations had been successful up to this point, he concluded: “it is becoming increasingly obvious that the regime is reluctant or unable to develop a system of government that can mitigate corruption and crime and go from a military economy to normal trade and economic relations.”
Aksenenok has been critical of Damascus before, but never so directly. The concurrent publication of an article accusing the Syrian president of corruption in a paper owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, and of a poll indicating that Bashar al-Assad’s popularity within Syria had fallen to 32 percent, have fueled speculation of a coordinated media campaign aimed at publicly signaling the Kremlin’s displeasure.
If so, this would be a worrying development for Assad, whose military machine is almost entirely dependent on Russian airpower, weapons, and technical expertise. But the alternative – that the pieces were published independently – would be just as significant, as it would suggest more general frustration with Russia’s main Syrian partner bubbling to the surface.
What might this mean for the future of Russia’s involvement in Syria?
The two countries have cooperated since the mid-1950s, but the partnership has been more transactional and strained than is sometimes acknowledged. During the Cold War, Russian officials fretted about Syria’s adventurous foreign policy and, despite substantial aid, found Hafez al-Assad difficult if not impossible to control. When the Soviet Union collapsed, ties frayed, only to be restored around 2005, when Russia’s desire to assert an independent foreign policy, including in the Middle East, intersected with mounting Western pressure on Syria.
The two countries have cooperated since the mid-1950s, but the partnership has been more transactional and strained than is sometimes acknowledged.
Since the 2011 uprising, and especially after 2015, Russian support has been robust, but Russian officials – including Putin himself – have consistently distanced themselves from the person of the Syrian president. Throughout multiple rounds of UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva, Russian diplomats insisted they were “not wedded to Assad.” Some believe this was never more than a ruse, intended to manipulate hopeful Western officials and buy time for Russia to consolidate Assad’s position. Certainly, this approach afforded Russia more flexibility than did President Obama’s call for Assad to “step aside.” But it also reflects the fact that Russia’s support was never about Assad (or even Syria) in the first place. Rather, it was motivated by the desire to prevent the United States from toppling another unfriendly regime, ending Moscow’s isolation over its actions in Ukraine, and ensuring continued access to the Mediterranean. In this, Assad has been a tool and, under the right circumstances, probably a dispensable one.
This should not be taken to mean that Russia is now prepared to accept a political transition in Syria along the lines laid out in UN Security Council Resolution 2254, for several reasons. The fear that Assad’s removal could lead to the chaotic collapse of the highly-personalized political system his father helped to build more than forty years ago makes that approach too risky. At a more practical level, Iran’s steadfast support for Assad limits Russia’s influence over domestic politics. And, probably above all else, Russia has placed Syria at the center of a narrative that emphasizes Russia’s defense of national sovereignty and reliability as a security partner. Any whiff of capitulation to the United States on Assad’s fate would puncture that narrative in ways that would negatively impact Russia’s foreign policy aspirations far beyond Syria.
...Russia has placed Syria at the center of a narrative that emphasizes Russia’s defense of national sovereignty and reliability as a security partner.
Nevertheless, the challenges for Russia are daunting. The first is military: Turkey and the United States stand in the way of a complete victory, leaving a major concentration of hardened fighters and extremists in Idlib province, close to Russia’s Hmeimim base, and denying the government access to oil and gas resources in the east. While the future of the US military presence is uncertain, Turkey’s military build-up suggests it is planning to stay. At the same time, an insurgency is brewing in the south, an area in which Russia was deeply involved in a series of de-escalation agreements and where Russian military police continue to patrol.
Politically, Assad has once again dug in his heels, undermining even the modest aspirations of the UN-led process to reform Syria’s constitution that Russian officials initially touted as an important step on a “long road” to peace. As political scientists have found in other contexts, military assistance does not necessarily translate into influence; in Syria, Russia’s success in stabilizing Assad’s government may have left Moscow with less leverage, not more.
In fairness, Syria has always been difficult to govern. Depending on how you count, there were at least five coups d’état between independence in 1947 and the “corrective movement” that brought Hafez al-Assad to power in 1970. The Assad family imposed order by building a ruthless security state, cloaking its Alawite character in Ba’athism, and playing up the Palestinian cause to bolster its domestic legitimacy. Of these three methods, only the first appears to have survived the civil war. A more able politician might co-opt former opponents and draw on Syrian patriotism or the incredible resilience of the Syrian people to begin to heal the wounds of war. But Bashar al-Assad is not that leader, and Russia knows it.
A more able politician might co-opt former opponents and draw on Syrian patriotism or the incredible resilience of the Syrian people to begin to heal the wounds of war. But Bashar al-Assad is not that leader, and Russia knows it.
Finally, there is the economic challenge. Russia’s gamble that the United States and European Union would ultimately accept a cosmetic political deal and foot the bill for reconstruction – if only to stem the flow of refugees – is not panning out. Instead, tightened US sanctions and the collapse of the Lebanese banking system are eroding what’s left of Syria’s economy. In the absence of a “peace dividend,” Assad is mollifying those who remained loyal with property and businesses appropriated from Syrians who fled during the war. Russia, meanwhile, is finding it difficult to extract economic benefits in Syria that would help offset the costs of its military campaign.
Make no mistake: those costs are sustainable, and on balance Putin’s intervention in Syria continues to look to many Russians and others like a major success. The military threat to Assad’s rule is over. Russia has tested and found new markets for its weapons systems. Its relationships with Iran, Turkey, Israel, and the Gulf states have all deepened, and its prestige in the region has been greatly enhanced. Nevertheless, it is hard to see where further gains will come from, and there may be heavier costs if the situation deteriorates further. The collapse of oil prices and economic disruption resulting from COVID-19 make these issues more urgent.
In Assad, Russia found a willing if highly-imperfect partner. It is ironic, though perhaps predictable, that at just the moment many in Europe, and at least some in the United States, have accepted his continued rule, Russian frustration with Assad is growing. Nevertheless, for the time being, Assad and Russia still need one another. It may be that Moscow is prepared to accept Syria as a failed state in which Russia can continue to act as an arbiter among regional and international powers, while waiting for opportunities to emerge in the future. But Putin would almost certainly relish the chance to play peacemaker. In that case, Russia will need to convince others, especially Turkey and the United States, that it is prepared to use the leverage it still has in Damascus. Otherwise, Assad will spoil its plans.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect an official position of the Wilson Center. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 3 | 97 | https://shortyawards.com/2nd-socialgood/searching-for-syria | en | Searching for Syria | ERROR: type should be string, got "https://shortyawards.com/2nd-socialgood/{% get_imgix photo.url fit='crop' w='1200' h='630' crop='faces,center' auto='compress' q='90' %" | ERROR: type should be string, got "https://shortyawards.com/2nd-socialgood/{% get_imgix photo.url fit='crop' w='1200' h='630' crop='faces,center' auto='compress' q='90' %" | [
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] | null | [] | null | An international award show that recognizes and celebrates the innovation and creativity in digital and social media, by brands, agencies, nonprofits and individuals. | //d3f8w85pjd4o8c.cloudfront.net/static/images/favicon.ico | http://shortyawards.com/2nd-socialgood/searching-for-syria | Objectives
Six years into the Syrian war, the scale of the crisis is still hard to fathom, while the experiences that refugees are facing can often feel too remote for most of us to understand. Right now, more than five million Syrian refugees are facing ever-growing hardships and risks in a world that is increasingly less inclined to welcome them. Host communities in neighboring countries to Syria continue to bear the brunt of the crisis in a manner that is unsustainable. Meanwhile, the humanitarian effort for Syrian refugees continues to face critical challenges; the budget for meeting the immediate needs of uprooted Syrian families is only 17% funded.
Our goal was to tackle compassion fatigue head-on. Working hand-in-hand, Google and UNHCR joined forces to paint a new kind of picture of the Syrian refugee crisis: a picture that is accessible to greater numbers of people, and one that reflects not only of the scale of the crisis, but also its human dimensions. We hoped to break through the indifference and fear that are leading so many countries to close their borders and doors to some of the world's most vulnerable people. We wanted to offer a new entry point to help people re-engage with a staggering conflict that has displaced more than 11 million people–or half a nation–from their homes.
In short, our end goal was to catalyze empathy from audiences worldwide on the Syrian refugee crisis through the creation of a beautifully immersive digital product.
Strategy and Execution
Strategy: Together, Google and UNHCR looked at ways to draw on our respective areas of expertise to produce something that neither of us could achieve on our own.
Implementation: We noted through Google Search trends that in 2016 Google users conducted 160 million searches about the Syrian refugee crisis, which has contributed to the highest levels of forced displacement globally since the second World War. Global Trends Report with Google Search trends, drawing connections between the questions that people are searching for with the UNHCR's detailed data sets. We distilled these searches into five core questions on people's minds:
• What was Syria like before the war?
• What is happening in Syria?
• Who is a refugee?
• Where are Syrian refugees going?
• How can I help Syrian refugees?
Next, the two organizations teamed up to combine UNHCR's Annual Global Trends Report with Google Search trends, drawing connections between the questions that people are searching for with the UNHCR's detailed data sets. We endeavored to answer each of these questions through a diverse combination of rich multimedia content in an immersive, scrollable, mobile-friendly format. Much of the content came from UNHCR's extensive storytelling work - throughout the Syria conflict while other parts came from Google and from third-parties sources.
Key Features: Collectively, the site gives visitors a factually clear and emotionally resonant way to re-engage with a tremendously complex conflict, to find ways to empathize with those fleeing its wrath, and to discover ways to take action and help. The content includes 360-degree photospheres, satellite imagery, infographics, refugee profiles, and video—including a heart-stopping documentary that follows a refugee family from their arrival on the shores of Greece all the way to the Netherlands. As a result, viewers get answers to the most pertinent questions about the Syrian war, but they also go face-to-face with a few of the millions whose lives have been turned upside down by the chaos.
Promotion: UNHCR harnessed it's social media footprint of more than 10.4 million followers to engage audiences. At the same Google featured the site on its homepage, driving millions to the microsite within the first days.
Results
Quantitative Results:
• Immersive website published in Arabic, English, French, German, Spanish, and Turkish. A Japanese version is in production.
• 2 million page views, with an average dwell time of 02:42, during first month
• 379 pieces of media coverage
• Featured on Google Search home page in selected markets as well as Google blog
• Over 4.5 million video views on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter
• Promotional support on social media by Alan Cumming, Ben Stiller, Douglas Booth, John Green, Khaled Hosseini, Kristin Davis, Mika and Neil Gaiman
• More than 200,000 social engagements, including tweets and clicks to sign petition, donate or share
• Generated 16,000 signatures on #WithRefugees petition, a concrete call to action to hold governments accountable for their commitments to refugees.
• Generated over 3,000 donations to UNHCR
The end result is not only a beautifully immersive digital rabbit hole you'd voluntarily fall down, but the result of the perfect marriage of two seemingly strange bedfellows. UNHCR brought authoritative refugee data, expert knowledge of humanitarian response and refugee protection alongside a rich body of multimedia storytelling to the table. While Google championed expertise in site design and development, a deep-dive of data analytics and visualization and homepage promotion that drove millions of views within days of launch.
Media
Video for Searching for Syria | ||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 2 | 34 | https://syriadirect.org/rifaat-al-assad-from-the-butcher-of-hama-to-aspiring-opposition-leader/ | en | Rifaat al-Assad: From the Butcher of Hama to aspiring opposition leader | [
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"Azzam Daaboul"
] | 2020-06-21T16:25:39 | AMMAN — On Wednesday, June 17, a French court sentenced Rifaat al-Assad, brother of the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, to four years in prison and ordered the seizure of his London mansion and French properties—valued at $133.6 million—on the charges of embezzling $300 million from Syrian state funds. | en | Syria Direct | https://syriadirect.org/rifaat-al-assad-from-the-butcher-of-hama-to-aspiring-opposition-leader/ | AMMAN — On Wednesday, June 17, a French court sentenced Rifaat al-Assad, brother of the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, to four years in prison and ordered the seizure of his London mansion and French properties—valued at $133.6 million—on the charges of embezzling $300 million from Syrian state funds.
His lawyers filed an appeal immediately after the ruling on Wednesday, which could take up to four years to settle, at which time al-Assad would be 86 years old. The trial started in 2014 when he was 76 years old and was initiated by the Paris-based, legal NGO Sherpa.
Already in poor health and bed-ridden in a London hospital, Rifaat is unlikely to serve any time in prison. However, his sentencing holds meaning for many Syrians, who see it as the first instance of accountability against a member of the Assad regime, though his charges are not related to his alleged crimes while a Major General in the Syrian Arab Army.
Who is the ‘Butcher of Hama?’
Born in the town of Qardaha in the countryside of Latkia province in 1937, Rifaat al-Assad is best known as the younger brother of Hafez al-Assad who brutally crushed the 1982 Hama uprising and later tried to overthrow Hafez in 1984, though his influence in Syria extends long before and after the coup attempt.
Not much is known about Rifaat until 1963, the year of Syria’s Baathist. He joined the military after the Baathist coup and then was made the commander of a special armed force which was key in helping Hafez al-Assad to consolidate power in 1970.
A year later in 1971, he became the head of the Defense Companies (Saraya al-Difa), a sort of Praetorian guard tasked with defending the Assad regime. The Defense Companies were later broken up into the Republican Guard—also tasked with defending the Assad regime—and the 569th division, the predecessor of the infamous 4th Armored Division now led by Maher al-Assad and widely considered to be one of the more effective units of the Syrian Arab Army.
Rifaat’s position in the military quickly translated into a wider role in Hafez al-Assad’s regime, and in 1975 he became president of the Constitutional Court (the highest court in Syria).
Similar to Maher al-Assad’s current role as the younger brother of Bashar al-Assad and head of the 4th Armored Division, Rifaat was to be the more brutal face of the Assad regime. In 1982, when unrest exploded into an outright uprising in the city of Hama led by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, as well as urban intelligentsia, Rifaat al-Assad was sent to crush the rebellion.
What followed was one of the bloodiest chapters of Syria’s modern history, as Rifaat commanded the Defense Companies to brutally put down the Muslim Brotherhood insurgency. Much of the historical parts of the city were razed to the ground and thousands of civilians were killed.
Death tolls of the event differ, ranging from 2,000 to 40,000 dead; however, 20,000 is a typically cited number of those killed. Rifaat’s brutal crackdown also displaced an unknown number of families who fled to neighboring countries to escape the Defense Companies’ offensive.
For his part, Rifaat denies he played a significant role in putting down the Hama uprising and claims that Hafez’s regime fabricated accounts of his involvement.
Rifaat al-Assad’s ambition soon outstripped his loyalty. In 1983, suffering from heart issues, Hafez al-Assad appointed a six-member committee to rule the country in his stead. Sensing weakness and possible imminent death of his brother, Rifaat mobilized the Defense Companies troops to occupy Damascus, quickly overwhelming the Republican Guard meant to be Hafez’s last line of defense against any insurrections in the country’s capital.
However, Hafez was able to successfully rally his loyalists in the army and confronted his brother before an outright conflict erupted between the two. In the end, Rifaat’s coup was stopped without a shot fired.
Following the coup attempt, Rifaat was stripped of his powers as a military general and appointed as the country’s vice president, a completely symbolic position. He was sent into virtual exile, first in the Soviet Union, then in France and Spain.
When he was exiled, he was gifted $300 million from Syrian state coffers at the direction of his brother, according to the Wednesday ruling of French courts. Rifaat maintains that the money was gifted to him by Saudi King Abdullah; Abdullah is married to the sister of one of Rifaat’s four wives.
In the 1980s, the CIA also speculated that Rifaat was in control of heroin smuggling networks in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon which exported to Europe and North America, though the veracity of these claims is unclear given that they have not received renewed attention in the 21st century.
Angling for a place in the Syrian opposition
Early on in the Syrian revolution, Rifaat was quick to urge his nephew, Bashar al-Assad, “to vacate his position,” as he told CNN in 2012. He then offered himself up as a sort of “transitional” candidate, claiming that he left Syria with “85%” of Syrians supporting him and that he maintains popularity within the army, as he “makes both the majority and the minority comfortable.”
The latter of his comments, a likely overture to the minority Alawite sect which suffered from much discrimination prior to the Assad’s ascent to in Syria, formed the backbone of Rifaat’s pitch to be considered as an alternative to his nephew. He enjoyed close ties to the political class in Europe and Saudi Arabia, and positioned himself as a ‘reasonable’ alternative to Bashar, who at the time, was increasingly seen as a dictator with blood on his hands, possibly on his way to being deposed.
In 2011, he organized a group of exiled political opposition, the Syrian National Democratic Council, as a sort of transitional body for Syria, though the group never gained much traction. In addition, he has run a satellite television station—the Arab News Network—focusing on the Middle East since the late 1990s.
For a time it seemed that Rifaat was taken seriously by at least Russia, who was exploring possible alternatives to Bashar al-Assad’s rule. In 2013, Rifaat met with Russian officials in Geneva to discuss the possible departure of Bashar and alternative leaders for the country.
However, even though Rifaat enjoyed “unique links to the regime’s inner core of Alawite military officers and the Assad-Makhlouf clan [made] him valuable both to the regime and to its enemies, his toxic reputation and overt ambitions for personal power have stood in the way of effective cooperation,” Aron Lund wrote in 2012, noting that “all mainstream opposition groups refuse to deal with him.”
In the end, Rifaat joined the numerous defected and former military officials of the Assad regime who began to tour European capitals in an effort to market themselves as credible alternatives to the increasingly brutal regime and extremist opposition. Like many of them, he found no buyers. | |||||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 3 | 81 | http://www.ollylambert.com/syria | en | Syria: Across The Lines — Olly Lambert | https://assets.squarespace.com/universal/default-favicon.ico | https://assets.squarespace.com/universal/default-favicon.ico | [
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] | null | [] | null | en | https://assets.squarespace.com/universal/default-favicon.ico | Olly Lambert | http://www.ollylambert.com/syria | This multi-award winning film reveals how the once-peaceful villages in the Orontes River Valley in rural Syria were radicalised and torn apart by sectarian tension following the outbreak of the country's bitter civil war.
Once, the fertile plains along the Orontes were a place of peaceful coexistence for Syria’s many sects and religions. But as the conflict entered its second year, the river came to mark a sectarian frontline: on one side, the rebel Free Syrian Army held ground in Sunni villages whose residents were calling for the fall of President Assad and his regime. But less than a mile away, Alawite villagers remained fiercely loyal to the government, and gladly hosted army checkpoints that daily fire shells and mortars into the Sunni villages across the valley.
With unprecedented access to both sides, I lived along this frontline for five weeks in late 2012, offering a raw and unflinching look at a nation that was breaking apart. The resulting film was hailed as one of the most important pieces of journalism to emerge from the Syrian conflict, and was the winner of ten prestigious awards, including a BAFTA, an Emmy, an RTS and a Grierson.
This film was accompanied by the online release of The Bombing of al-Bara, a narrated account of mostly unedited footage that documented the shocking aftermath of a double airstrike on a small, rural village.
Watch the full film below.
PRESS
"Mesmerising... simply the most powerful film to have come out of the war in Syria. There are not that many programmes on television that demand to be seen, but this is one of them." The Times
"A once-in-a-generation programme that demonstrates the full horror of the war from both sides. The most illuminating piece of journalism on the war-torn country to date - astonishing access, beautifully presented without any ego on behalf of the film-maker." Broadcast Awards jury citation
"A brave, astonishing attempt to show the real Syria.... [The film] compelled you to face the brutal truth of the civil war." Daily Telegraph
"Lambert makes [the civil war] viscerally comprehensive, while presenting the purest interpretation of 'fair and balanced' most of us are ever likely to see: He doesn't just get both sides of the story, but could have easily died in the process of getting them." Newsday
"An extraordinary achievement. I urge anybody who wonders what this war has now become, to sit down, turn off the mobile and watch." Alex Thomson, Chief Correspondent C4 news
"A particularly brave bit of film-making, deftly capturing the absurdity and the pathos of the ongoing struggle in Syria, whilst never side-stepping the horrors either." Matt Baylis, Daily Express
"A brilliant piece of reporting... a piercing portrait of a nation being torn apart." Radio Times
"Bloody, brave, and bloody brave," The Times
"Gripping, must see war footage" Sen John McCain | |||
wrong_mix_property_leader_00031 | FactBench | 1 | 77 | https://fivebooks.com/best-books/syria-nikolaos-van-dam/ | en | The best books on Syria | [
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"Patrick Seale",
"Hanna Batatu",
"General Mustafa Talas",
"Hanna Mina",
"Brigid Keenan",
"Five Books"
] | 2011-05-18T06:09:30+00:00 | The veteran Dutch diplomat, Nikolaos van Dam, explains why meaningful political change in Syria will be difficult to achieve – and warns that any move towards democracy is likely to be accompanied by severe sectarian tension. | en | /favicon.ico | Five Books | https://fivebooks.com/best-books/syria-nikolaos-van-dam/ | As we speak in 2011, what is your view of the situation now? Is the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, going to be able to stay in power?*
This is very difficult to predict and anything can happen. But he won’t be toppled just because of the demonstrations. If he is going to be toppled it will come from within the armed forces. But just like his father [Hafez al-Assad], he has been clever, putting trusted people in strategic places. And the troops that are taking harsh action against the demonstrators are not just military conscripts, they are his most reliable forces.
The regime has been very stable for decades because it is dominated by [Shia Muslim] Alawites, and Alawite officers are in key positions. They trust one another, they come from the same region, sometimes the same villages. It’s not so much about religion (in fact it isn’t that important) but more about the social relationships and trust. At the same time, this Alawite factor is also a weakness of the regime. It’s very difficult to transform an Alawi-dominated regime into a democracy. On the road from this dictatorship to democracy, there are many possibilities for enormous violence and for bloody conflict. In a way, it’s a miracle that the demonstrators have been able, in general, to be peaceful. I think this could be the key to their success – if they can maintain that. If you are peaceful, there is no need for the regime to shoot, to put down the demonstrations with violence.
“Assad won’t be toppled just because of the demonstrations in Syria. If he is going to be toppled, it will come from the armed forces.”
But, hypothetically speaking, if the regime were to relinquish its privileged position and move towards a more democratic system, it’s likely that the majority community, the Sunnis, would not be very forgiving or very tolerant towards these Alawis. I would expect there to be a bloody confrontation, and a strong probability of sectarian polarisation between the Alawite community and the Sunnis even though a dictatorship generally applies to the whole population. Like in Iraq – Saddam Hussein was a dictator who relied to a great extent on people from his own town, Tikrit. That didn’t mean that many people there weren’t also suffering from his dictatorship. In the same way, many, many people from the Alawite community are suffering from this dictatorship. Sometimes even more, because potentially they are more dangerous to the regime because they can operate from within.
[*Editor’s note: This interview was conducted on May 11th, 2011 — two months after anti-government uprisings had started in Syria but before it was clear these would escalate into civil war]
How small a minority are the Alawites?
About 11%, so really a minority. There are all kinds of historical reasons why they are so heavily represented.
Am I right to get the sense that you’re not really rooting for the demonstrations to succeed – because you’re worried about what will happen if they do?
It would be nice if the demonstrators could peacefully bring about a more democratic Syria. But I don’t expect the regime to voluntarily give up, because they know they will be court-martialed and some might even be executed. They have also had time to see what happened to others, like President Mubarak. When he resigned, I don’t think that many people would have imagined that within two months he would be in prison or brought before a court. The president of Yemen is still in power, but he faces the same practical issue. If the people in power could get a guarantee that they would be safe… but they won’t get that guarantee, and if I were in their place I would not trust any guarantees anyway, because if other military forces take over, they will simply put them in prison and it will be a day of reckoning. It’s always gone that way.
So your most likely scenario is that Assad will stay in power and make the reforms he was expected to make at the start, when the death of his older brother led him to leave his job as an ophthalmologist in the UK and take over from his father as Syria’s president?
Yes. It would have been better if he had done it earlier, but the dilemma is, as we say in Dutch, if you give one finger someone wants the whole hand. He saw that with the Kurds, when he finally gave them their Syrian nationality. They should have had it all along – but when he gave it to them, they immediately wanted more.
Assad faces a big challenge to survive, and he will have to make reforms. As a dictator, he does have the power to suppress these protest movements – in a peaceful manner and not just by shooting, which has already been fully shown to be counter-productive. It’s also important for him to have a dialogue with people from the opposition. He’s been rather late with that – it hasn’t really happened yet. He’s also been rather ill-advised by his entourage. These are people who over the decades have got used to a certain kind of behaviour – dictatorship, violence, intimidation and so on – and it’s not as if by pressing a button, the president can make them all behave themselves. But he cannot stay in power forever. One day he will have to get rid of the Alawite character of the regime, and that won’t happen peacefully I’m afraid.
Your first book is Patrick Seale’s, Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East. This is a biography of Hafez al-Assad, but quite a flattering one?
That’s what people say, but I don’t think it’s correct. Patrick Seale was my great inspiration for studying Syria. I started with one of his earlier books, which I used at university, both when I was studying and when I was teaching. He is one of the few people who can write in such a way that it is both high quality in terms of content and also attracts a lot of readers. He’s both a very high calibre academic and a high calibre journalist. You can read this book from page one to the end, not only as an academic book but also as a thriller. The book is part of a trilogy which also includes The Struggle for Arab Independence and The Struggle for Syria. Seale has this way of interweaving personal things with the wider context of history. So the book alternates. It’s not just a theoretical history, but also highly personal about the [former] president. Patrick Seale is I think the only writer, or one of very few writers, who had personal access to Hafez al-Assad. When the book was just published, I saw the criticism that he was a little bit biased – but I didn’t see that at all in the book. Having spoken with the president on various occasions just means he had better information, it doesn’t mean he was less critical. Usually it’s called Assad’s biography, but it interweaves the wider historical context. It’s a history textbook on quite an important episode of Syrian political history, in which Hafez al-Assad was president, and also the time before he became president.
If you don’t know much about Syria, what interesting things come out of the book?
It looks at things that happened in very critical periods, for example during the October [Arab-Israeli] War in 1973 and how the views of [former] President Assad conflicted with those of [the then Egyptian president] Anwar Sadat. Sadat made a separate peace treaty – and the word separate is very important – with Israel. President Assad’s line was that only by having a united front towards Israel would there be a solution. Patrick Seale, also in a more recent article, referred to the disaster of Camp David. And we’ve seen that. There has been peace between Egypt and Israel, but it didn’t lead to any other real peace, even though it was in 1979, already more than 30 years ago.
One of the Amazon.com reviews said the book “really changes my perspective about historical events”. I do think it’s fascinating to see these historic moments, like Camp David, from a Syrian perspective.
Exactly. This is what you see in all of Seale’s books. There are a lot of eye-openers in them. On several occasions, in his latest book [The Struggle for Arab Independence], I came across things which were a real surprise. It’s not at all a dull history but a real eye-opener, not only for people who know very little but also for people who have dealt with the Middle East, including Syria, for a long time.
Before this interview, you mentioned that Seale talks about Greater Syria or Bilad al-Sham. Does that notion have an impact on the way people think in Syria today?
It’s less the case than it was, but it is a framework that exists in people’s minds. The area was divided up by the French and the British, who created artificial boundaries and artificial units. Under the Ottomans in that area, there were no boundaries. People could cross easily from Damascus to Haifa, or to Beirut, or they could go from Aleppo to what now is southern Turkey. There were no such borders, and the communication between Aleppo in northern Syria and Mosul in northern Iraq was, for instance, more intense than between Aleppo and Damascus.
And these people still have a lot in common – their Arabic is very similar. With Lebanon and Jordan, there are borders now, and the military may wear different uniforms. But the people are very close to each other.
So when we think Syria is interfering in other countries – Lebanon in particular – they probably don’t see it that way?
They don’t see it that way. Lebanon is also a very specific case. These two countries are very much bound together through history, and the Maronite Christians in Lebanon play a role in this. Patrick Seale calls Syria a truncated body. It used to be much bigger, but its limbs have been cut off – Lebanon and the former Palestine, Jordan or even southern Turkey. It has a new shape. That’s also the reason why there was no strong Syrian identity, in the sense of an identity linked to the territory of today’s Syria. It was either a broader Arab identity, or much smaller than Syria – a provincial or tribal identity.
Your next book is Syria’s Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics, by Hanna Batatu. How does this fit into your picture of Syria?
This is the next best book, after Seale’s, which is why I’ve put it at number two. It gives you a very rich multi-dimensional picture of what Syria really is. The peasantry and the descendants of lesser rural notables are the people who are now in power. Both the former president and the present president are descendants of peasants, people from the countryside. The book gives a very varied picture. Not all peasants are the same – you have peasants with land, without land, belonging to a certain clan or tribe, living in the lowlands or in the highlands. But they are very much represented in the regime and that’s why Hanna Batatu wrote this study. I should mention that he also wrote what I consider to be the best book on Iraq. His Syria book is shorter, it is about a third of the size of the one on Iraq, but it is almost like an encyclopaedia of the complexities of Syria, of the countryside, of people within the Ba’ath Party, the background of the Alawite officers et cetera.
But it’s not just about the Alawites?
No, it’s much wider, it’s about all the peasantry, and about the whole of Syria. It’s about certain politicians, like Akram al-Hawrani, who was the first to bring in the poorer people, the lower middle class from the countryside, into politics and recruited people for the military who happened to have that background. It’s a tougher book than Seale’s, but for people who are really interested in Syria it’s a highly interesting book. It hasn’t been given the place among Syria books which I think it deserves.
Is the author Syrian?
He was a Palestinian from Jerusalem. He died in 2000. He proudly showed me, at the time, in Beirut, his manuscript of the book on Iraq, which was published later. This sequel book about Syria, is really for the fine tasters. It’s not just about the Ba’athist period, after 1963, but also a long time before – he gives a deep perspective on the time of the French Mandate, and of the Ottoman Empire. Also if you want to get to know something about the earlier history of Syria, it’s a very good book to read.
As your third choice you’ve chosen a memoir that is only available in Arabic, but that you discuss at length in your own book. By the way, I saw in the Robert Fisk article about your book that not only is it a must-read on Syria for us foreigners, but that all members of the Ba’ath party have been urged to read it. Do you take that as a compliment?
Yes I do, because generally the subject of sectarianism/tribalism/regionalism is a taboo subject in Syria. People in general, and the regime certainly, react very negatively to any talk about it, saying that it’s untrue, that it’s all polemic. They banned my book, but when the Arabic version was published in Cairo they brought big quantities with them from Cairo to Damascus and copied them. I see it as a compliment, because as Fisk says, it’s a highly critical book. The fact that they – and their opponents – took it seriously is a good thing. If you were to officially ask them they would not admit that, of course. My book has, by the way, also been used as obligatory literature in universities all over the world.
So the book you’ve chosen is by Mustafa Talas, who was minister of defence for over 30 years, and it’s called The Mirror of My Life. This is to really show the inner workings of the Syrian regime and Ba’athist party, is that right?
Yes, in the greatest detail. In fact, it’s almost 5,000 pages, in five volumes, and we’re still waiting for the sixth. But you’ll never find another book which is such an insider’s account of all the things that have happened in Syria under Ba’athist rule. There is one thing that he doesn’t deal with in his book – the massacre of Hama in 1982, probably because it was too painful to write about it – but he deals with almost all the other important happenings and he’s quite honest about all kinds of other developments. You would never find that anywhere else. He also writes very well. It’s not dull, he describes quite a few amusing things and it varies from the very serious to sometimes the trivial, even. But for those who really want to study the inner workings of the regime, this is an unmissable book, together with Muhammed Ibrahim al-’Ali’s My Life and Execution. The “execution” is because he was supposed to be executed on 9 March 1963, and so the coup of the Ba’athist officers was brought forward a day so they could rescue him. He is still at the top of the regime, having been a member of the Ba’ath Party Central Committee for more than 25 years.
What story most impressed you?
What I found really interesting is a story in 1984, when the brother of Hafez al-Assad, Rifaat al-Assad, wanted to take over power. He wanted to use his reliable defence platoons, where he had some 3,000 Alawites of the Murshidiyin sect in key positions. But according to both Talas and Muhammed Ibrahim al-’Ali, Hafez al-Assad persuaded them to refuse any orders from Rifaat al-Assad, and from one moment to the next, the brother of the Syrian president was left toothless. The Murshidiyin military left their units, as a result of which Rifaat’s tanks and other armoured vehicles could not move into action. This was an inside story that I didn’t come across in any other books. It shows that sectarianism, or relying on certain groups within, in this case, the armed forces, can give you strength, but at the same time if all those people join you, they may also be induced to leave you.
Moving on from politics, your next book is Fragments of Memory, which is an autobiographical novel by the Syrian author Hanna Mina.
Yes, I wanted to choose a varied range of books so my last two are a bit different. This is a novel I happened to read which fascinated me. I didn’t know, before I read it, that Hanna Mina was one of the most well-known Syrian authors, so I was not coloured by the idea that it had to be a really good book – I was authentically really fascinated by it.
Mina is describing his youth, in circumstances of poverty which I hardly imagined could exist. He was living in the area of the former Syrian territory of Iskenderun, in what today is part of southern Turkey, and his father worked day-to-day but was not very fortunate. I think he had two left hands, and almost never came home with money. For a long time, the family lived under a fig tree on a very dusty roadside. That’s where they had to stay all day, under a tree in the harsh sun. His mother worked in the countryside. The farmers raised silkworms, which the landlords would give to them. They would be very careful with them, because they were very, very expensive. Then, at the end of the season, they would give the landlords the end-product. When the silkworm industry collapsed because of modern technology, the farmers’ lives were deeply affected. These people were so poor that often they had to borrow money from the landlords, indebting themselves further and further. They were almost like slaves. This miserable picture of Hanna Mina’s mother and children under a tree really stuck with me. You can put a cloth on top of the fig tree to protect yourself from the sun, but you have to move it all the time as the sun moves. They had so little to eat that his mother instructed him that he should not eat before the shade reached a certain point. They had to divide what little food they had, if they had any at all. He describes the whole story of how this family is embedded in the countryside, working for the landlord, and all kinds of intricacies, including hospitality. But it was the bare necessities and the harshness of life that really struck me.
When was this? How old is he now?
He was born in 1924 in Latakia, and died in 2018 at the age of 94. The story starts when he was about eight years old, so in the early 1930s. Later on, one of his sisters complained that by writing all these personal things he had exposed them. They found it very shameful to be known to have been in such difficult circumstances. So this is a book from the early 20th century, but it’s fascinating. It’s an eye-opener, and he writes very well. It’s hardly imaginable that you could live under such circumstances.
So this kind of abject poverty is still in living memory for many Syrians?
I think most people were a little better off. But now things have changed. The position of the farmers – and you can read about this in the Batatu book [on the peasantry] – has improved substantially. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t still many poor people, but they are not being exploited by landlords. Some of them of course exploit their own people, just like elsewhere in the world. But it is less extreme. People are better off. But the kind of poverty this book describes is good to know about, not only as a story but as a reality.
The next book you’ve chosen is Damascus: Hidden Treasures of the Old City. The author, Brigid Keenan, is a diplomat’s wife and she fell in love with the city?
That’s right. Because if you walk around it – as I have done very frequently – there are very beautiful monuments. But if you go down the side streets, they are rather grey and you don’t have the faintest idea that behind those blind walls you can find the most beautiful houses. She, in a way, contributed to making that more public. Of course the traditional Syrians were aware of these houses, but many of them had deteriorated. What is new now in Damascus, and also in Aleppo in northern Syria, is that many of these old houses have been renovated and restored, and sometimes also changed into hotels. When you stay there it gives you an idea of living in that atmosphere, which is very nice. You go through a very dusty street, not even the door is at all luxurious, and then all of a sudden you enter into a kind of oasis of beautiful decoration, mosaics, stonework and so on. So she and the photographer, Tim Beddow, opened this world up to the public. It’s a general book, but it has good descriptions of these houses and the families who owned them.
Would you say Syria is a lovely place to visit on holiday?
Oh yes! I think many people would be amazed. In Damascus you have many historic places, the wonderful souqs or traditional markets. The same is true in Aleppo. Aleppo has the most beautiful traditional markets, 12 kilometres at least of covered streets where you find all kinds of small shops. I find it fascinating walking through these streets, soaking up the local atmosphere and smelling the rich aroma of oriental spices. Then you have the older cities like Palmyra or Afamia and the crusader castles. I think many people wouldn’t have the faintest idea of what kind of beautiful things Syria has to offer. This book about Damascus lifts the tip of the veil of the many, many beauties that Syria has.
That’s the metaphor she uses, isn’t it, that Damascus is like a beautiful woman behind a veil?
That’s right. You just wouldn’t know. Also in Aleppo, I spent a lot of time there, but it was only later on that I discovered a certain quarter, the mainly Christian quarter of al-Jdeida, where you have beautiful traditional houses and alleys. There is also the central citadel. Syria has a lot to offer, but it is not always visible to the outsider. This probably also has an effect in the political sphere. Sometimes if people like a country culturally, they are more inclined to be positive. I know Syria very well, but many people have preconceived ideas about it. Also, if you really want to know about Syria you have to spend time there. You can get to know a country through books, and that’s very important. But if you have the luxury or the possibility of combining that with a personal visit, that’s even better.
What do you think of the sanctions that have been – or are being – imposed on Syria by the US and the EU?
In my opinion they are not going to help at all. What is usually missing in these cases is the dialogue. Because if you only impose sanctions, and you don’t talk or communicate with the Syrian government or the Syrian president, nothing positive will come out of it. I have seen it in many other cases – in Iraq, in Iran and other countries. The US also waited a long time to appoint an ambassador to Damascus, almost as if it were a privilege for the Syrians to have an American ambassador. As a result, he doesn’t have good access. If your government is talking only about sanctions, and telling the Syrians what to do, you’re not going to get very far. If you want to influence the president, you have to talk to him. If he only sees his foreign bank reserves have been frozen and that he cannot go to Marbella in Spain for a holiday, that’s not going to persuade him or his subordinates to act differently. You can impose sanctions, but if you don’t communicate at the same time you can be sure that you’re not going to contribute to a solution. | ||||
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] | null | [] | 2012-08-26T07:46:00 | <p>Syria’s opposition comprises old-guard liberal dissidents, Islamists, Christians, Druze, Kurds, even Alawites. As the conflict has intensified, power has shifted to armed factions grouped under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army, away from the main official opposition group, the foreign-based Syrian National Council</p> | en | /assets/images/favicon.png | MEED | https://www.meed.com/the-whos-who-of-syrias-opposition | Key opposition bodies
Syrian National Council (SNC)
Syria’s largest opposition group formed in October 2011 and comprises several entities, including the largest single party, the Muslim Brotherhood. The SNC leadership is dominated by exiled figures. Chief spokesperson, Basma Qodmani, and former leader, Burhan Ghalioun are both Paris-based. Academics dominate its ranks. The current SNC chairman, Abdulbaset Sieda, is a Kurdish academic with a communist background. Other SNC leaders are prominent players in Washington – Radwan Ziadeh, the director of foreign relations, Ausama Monajed and Najid Ghadbian, the latter seen as a key interlocutor between the White House and the Syrian opposition. Among SNC leaders close to the Brotherhood is Obaida Nahas along with executive board member Ahmed Ramadan, who is the key point man for raising funding from Turkey and other foreign sponsors. The SNC’s effectiveness has been limited by leadership disputes. When the UK government offered $8m in funding to the Syrian opposition in early August, it went directly to the FSA direct rather than the SNC. Analysts see its role as less significant than a year ago, now that armed FSA groups are taking the fight to the regime. The main rival group to the SNC is the Syria-based National Co-ordination Bureau (NCB), which has taken a stance against armed opposition. Then there are the small groups comprised of young activists, which collectively make up the Local Co-ordinating Committees (LCC).
Free Syrian Army (FSA)
The FSA has emerged as the main force in opposition to President Bashar al-Assad’s rule. Headed by a prominent defector from the Syrian army, Colonel Riad al-Asaad, many of its commanders are based in Turkey, but the key factions that operate under it are on the ground in the main centres such as Idlib, Homs and now Aleppo. The FSA structure is loose, mostly made up of autonomous rebel brigades, which in many cases to do not answer directly to the FSA leadership. Among its senior commanders are General Mustafa al-Shaikh, who heads the 7th FSA Military Council. He has publicly backed Manaf Tlass, formerly head of the Republican Guard before he defected from the regime in early July, as a future Syrian consensus leader. The FSA Joint Command, headed by Colonel Kassem Saadeddine, is seen as the main representative co-ordination body for the FSA inside Syria. The ranks of senior military defectors swelled in 2012 and estimates suggest that 20 generals and 100 high-ranking officers form the leadership of the FSA are in Turkey. A smaller number are stationed in Jordan. An increasing array of FSA units now operate under different banners, according to UK-based think-tank Chatham House. Some are under exclusively Muslim Brotherhood command, or under Saudi and Turkish trainers, or in affiliation with terror group Al-Qaeda.The FSA is reportedly establishing a rudimentary justice system to interrogate suspected regime loyalists falling into their hands. More recently, FSA leaders have proposed the creation of a formal structure for a future governing authority, involving higher councils for defence.
Salafists and Jihadists
Partly operating outside the FSA/SNC groups, a series of radical Islamist factions have established themselves, identifying as Salafists. For example, Al-Bara bin Malek Brigade, which uses the flag used by Al-Qaeda in Iraq, is committed to carrying out martyrdom operations. According to Jihadist watchers, the most powerful Salafist faction inside Syria is Jabhat al-Nusra, which is reported to have mounted a series of suicide bombings targeting the regime and claims links to Al-Qaeda. It is reported to have an active presence in the eastern Deir el-Zour, which has been a base for recruiting Jihadists in Iraq over the past 10 years. Another Islamist group, Ahrar al-Sham, has claimed responsibility for the bombing that killed senior members of Al-Assad’s inner circle in Damascus on 18 July (although this appears unlikely to be true). Among the most prominent Salafist leaders is the Hama-born cleric Adnan al-Arour, who now lives in Saudi Arabia.
The Muslim Brotherhood
The most powerful non-Baathist political movement in Syria is primed to play a prominent role, although until now its participation within the SNC has blunted its impact. Driven into exile after the routing of its forces in Hama in 1982, it remains influential, but lacks the organisational mettle of its counterparts in Egypt and Jordan. There are two branches of the Syrian Brotherhood: the Aleppo faction, considered more moderate, headed by Ali al-Bayanouni, and the more radical Hama faction, headed by Mohammed Riad al-Shaqfa (the overall Ikhwan leader) and Mohammed Farouq Teifour (who heads the Brotherhood within the SNC). There is tension between the two. The Aleppo faction is close to Turkey’s Islamist AKP Party, while the Hama faction has contacts with paramilitary groups.
Other prominent opposition figures
Manaf Tlass is the most high-profile defector from Al-Assad’s inner circle and has been touted as a potential unity candidate to succeed the Syrian leader. He is a former brigadier general in the Syrian Republican Guard and childhood friend of Al-Assad. His father was defence minister under Hafez al-Assad. Basing himself in Paris, the scion of a leading Sunni military clan has sought to make overtures to the Saudi leadership, conducting hajj soon after his defection. However, he remains a controversial figure within Syrian opposition ranks. Some do not consider him a true opponent of the regime, saying his defection was intended to protect the family’s wealth. Tlass himself has yet to make clear his future intentions.
Abdulhalim Khaddam is another Paris-based figure once inside the Al-Assad inner circle, serving as foreign affairs minister and vice-president for the best part of three decades under both Hafez and Bashar al-Assad. However, he defected in December 2005 after seeing much of his power diminished in the aftermath of the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. He was one of the most prominent senior regime figures who had supported Hariri. Khaddam was the architect of the Syrian troop pullout from Lebanon in 2005, Khaddam’s age – he is in his eighties — counts against him, but he has attempted to form links with the Muslim Brotherhood in the past year. He is also heavily tainted as a Baathist regime stalwart.
Riad Seif, a former MP and businessman, is a respected dissident who heads the Forum for National Dialogue. He has also been spoken of as a potential unity leader of a future civilian administration in Syria. Arrested in 2001, he served five years in jail for “defying the state”. Previously, he accused the regime of Hafez al-Assad of corruption and focused on transparency issues, particularly in relation to the granting of government contracts to favoured regime associates. This marked him out as an enemy of Al-Assad’s regime. He was arrested in 2008 for attempting to “overthrow the government”. More recently, Seif has again run foul of the law, being arrested in demonstrations against the regime last year.
The Kurds
With an ambivalent relationship to both the opposition and the regime, the Kurds stand to be clear winners from the turmoil of the past year and a half. The two main political groups are the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Kurdish National Council (KNC), some of which have links to Iraq’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party. The PYD led by Saleh Muslim Mohammed is the more powerful of the two and has strong links to Turkey’s PKK. Many senior PKK guerrillas are also Syrian Kurds. The removal of state forces from Kurdish areas this year has given Syria’s Kurds their first true taste of freedom. Tensions with the main FSA factions are already evident, as the overwhelmingly Arab militia brigades clearly do not envisage an autonomous Kurdistan province after the fall of Al-Assad. However, Syrian Kurds also have a difficult relationship with the regime. In 2004, about 30 Kurds were killed by government troops in the main city of Qamishli, following attacks on Baath party buildings.
The SNC leader Sieda is himself a Kurd, but only 7 per cent of the SNC is made up of Kurdish members. As with their fellow Kurds in Iraq, which benefited from the removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003 but have a fractious relationship with Baghdad, ties with the main opposition movements could suffer if the Kurds seek to consolidate the gains made in the recent months, notably the granting of full citizenship rights by presidential decree after 50 years of campaigning. The Al-Assad regime is attempting to play a canny game with the Kurds, as the citizenship move showed. While Turkey has always made it clear that it would take action against Syria if it actively funded the PKK again, such a move is not necessary, say analysts. “If by freeing troops and intelligence assets away from Kurdish areas it can safely leave these areas to other people to police them, then all the better. If at the same time this threatens Turkey and provides the Syrian regime with some authority to say to the Turks, we can make things even worse for you, that is an important aim,” says Carnegie Middle East analyst Yezid Sayigh. | ||
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] | 2024-04-23T01:00:13+00:00 | Whether you are a wildlife conservation enthusiast or an eagle pet owner, the naming of these iconic birds is not just a matter of personal preference but a | en | //relationshipnames.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-RelationshipNames-32x32.png | Relationship Names | //relationshipnames.com/pet/names-for-eagles/ | Whether you are a wildlife conservation enthusiast or an eagle pet owner, the naming of these iconic birds is not just a matter of personal preference but a vital part of ensuring their survival for future generations. By giving eagles unique names, researchers and conservationists can track their movements and behavior, helping to understand better and protect their habitats.
In Greek mythology, the “Zeus Eagle” was the sacred bird of the king of gods. At the same time, in Native American folklore, the “Thunderbird” was a supernatural entity believed to control the forces of nature.
From the revered “Bald Eagle” of North America, a national emblem of strength and freedom, to the “Golden Eagle” of Europe and Asia. Its golden-hued plumage has been likened to the radiance of the sun, eagle name ideas often reflect their striking appearance and awe-inspiring presence.
See Also:
Falcon Names
How to choose the best names for eagles?
First and foremost, it is essential to adhere to scientific nomenclature guidelines, ensuring that the names accurately reflect the species’ taxonomy and evolutionary relationships. Geographic distribution and distinctive physical characteristics, such as plumage color or beak shape, can also inform the naming process. Additionally, incorporating elements from local indigenous cultures and mythologies can imbue the names with deeper cultural significance and foster a sense of stewardship among communities.
300 Names for Eagles for Your Avian Friend
Best Names for Eagles
Unveiling the ultimate list of epic titles for nature’s winged royalty.
Regal, fierce, and majestic – these names will make your eagle soar above the rest.
From ancient legends to modern marvels, prepare to be spellbound by these mighty appellations.
Good Names for Eagles
Seeking inspiration? Discover the perfect blend of strength and grace in these avian appellations.
Elevate your eagle’s identity with these time-honored and captivating designations.
Skyler
Breeze
Cliff
Scout
Flint
Hunter
Freespirit
Vista
Zephyr
Arrow
Raptor
Drifter
Skylight
Vane
Cirrus
Swoop
Echo
Ridge
Wisp
Glint
Swift
Crest
Jet
Gaze
Glide
Spark
Whisper
Wingbeat
Loft
Male Names for Eagles
Unleash the untamed spirit of your feathered warrior with these powerful male eagle names.
From mythical heroes to fearless hunters, these titles embody the essence of masculine majesty.
Thor
Orion
Griffin
Vulcan
Stark
Jagger
Hawk
Mars
Blazer
Baron
Titan
Raider
Rex
Falcon
Mythological Names for Eagles
Tap into the ancient wellspring of legends and lore with these mystical eagle names.
Where folklore meets feathers uncover the enchanting world of mythological eagle monikers.
Aetos
Garuda
Thunderbird
Simurgh
Jatayu
Fenghuang
Aquila
Griffin
Anzu
Piasa
Haliaeetus
Sylph
Skoll
Veles
Horagalles
Tengu
Ziz
Harpy
Gwaihir
Thorondor
Roc
Gandaberunda
Fuxi
Manu
Baihu
Samshin
Enlil
Phane
Illuyanka
Khepri
Aruna
Hayagriva
Chantico
Cool Names for Eagles
Edgy, daring, and utterly unforgettable – these eagle names will leave you breathless.
Soar to new heights of coolness with these iconic and trendsetting avian titles.
From urban chic to rugged wilderness, these names epitomize the ultimate in eagle attitude.
Female Names for Eagles
Celebrate the grace and strength of your winged huntress with these feminine eagle names.
Embodying beauty, power, and elegance – discover the perfect moniker for your lady of the skies.
Athena
Artemis
Celeste
Freya
Iris
Luna
Aurora
Sirena
Hera
Jade
Sierra
Bella
Willow
Starla
Zara
Ruby
Cute Names for Eagles
Prepare to be smitten by these adorably charming eagle names.
Capturing the playful spirit and endearing charm of nature’s feathered wonders.
Fluffy
Sparky
Beaky
Cuddles
Whirly
Breezy
Puffy
Sunny
Softwing
Feathers
Tweety
Giggles
Hootie
Peep
Puff
Fuzzy
Squawks
Snuggles
Twinkle
Peeper
Lark
Dandy
Chipper
Blinky
Cloud
Ripple
Misty
Numeric Names for Eagles
Embrace the mystique of numbers with these unique and intriguing eagle names.
From lucky digits to symbolic sequences, these titles bring a touch of intrigue to your avian companion.
Uno
Duo
Tri
Quattro
Cinque
Hexa
Septa
Octa
Nona
Deca
Prime
Binary
Ternary
Quat
Quint
Hex
Sept
Oct
Nonet
Dec
Cent
Milli
Nano
Giga
Tera
Penta
Hecto
Kilo
Famous Names for Eagles
Immortalized in legend, these eagle names carry the weight of history and renown.
Bask in the glory of nature’s most celebrated raptors with these iconic appellations.
From legendary warriors to celestial deities, these names command respect and admiration.
Golden Names for Eagles
Radiant, regal, and resplendent – discover the perfect golden moniker for your feathered majesty.
Bask in the warmth and splendor of these gilded eagle names.
Midas
Goldwing
Glitter
Glimmer
Aurelius
Sundance
Sunkiss
Aureate
Sunflare
Helios
Sol
Marigold
D’oro
Goldrush
Goldenrod
Nugget
Pyrite
Sunbeam
Goldleaf
Sparkgold
Richesse
Lux
Treasure
Bullion
Radiant
Lustrous
Bald Names for Eagles
Embrace the powerful symbolism of these iconic bald eagle names.
From patriotic pride to rugged elegance, these titles capture the essence of America’s winged emblem.
Shiny
Glossy
Chrome
Glaze
Sheen
Smoothie
Polished
Luster
Sleek
Baldric
Shine
Reflect
Mirror
Gloss
Silky
Satin
Bare
Naked
Clear
Pure
Transparent
Baldwin
Clean
Vinshine
Sea Names for Eagles
Soar above the crashing waves with these nautical-inspired eagle names.
Where sea and sky converge, discover the perfect oceanic moniker for your feathered marvel.
Marine
Neptune
Aquamarine
Oceanus
Tidal
Coral
Wave
Seafarer
Marina
Nautical
River
Shoreline
Reef
Surf
Briny
Tide
Sailor
Pelagic
Salt
Bluewave
Seacliff
Deepsea
Whirlpool
Splash
Hydro
Conclusion
Whether you seek to honor their regal bearing, pay homage to their mythical origins, or simply bask in the sheer beauty of their existence, the perfect name awaits – a name that will soar on the winds of time, forever etching its place in the annals of nature’s most awe-inspiring creatures.
From the soaring heights of mythological lore to the rugged expanse of modern wilderness, these winged monarchs have long been revered as symbols of strength, freedom, and untamed majesty.
FAQs
What is the Famous Eagle?
The term “Famous Eagle” does not refer to a specific bird known universally as the “Famous Eagle.” Instead, it could be interpreted to refer to famous eagles from history, mythology, or nature. In a mythological context, the eagle most frequently referred to is the one associated with Zeus, the king of the gods in Greek mythology. This eagle acted as Zeus’s messenger and bore his thunderbolts. In nature, notable eagles like the Bald Eagle are famous for being national symbols, such as the United States’ national bird.
What is the Greek Name for Eagle?
The Greek name for eagle is “αετός” (pronounced “aetos”). The eagle holds significant symbolism in Greek mythology and culture, often depicted as a powerful and majestic bird.
What is the Eagle’s Mythical Name?
In various mythologies, eagles are given specific names or roles. The most prominent mythical eagle is often linked to Zeus. In Greek mythology, the eagle is a symbol of Zeus himself, often called the “Aetos Dios,” which means “Eagle of Zeus.” This eagle was a representation of the god’s power and was said to control thunder and lightning.
What are the Names of Mighty Eagle?
There are several names and titles given to mighty eagles in different cultures: | ||||
4562 | dbpedia | 0 | 14 | https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/166736/ | en | 166736 photos on Flickr | https://combo.staticflickr.com/pw/favicon.ico | https://combo.staticflickr.com/pw/favicon.ico | [] | [] | [] | [
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"Flickr"
] | 2024-08-19T19:59:36.173000+00:00 | Flickr photos, groups, and tags related to the "166736" Flickr tag. | en | https://combo.staticflickr.com/pw/favicon.ico | Flickr | https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/166736/ | Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 163 (VMM-163) "Evil Eyes" is a United States Marine Corps helicopter squadron consisting of MV-22 Osprey transport tiltrotors. The squadron, known as the "Ridge Runners", is based at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California and falls under the command of Marine Aircraft Group 16 (MAG-16) and the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing (3rd MAW).
The Squadron's nickname, "Ridge Runners", was bestowed as a result of typhoon rescue and relief operations in the mountainous terrain surrounding Hagman, Japan.
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4562 | dbpedia | 1 | 35 | https://recordcollectormag.com/articles/200-rarest-records-2 | en | 200 RAREST RECORDS | [
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] | null | [] | 2012-10-30T22:29:36+00:00 | THE ULTIMATE COLLECTABLES *PLEASE NOTE: This article is now out of date, and a new version will be found in our October 2020 version, online and in print. | en | https://recordcollectormag.com/articles/200-rarest-records-2 | 200 (-) ARZACHEL ARZACHEL £800.00
(1969, Evolution Z 1003)
Devotees of Egg, Gong, Khan and Steve Hillage hunger for this album, improvised in one session.
199 (-) BREAD LOVE AND DREAMS AMARYLLIS £800.00
(1971, Decca SKL 5081)
Their second LP sold poorly. This, their third, was released under contractual obligation with no promotion.
198 (187) JOHNNY BURNETTE TRIO JOHNNY BURNETTE TRIO £800.00
(1956, 10” LP Coral LVC 10041)
A Mint copy of this rock’n’roll gem sold for £937 this year.
197 (184) CLOVERS Nip Sip/If I Could Be Loved By You £800.00
(1956, London HLE 8229)
Gold tri-centre of this doo-wop rarity — silver label is worth £400.
196 (181) NICK DRAKE FIVE LEAVES LEFT £800.00
(1969, Island ILPS 9105)
Demand for this debut LP on the pink ‘eye’ label remains strong.
195 (179) FIVE DAY RAIN FIVE DAY RAIN £800.00
(1970, private pressing)
The band made 25 test pressings to secure a deal, failed, split. Engineer Brian Carroll threw away 20 copies!
194 (178) FLEUR DE LYS Circles/So Come On £800.00
(1966, Immediate IM 032)
This Who cover sold abysmally, but got them into this chart!
193 (177) FLEUR DE LYS Mud In Your Eye/I’ve Been Trying £800.00
(1966, Polydor 56124)
Classic freakbeat sold for over a grand on three occasions in 2011 and £755 (Mint) in 2012.
192 (-) GLORY HUNTER Thoughts Of Destiny/At The Crossroads £800.00
(1979, Rock Hard CPS 027)
NWOBHM rarity that has only recently surfaced.
191 (-) HOLOCAUST Slay That Dragon/Take Me To Your Lawyer/So Called Civilized Way £800.00
(1979, 12” Pile Driver HOL 201)
A piece of British metal history.
190 (-) CATHERINE HOWE WHAT A BEAUTIFUL PLACE £800.00
(1971, Reflection REFL 11)
A wonderful concept LP tied together by spoken-word pieces.
189 (-) IRON MAIDEN Twilight Zone/Wrathchild £800.00
(1981, EMI 5145)
This 12” brown vinyl mis-press remains rare as Eddie’s teeth.
188 (172) JULY JULY £800.00
(1968, Major Minor MMLP 29)
A psychedelic classic: the sleeve sums up its sound and era.
187 (-) THE WHO MY GENERATION £800.00
(1965, Brunswick LAT 8616)
Demand for this debut LP is never going to f… f… fade away.
186 (-) ZAKARRIAS ZAKKARIAS £800.00
(1971, Deram SML 1091)
Was this LP really funded by an Israeli poet rather than Deram? Certainly sold like poetry…
185 (153) HIM & OTHERS I Mean It/She’s Got Eyes That Tell Lies £850.00
(1965, Parlophone R 5510)
A massive freakbeat collectable, despite being widely compiled.
184 (167) MIKE & THE MODIFIERS I Found Myself A Brand New Baby/It’s Too Bad £850.00
(1962, Oriole CD 1775)
Super-rare early UK Motown 45.
183 (152) TANTONES So Afraid/Tell Me £850.00
(1957, Vogue V 9085)
Barely issued! Scarce doo-wop 7”.
182 (-) AGINCOURT FLY AWAY £900.00
(1970, Merlin HF 3)
RC reissue has not pricked the price of this sublime rarity.
181 (-) ARCADIUM BREATHE AWHILE £900.00
(1969, Middle Earth MDLS 302)
A prog psych beast, doubled in value since RRPG 2012.
180 (149) LEN BARRY IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR £900.00
(1966, Brunswick LAT 8656)
This album was canned. There are still a few floating around in circulation with labels but no sleeves.
179 (146) THE CUPIDS Now You Tell Me/Little Mae £900.00
(1958, Vogue V 9102)
R&B poor seller equals big bread.
178 (143) NICHOLAS GREENWOOD COLD CUTS £900.00
(1972, Kingdom KVLP 9002)
A Kingdom that will not come to you unless you boast very deep pockets.
177 (142) NORMAN HAINES BAND DEN OF INIQUITY £900.00
(1971, Parlophone PCS 7130)
LP withdrawn/poorly promoted by EMI due to scatological sleeve.
176 (141) BILLY HARNER What About The Music (Instrumental)/Please Spare Me This Time £900.00
(1971, Kama Sutra 2013 029)
Northern soul rarity with instrumental version on A-side.
175 (140) GEORGE HARRISON SONGS BY GEORGE HARRISON £900.00
(1988, Genesis SGH 77)
2,500 sets of lyrics were printed, which came with a 4-track EP available on CD, or this rare 7”.
174 (-) THE HIGH NUMBERS Zoot Suit/I’m The Face £900.00
(1964, Fontana TF 480)
Mod anthem. Daltrey proclaims: “The main thing is unless you’re a fool you know, you know, you gotta be cool.” Top eBay prices: £1,280, £1,131, £1,130, £1,023 and £947.
173 (-) LINDA HOYLE PIECES OF ME £900.00
(1971, Vertigo 6360 060)
Solo outing from former Affinity vocalist remains an extremely scarce Vertigo swirl.
172 (-) ELIAS HULK UNCHAINED £900.00
(1970, SSYB 8)
Prog album with Marvel-inspired cover: rated £350 in 2012 guide.
171 (-) LOCOMOTIVE WE ARE EVERYTHING YOU SEE £900.00
(1969, Parlophone PCS 7093)
On a few Christmas shopping lists in December 1969, but up £525 from 2012.
170 (168) MANISH BOYS I Pity The Fool/Take My Tip £900.00
(1965, Parlophone R 5250)
Early Bowie: demos (£500) are easier to find than stock copies.
169 (-) ONE IN A MILLION Fredereek Hernando/Double Sight £900.00
(1967, MGM 1370)
Psych classic up £200 from RRPG 2012 with not much light between demo and stock copies.
168 (162) PINK FLOYD Point Me At The Sky/Careful With That Axe Eugene £900.00
(1968, Columbia DB 8511)
DJs and reviewers were sniffy about this promo 7” despite its postcard and newsletter insert.
167 (136) ALLEN POUND’S GET RICH Searchin’ In The Wilderness/Hey You! £900.00
(1966, Parlophone R 46006 2)
A-side had stinging overloaded freakbeat guitar, while the B-side chorus sounds like Banana Splits!
166 (-) ROOM PRE-FLYTE £900.00
(1970, Deram SML 1073)
MM talent search runner-up’s jazz/prog album crash landed.
165 (132) WOODEN HORSE WOODEN HORSE II £900.00
(1973, York FYK 413)
Withdrawn upon release, making this horse hard to back.
164 (155) CALEB Baby Your Phrasing Is Bad/Woman Of Distinction £950.00
(1967, Philips BF 1588)
RC scribe Kingsley Abbot once gave Caleb Quaye a lift and the guitarist gave him a copy. Result.
163 (131) A JAES I’m Leaving You/Kansas City £1,000.00
(1964, Oak RGL 132)
Hard Oak to find by Tony White (vocals), Chris Marchant (bass), Allen Rimes (guitar), John Steven (guitar), Stanley Vile (drums).
162 (151) APPLE AN APPLE A DAY £1,000.00
(1969, Page One POLS 016)
These copies of this Caleb Quaye-produced LP have an insert from the Apple And Pear Development Council. It failed to get up stairs!
161 (-) THE BEATLES PLEASE PLEASE ME £1,000.00
(1963, Parlophone PMC 1202)
First and second mono pressings on black/gold label with Dick James or Northern Songs credits.
160 (129) THE BEATLES ABBEY ROAD £1,000.00
(1969, Parlophone P-PCS 7088)
Decca pressing for export. Took £1,800 on eBay this year.
159 (-) BEN BEN £1,000.00
(1971, Vertigo 6360 052)
Jazz rock LP: rare case of Vertigo.
158 (128) BO STREET RUNNERS £1,000.00
(1964, Oak RGJ 131)
A DIY EP limited to 99 copies, including a hand-pasted sleeve.
157 (-) BODKIN BODKIN £ 1,000.00
(1972, West CSA 104)
This value is for the original limited silk-screen sleeve, not the more common posthumous German-designed sleeve (£700).
156 (-) DAVID BOWIE Can’t Help Thinking About Me/And I Say To Myself £1,000.00
(1966, Pye 7N 17020, demo)
“Remember when we used to go to school on Sundays?” This is a mod stomper filtered through The Who and The Kinks.
155 (-) DAVID BOWIE Do Anything You Say/Good Morning Girl £1,000.00
(1966, Pye 7N 17079, demo)
“You don’t see yourself as another Tommy Steele?” an interviewer asked young David at London’s Marquee in 1966. “No, not at all,” he replied. But the flip suggests another Georgie Fame.
154 (-) DAVID BOWIE I Dig Everything/I’m Not Losing Sleep £1,000.00
(1966, Pye 7N 17157)
“I’ve got more friends than I’ve had hot dinners,” bragged Bowie on this Motown prowl. But they didn’t buy the record.
153 (122) WERLY FAIRBURN & THE DELTA BOYS I’m A Fool About You/Love All The Time £1,000.00
(1956, London HL-C 8349)
Despite cutting 12 US singles, this was Fairburn’s lone UK release.
152 (-) CZAR CZAR £ 1,000.00
(1970, Fontana 6309 009)
Tuesday’s Children became Czar and served up this prog LP, panned as “third-rate Crimson”.
151 (-) DOGFEET DOGFEET £1,000.00
(1970, Reflection REFL 8)
Swaggering LP ranging from the punch of On The Road to the spacey, ethereal Evil Woman.
150 (123) THE DRIFTERS Soldier Of Fortune/ I Gotta Get Myself A Woman £1,000.00
(1956, London HLE 8344)
This debut sold poorly. The band had enough line-up changes to form an American football team.
149 (-) ENGLAND’S GLORY ENGLAND’S GLORY £1,000.00
(1973, Venus VEN 105)
Only 25 copies of this album featuring a pre-Only Ones Pete Perrett were pressed.
148 (145) FACTORY Path Through The Forest/ Gone £1,000.00
(1968, MGM 1444)
Psych classic by Jack Brand (bass/ vocals), Ian Oates (guitar) and Jack MacLeod (drums) woth 10 per cent more since RRPG 2012.
147 (-) BILL FAY TIME OF THE LAST PERSECUTION £1,000.00
(1971, Deram SML 1079)
Fay’s Life Is People won him a new generation of fans — who will download this rare second album!
146 (120) GAME The Addicted Man/Help Me Mommy’s Gone £1,000.00
(1967, Parlophone R5553)
Cut from a Juke Box Jury show and withdrawn. Mommy’s not the only thing that’s gone.
145 (118) GENESIS FROM GENESIS TO REVELATION £1,000.00
(1969, Decca LKL 4990)
Mono version ofinventive, lush and musically impressive debut LP. “Come and join us now,” crooned Gabriel. Later, Pete, OK?
144 (144) PAUL GONSALVES BOOM JACKIE BOOM CHICK £1,000.00
(1964, Vocalion LAE 587)
Copies of this London session by Duke Ellington’s tenor sax player keep appreciating.
143 (-) GRANNIE GRANNIE £1,000.00
(1971, SRT 71138)
Our packing guy Richard is certainly not a fan as he helped assemble 750 sleeves for our reissue of this early hard rocking and folky classic. Easy to see why they only made 99 in 1971!
142 (117) GREAT BRITISH HEROES Eric Miller/Don’t Give A Damn £1,000.00
(1978, Lightning GIL 534)
Lightning scrapped this release and it was thought all copies were destroyed. This finished copy in a pic sleeve turned up in 2002.
141 (116) JIMI HENDRIX ELECTRIC LADYLAND £ 1,000.00
(1968, Track 612 008/009)
Only issued in stereo in the UK, but Track planned a mono version: this test pressing is it.
140 (73) ALEXIS KORNER BLUES INCORPORATED BLUES FROM THE ROUNDHOUSE £1,000.00
(1957, 77 LP2)
Liner states that with “a particular passion for vintage-motor cars, Alexis Korner also finds time to write about jazz and blues as well as singing and playing guitar.”
139 (115) ELTON JOHN WARLOCK MUSIC SAMPLER £1,000.00
(1970, Warlock Music WMM 101/2)
Elton John (piano/vocals), Linda Peters (vocals), Caleb Quaye (guitar), Gerry Conway (drums), Pat Donaldson (bass) performed 11 songs by Nick Drake, John Martyn, Ed Carter and others.
138 (114) ELTON JOHN PLAYS THE SIRAN £ 1,000.00
(1993, Happenstance HAPP 001)
Fifty copies of a private performance of classics like Song For Guy and Sixty Years On. Elton used them as Xmas gifts.
137 (113) JOKERS WILD JOKERS WILD £1,000.00
(1966, Regent Sound RSLP 007)
David Gilmour cut his teeth with this one-sided LP containing Don’t Ask Me, Why Do Fools Fall In Love, You Don’t Know What I Know and That’s How Strong My Love Is. A 7”with the last two tracks is worth £500.
136 (-) KALEIDOSCOPE KALEIDOSCOPE £1,000.00
(1969, Fontana STL 5491)
Another psych classic, rated at £600 in RRPG 2012.
135 (106) MADONNA Lucky Star £1,000.00
(Edit)/I Know It (1983, Sire W 9522)
Madonna’s first single fared poorly on UK release. £1,550 on eBay in 2009 and 2012.
134 (106) MADONNA Borderline/Physical Attraction £1,000.00
(1984, Sire W 9260 P)
Uncut picture disc.
133 (107) MADONNA Into The Groove/Shoo-Be-Doo £ 1,000.00
(1985, Sire 8934P)
Ditto…
132 (102) MADONNA Angel (Edit)/Burning Up £1,000.00
(1985, Sire W8881 P)
A 12” virginally uncut version.
131 (-) MEGATON MEGATON £1,000.00
(1971, Deram SML-R 1086)
With John Lawton from Lucifer’s Friend on vocals, this borrows freely from Zeppelin.
130 (-) MIRKWOOD MIRKWOOD £1,000.00
(1971, Flams Ltd PR 1067)
This LP, limited to 99 copies and very rare, attacked heavy rock with two lead guitars.
129 (-) OLIVER STANDING STONE £ 1,000.00
(1974, Oliv OL 1)
Oliver Chaplin cut this folk/blues/ psych mélange with brother Chris and “smaller winged creatures.” 250 pressed, but this blue sleeve was changed for green (£800) when the title was hard to read.
128 (-) OPEN MIND OPEN MIND £1,000.00
(1969, Philips SBL 7893)
Freakbeat with elements of pop/ proto-rock. A stunning sleeve.
127 (104) THE PLEBS PLEBS £1,000.00
(60s, Oak acetate)
An EP that Andrew Mitchell wouldn’t appreciate, though he is rich enough to afford one.
126 (101) QUEEN COMPLETE WORKS £1,000.00
(14-LP box set, numbered; 600 signed)(1985, QB1)
Worth this amount only if signed by all members. Uninked: £100.
125 (161) DON RENDELL MEET DON RENDELL £1,000.00
(1955, Tempo LAP 1)
Debut 10” LP by tenor sax, and reissued as 10” LP in 2010 with Japanese liner notes.
124 (100) DON RENDELL & IAN CARR SHADES OF BLUE £1,000.00
(1965, Columbia 33 SX 1733)
Great British Jazz LP. First pressing of Dusk Fire (£700) is also a thing of beauty.
123 (99) THE ROLLING STONES We Were Falling In Love £1,000.00
(1964, acetate)
Cut by Jagger and Richards as part of a budding song-writing partnership in September 1964 with the intention (unfulfilled) of Mark Wynter recording it.
122 (98) THE ROLLING STONES THE ROLLING STONES £ 1,000.00
(1964, Decca LK 4605)
This first pressing has the 2.52 minute version of Tell Me (Matrix XARL 6272-A). Second pressings with a longer version and Mona or I Need You Baby title on sleeves is £350/£200.
121 (-) THE ROLLING STONES GOLDEN B-SIDES £ 1,000.00
(1973, test pressings only)
Decca planned this grim 2-LP set of B-sides but pulled it. Matrixes XEAL 12364P-1W/XEAL 12365P-1W, XEAL 12366-1W and XEAL 12367-1W.
120 (159) THE ROLLING STONES THE HISTORY OF THE ROLLING STONES £ 1,000.00
(1975, test pressings only)
Only test pressings exist of this ditched 3-LP retrospective (Matrixes ZAL 12996, 12998 9 & 13000 1), abandoned in favour of the double Rolled Gold.
119 (-) SINGLES Adolf Hitler/Mercy £1,000.00
(1978, Sing SING 1)
This punk rarity emerged just as RRPG 2014 went to press but has been added to our online version.
118 (94) RINGO STARR Interview By Bob Mercer For The Salesmen And Uxbridge Road/Only You £1,000.00
(1974, Parlophone 375)
Ringo sends a personal message to the sales team plugging his single, Only You. It didn’t work: the single stalled at No 28.
117 (97) THE SMITHS Reel Around The Fountain/ Jeane £1,000.00
(1983, test pressing)
Troy Tate sessions saw these two tracks earmarked as a single, but doubts over the quality of the recordings saw it replaced by the John Porter-producedThis Charming Man. 25 copies.
116 (95) THE SMITHS Meat Is Murder/Nowhere Fast/Stretch Out And Wait £1,000.00
(1985, Rough Trade RT 186)
7” of the scrapped live EP from Oxford Apollo, 18 March 1985.
115 (95) THE SMITHS Meat Is Murder/William It Was Really Nothing/Nowhere Fast/Stretch Out And Wait/ Miserable Lie (Live) £1,000.00
(1985, Rough Trade RT 186)
12” also prepared as a test press with two extra tracks shows just how close this EP came to release.
114 (-) MIKE TAYLOR PENDULUM £1,000.00
(1965, Columbia SX 6042)
The pianist with Dave Tomlin (soprano sax), Tony Reeves (bass) and John Hiseman (drums): three covers, three Taylor originals.
113 (133) TINTERN ABBEY Beeside/Vacuum Cleaner £1,000.00
(1967, Deram DM164)
The legacy of Dan Smith (guitar), David McTavish (vocals), Stuart Mckay (bass) and Jon Dalton (drums) is this psych marvel.
112 (93) THIN LIZZY The Farmer/I Need You £1,000.00
(1970, Parlophone DIP 515)
Lizzy started 42 years ago with 500 copies of this Irish-only 7”. Sold 283: the rest were junked.
111 (91) U2 THREE EP £ 1,000.00
(1980, CBS 7951)
There are only 50 copies of this brown vinyl mispressing in existence for U2 fans to dream of.
110 (90) U2 4 U2 PLAY £1,000.00
(1982, CBS PAC 1)
CBS Ireland milked their slim catalogue. This white vinyl presentation pack of their four singles is the most limited variant.
109 (89) U2 THE JOSHUA TREE COLLECTION £1,000.00
(1987, Island 6-1 —U2 6-5)
Arguably the greatest of the group’s albums, it was sent to journalists and radio stations as five singles. These 50 sets have Red Hill Mining Town pressed on both sides. Hideously rare.
108 (88) U2 RATTLE AND HUM £1,000.00
(1988, U2-7)
Flight case of goodies including a CD and cassette of the album, which many hacks swiftly sold.
107 (86) VARIOUS ARTISTS LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE BLUES £1,000.00
(1966, Blue Horizon LP2)
This second LP from Mike Vernon’s label has “VER. LP/124” on the left-hand side of the black-and-white label, while “LP.2” appears on the right.
106 (-) VARIOUS ARTISTS LONELY IS AN EYESORE £1,000.00
(1987, 4AD CADX 703)
One hundred of these special boxes were made. Containing LP, CD, cassette, video and etching curated by designer Vaughan Oliver, complete sets retain their price as most have items missing.
105 (87) THE VALADIERS I Found A Girl/You’ll Be Sorry Someday £1,100.00
(1963, Oriole CBA 1809)
UK Motown poultry denture 45.
104 (188) BRUTE FORCE King Of Fuh/Nobody Knows £1,200.00
(1969, Apple APPLE 8)
EMI took a dim view on “Fuh King” around and Stephen Friedman’s allusive song was canned. A £400 rise in price since RRPG 2012: fuh king Ada!
103 (147) VASHTI BUNYAN JUST ANOTHER DIAMOND DAY £1,200.00
(1970, Philips 6308 019)
Mint originals of this folk/psych LP keep rising in value: copies have hit £1,200+ on eBay.
102 (-) CATAPILLA CHANGES £1,200.00
(1972, Vertigo 6360 074L)
Massive increase in the price of this Vertigo rarity due to the impossibility of findingan undamaged Mint die cut cover.
101 (111) JOY DIVISION AN IDEAL FOR LIVING £1,200.00
(1978, Enigma PSS 139)
First pressings of this self-financed EP have serrated edges around the rim of the label and different label contours to well-known bootlegs that replicate the original matrix mostly without the “EG” in the run-off groove of original copies.
100 (81) LED ZEPPELIN D’yer Mak’er £1,200.00
(1973, unissued one-sided acetate)
Zep placing themselves on the event horizon of a black hole where reggae hits doo-wop. This acetate suggests that plans to release it as a 7” in the UK were scotched by the band. Irie.
99 (135) PUSSY PUSSY PLAYS £1,200.00
(1969, Morgan Bluetown BT 5002)
The eye-catching sleeve art reflects the beguiling psych-pop of tunes such as Come Back June.
98 (83) SPRIGUNS OF TOLGUS JACK WITH A FEATHER £ 1,200.00
(1975, Alida Star ASC 7755)
Folk LP helmed by married couple Mandy and Mike Morton, pressed and sold in tiny numbers.
97 (92) THORS HAMMER THORS HAMMER £1,200.00
(1979, Parlophone DIP 515)
The label pressed up two 7”s for export to this band’s native Iceland, plus this EP that came with a free copy of their second single If You Knew/Love Enough.
96 (80) MARC BOLAN Christmas Bop/Telegram Sam/ Metal Guru £1,250.00
(1975, EMI MARC 12)
With New York City getting to No 15 and Dreamy Lady to No 30 in July and October 1975 respectively, Christmas Bop was scheduled for a festive release and then cancelled. All that remains of this aborted platter are two labels. This is the price for one!
95 (119) MICHAEL GARRICK MOONSCAPE £1,250.00
(1964, 1064, Airborne NBP 004)
10” LP limited to 99 copies to avoid sales tax, marking the long-playing debut of jazz pianist and composer Michael Garrick.
94 (112) DAVIE JONES & THE KING BEES Liza Jane/ Louie Louie Go Home £1,250.00
(1964, Vocalion Pop V 9221)
Stock copy of the single that introduced Bowie to the world. For the demo version read on.
93 (180) FACTORY Try A Little Sunshine/Red Chalk Hill £1,400.00
(1969, CBS 4540)
Sunshine has elements of indie band The Delays and a lead singer with a tendency to go all falsetto during choruses. Red Chalk Hill is like a conflation of Bowie and Barrett songcraft.
92 (56) THE BARONS Don’t Walk Out/Once In A Lifetime £1,500.00
(1957, London HLP 8391)
The Barons issued five singles on Imperial between 1954 and 1956, but only the last was issued here. VG copy sold on eBay for £1,400 in 2007 and Good (£600) 2008.
91 (85) THE BEATLES Please Please Me/Ask Me Why £1,500.00
(1963, Parlophone 45-R 4983)
Promos of The Beatles’ second single were sent out around Christmas 1963 to support a January release. Along with Love Me Do, the rarest Beatles demo.
90 (77) DAVID BOWIE BOWPROMO £1,500.00
(1971, Gem BOWPROMO 1)
In order to secure record deals for David Bowie and Dana Gillespie, Tony Defries pressed 500 copies of this showcase LP with no cover/labels butmatrixes that show who the main man was — BOWPROMO 1A-1 and BOWPROMO 1B-1.
89 (189) DAVID BOWIE From The New Album Low £1,500.00
(1977, RCA BOW-1E)
There must have been nervous executives at RCA when Bowie delivered Low with one side full of instrumentals. To smooth the path these one-sided 7” demos were distributed containing edited versions of the vocal tracks.
83 (139) THE KOOBAS THE KOOBAS £1,500.00
(1969, Columbia SCX 6271)
By 1969 The Koobas had built psychedelia into their Merseybeat musical DNA. The LP hardly sold, making it a massive rarity.
82 (110) LED ZEPPELIN LED ZEPPELIN £1,500.00
(1969, Atlantic 588 171)
The price has jumped up since RRPG 2012. First pressing with turquoise sleeve, “Superhype Music/Jewel Music” credit and the matrix numbers 588171 A//1 and 588171B//1. If an “8” is crossed off, it’s a later pressing.
81 (79) LED ZEPPELIN Whole Lotta Love (Edit)/Livin’ Lovin’ Maid (She’s A Woman) £1,500.00
(1969, Atlantic 584 309)
Atlantic tried to release this single on 5 November and demo copies were dispatched. Zep’s manager Peter Grant used his iron fist to ensure that the label respected his band’s wishes not to issue 45s in the UK. The release was aborted.
80 (109) LEVIATHAN LEVIATHAN £1,500.00
(1969, Elektra EKS 74046)
This band thought the release of their first LP on Elektra would establish their reputation, but label boss Jac Holzman cancelled the record’s release. Only this rare acetate on two discs survives.
79 (72) WIL MALONE WIL MALONE £1,500.00
(1970, Fontana STL 5541)
Around 200 copies of this perfect baroque pop collection were sold.
78 (71) PAUL MCCARTNEY Love Is Strange/I Am Your Singer £1,500.00
(1972, Apple R 5932)
McCartney dropped this single for Give Ireland Back To The Irish after being appalled by the Bloody Sunday massacre. These TPs are McCartney holy relics.
77 (69) PINK FLOYD Arnold Layne/ Candy And A Currant Bun £1,500.00
(1967, Columbia DB 8156, pic sleeve)
Demo copies of this first single came in a picture sleeve and bruised the Top 20. Sell-outs!
76 (68) PINK FLOYD See Emily Play/Scarecrow £1,500.00
(1967, Columbia DB 8214)
The train artwork for this promo picture sleeve was drawn by Syd Barrett, adding to its cachet.
75 (67) PINK FLOYD Apples And Oranges/Paintbox £1,500.00
(1967, Columbia DB 8319)
Last Syd Floyd 45, November 1967: it flopped. Price is for lusted-after pic sleeve demos.
74 (134) RED DIRT RED DIRT £1,500.00
(1970, Fontana STL 5540)
The RC reissue of this fab LP allowed 500 buyers the pleasure of hearing Brain Worker and Death Letter on vinyl.
73 (66) THE ROLLING STONES Fortune Teller/ Poison Ivy £1,500.00
(1963, Decca F 11742)
This single was to be released on 26 August, but was dropped for I Wanna Be Your Man (£20).
72 (65) DOCTOR ISIAH ROSS The Flying Eagle £1,500.00
(1966, Blue Horizon LP 1)
Ross recorded this album for Mike Vernon’s fledgling label on 20 October 1965. 99 copies were pressed up to avoid sales tax.
71 (63) SEX PISTOLS God Save The Queen/Did You No Wrong £1,500.00
(1977, Virgin VS 181)
Richard Branson cautiously ordered these plain blue sleeve samples to sheath the Pistols’ first Virgin single in case Jamie Reid’s cover was banned.
70 (-) TUDOR LODGE TUDOR LODGE £1,500.00
(1971, Vertigo 6360 043)
Vertigo dressed this debut LP in an elaborate sleeve. The Lodge shut when Linda Peters left to join Richard Thompson.
69 (61) THE UGLYS I See The Light/Mary Cilento £ 1,500.00
(1969, MGM 1465)
The Uglys cut five singles before ending up at MGM, where these tracks were pressed on a handful of demos before being ditched.
68 (59) U2 I Will Follow/Boy Girl £1,500.00
(1980, CBS 9065)
U2 signed a worldwide deal with Island in March 1980, though the contract allowed CBS Ireland to release two Island singles. I Will Follow (WIP 6656) was issued in a number of formats with these 50 brown vinyl mis-pressings being particularly scant.
67 (60) U2 THREE £1,500.00
(1981, CBS 12-7951)
U2’s debut EP — Out Of Control/Stories For Boys/Boy- Girl — was issued in Ireland in 1979, with colour vinyl variants in 1980. In 1981, it was reissued as a 12”, with this limited edition first pressing of 1,000 orange vinyl (with numbered stickers).
66 (58) RUSTY YORK Peggy Sue/Shake ’Em Up Baby £1,500.00
(1958, Parlophone R 4398)
This cover version of Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue was only issued as a demo copy in the UK.
65 (-) DAVIE JONES & THE KING BEES Liza Jane/ Louie Louie Go Home £ 1,600.00
(1964, Vocalion Pop V 9221 demo)
Bowie’s manager Leslie Conn negotiated a one-off deal with this Decca subsidiary (and was named on the A-side as a songwriter). It flopped. Conn’s mother threw 200 copies out of her garage.
64 (57) KATE BUSH Eat The Music/Big Stripey Lie £1,600.00
(119 EMI EM 280)
Intended as the first single from The Red Shoes, EMI went with Rubberband Girl instead, though some finished copies were pressed. EMI destroyed most of these.
63 (55) TOBY TYLER The Road I’m On/Gloria £1,750.00
(1964, acetate)
The future Marc Bolan cut this session in December 1964.
62 (42) THE PENGUINS Earth Angel/Hey Senorita £1,750.00
(1955, London HL 8114)
The US sheet music boasted: “Recorded on Dootone records by The Penguins — on Mercury records by the Crew Cuts — on Capitol records by Les Baxter — on MGM records by Pat O’Day — on Sound records by Gloria Mann.” The UK shrugged.
61 (62) THE SMITHS Hand In Glove £1,800.00
(1983, Rough Trade RT 131)
Handed to Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis after the band’s first London gig at the Rock Garden, the label agreed to release it and these five TPs are the first time The Smiths were cut into vinyl.
60 (-) A FLEETING GLANCE A FLEETING GLANCE £2,000.00
(1970, private pressing)
A wonderful psych confection, this LP has sold for over £2,500. Just added to the online guide.
59 (84) THE BEATLES THE BEATLES £2,000.00
(1968, Apple PMC/PCS 7067/8)
While the price for numbers 1-10 of this edition can go for £7,000, numbers 11-1000 have this more conservative value. No 20 (mono) has gone for £2,900 in VG, No 56 (mono) for £2,250 in VG+ and No 483 (mono) for £2,627 in Excellent, while copy No 499 (mono) went for £839.
58 (54) THE BEATLES YELLOW SUBMARINE £2,000.00
(1969, Odeon PPCS 7070)
The rarest Beatles export album, with an Odeon label and Odeon sticker on the rear of the Apple sleeve. How many of these were removed by punters at the time, not thinking that they were devaluing their inheritance?
57 (148) BLONDIE X Offender/In The Sun £2,000.00
(1977, Private Stock PVT 90)
The price for this withdrawn Blondie 7” has doubled in two years. Originally “Sex Offender”, but softened by La Harry.
56 (-) DAVID BOWIE The Prettiest Star/Conversation Piece (Irish pressing) £2,000.00
(1970, Mercury EMF 1135)
Bowie expected this single — his first for Mercury — to chart, but coming eight months after his space novelty, it sold a mere 800 copies. This Irish pressing of the single is utterly, hideously rare.
55 (52) THE BREAD AND BEER BAND THE BREAD AND BEER BAND £2,000.00
(1969, Rubbish, no cat no)
Elton John (piano), Caleb Quaye (guitar), Bernie Calvert (bass), Roger Pope (drums), Lennox Jackson and Rolfo (percussion) play covers. Decca rejected it, so the band pressed up these test pressings in a handmade sleeve.
54 (35) CAPTAIN MARRYAT CAPTAIN MARRYAT £2,000.00
(1974, Thor 1007 S)
Jim Rorrison (drums/vocals), Hugh Finnegan (bass), Alan Bryce (organ) and Ian McEleny (guitar) played Scottish clubs and cut this LP. They split in 1975. A track like Blindness opens with a lovely organ fugue before oozing into backwater Floyd.
53 (51) CHORDS Sh-Boom (Life Could Be A Dream)/ Little Maiden £2,000.00
(1954, Columbia SCM 5133)
Another doo wop doo flop.
52 (49) CROWS Gee/I Love You So £2,000.00
(1954, Columbia SCM 5119)
One of the first rock’n’roll records, broken over the airwaves in America by DJ Dick ‘Huggy Boy’ Hugg. Did zilch in the UK.
51 (125) DARK DARK ROUND THE EDGES £2,000.00
(1972, SIS 0102)
Forty more common LPs in single monochrome sleeve (see entry #21).
50 (46) FOREVER AMBER THE LOVE CYCLE £ 2,000.00
(1969, Advance, Private Pressing)
Reflected the eight stages of a love affair from The Meeting via The Joy to The Grief. Music ranged from the organ-led Mary The Painter to the Zombies psych-patrol of Better Things Are Bound To Come. 99 pressed.
49 (45) JIMI HENDRIX THE CRY OF LOVE £2,000.00
(1971, Track 2408 101)
A pressing plant experiment on red vinyl with three or four known copies. The same as the black vinyl pressing of Hendrix’s fourth (and first posthumous) album down to the matrix numbers — although the B-side label is from The Very Best Of Bert Kaempfert. Hmm.
48 (44) LED ZEPPELIN Good Times Bad Times £2,000.00
(1969, EMIdisc acetate)
Atlantic sent out demo copies of Communication Breakdown/Good Times Bad Times (584 269, £700) in April 1969, but Peter Grant stopped the release. This one-sided acetate of the B-side has EMIdisc or LDC labels. Whole Lotta Love (Edit)/Whole Lotta Love (Edit) acetate (1969), is also £2,000.
47 (43) JOHN LENNON Interview With John Lennon By Bob Mercer And Message To The Salesmen/Whatever Gets You Thru’ The Night £2,000.00
(1974, EMI PSR 369)
“Yeh, I’d like to say hi to all of you. If I was there I would come and see you. The message is, you know, if you like it sell it, if you don’t, try and sell it anyway cos we’re all in the same business,” Lennon tells the EMI sales force.
46 (70) MELLOW CANDLE SWADDLING SONGS £2,000.00
(1972, Deram SDL 7)
Up £500 from its valuation in RRPG 2012, Silver Song and Sheep Season are two examples of compelling acid folk made mystical by the vocals of Clodagh Simonds and Alison Williams.
45 (33) MORRISSEY November The Second £2,000.00
(1990, HMV no cat no)
EMI had this remixed for a 12”, but when Mozza heard it he demanded all copies be destroyed. This solitary copy survived.
44 (40) THE ROLLING STONES THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES REQUEST £2,000.00
(LP, padded silk sleeve, 1967, Decca TXL/TXS 103)
Back in 2012 I asked if anyone has seen one of these promotional padded sleeve editions. A dealer came forward with a copy of the album in what looked like a padded silk frame. If authentic, it would probably be one of the rarest Stones promos.
43 (39) THE ROLLING STONES PROMOTIONAL ALBUM £ 2,000.00
(1969 Decca RSM. 1)
Sent out prior to Let It Bleed to remind DJs in the UK and US of the Stones’ back catalogue, the second side on this version ends with a different mix of Love In Vain to the released cut. The album was also a hybrid, with US copies on the London label (catalogue number RSD 1) and the UK copies on RSM 1 (Decca label): 200 copies per territory.
42 (38) THE SMITHS Hand In Glove/ Handsome Devil £2,000.00
(1983, Rough Trade RT 131)
Later pressing of debut 7”, with the sleeve accidently printed in blue/negative colours, making it hard to distinguish the naked man on the front.
41 (36) RINGO STARR Steel £2,000.00
(1972, ROR ROR 2001)
Starr and designer Robin Cruickshank entered a business partnership to design and market steel and glass furniture. When Liberty’s held a one-week exhibition of Cruickshank’s furniture this one-sided interview with Starr was sold.
40 (32) MARC BOLAN HARD ON LOVE £2,250.00
(1972, Track 2406 009, acetate)
Simon Napier-Bell planned to cash in on Bolan’s success by releasing early recordings to which he owned the rights. Bolan went to court to block the release, but Napier-Bell had already made test pressings (£800). The Bopping Elf won. It famously features Bolan telling someone, “Fuck off or keep cool, you know,” before launching into Jasper C Debussy.
39 (78) THE BEATLES GOLDEN DISCS £2,500.00
(1964, Parlophone GEP 8899)
In May 1964, EMI executives held a secret meeting cancelling the Golden Discs EP, rush releasing the Long Tall Sally EP (on 19 June). This cleared the way for a single and LP launch on 10 July, capitalising on the film A Hard Day’s Night. All that remains of Golden Discs is two test pressings (7TCE 1N & 7TCE 1N) and a sample set of labels. This price is for either test pressing or the labels — not both together.
38 (31) THE BEATLES OUR FIRST FOUR £2,500.00
(1968, Apple no cat no)
This press kit launched the first four Apple singles. The four 7”s by Jackie Lomax, Mary Hopkins, The Black Dyke Mills Band and The Beatles came in plastic sleeves with band bios and photos. This price is for rarer sets in matt plastic boxes rather than the more common card ones.
37 (30) MARC BOLAN Ride A White Swan/ Summertime Blues/Jewel £ 2,500.00
(1970, Octopus OCTO 1)
Ride A White Swan was to appear on Octopus, the new label being launched by Bolan’s music publisher David Platz (with Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp from Track). These test pressings have OCTO 1 in the run-out groove. When the label was launched in October 1970, its name was changed to Fly, so Ride A White Swan/Is It Love became BUG 1.
36 (29) BOBBY CHARLES See You Later Alligator/On Bended Knee £2,500.00
(1956, London HLU 8247)
Bill Haley had a monster hit with his version of Bobby Charles’ tune. The Chess original was called Later Alligator but changed to See You Later Alligator when London tried to cash in on Haley’s success in March 1956.
35 (28) JACKIE LEE COCHRAN Ruby Pearl/Mama Don’t You Think I Know £2,500.00
(1957, Brunswick 05669)
Cochran was 16 when he recorded this song about falling in love with a shop assistant. Time has not curbed its drive. In 2010 a copy took £2,000 on eBay.
34 (48) MAC CURTIS The Low Road/You Ain’t Treatin’ Me Right £2,500.00
(1957, Parlophone R 4279)
A battered copy sold for £265 in 2005, testifying to just how few copies exist. The Low Road is an average ballad, but the souped-up flip could give you palpitations.
33 (27) THE JAM Some Kinda Lovin’/Making My Way Back Home £2,500.00
(1973, acetate)
A young Paul Weller (bass/vocals) cutting his studio teeth with Dave Waller (guitar), Steve Brookes (guitar), Rick Buckler (drums). Six copies are known to exist.
32 (26) LEAF HOUND GROWERS OF MUSHROOM £2,500.00
(1971, Decca SKL-R 5094)
Leaf Hound emerged from the ashes of Black Cat Bones with a line-up of Stuart Brooks (bass), Mick Halls (guitar), Keith Young (drums) and Peter French (vocals). This LP hardly sold and is now one of the top 70s rarities.
31 (25) JOHN LENNON Woman Is Nigger The Of The World/Sisters O Sisters £2,500.00
(1972, Apple R 5953)
A single in America in April 1972, EMI cancelled a UK issue as it was thought the title would offend. These test pressings exist.
30 (24) MADONNA Erotica (Album Version 5.12)/Erotica (Instrumental 5.12)/Erotica (Radio Edit 4.31) £2,500.00
(1992, Maverick WO13 TP)
Though Madonna can’t compete with Lady Gaga or Florence & The Machine when it comes to UK collectables, the 138 copies of this withdrawn 12” toe-sucking picture disc are sought by fans and foot fetishists.
29 (23) BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN Sherry Darling/Independence Day £2,500.00
(1981, CBS A 9568)
A handful of copies in finished picture sleeves that credit Independence Day as the B-side. When officially released in February 1981, the B-side was changed to Be True. White label promos go for up to £2,000.
28 (22) XTC Science Friction/ She’s So Square £2,500.00
(1977, Virgin VS 188)
Virgin decided to release this as a 12” in a special 3D sleeve rather than giving a 7” the same treatment. Only 50 finished sleeves in the smaller format are thought to have been made. This price is for a Mint 7” and sleeve.
27 (12) THE BEATLES PLEASE PLEASE ME £2,800.00
(1963, Parlophone PCS 3042)
A transitional pressing between the black/gold and the yellow/ black label with “33â…“” on the label from the initial pressing.
26 (53) THE BEATLES THE BEATLES £3,000.00
(1968, Parlophone P-PCS 7067/8)
EMI had to contract Beatles pressings out to other companies to meet demand. These “contract” pressings require real expertise to uncover. This Decca version of “The White Album” has no EMI stamper letters (D or G) in the run-out grooves and a circular impression about 15mm from the edge of the label. A copy sold for £7,100 in March in EX+/ EX+, though another copy drew a more prosaic £3,100 in 2010.
25 (20) DAVID BOWIE Space Oddity/Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud £3,000.00
(1969 Philips BF 1801)
In the wake of the film 2001 and the first landing on the moon, Philips thought that they had a hit on their hands. This item seems to suggest that there were plans to launch the record in an eye-catching picture sleeve, which was uncommon for UK singles at the time. It was subsequently issued in mono and went Top 5.
24 (50) NEIL CHRISTIAN & THE CRUSADERS Restless/ Red Sails In The Sunset/Your Cheating Heart/Danny £3,000.00
(1961, acetate)
Believed to feature Jimmy Page’s (aged 17) first recordings. There are only two known copies in circulation (of six cut).
23 (76) DARK DARK AROUND THE EDGES £3,000.00
(1972, SIS 0102)
This Northampton band, led by Steve Giles on guitar and vocals, found it hard to make headway performing original material. Giles took Dark into a studio in April 1970, but when they went back for five days in 1972 the line-up had changed to Giles, Ron Johnson (bass), Clive Thorneycroft (drums) and Martin Weaver (guitar). This second version of the record is limited to eight copies and comes in a black-and- white handmade gatefold sleeve, some containing a booklet.
22 (19) RON HARGRAVE Latch On/Only A Daydream £3,000.00
(1958, MGM 956)
Ron Hargrave’s sped-up version of country ditty Latch On is so fast it’s almost punk. US copies are cheap, but there are only a handful of UK pressings.
21 (13) LED ZEPPELIN Immigrant Song £3,000.00
(1970, acetate)
Zep boss Peter Grant flattened Atlantic UK’s attempts to sneak out 7” singles: this one-sided slate is evidence of thwarted plans.
20 (18) JOHN LENNON/ PLASTIC ONO BAND You Know My Name Look Up The Number/What’s The New Mary Jane? £3,000.00
(1969, Apple APPLES 1002)
The A-side was a Beatles track, but after completing his version on 26 November 1969, Lennon planned to issue it as a solo 7”. The other Beatles prevailed upon him and a Beatles version was coupled with Let It Be. The B-side to this acetate featured Lennon, Harrison and Ono “out of our heads on the floor at EMI” — shorthand for a wonderful psychedelic musical experiment.
19 (17) JOHN LENNON PLASTIC ONO BAND UNFINISHED MUSIC NO 1: TWO VIRGINS £3,000.00
(1968 Apple APCOR 2)
In the wake of the boldness that was “The White Album”, it was no surprise that McCartney and Lennon began to explore tape loops. John found a new muse in Yoko and this album emerged out of a crazed all-night session where she could wail “who’s theeeerree?” and Lennon could ape Peter Sellers and retort, “It’s just me, Hilda!” Lennon insisted on a release and EMI relented. They were especially reticent when Lennon submitted the naked photo he wanted to use for the cover. Most of these mono copies were destroyed when Lennon demanded that the record be remixed in stereo.
18 (15) TINKERBELLS FAIRYDUST TINKERBELLS FAIRYDUST £3,000.00
(1969 Decca LK/ SKL 5028)
This East End band cut their teeth on the pub circuit as The Rush, with two flop singles for Decca. Their working of Spanky And Our Gang’s Lazy Day tapped into the psychedelic vibe, so producer Vic Smith suggested a new name and it was released as by Tinkerbells Fairydust. Lazy Day and a follow-up did not hit, and album sessions were halted after eight songs. The band was dropped by Decca. Test pressings were made of a 13-track LP, as well as a small number of albums with labels in finished sleeves. There are four known copies of the finished LP with labels.
17 (14) TOBY TYLER The Road I’m On (Gloria)/ Blowin’ In The Wind £3,000.00
(1964, acetate)
The name “Marc Feld” is crossed out on the label of this acetate and “Toby Tyler” has been hand-written. Tyler became Marc Bolan and it’s fascinating to hear him covering this Dylan song on acoustic guitar and harmonica. Both tracks were recorded in December 1964 at Maximum Sound, along with The Perfumed Garden Of Gulliver Smith.
16 (7) QUEEN Bohemian Rhapsody/I’m In Love With My Car £3,500.00
(1978, EMI EMI 2375)
Price is for the hand-numbered blue vinyl single alone (see entry numbers 15 and eight).
15 (7) QUEEN Bohemian Rhapsody/I’m In Love With My Car £3,800.00
(1978, EMI EMI 2375)
Price is for a copy in a pic sleeve in an EMI “carrying envelope”.
14 (16) BILLY NICHOLLS WOULD YOU BELIEVE £4,000.00
(1968, Immediate IMCP 009)
Andrew Loog Oldham’s label hit a financial iceberg and the only survivors were these 100 finished promo copies. The grooves were packed with psych-tinged pop, with guest appearances from The Small Faces, Nicky Hopkins and an orchestra. A copy sold on eBay for £7,312 in 2009 and a VG+ copy went for £3,212 in 2007.
13 (47) DARK DARK ROUND THE EDGES £4,000.00
(1972, SIS 0102)
This band gets another entry with a small private pressing of their album: 12 copies in colour sleeves and booklet inserts — super rare.
12 (9) JOHN’S CHILDREN Midsummer Night’s Scene/ Sara Crazy Child £4,000.00
(1967, Track 604005)
Andy Ellison sang at a concert to mark the 35th anniversary of Marc Bolan’s death: Bolan was briefly in Ellison’s band, John’s Children. They’d released two singles by the time Simon Napier-Bell eased Bolan into the group as a songwriter, with Desdemona becoming their third failed single. The waft of Midsummer Night’s Scene was intended as the follow-up, but was withdrawn: stock copies impossible to find.
11 (11) THE BEATLES PLEASE PLEASE ME £4,500.00
(1963 Parlophone PCS 3042)
In previous guides we’ve given the same price for first and second stereo pressings of Please Please Me, but in this edition we give the first a slight edge over this second pressing with the right Northern Song publishing credits.
10 (8) SEX PISTOLS Anarchy In The UK £5,000.00
(1976, acetate)
A one-sided acetate from 1976 featuring the three-minute, 36- second version of this punk classic cut during the band’s brief stay with EMI. Has sold for £12,000.
9 (21) THE BEATLES Love Me Do/PS I Love You £5,000.00
(1962, Parlophone 45-R 4949)
Demo copies of the first Beatles single have soared from £3,000 to £5,000 from the last guide, cementing its position as the most sought-after single by the group. Only 250 copies were pressed in 1962 to secure airplay and reviews for Parlophone’s latest signing. Paul’s name was spelt “McArtney”. A copy sold for £12,000 in 2012.
8 (7) QUEEN Bohemian Rhapsody/I’m In Love With My Car £5,000.00
(1978 EMI 2375)
At a time when EMI has been flogged to Universal, it must be galling to look back to 1978 when the label won a Queen’s Award For Industry, celebrating in fine style at a dinner in Selfridges in London’s West End. This special limited blue-vinyl edition 7”of Queen’s best-known recording was limited to 200 copies and given away to guests, executives and, probably, the band. As well as the vinyl there was a goblet, handkerchief, menu cards, boxes of matches — even a pen. This price is for the lot.
7 (11) THE BEATLES PLEASE PLEASE ME £5,000.00
(1963, Parlophone PCS 3042)
Parlophone had used the black/ gold label for all album releases from 1957. The release of The Beatles’ debut coincided with a decision to redesign the label with a fresher yellow/black design from March 1963. By that time, the first two pressings of Please Please Me had been manufactured on black/gold labels. EMI only made a small pressing of each batch in stereo, and this first pressing has famed Dick James Music credits.
6 (4) THE BEATLES THE BEATLES £7,000.00
(1968, Apple PMC/PCS 7067/8)
This 2-LP set holds the distinction of topping the charts upon release and being the rarest LP in the UK. What makes it so collectable is the decision by sleeve designer Richard Hamilton — in conjunction with Paul McCartney — to brand each copy with a unique number, thus every edition of “The White Album” — mono or stereo — was limited. Beatles collectors’ lust for low numbers and, back in November 2009, a mono 0000005 sold for £19,201, sleeve in VG condition. At the other end of the scale an EX++ copy (with creases on the sleeve) of 0000023 took £3,990.
5 (6) SEX PISTOLS Anarchy In The UK/No Fun £7,000.00
(1977, acetate)
An irate rock’n’roll collector rang up to state that a Mint copy of Elvis Presley’s Blue Suede Shoes on gold/purple HMV was worth “10 times” more than any Pistols acetate. Not so. There are three known copies of this item.
4 (3) SEX PISTOLS God Save The Queen/No Feelings £8,000.00
(1977, A&M AMS 7284)
Thrown off EMI for deploying what the Daily Mirror deemed “the filthiest language heard on British television”, the Pistols were snapped up by A&M. Anti-social behaviour saw the band thrown off the label like a shot. Though 20,000 copies of God Save The Queen were pressed, most were destroyed, making it vitally collectable.
3 (5) SEX PISTOLS God Save The Queen/No Feelings £10,000.00
(1977, acetate)
These few acetates were deployed by the late Malcolm McLaren to secure the band a new deal and gigs after the EMI debacle. Priced at £6,000 in the RRPG 2012, they have increased in value by 60 per cent in the wake of one selling for £12,630.
2 (2) THE QUARRY MEN That’ll Be The Day/In Spite Of All The Danger £10,000.00
(1981, 7” 45rpm and 10” 78rpm replicas of 1958 acetate in reproduction die-cut Parlophone sleeve)
In 1981, John Duff Lowe sold Paul McCartney The Quarry Men acetate for an undisclosed sum. McCartney took the acetate to Abbey Road for restoration, removing pops and clicks before making a private pressing of 20 to 25 copies on 10”and 30 to 50 on 45rpm 7”. The labels reproduced the original with no mention of The Quarry Men. At Christmas, George, Ringo and others received copies. This version of In Spite Of All The Danger is just shy of 4 minutes, as opposed to the abridged version on Anthology. It has never materialised on eBay.
1 (1) THE QUARRY MEN That’ll Be The Day/In Spite Of All The Danger £200,000.00
(1958, acetate)
On 12 July 1958, a young Paul McCartney visited a recording studio for the first time with The Quarry Men. The five-piece — John Lennon, (guitar/vocals) George Harrison (guitar), John ‘Duff’ Lowe (piano), Colin Hanlon (drums) and Paul paid either 11 or 17 shillings and 6d. You can imagine the excitement and pride when they got home and gathered around a 78rpm record player to listen to their efforts. The acetate was passed around and when The Quarry Men split, ended up with John Duff Lowe. £200,000 and worth every penny, we estimate. | ||||||
4562 | dbpedia | 3 | 94 | https://townlift.com/2022/09/how-the-california-gull-became-utahs-state-bird/ | en | How the California gull became Utah's state bird | [
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] | 2022-09-23T10:00:08-06:00 | GREAT SALT LAKE, Utah — The California Gull was named Utah’s state bird in 1955. It’s curious that the Utah bird would have another state’s name attached | en | /apple-touch-icon.png | TownLift, Park City News | https://townlift.com/2022/09/how-the-california-gull-became-utahs-state-bird/ | GREAT SALT LAKE, Utah — The California Gull was named Utah’s state bird in 1955. It’s curious that the Utah bird would have another state’s name attached to it, but great significance has been prescribed to the bird. The first explanation can be described as perhaps mythical in nature, and the second is more pragmatic.
In 1847, about 1,700 Mormon pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley to settle the land for the following groups of settlers. Immediately, the settlers got to work homesteading and planting much-needed crops. Initially, the crops struggled due to unexpected frosts. Then the crickets came in May 1848.
Oft referred to as the Cricket War of 1848, hordes of what are now known as Mormon crickets abounded on the settlers’ beans, corn, wheat, peas, squash, millet, and other varietals.
Pioneer William Clayton claimed in his diary, “The ground seems literally alive with very large black crickets crawling around up grass and bushes.”
Many diarists commented on the never-ending brigade of crickets feasting on their crops day after day, hour after hour for weeks.
“We have grappled with the frost…but today to our utter astonishment, the crickets came by the millions, sweeping everything before them,” wrote Mrs. Lorenzo Dow Young.
The situation seemed so dire that settlers reported back to Brigham Young to not bring any more Mormons for fear of starvation. Other settlers thought of or went through with continuing the pilgrimage to California.
That is until the gulls came. The earliest documented mention of the gulls is June 9 in a letter to Brigham Young.
“The sea gulls have come in large flocks from the lake and sweep the crickets as they go; it seems the hand of the Lord is in our favor,” said valley leaders to Brigham Young.
Between the gulls devouring crickets (and reportedly regurgitating them to continue feasting after) and the Mormons’ efforts to scare them away, enough crops were salvaged to avoid starvation.
Mormons made noise to scare the crickets, run back and forth across fields with rope to essentially close-line crickets off the crops, or simply used brooms or sticks to whack the crickets from feasting.
According to William C. Hartley in his book “The New Mormon History,” documentation of the gulls wasn’t as plentiful as the crickets.
He wrote, “from the first arrival of the pioneers until 1849 nowhere mentions the gulls, despite prominent notice paid to the cricket plague…Therefore the actual physical benefit brought by the gulls was not extensive as is popularly believed.”
The Sea Gull Monument erected in October 1913 in Temple Square in Salt Lake City shows the prominent symbolism of the gulls. In spite of the lack of documentation from Mormon diarists, there was no doubt an ideological shift in the narrative of ‘The Miracle of the Gulls.’
Biologically speaking, the California gull in 1848 was no stranger to the Salt Lake Valley, nor were Mormon crickets.
“We have the largest breeding population of California gulls anywhere,” said Great Salt Lake Ecosystem Program Manager John Luft. “We usually get about, or have documented, 160,000 breeding adults here at Great Salt Lake in different locations.”
Gunnison Island, Hat Island, Egg Island, and the Great Salt Lake are the primary breeding and nesting grounds for the California gull.
“Typically, they’re attracted to [the Great Salt Lake] because of the remote nature of most of the islands. They nest basically on top of each other; they will nest within a couple of feet of each other. But they need a remote location… because they don’t get disturbed, there’s little to no predator issues there.”
The gulls are colonial nesters and will nest within 2-3 feet of one another. Gulls will lay 2-3 eggs at a time, and both parents protect the nest. Luft explained that if both parents leave the nest the eggs and chicks would get eaten by fellow gulls. Eggs hatch after about 23 days, and after a few days, chicks can leave the nest and swim. Chicks cannot fly until around 45 days.
The Great Salt Lake provides excellent feeding with brine shrimp and brine flies, but California gulls are known to eat just about anything, whether it’s good or safe to eat or not.
“They’ll eat just about anything,” Luft said. Gulls can and will eat from dumps, garbage, and agricultural plots.
Most populations migrate, but the Great Salt Lake is one of the only places the gulls will populate year-round, according to Luft.
These omnivorous birds are known to eat insects and small vertebrates. They are prey to mammals like coyotes and raccoons but seem to find respite on the islands in the Great Salt Lake. The oldest recorded gull was 28 years old.
Miracle or not, the California gull remains a prominent symbol in Utah’s culture. | ||||
4562 | dbpedia | 3 | 82 | https://boards.sportslogos.net/topic/46470-each-states-university-nickname/page/4/ | en | Each state's university nickname | [
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] | 2007-02-15T20:48:30+00:00 | en | //content.invisioncic.com/r224567/monthly_2021_05/ccslc2.svg?v=1710283281 | Chris Creamer's Sports Logos Community - CCSLC - SportsLogos.Net Forums | https://boards.sportslogos.net/topic/46470-each-states-university-nickname/page/4/ | In light of a lot of comments about nicknames in general, I decided to rate the different nicknames for each state's main university.
The best nicknames represent their state or state history well and appear powerful.
On three of them -- Louisiana, Ohio and Pennslvania -- I'm going with Louisiana State, Ohio State and Penn State because they are generally considered their state's main univer ities. On New Jersey, I'm going with Rutgers because I can't find a University of New Jersey.
Alabama Crimson Tide: D. Doesn't get an F only because everybody associates Crimson Tide teams with Alabama ... but that's putting the cart before the horse.
*Alaska-Fairbanks Nanooks: A-plus. Fantastic nickname. Very Alaskan.
Arizona Wildcats: C. Too generic.
Arkansas Razorbacks: C. OK name. Different. But not great.
California Bears: A. The bear has always been associated with California.
Colorado Buffaloes: B. Good solid nickname, good with the state.
Connecticut Huskies: A-minus. It's a nickname you don't associate with Connecticut, but when you turn it into UConn it sounds like Yukon, and becomes extremely clever.
Delaware Blue Hens: D. Awful name that would be an F if it wasn't associated with Delaware.
Florida Gators: A-plus. Powerful nickname and strongly represents the state.
Georgia Bulldogs: C. Too generic.
Hawaii Warriors: C. Would have been a B or higher had they kept Rainbow Warriors.
Idaho Vandals: C-minus. Weird nickname, not very representative of the state.
Illinois Illini: A. What other state would have Illini as its nickname?
Indiana Hoosiers: C. Very representative of the state, but what's a Hoosier?
Iowa Hawkeyes: C. It's the Hawkeye state, but why?
Kansas Jayhawks. A-minus. Pretty representative of the state's history.
Kentucky Wildcats: C. Too generic.
Louisiana State Tigers: D. Too generic and not representative of the state.
Maine Black Bears: A-minus. Good name for the state. Better than Lobsters.
Maryland Terrapins: D. Terrapins? Fear the turtle nickname.
Massachusetts Minutemen: A-plus. Fantastic nickname for Massachusetts.
Michigan Wolverines: A-minus. Powerful nickname and it's the Wolverine state.
Minnesota Gophers: D. Minnesota may be the Gopher state, but is that something to be proud of?
Mississippi Rebels: C. That high because it represents Mississippi's history, that low because if you were African American, would you want to be proud of that history?
Missouri Tigers: D. See LSU.
Montana Grizzlies: A-plus. Same reason as Florida Gators.
Nebraska Cornhuskers: C. Representative of the state, but kind of weird.
Nevada Wolfpack. B-minus. Good name, but a little generic.
New Hampshire Wildcats: C. Too generic.
New Jersey -- Rutgers Knights: C. Too generic.
New Mexico Lobos: B. Good, solid nickname.
*New York -- SUNY Great Danes: B-minus. Unique, but not very New Yorkish.
North Carolina Tar Heels: A. Read some history about what Tar Heels means in North Carolina. Great name.
North Dakota Fighting Sioux: A-minus. Great name, but I can think of even better tribes from North Dakota that are more worthy, such as the Mandans, the Arikara and the Hidatsa. If you're not PC, that is.
Ohio State Buckeyes: D-minus. It represents Ohio, but Buckeyes??? A nut???
Oklahoma Sooners: A-plus. Fantastic name for Oklahoma.
Oregon Ducks: F. Ducks???
*Penn State Nittany Lions: A-minus. Great name and represents Pennsylvania, even though there may not have been mountain lions in the Nittany Mountains (from what I read).
Rhode Island Rams: C-minus. Generic name, and how does it represent Rhode Island?
South Carolina Gamecocks: C. Solid name, but it's still a chicken.
South Dakota Coyotes: B-minus. Like the Nevada Wolfpack, a solid name, but a little generic.
Tennessee Volunteers: B. Good name for the state.
Texas Longhorns: A. Great name. Would be A-plus except for the fact that many Longhorns went on to become steaks.
Utah Utes: A. Like the Illinois Illini, what other team would be called the Utes?
Vermont Catamounts: B-minus. Unique nickname, but maybe a little too unique.
Virginia Cavaliers: B. Good, solid nickname with some historical ties.
Washington Huskies: B. Good, solid nickname. Would be even better for a team in Alaska.
West Virginia Mountaineers: A. Very representative of the state.
Wisconsin Badgers: D. See Minnesota Gophers.
Wyoming Cowboys: A-plus. Powerful nickname and very representative of the state. So much so that there's a cowboy on the state's licene plate -- the same logo that adorns the university's football helmets.
* Corrected from first post.
OK, you requested it, you got it:
Baylor Bears: B-minus. Too generic, but gets a slightly higher mark than a C for the illiteration.
Davidson Wildcats: C. All Wildcats nicknames get Cs.
East Tennessee State Buccaneers: B-minus. Buccaneers in East Tennessee? That doesn't make sense to me, but I may be missing something.
Eastern Washington Eagles: B. Good nickname for Eastern Washington. Would be higher except Eagles is a bit generic.
Florida A&M Rattlers: Before I rate this, I need to ask: Are there many rattlesnakes in Florida? If so, then this gets an A. If not, then this gets a B-minus.
Gonzaga Bulldogs: C. All Bulldogs nicknames get Cs.
Louisville Cardinals: D. Cardinals is hardly a powerful nickname, and you don't think of Cardinals when you think of the city of Louisville.
Middle Tennessee State Blue Raiders: B-minus. A powerful nickname, but doesn't say anything about Tennessee.
Oklahoma State Cowboys: A. Fantastic nickname. Powerful and very representative of the state. Doesn't get the A-plus that Wyoming got, but that's because Wyoming has the cowboy logo on its license plates.
Oregon State Beavers: A-minus. Great nickname for the Beaver State. Gets an A-minus instead of an A because a beaver isn't the most fearsome critter on the planet, and what do you call the women's teams?
Rutgers Scarlet Knights: Was mentioned in the first post.
South Florida Bulls: B. Good nickname. Not a lot of colleges nicknamed Bulls. But does it represent South Florida?
Tennessee Tech Golden Eagles: B. See Eastern Washington. I could picture eagles in Tennessee, especially in the mountainous areas.
Texas A&M Aggies: F. All Aggies nicknames get Fs, even if they are ag colleges. Horrible nickname. Might as well call them Plow Jockeys. I can think of a lot of better nicknames for ag colleges.
Texas Tech Red Raiders: C. Powerful, but not representative of Texas.
Virginia Tech Hokies: B-. OK, a hokie is just a turkey, but this is such a unique nickname that it deserves this high a mark.
Washington State Cougars: B. Same rule applies as Eastern Washington. | |||||
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4562 | dbpedia | 1 | 0 | https://squadronnostalgia.com/product/vmm-162-golden-eagles-mv-22-model/ | en | VMM-162 Golden Eagles MV-22 Model | [
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] | null | [] | 2023-02-23T03:19:17+00:00 | Fly with the VMM-162 Golden Eagles in this hand crafted MV-22 model. Each piece is carefully carved from wood and hand painted | en | Squadron Nostalgia | https://squadronnostalgia.com/product/vmm-162-golden-eagles-mv-22-model/ | Fly with the VMM-162 Golden Eagles in this hand crafted MV-22 model. Each piece is carefully carved from wood and hand painted to provide a unique piece you’ll love.
Length – 14 inches
Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 162 (VMM-162) is a United States Marine Corps tiltrotor squadron consisting of MV-22 Osprey transport aircraft. The squadron, known as the “Golden Eagles”, is based at Marine Corps Air Station New River, North Carolina and falls under the command of Marine Aircraft Group 26 (MAG-26) and the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing (2nd MAW). HMM-162 officially stood down December 9, 2005 to begin the process of transitioning to the MV-22 Osprey. On August 31, 2006, the squadron was reactivated as the second operational Osprey squadron in the Marine Corps.
Marine Helicopter Transport Squadron 162 (HMR-162) was activated on June 30, 1951 at Marine Corps Air Facility Santa Ana. The primary mission of the squadron at that time was to provide airlift and air supply for the Fleet Marine Force in amphibious operations. The personnel strength of the squadron grew quickly and crews were sent to Marine Corps Air Station Quantico, Virginia to accept and ferry the new Sikorsky HRS-1 helicopters to MCAF Santa Ana.
During these early months, the squadron was occupied primarily with proficiency training, which contributed to the growing body of knowledge of rotary winged aircraft and their tactical employment, ultimately evolving into a basis for the Marine Corps’ doctrine of vertical envelopment.
Helicopters of HMR-162 made amphibious warfare history in February 1952 during Operation Lex Baker I, when they airlifted a combat-equipped company of the 3rd Marine Regiment from the escort carrier USS Rendova to the Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton hills. The ship-to-shore movement was the first ever attempted on such a scale.
On December 31, 1956, the squadron was redesignated as Marine Helicopter Squadron-Light (HMR(L)-162). In the fiscal year 1956, the squadron logged 5,166 accident-free flight hours and was awarded the Chief of Naval Operations Aviation Safety Award.
During March 1957, six Marines of the squadron were awarded the Philippine Legion of Honor for their gallant conduct in the recovery operations at the scene of the death of President Ramon Magsaysay on Cebu Island. The plane carrying the Philippine President from Cebu City to Manila crashed and the squadron was asked to assist in the rescue and recovery operations that were subsequently undertaken.
As the year came to a close HMR(L)-162 boarded the USS Princeton and set sail for the South China Sea. While en route, the ship was ordered to Singapore to load supplies to be helo distributed to flood victims in Ceylon.[1] The squadron used 20 HRS-3s in the operation and logged a total of 1123.9 hours for the five days of evacuation and resupply. One of the recommendations to emerge from this action was that efforts be continued and intensified to devise navigational systems for helicopters.
On February 5, 1959, the squadron was transferred to the Marine Corps Air Station New River, North Carolina, where it reformed as a unit of Marine Aircraft Group 26. During the summer months of 1962, HMR(L)-162 was involved with the relief operations in the Gulf Coast area in the aftermath of Hurricane Carla.
Old HMM-162 insignia
On April 2, 1960, HMR (L)-162 was reduced to zero strength and shifted to the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing. The squadron was immediately built up in a few days at MCAS Futenma, Okinawa as personnel began reporting from MCAS New River.
Vietnam War and the 1980s
HMM-162 operated deployed to the Republic of Vietnam in January 1963 and operated from Da Nang Air Base until June 1965.
In 1983, the squadron deployed as part of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit aboard the USS Iwo Jima to Beirut, Lebanon. While in theater, the squadron provided helicopter support during the deployment, and provided critical support during the aftermath of the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing.
Gulf War and the 1990s
HMM-162 Phrog practices a raid at Camp Lejeune in 2004
While filling the role as the Strategic reserve for Operation Desert Storm, HMM-162 participated in the Noncombatant Evacuation Operation (NEO), Operation Sharp Edge in war-torn Liberia. During this operation the “Golden Eagles” evacuated 226 American Citizens and 2,400 third-country nationals.
The squadron also participated in Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq and in Operation Restore Hope in Somalia and Operation Deny Flight in Bosnia in 1993 while as part of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (22nd MEU).
Global War on Terror[edit] | |||||
4562 | dbpedia | 3 | 77 | https://www.nationaleaglecenter.org/masters/ | en | National Eagle Center | [
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] | null | [] | 2022-07-14T20:12:21+00:00 | Explore about what makes raptors unique and learn about the raptor species found in the Upper Midwest and Upper Mississippi River Valley. | en | National Eagle Center | https://www.nationaleaglecenter.org/masters/ | Masters of the Sky
Discover the raptors and birds that utilize the Upper Mississippi River Flyway’s highway in the sky.
The skies above the Upper Mississippi River are a natural highway used by songbirds, waterfowl, and raptors. Known as the Upper Mississippi River Flyway, it sees millions of birds pass through each spring and fall. It provides critical habitat and food sources for birds during the long and dangerous journey known as migration. The Masters of the Sky exhibit explores what makes a raptor a “raptor”, and also introduces guests to the wide variety of birds they can expect to see in the skies above Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Exploring the Mural
Masters of the Sky features a beautifully detailed mural on the walls encircling the second floor exhibit space. Painted by Wabasha artist Sue Mundy in 2013, it features depictions of several different species of birds and raptors during migration. This page serves as your guide to the scenes depicted above your head. As you scroll through this page, you will see selected scenes along with explanations of what you are seeing.
The Kettle
“Kettle” is a term that refers to a large group of raptors soaring together in the sky. It derives from the similarity in appearance to a boiling kettle of water, with bubbles swirling and rising upward. As raptors ride rising currents of warm air known as thermals, they create these swirling formations.
This depiction is based on an actual kettle observed at Hawk Ridge Observatory in Duluth, MN by Director of Education Scott Mehus. The mural contains 429, but the actual kettle consisted of over 500 hundred raptors, most of which were Broad-winged Hawks. Other species shown in this mural kettle include Mississippi Kites and Swainson’s Hawks.
American Kestrel
The Upper Midwest and Mississippi River Valley are home to North America’s smallest raptor – the American Kestrel. These small, but fierce raptors feature flashy plumage and are commonly seen perching on power lines and the top of telephone poles along roads and highways. They hunt small rodents and insects. The Kestrel that appears in this mural has a Green Darner dragonfly in its clutches.
Female Kestrels typically move south during the winter months, while males remain all year-round. Be sure to keep a sharp eye out as you drive through the Upper Midwest and you may spot a Kestrel on the hunt.
Flocks and Hunters
The mural shows several groups of birds, including this flock of American Robins. Migration is a serious undertaking for birds, covering long distances and requiring a lot of energy to fuel the journey. On top of that, songbirds face the added danger of being preyed upon by predators. In this portion of the mural, we see a bird-eating raptor – a juvenile Cooper’s Hawk (upper left) – chasing the flock of Robins.
For added protection, many songbirds migrate at night when they are harder to spot by predators. Night migration also means cooler temperatures during flight, which helps conserve energy.
Northern Harrier
Many species call the marshy landscape that flanks the Mississippi River home, including the Northern Harrier. This hunter of small mammals, reptiles, and songbirds has a unique appearance, and its white face, breast, and gray back have earned it the nickname “the gray ghost”. Unlike most raptors (except for owls), the Harrier hunts using both sight and sound. This is possible due to the facial disc feathers that direct sound toward its ears, just like an owl. You will typically see Harrier hunting by gliding low over the ground.
The Harrier depicted in the mural (below the Robins) is a male. Females feature a brown plumage and light ring around their necks that resembles a necklace.
Rough-Legged Hawk
Come fall, many birds leave Minnesota and Wisconsin and migrate south to warmer climates to overwinter. Some species come south to the Upper Midwest from northern Minnesota and Canada for the winter. Rough-Legged Hawks are among them, and these spectacular raptors are often observed hovering over fields as they hunt for mice, voles, and shrews.
Similar in size to Red-Tailed Hawks, this boldly patterned species comes in two distinct “morphs” or plumage variations. The morph depicted in the Masters of the Sky mural is a “light morph”, with a lighter breast and undersides of the wings and distinct dark patches at the wrist. “Dark morph” individuals feature a dark breast and dark undersides of the wings. All feature tails that are dark at the tip and pale at the base.
Juvenile Bald Eagle
Bald Eagles are true Masters of the Sky and a common sight along the Mississippi River. In fact, in total population size, Minnesota ranks second among the states, and Wisconsin ranks fourth. Even during the peak of endangerment in the 1970s and 80s, the Wabasha area remained a bastion for winter Bald Eagle viewing.
Juvenile Bald Eagles do not look anything like adults, lacking that iconic white head and tail. Instead, they are mostly brown and slowly transition to their adult plumage over a period of four to six years. This frequently leads to an understandable misidentification of Golden Eagles by casual observers. However, ongoing research, such as the Golden Eagle Project, tells us that Golden Eagles are only found in the Upper Midwest during the winter months, and are rarely observed near the water.
The individual depicted in the mural represents the wide diversity of plumage observed among juvenile Bald Eagles. This eagle is very light for a juvenile, even by Bald Eagle standards. However, the white “axillaries” (wingpits), dark beak, and the fish in its talons give away its identity as a Bald Eagle. Did you notice the fish in the eagle’s talons?
Tundra Swans
One of the region’s special seasonal attractions is Tundra Swan migration in late fall. Tundra Swans have a long migration from their nesting territory in western Canada to their winter territory in the Chesapeake Bay on the Atlantic coast. Along the way, they stop over on the Upper Mississippi River for around a month as they feed on Arrowroot tubers, potato-like root vegetables rich in carbohydrates and other nutrients, that grow in the shallow backwaters. These refuel the swans for the second leg of their journey.
Tundra swans migrate as family units and are observed in the hundreds to tens of thousands at viewing locations along the Upper Mississippi each fall.
Northern Flicker
Of all the birds observed in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, few are as striking and uniquely patterned as the Northern Flicker. This member of the woodpecker family features a tannish/brown base with flashes of red, yellow, grey, and black displayed as spots on the belly, bars, and crescents on the face and nape of the neck. Eastern birds have a yellow underside to their wings and tails, while western birds feature red. It’s a showy bird!
The Northern Flicker is a resident of wooded areas and, unlike most other woodpeckers, typically spends much of its time foraging on the ground. You’re most likely to hear their rolling rattle song in the spring when they establish nesting territory, but may also hear their “kyeer” call throughout the year. | |||||
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"Tennessee Tech"
] | null | [] | null | Why Tennessee Tech teams are called the Golden Eagles | en | Tennessee Tech | https://www.ttusports.com/traditions/nickname | The Tennessee Tech Athletic Department unveiled a new brand on Aug. 31, 2006, with an all-new set of logos for the Golden Eagles.
The brand is new, but the tradition remains -- the name Golden Eagles. How did TTU adopt the name?
In the first quarter of this century, Tennessee Polytechnic Institute was a tiny school, located in the rugged, mountainous Upper Cumberland region where Golden Eagles were plentiful, soaring above the lush, upland forests. It's easy to understand how those early students and faculty could narrow their choices for their athletic team's nicknames to "Golden Eagles" or "Mountaineers."
On February 14, 1925, the nickname "Golden Eagles " was officially adopted. The school newspaper, The Oracle, printed a story that outlined the efforts of a committee to suggest several possible nicknames to Athletic Association members for their consideration. The two most popular names were "Golden Eagles" and "Mountaineers," and the association, by a vote of 139-18, proudly declared its preference.
It wasn't until 27 years later that a tangible mascot found its way to the campus. Several Tech students braved a driving night rainstorm to pilfer a huge block-tin eagle statue from the charred ruins of a resort hotel in Monteagle. They painted the creature - with a wingspan of over six feet - a glistening gold, and suspended it from the rafter for public inspection at the following day's basketball game in Memorial Gym.
Then-Governor Frank G. Clement, a lifelong friend of the hotel owner, was in Cookeville to speak . He worked out a compromise between his friend and the school students, who wanted to retain the eagle as their mascot.
Over the years, a wide variety of artwork and drawings have been used to represent the Tennessee Tech Golden Eagles. Some of those include a drawing which appeared in media guides in the mid 1970s, and a cartoon-style mascots in the early 1980s that was dubbed ‘the purple chicken” by Tech students. | |||||
4562 | dbpedia | 3 | 61 | https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/college/2024/03/22/western-kentucky-hilltoppers-big-red-mascot-ncaa-tournament-march-madness/73066419007/ | en | What is a Hilltopper? Explaining Western Kentucky's nickname, Big Red mascot | [
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"The Indianapolis Star",
"John Leuzzi"
] | 2024-03-22T00:00:00 | What is a Hilltopper? Why is Western Kentucky's mascot called Big Red? Here's what you need to know of Western Kentucky's nickname, mascot: | en | Indianapolis Star | https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/college/2024/03/22/western-kentucky-hilltoppers-big-red-mascot-ncaa-tournament-march-madness/73066419007/ | As March Madness gets underway in Indianapolis, and 2-seed Marquette takes on 15-seed Western Kentucky, you might find yourself throughout the game asking — who is that big red squishy-like mascot dancing on the baseline?
The answer: It is Western Kentucky's mascot Big Red.
MORE: Watch select NCAA Tournament games with Sling TV
The Hilltoppers (22-11, 8-8 in Conference USA play), who are appearing in their first NCAA Tournament since 2013, have a tough challenge against them on Friday with the Golden Eagles' one-two punch of All-American point guard Tyler Kolek and 6-foot-11 forward Oso Ighodaro, who is used also used as a point guard at times.
Western Kentucky is led in scoring by junior guard and Milwaukee native Don McHenry, who is averaging 15.2 points per game while shooting roughly 47% from the field. It is the 24th appearance in the NCAA Tournament for the Hilltoppers, who won the Conference USA automatic bid this season, and the first since 2013 when Western Kentucky fell 64-57 to top-seeded Kansas.
Here's the history of why Western Kentucky is called the Hilltoppers and why its mascot is called Big Red:
What is a Hilltopper?
You guessed it — it has to do with a hill.
Western Kentucky moved its location in February of 1911 to a different part of Bowling Green, Kentucky. The new location, which previously was the location of The Pleasant J. Potter College, sits on a hill that is approximately 125 feet above downtown Bowling Green according to the Western Kentucky University website.
And because students would have to walk up the hill for classes, Western Kentucky became to be known as the Hilltoppers.
What is Western Kentucky's mascot?
Western Kentucky's mascot is named "Big Red" — and no it is not in reference to Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid.
According to the Western Kentucky athletics page, Big Red was designed by Western Kentucky student Ralph Carey and made its debut during the 1979-80 basketball season. Carey told the Bowling Green Daily News that when he was trying to come up with an idea for the Western Kentucky mascot he wanted something similar to the San Diego Chicken, the mascot that wandered through the stands of San Diego Padres games.
This led to the birth and development of Big Red.
All these years later, Big Red has become a fixture at Western Kentucky sporting events, highlighted by his two signature moves — the belly slide and belly shake.
“It’s a very funny suit. ... It can make expressions where most mascots have one stupid expression on their face at all times,” Mark Greer, a former Big Red, told the Bowling Green Daily News. “Big Red can show emotion like no other mascot. Everybody can associate with it. The kids love him, too, because he’s a great big Muppet to them. He appeals to all age groups.”
The legend of Big Red doesn't end there. He was the focal point of ESPN's promotion of the 25,000th Sports Center in 2002 and has appeared on NBC's “The Ellen Degeneres Show" and “Deal or No Deal”. According to Western Kentucky athletics, Big Red won the "Key to Spirit" award, "the highest honor presented to team mascots at the time," three times at Universal Cheerleading Association competitions.
Then most recently, he was featured in a McDonald's commercial this past year when they celebrated Grimace's birthday.
We occasionally recommend interesting products and services. If you make a purchase by clicking one of the links, we may earn an affiliate fee. USA TODAY Network newsrooms operate independently, and this doesn’t influence our coverage. | |||||
4562 | dbpedia | 2 | 95 | https://issuu.com/isaporg/docs/isnap_jan2019 | en | ISnAP January 2019 | [
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"Inc. Follow this publisher"
] | 2019-01-05T00:00:00+00:00 | International Society for Aviation Photography (ISAP) January 2019 issue of ISnAP. (Magazine by International Society for Aviation Photography-ISAP) | en | /favicon.ico | Issuu | https://issuu.com/isaporg/docs/isnap_jan2019 | Welcome to Issuu’s blog: home to product news, tips, resources, interviews (and more) related to content marketing and publishing.
Here you'll find an answer to your question. |