Syria’s Assad: an underestimated tyrant and merchant of terror
• ‘Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny’ covers the savage conflict of the Syrian civil war and how Bashar al-Assad has used terror to maintain his grip on power
Anew book about Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, aggregates his evildoings and depressingly confirms that the world has largely chosen to forget them.
The term “baby-faced assassin” comes from sports, connotating a gentle-looking player with a killer instinct to seize any advantage. It’s apposite for Assad, Syria’s president since July 2000, whose regime has brutally quelled any and all opposition.
Bashar was completing his ophthalmology residency in London when his father, dictator Hafez al-Assad, started ailing. Photographs of 34-year old Bashar when he took the reins of power show a shy smile, a weak chin and a wispy, teenage-like moustache. He looks innocuous and gormless. He has just been charged with complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes.
It’s astonishing, reading the new book Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny by Con Coughlin, that an international arrest warrant has taken so long to materialise. Assad fits the term, the banality of evil, as coined by political philosopher Hannah Arendt to describe Adolf Eichmann, the arch-planner responsible for the Holocaust. One human rights group estimates that 1.2-million people have been tortured by his regime, 14,235 of them to death.
Coughlin, a veteran Middle East correspondent for The Telegraph in the UK, has written six previous books on Middle East flashpoint events or despots, including the rise and demise of Saddam Hussein and the fundamentalist Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.
“During the four decades or so that I have been covering wars across the globe, I have never encountered a more savage conflict than the Syrian civil war,” he writes in the book’s introduction.
The Assad clan, minority Alawites from the northwest coastal region of Syria, rose to power in the 1960s and 1970s, a period of major instability, with coup following coup. Hafez, understanding the fragility of political tenure in Syria, promoted Alawite sectarianism to capture and control the levers of government and secure the family’s dynasty.
The book’s flaw is its title. Though it addresses Bashar’s early life, it isn’t a portrait or full biography, and the author doesn’t answer the question “was this meek and mild son a latent killer, or did he transform into one?”
Rather, Coughlin dispassionately details how Assad responded to watershed events such as 9/11 and the Arab Spring, mercilessly and unflinchingly wielding the iron fist of power and descending into evil.
The chapter titled “First Blood”, covering the early part of his rule, is morbidly riveting. Initially, Western leaders, enamoured by Bashar’s inoffensive appearance, shyness, and his early speeches, thought he was a reformist. “He is ready to pursue peace,” said US secretary of state Madeleine Albright after meeting him at his father’s funeral.
BUCKINGHAM PALACE
The book includes a nauseating photograph supporting the author’s understated criticism of how the West misjudged Assad’s character and his intentions. It is of Bashar and his wife, Asma, shaking hands with Queen Elizabeth in December 2002, the despot having been invited to Buckingham Palace at then-prime minister Tony Blair’s insistence. (The visit has been expunged from the palace’s official records.)
But soon Bashar escalated Syria’s long-standing meddling in Lebanon, including its role, with Iran, as backer of fundamentalist terror group Hezbollah. When Lebanon’s Sunni prime minster, Rafic Hariri, started to embark on modest reforms, Bashar plotted and gave the order to assassinate Hariri by means of a car bomb in 2005.
By that stage Syria was already banded among the “axis of evil” nations, its alliances with Iran, Iraq and North Korea strategised to position itself as leading the fight against the existence of Israel, to access weaponry — including commencing a nuclear programme — and simultaneously resisting both Kurdish and Islamist aspirations.
Bashar’s bedding-in with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, came later, two pariahs seeking kindred spirits and reciprocity: armaments and a semblance of international credibility in exchange for influence and territory for Russia’s war games.
In March 2011 the Arab Spring had been triggered in a number of Middle East countries. A group of 15-yearold boys graffitied “Doctor, you’re next’” and “Down with the regime” on a school wall in the southern Syrian town of Deraa. They were seized by the security police, tortured, and transferred to Damascus for further interrogation. Deraa residents gathered to protest the brutality; they were met by gunfire on the orders of one of Assad’s cousins in charge of bringing Deraa to heel. Three people were killed, sparking the Syrian uprising and the outbreak of the civil war.
To crush the revolution, Assad — backed by his Alawite clan in control of the military and security apparatus — treated other Syrians as enemies and the country as enemy territory.
Two years later, in 2013, Assad used chemical weapons against his own people in the Ghouta district of Damascus, killing more than 1,400 civilians.
STALEMATE
A decade has since passed, and by some definitions Syria’s civil war is over. But Coughlin points out that though the “main thrust of combat operations” ended in late-2017, a few months after the regime had used chemical weapons on civilians for the second time, the situation is better described as a stalemate. The regime controls about 70% of Syria, but antigovernment Islamist militant coalitions, or Kurdish Syrian Defence Force
WHAT IS CERTAIN IS THAT THE PAST DECADE IN SYRIA WILL COME TO BE CALLED A GENOCIDE
units, dominate the north.
Today, the deadlock — and more immediately dramatic Middle East conflagrations — means that the scale of death and destruction in Syria is largely ignored by Western leaders and bypassed by mainstream media.
Lost in the fatigue of the near 13-year battle is how the Assad regime has turned Syria into an abyss. More than half the country’s pre-war population has been displaced, these 13.5-million people comprise a third of the world’s refugees. Six cities have been devastated or lie in ruins. A conservative estimate is that 306,000 civilians have been killed, but the full scale of the state’s torture, murder, and the number of war deaths may only be known when the Assads have been deposed.
What is certain is that the past decade in Syria will come to be called a genocide.
A tyrant arises from a context, and the book covers enough of the Middle East’s modern history to explain how the Assad clan rose to power, how Syria’s regime garnered support from Iran and Russia, in particular, and why it continues to be a major player in a network of rogue states.
Assad is a sound building block towards understanding more of the region’s inordinate complexity, its long parade of awful, immoral leaders whose reigns have varied only in the scale of bloodshed and venality.
Focusing on Assad as one such tyrant clarifies the interlinked interests and rivalries among them all. It also demonstrates, as historian Simon Sebag Montefiore proves in his recent magnum opus, The World: A Family History, that the human psyche is set to default to tribalism, to the clan. Blood is thicker than water — and Bashar al-Assad, a doctor of benign appearance, has caused rivers of blood to flow.