Inside Syria’s most dangerous dynasty
A new documentary reveals how Bashar al-assad’s complex family has shaped his unexpected presidency, says Nick Green
Many have wondered how Bashar al-assad and his British-born wife, Asma, a couple once heralded as a force to modernise the Middle East, ended up running a regime accused of war crimes. The answer, I would discover during interviews with many of those who have crossed paths with them, lies in the complex relationship between Bashar, his wife, his father, his mother and his siblings; get to know the inner workings of this family dynasty, which has ruled Syria for more than 40 years, and you will understand how Syria has become one of the world’s biggest problems. During the making of A Dangerous
Dynasty: House of Assad, a new BBC Two documentary series, Leon Panetta, President Obama’s former secretary of defence, helped to lift the lid on the complex relationship Bashar had with his parents. In 2011, as the Arab Spring protests caught fire across Syria, Bashar had to choose whether to give his people the reforms they wanted or crack down. His relationship with his mother, Anisa, was crucial to what happened next. Thought to be the toughest member of the family, Anisa didn’t want to soften the family’s hardline approach to government. Although her husband, Hafez, had died in 2000, her influence had not waned.
“There was a point in time where there really was a sense that Assad… was not going to be willing to fight for power,” Panetta told me.
But, he added: “His mother was putting pressure on him to be like his father. And that he owed it to his father to fight for continuing power and not to just walk away.” And so Anisa’s tactic of “using the ghost of his father as leverage to give him a spine to fight on” would win out.
Syria had been run as a family business since 1970, when Hafez took control of the country, creating a cult of personality in which the presidency controlled every aspect of public life. Those who pushed back were crushed; the survival of the regime, which enabled the personal wealth and power of the Assad clan to flourish, was everything.
For Bashar, it could have been so different. His eldest brother, Bassel, had already been lined up as Syria’s next president, allowing Bashar to pursue medicine. In the early Nineties, he travelled to London to study ophthalmology; absolved, then of involvement with the grubbiness of running a Middle East dictatorship.
It was in London where he met Asma, a young computer science graduate from Acton, west London. In 1994, however, the 29-year-old was summoned back to Syria. Bassel – himself second choice for the presidency after Hafez’s brother, Rifaat, had attempted a coup a decade earlier and been exiled – had died in an accident while driving one of his many sports cars in Damascus. Bashar, the next eldest son, was fast tracked to take over.
Though Bushra, Bashar’s sister, had huge power in the family – it was rumoured she was her father’s favourite, and more suitable for the top job – Syria was not ready for a female president. Dennis Ross, one of Bill Clinton’s Middle East peace negotiators who knew Hafez well, explained: “He thinks his daughter is stronger than Bashar but, in his society, it can’t be his daughter.” And so, when Hafez died of a heart attack, Bashar became president. He married Asma six months later in a ceremony with no photos and no official announcement of the happy day.
Asma entered the Assad family wanting to assume an unusual role for the wife of a Middle Eastern dictator: to be a beacon of female progress for the Syrian people.
She “came from a totally different mindset”, says Bashar’s former adviser, Ayman Abdelnour. “She wanted to be part of building or modernising… Then she discovered she wasn’t accepted as a member of the family.”
This led to “bad disagreements” between Asma and Bushra, who didn’t share her vision, according to Riad Nassan Agha, former minister of culture. Agha said the women squabbled over the title “first lady”. Yet Asma’s troubles at home would soon be eclipsed as her husband became an international pariah. President George W Bush named Syria as part of the “axis of evil”, and the Assads found themselves at the centre of a murder investigation following the assassination of Rafic Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister.
Most damaging to him, personally, though was the UN’S ordering of Syrian troops out of Lebanon – a personal humiliation, as his father had considered the country an extension of Syria. In the eyes of his mother this was, we were told, a black mark.
But this was Asma’s chance to rise through the family ranks. In 2005, opportunity presented itself in an unlikely form. She attended the funeral of Pope John Paul II while Bashar’s brand was particularly toxic. No one would be seen anywhere close to him but Asma worked the room, becoming “the acceptable face of a terrible regime”, in the words of the Assads’ then-photographer, Ammar Abd Rabbo.
“I think she realises how valuable she is,” he said, having rebranded herself as “the asset in the crisis”. Halla Diyab, Asma’s former colleague, agreed she served “to distract the world from the political dirty laundry of the Assads”.
From the mid-2000s, with Bushra spending more time in Dubai and, thus, out of the way, Asma started charities and attempted to organise an arts festival for Damascus. Her status flourished, and Vogue magazine would gushingly brand her “A Rose in the Desert”. But the timing could not have been worse – the article was published the same month that the Arab Spring arrived in Syria.
As the uprising took hold, and government forces pushed back with more violence, many wondered what Asma’s position was. For a long time, she disappeared from the public eye. Hacked emails published in 2012 suggest she mainly spent the period shopping online – the EU froze her assets and imposed a travel ban on the pair – while her husband appeared to have a flirtatious digital correspondence with female aides.
Yet that year, she finally re-emerged on the world stage: making speeches, comforting the mothers of fallen soldiers and giving interviews to Russian television, talking up her husband. Finally, indisputably, Asma was Syria’s first lady – confirmed after Anisa’s death in early 2016.
It hasn’t been plain sailing – mother-of-three Asma was threatened with being stripped of her British citizenship last year due to the brutality of the regime, which has seen the deaths of an estimated 400,000 Syrians. Today, she communicates to the world through Instagram, where she has almost 300,000 followers: a potent force saying that Syria is still Assad Incorporated. Several days ago, she posted a picture following chemotherapy for breast cancer, having turned down treatment in Russia for a Syrian military hospital.
Most people we spoke to reluctantly believe the regime will survive in the near future. Yet how Asma, desperate to liberalise the country, may do so, remains to be seen.
A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad
begins tonight at 9pm on BBC Two
His mother used the ‘ghost of his father as leverage to give him a spine’