Given current events in Syria, I thought it might be a good idea to post Brooks Newmark’s essay from THE DICTATORS here. Brooks actually met Assad several times and has a unique insight into him. You can order a signed copy of THE DICTATORS here.
Bashar al-Assad
Syria, 2000-
By Brooks Newmark
Full Name: Bashar al-Assad
Date of Birth: 11 September 1965
Place of Birth: Damascus
Educated: al-Hurriya School, University of Damascus and Western Eye Hospital London
Married to: Asma Akhras. 2 sons (Hafez, Karim), 1 daughter (Zein)
Assumed Office: 17 July 2000
Quotation: “You cannot be a dictator and not in control”
How could a mild-mannered ophthalmologist with a slight lisp and a tendency to be a people-pleaser become the most brutal dictator of the twenty first century, responsible for killing more than 500,000 of his own citizens with chemical weapons and barrel bombs? Nine meetings over five years with Assad certainly gave me the opportunity to find out.
Bashar is the second son of Hafez al-Assad, who rose to power in a military coup in 1970. While the majority in Syria are Sunni Muslims, the Assad family are from the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ism who, while representing only 15% of the country, dominate the political and military leadership in Syria through the Ba’athist Party. Hafez ruled Syria with an iron fist and was responsible for the harsh repressions of civil unrest which took place during his rule, most notably the suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama in 1982 by his brother Rifaat al-Assad, which resulted in the massacre of more than 25,000 innocent Syrian civilians in 27 days. At that time Robin Wright, a Distinguished Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre, called the Hama massacre “the single deadliest act by any Arab Government against its own people in the modern Middle East.”
Bashar, who had three brothers (Basil, Maher and Majd) and one sister (Bushra), was never expected to take power. His elder brother Basil was the heir apparent. Basil was everything Bashar was not. He was good looking, very physical, military trained and enjoyed a playboy lifestyle, especially fast cars. Bashar was more insecure, somewhat nerdy, loved chess (according to Kirsan Ilyumzhinov the head of the world chess body Fide, “[Bashar] plays chess very well, since his studies in London”) and wanted to go into medicine. After studying at the University of Damascus Bashar went on to study at the Western Eye Hospital in London in 1992 and became an ophthalmologist. During his time at the hospital Bashar worked hard and went out of his way to please his superiors. While in London he met his future wife, Asma, who was English and of Syrian descent. Asma was clever, beautiful and a businesswoman, working as an investment banker at JP Morgan in the City.
Bashar’s plans for a career as an ophthalmologist were thrown into the air when Basil was killed in a car crash in Damascus in 1994. Bashar, aged 29, returned to Damascus. His father, who doted on his only daughter Bushra, had thoughts of making her heir apparent, but in the male-dominated Middle East he came to the conclusion that his second son should take on the mantle. However, unlike his older brother, Bashar had not been groomed for the role. His parents were only too aware of Bashar’s weak people-pleasing personality and felt he needed toughening up if he were to be able to lead Syria one day. He was sent into the military in Homs and became colonel within five years, while at the same time advising his father on political matters. He became skilled in balancing the various factions in the military, in intelligence and even within his own family – including Bushra who still had ambitions to take over from her father, and his ruthless younger brother Maher, a senior officer in the 4th Armoured Division. In addition, he had to learn to work with his mother’s side of the family, the Makloufs, who increasingly controlled all the key businesses in Syria.
Hafez became ill in 1999 and increasingly relied on Bashar both to look after him medically and to take on the responsibilities of the state. His physical health continued to deteriorate and on 10 June 2000, Hafez died. Bashar was by now ready to step into the role – however the law at the time stated that the minimum age for presidential candidates had to be forty. Bashar was 34 years old. To no-one’s surprise, within days of Hafez’s death the Syrian Parliament reduced the age for presidential candidates from 40 to 34. Now eligible for office, Bashar was immediately selected as leader of the Ba’athist Party and Commander in Chief of the military. A month after his father’s death he was elected President of Syria and took office on 11 July 2000, with 97% of the vote. Bashar and Asma viewed themselves as modernisers. Bashar’s inaugural speech talked of economic liberalisation and political reform. Asma, meanwhile focussed on charity and the arts. They captured the imagination of the West, and increasingly many politicians and some in the media felt that Bashar was going to pull Syria into the twenty first century along the lines of a Western-style liberal economic democracy. In my conversations with the future Secretary of State, John Kerry, he felt strongly there was an opportunity to pull Syria away from Iran’s control, as did Tony Blair, the then UK Prime Minister, who encouraged Assad to go down a modernising liberal track. Similarly, there was an effusive article about Bashar’s glamorous wife Asma in Vogue magazine entitled ‘A Rose in the Desert.’
But there were two faces to Bashar – the one who understood the language of the West and sought to engage with the US, the EU and especially the UK where he had lived for two years, and the other who took a more hard-line approach domestically, dealing with infighting in his immediate family (especially between Bushra and Maher) as well as in his mother’s family the Makloufs. Like a combination of the TV series’ Succession and Game of Thrones, Bashar was finding it increasingly challenging to manage the many powerful actors both in his family and in the wider political arena. His weakness was his wish to try to please everyone.
Domestically, his first term was spent dividing responsibility between the various family members. Maher, the impulsive brother with his reputation for ruthlessness, was given charge of protecting the President, and made commander of the Syrian army’s elite 4th Armoured Division. Bushra’s husband Asef Shawkat was made Deputy Director of Military Intelligence. Rami Makhlouf, the President’s cousin on his mother’s side, controlled many of the state monopolies such as the national mobile company and Duty Free. Economically, many state industries were privatised but without creating any new competition. Close friends and associates of Assad were the beneficiaries of the privatisation drive in Syria. What emerged in Bashar’s first term in office was more crony capitalism than neo-liberal free market economic reform.
Bashar’s first international challenge was not Syria’s issues with Israel but the country’s relationship with Lebanon. Syrian forces and Syrian intelligence were omnipresent in Lebanon in 2000. In particular, Bashar and Syria were the bridge between Iran and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. However, protests in Lebanon against Syria’s presence led to Bashar beginning the withdrawal of Syrian troops from the country. This was accelerated in 2005 following the assassination of the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri. The public uprisings against Syria came to a head with accusations of Syria’s involvement in the assassination. At the time Bashar said, “if the UN investigation concludes Syrians were involved, those people would be regarded as traitors who would be charged with treason and face an international court.” Fifteen years later in 2020 a UN backed court found just one member of Hezbollah guilty. But it was an open secret that the orders to kill Hariri came from Damascus. As Faysal Itani, recently wrote “…few believed anyone in Syria-controlled Lebanon would kill a figure as large as Hariri without Assad’s direction or endorsement” (New Lines Magazine, 14 February 2023). Syria’s military control in Lebanon was no longer an option, and on 26 April 2005 the last Syrian soldier left Lebanese territory.
In May 2005 I was elected to Parliament in the UK and decided to focus on Lebanon and Syria as one of my areas of interest. In 2006, following the six week war between Hezbollah and Israel, I made plans to visit Lebanon, but as Beirut airport was closed found my only route in was via Damascus. At the time Syria was still very much seen as a pariah state which Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, referred to as part of the “Axis of Evil” with Iran and North Korea and “part of the problem not part of the solution” in the Middle East. I had recently met Syria’s UK ambassador in London, the avuncular Sami Khiyami, who was delighted a British Jewish MP was interested in visiting Syria. He organised for me to meet several Syrian Government Ministers during my 24 hours in Damascus before I took the two hour drive to Beirut. I left very impressed with Syria – the message I was getting was that Syria was on the path to political and economic reform and wanted to engage more positively with the West, especially the UK and the US. When I returned to London, I wrote a short article on my trip to Syria entitled: ‘Syria – Part of the Solution not Part of the Problem’ (inverting Condoleezza Rice’s comment). Two weeks later I was called in to meet Syria’s ambassador for coffee. He asked me about my trip. I said I was very impressed with everyone I had met and had written an article on my impressions, which included the importance of engaging with President Assad if we wanted to bring peace in the Middle East. I quoted the ex-US Secretary of State Warren Christopher who said: “diplomacy becomes a little lazy if all we do is talk to our friends” which became a guiding principle for me in my ten years in Parliament. Ambassador Khiyami told me that the President had read my article (I am sure he hadn’t but was told about it) and wanted to meet with me. When could I go over? As I was an opposition MP at the time I had no need to ask anyone’s permission to do this (though I did clear it with William Hague, the shadow Foreign Secretary) so plans were set in motion for a meeting.
In early 2007 I flew to Damascus, was met at the airport and driven straight to President Assad’s residence. I waited for Bashar in what was a relatively small sitting room in his house. I had little idea what to expect and had a rough outline of a map of the Middle East (Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran etc) in my head if I was short of conversation. Suddenly Bashar walked in. He was taller than I expected, with a small moustache, a slight lisp when he spoke and surprisingly sweaty palms when we shook hands. He seemed even more nervous than I was. We sat down next to each other with no one else in the room. He began by talking about his wish for good relations with the UK, how he had spent time there, perhaps we could have cultural exchanges and then launched into his vision of political and economic reform for Syria and how we could work together to bring peace to the region. He didn’t pause for breath for 45 minutes. I listened attentively. I then asked him what he meant by peace in the Middle East, and he talked about Israel and how he wanted to resolve the Golan Heights issue and the war in Iraq. I knew he was trying to press the right buttons with me. We chatted for over an hour, and I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to end the conversation so when he paused for breath I suddenly blurted out “well thank you for your time Mr. President….” But before I had finished my sentence he said, “no, no, I am enjoying this – please stay.” Three hours later, after discussing his views on domestic politics (increasingly liberalisation), UK relations (cultural exchanges), Israel (a rapprochement on condition of a return to the 1967 border), Iraq (peace), Iran (they had stuck by Syria in difficult times and so would always be close friends), and Hezbollah (the relationship could change if there was peace between Syria and Israel) the meeting ended. He concluded by asking: “When can you come back? I have enjoyed talking to you.” I almost felt this had been like a therapy session for him, where he could get all the things he had been wanting to say to Western politicians off his chest. My Damascene conversion was complete – I honestly believed Bashar wanted to modernise Syria and was an agent for positive change. How wrong I was.
As I said, there were the two faces of Bashar, the one which looked inwards and was ruthless and one which looked outwards – the people-pleaser who wanted to persuade the outside world he was different from his father, the moderniser with the beautiful charming intelligent wife who looked west for inspiration. As Bashar’s first term in office was coming to an end in 2007; internally there was a crackdown on dissidents and travel bans on those that opposed him. Sednayya prison, known as the “human slaughterhouse”, was filling up with more and more men and women who opposed Bashar. Twice a week, according to Amnesty International, 20 to 50 people would be taken from their cells and hanged in the middle of the night. Their bodies would simply disappear. Torture and rape were routine. While all of this was happening, Bashar was feted in the West. In London he was welcomed by Tony Blair and had tea with the Queen. In France he was hailed by President Chirac and awarded the Legion d’Honneur. Bashar’s first term ended in 2007 and he was elected again with 97% of the vote.
I had my second meeting with Bashar just after his re-election in 2007. We discussed the war in Iraq. There was a concern in London and Washington that Assad was providing a corridor for Islamists to enter Iraq to fight our soldiers. I asked Bashar about this and said this was causing deep consternation in London. He explained to me that Syria’s border with Iraq was long, his soldiers were not well paid and that he couldn’t police the whole border. If people wanted to go to Iraq and get killed by the Americans and the British, he wasn’t going to stop them. I pressed him on this point. He said to me: “The most important thing is regime survival…if I stop people crossing the border, they will turn on me.” I never really ‘got’ the point of this comment until three years later in 2011 following the start of Syria’s decade long civil war.
In late 2010 the Arab Spring began in Tunisia and spread to Egypt. I was in Syria in March 2011 touring the country with my family. I felt there was no way the Arab Spring would come to Syria. There was no tension on the streets and north Africa seemed far away. Daily life seemed to be continuing as normal. The day after I left the first protests began in the south of the country, in a town called Deraa. There a group of teenagers sprayed slogans calling for the regime to fall and tore down a poster of Bashar. The teenagers were arrested and tortured and at least one was killed. The families were outraged and took to the streets. The protests spread like wildfire and went from city to city. In the first six months 6,000 civilians were killed. At the end of June 2011, I was invited to meet with Bashar for what was my ninth and final time. At this stage I was now in Government in the Whips Office so needed clearance from the Foreign Office. William Hague, now Foreign Secretary, wanted to know what I was going to say, so I laid out a five-point plan: cessation of violence, release of all political prisoners, allow in humanitarian aid agencies, allow in the media and accelerate political reform. I was given clearance to go but was told that this was a private initiative and not an official visit. I was happy with these conditions and said if my meeting with Bashar got out, I’d take the rap. Over the past five years Bashar had kept all our meetings confidential so I wasn’t concerned it would leak.
I flew into Damascus and once again had a one-on-one meeting with Bashar. He seemed like he had no idea how to bring what was going on in his country to an end. I went through my five-point plan over the next two hours, and we discussed how to implement each part of the plan. I suggested we meet every two weeks to see how he was making progress in both implementing the plan and de-escalating the civil unrest. At the end of our meeting, he suddenly said to me that he didn’t understand why the media were attacking his brother, Maher. He tried to explain to me that his brother was a “good family man” and was only responsible for defending Damascus as Commander of the 4th Armoured Division. At this point I should have kept my mouth shut but I didn’t. I knew Bashar often outsourced his dirty work to his brother as he didn’t want to be seen as the bad guy to the people. So I said to him: “Do you know why this civil war was triggered?” He looked at me blankly. “Because your brother gave orders to his security people to arrest a 13-year-old boy who urinated on a poster of you. I agree it was perhaps disrespectful to urinate on a poster of you. But then Maher’s security people tortured the young boy, beat him up, killed him, cut off his penis and returned him to his parents!” Bashar blanched at my language and at this point was silent. He then looked at me and said, “I cannot control what all my security people do.” I then dug a hole deeper for myself and said to Bashar: “My advice is if you want to clean up this mess, send your brother away somewhere overseas, like your father did to his brother Rifaat after the massacre in Hama in 1982.” We then parted ways. I flew back to London, but I gather he then spoke to his brother about our meeting. A story of the meeting, along with an old photo of us together, was then leaked to Associated Press, and published in all the UK papers by the time I landed. Needless to say, Downing Street put a ban on me returning to the Middle East and I was sacked at the next reshuffle.
I realised my assessment of Bashar had been completely wrong, had my second Damascene conversion, and became one of Bashar’s harshest critics in Parliament. In the early weeks of the war Bashar didn’t want to be seen as the bad guy so, unlike his father who crushed the rebellion in Hama 40 years earlier by immediately slaughtering 25,000 of his own citizens, Bashar sought not to highlight what he was doing, gave few press conferences and kept the death toll to 50-100 people a day which remained unreported in the international media. He kept calling for a national dialogue and denied his forces were responsible for any killings. Nine months after the civil war had started, he gave an interview on the US network ABC in which he said “they are military forces who belong to the Government. I’m President. I don’t own the country. No Government in the world kills its own people, unless it’s led by a crazy person” (ABC, December 2011). Bashar was not only in denial of what was going on in his name, but like any sociopath lacked empathy for what was being perpetrated by his security forces and the military on his own people. He was the victim – not the Syrian people. By the end of 2011, Bashar, the darling of the West, was once more a pariah, suspended from the Arab League with calls for his resignation in the US and Europe.
A year after the start of the Civil War, as the death toll mounted, Kofi Annan the UN Secretary-General drafted a peace plan (with many similar points to those I had made the previous June, with a focus on cessation of violence and political reform). The numbers of dead continued to mount with Assad remaining in denial, claiming the numbers were faked and blaming outside interference from some of the Gulf states. In fact, early on it was Bashar’s authorisation of the release of thousands of Islamic radicals from his prisons that brought this newly destructive direction to the war by allowing the emergence of Al Qaeda in Syria. His plan was to discredit the moderate secular factions who had emerged as the main opposition, such as the Free Syria Army and the Syrian National Coalition and to show the world he was in fact fighting the same fight as the West against Islamic radicals.
Then on 21 August 2013 matters came to a head with the West when Bashar crossed one of President Obama’s red lines. Maher, notwithstanding the presence of chemical weapons inspectors from the OPCW, fired rockets containing the chemical agent Sarin on Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. The impact of this was filmed and spread on social media within hours. Notwithstanding the satellite evidence of the rockets being fired on the instructions of his brother Maher, Bashar denied culpability and blamed the jihadist radicals for gassing their own people. Assad was mastering the dark arts of disinformation and sowing confusion and doubt. There was a vote in the British Parliament on 29 August on taking military action against Syria. However, Ed Miliband, the Labour leader who had made an agreement the night before with Prime Minister David Cameron to abstain on the vote, then came under pressure from the left wing of the party led by Jeremy Corbyn and the Stop the War Campaign. On the morning of the vote Miliband, unable to control his backbenchers, backed down and gave them a free vote. The Government narrowly lost the motion by 13 votes. The consequences of that decision are still being felt today. President Obama, who had made the red line, blinked and handed over the decision to Congress who, like the British Parliament, voted against military action. The Russians, close allies of Assad, then offered to broker a deal in which they would remove Assad’s stockpile of chemical weapons. Bashar survived and Putin was quick to sense a lack of resolve in the West which led a year later to Russia’s annexing of Crimea from Ukraine, achieved with complete impunity. By the end of 2013 Bashar had killed more than 70,000 of his own people.
In 2014 with his second term as President ending and calls for him to step down both internally and externally, Bashar still proceeded with elections. While he made no public appearances, he won the election by 88% of the vote. The Russians then came into the war to support Bashar in September with air cover, while Iran and Hezbollah provided most of the support on the ground. Bashar, not trusting his 300,000 soldiers, kept most of them in barracks and in essence outsourced the fighting to Iran and Russia, while he had the primarily Alawite Republican Guard protect him in Damascus. The war continued to rage, and the slaughter continued. Over one and half million Syrian refugees fled to Lebanon (about one third of Lebanon’s population), 3.6 million fled to Turkey, and another million plus fled to Europe, with Germany agreeing to host the majority.
By February 2016 it was estimated that Bashar had killed roughly 470,000 of his own people. The Syria Free Army which comprised of 150,000 fighters, across a wide range of militias, increasingly became radicalised as a result of the violence inflicted on their families by Assad’s forces and coalesced around two formidable Syrian Islamic fighting groups: Ahrar al-sham and Jaysh al-Islam. Further, the relatively small Al-Qa’eda franchise in Syria formed Jabhat al-Nusra, and Isis, who had previously been in Iraq, moved into Syria.
Islamic State, which in fact first became engaged in Syria in 2014 and was responsible for the destruction of much of the ancient city of Palmyra in 2015, settled around the city of Raqqa and controlled much of the east of Syria that bordered on Iraq. While Bashar was responsible for 96% of all civilian deaths in Syria and Isis only 2%, the US became obsessed with taking out Isis, and with the support of the Syrian Kurdish Independence Movement the YPG, who controlled the northern eastern border of Syria, they removed Isis from Raqqa. By the end of 2018 Isis had lost 95% of the territory they had controlled in eastern Syria. Bashar had let the West unwittingly do his work for him.
Further west, the Battle for Aleppo came to a head in late 2016 as Russian air power and Shi’ite militias from Iraq and Lebanon (Hezbollah) with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard on the ground retook the city, capturing the last rebel enclave in the eastern part of Aleppo. In the process Aleppo had been razed to the ground. Over 90% of Bashar’s forces that recaptured Aleppo were foreign fighters. Bashar simply did not trust his own soldiers. By late 2018 Russia’s military intervention in support of Assad had tilted the balance of power in Syria back to Assad, where he controlled most the country through his proxies except for the rebel stronghold of Idlib in western Syria. Bashar was elected for a fourth term in May 2021 by 95% of the vote and re-admitted into the Arab League in late 2023.
As I reflect on Assad’s rule over Syria since 2000, his words to me in our second meeting in 2007 still resonate: “the most important thing is regime survival.” With an estimated 580,000 people killed in the civil war alone, mainly by Assad forces, an estimated 13 million people displaced by the war and 6.7 million forced to flee the country, regime survival for Bashar Assad has been a heavy price for his people and his country. The softly spoken mild mannered ophthalmologist with the slight lisp will go down in history as one of the most brutal dictators of the twenty first century.
Brooks Newmark, is the former Member of Parliament for Braintree and is currently writing a book on Bashar Assad with the working title ‘Tea with a Tyrant.’
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