On the face of it at least, the Bashar al-Assad of 2002 presented a starkly different figure to the brutal autocrat he would become, presiding over a fragile state founded on torture, imprisonment and industrial murder.
He had been president then for just two years, succeeding his father, Hafez, whose own name was a byword for brutality.
For a while the gawky former ophthalmologist, who had studied medicine in London and later married a British-Syrian wife, Asma, an investment banker at JP Morgan, was keen to show the world that Syria, under his leadership, could follow a different path.
Reaching out to the west, he pursued a public relations campaign to show the young Assad family as somehow ordinary despite the palaces and the ever visible apparatus of repression.
Visiting Damascus in that year ahead of Bashar’s state visit to the UK, arranged by then prime minister Tony Blair – the high point of that engagement – I was invited for a private coffee with Assad who sat on a white sofa in an expensively tailored suit.
Suggesting some uncertainty, he was curious about how Syria was seen in the world, floating possibilities for a change, including a reset in the relationship between Damascus and Israel.
It was a constructed iteration of the Assads – highlighting Asma’s much-vaunted “charitable” works and Bashar’s brief embrace by the west – that nodded to an ambition to transform Hafez’s Syria into something more like a version of Jordan’s paternalistic royal family. More manicured. Certainly more PR savvy. A dictatorship all the same.
In the midst of the conversation, however, Bashar proffered a chilling and almost throwaway line as he reflected on the previous year’s 9/11 attack on the US by al-Qaida and the subsequent American invasion of Afghanistan.
The world should know, Bashar insisted, that his father had been “right” all along in his brutal crushing of Islamist insurgents.
Dictatorship
Twenty-two years later Bashar is gone, swept out of power by an off-shoot of al-Qaida. And with the dramatic ending of the half-century of Assad rule, a key section of the map of the Middle East has been utterly redrawn.
But even in the pre-Arab spring days which would challenge and define his rule, the reality of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria – like Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya – was a country in which a vast security apparatus was ever present, agents watching in market places, at taxi ranks and on street corners.
Rejecting the model of democracy as appropriate for Syria, Bashar’s initial offer of reform was to promise economic change ahead of political transformation, replacing unpopular state monopolies with a free market, but which ultimately benefited a crony elite.
His political doctrine, as it would emerge, was no different from his father’s – a highly personalised dictatorship with power concentrated in the armed forces, including the air force, and intelligence agencies.
If one anonymous European diplomat would venture early on to question his real authoritarian chops, describing Syria as a “dictatorship without a dictator”, there would soon be no question what he represented. A dictator he would become.
While Bashar released a number of political prisoners in 2001 – mainly communists – in a presidential amnesty as part of his campaign to demonstrate to the west that Syria was changing, it was always window dressing. The arrests had really never stopped. It was business as usual.
Under the threat from the Syrian uprising of 2011 the last pretence would slip, showing a regime willing to industrialise the detention, torture and murder of huge numbers – including up to 13,000 killed between 2011 and 2015 at Sednaya prison, known as the “Human Slaughterhouse”.
And despite attempts to burnish the Assads that would continue until as late as 2011 – with a glossy profile of Asma in Vogue as the purported “Rose in the Desert”, Bashar’s rule would become even more horrific than his father’s.
If it was Hafez, an air force officer and Ba’athist organiser, who first participated as a plotter in the 1963 military coup that brought the Syrian branch of the Ba’ath party to power who first framed the Assad family values, Bashar brought them to their logical conclusion.
As early as 1966, during the so-called Hama riot, Hafez endorsed a view that would become the Assad credo and a chilling precursor of the slaughters to come under his rule and that of his son: all and any opposition should be violently crushed.
For Hafez that would find its fullest expression in the period after his seizure of full power for himself in another coup, gradually establishing his own Alawite minority as the centre of an all encompassing police state, with the brutal repression of an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood against his rule that began in the mid-1970s and culminating in the Hama massacre of 1982.
Prisoners were murdered en masse. Muslim Brotherhood figures and their families assassinated. In February 1982 Hama was subjected to a scorched-earth land and aerial assault, killing thousands. It was a playbook that would be embraced just as energetically by Bashar and his brother Maher.
Arab spring
If Bashar initially seemed different, it was, perhaps, because he was not at first intended as Hafez’s successor, a role earmarked for his brother Bassel before his death in a car crash in 1994. In the aftermath Bashar, previously little interested in politics before his recall to Syria from London, would be personally coached by Hafez on the exercise of power.
By 2011 and the onset of the Arab spring, the carefully curated image of Bashar and his family as a more wholesome version of the Hafez era – with its weekends spent watching screenings of western films with friends in their private cinema and meals in Damascus restaurants – had evaporated.
Beginning with sporadic demonstrations against the rule of the Assads, by March the movement had caught fire, turning into revolution. The response was brutal. Security forces under the command of Maher fired on demonstrators as part of an official policy while heavily armed pro-regime militias known as shabiha emerged to operate as death squads.
And through the years Bashar would return to the same justification deployed in 2002 in defence of his father: all the bloodshed was in service to a “war on terror”, at one point describing victims of his own security forces as a necessary sacrifice.
A year later, in 2012, leaks of thousands of hacked emails by WikiLeaks relating to Bashar and his family and their contacts across the region, provided a rare insight into the deliberations and life of the Assads inside Damascus: Asma ordering expensive jewellery in Paris; the inevitable PR consultants advising how to appear to be reforming while pursuing a violent crackdown.
Key among the revelations that year, even as the first Russian military advisers would begin arriving to bolster the regime, was Bashar’s personal involvement in signing off on daily orders for the continuing violence even as a sense of unreality pervaded, prompting Asma’s British-based father to question the wisdom of the timing of a New Year’s Eve party planned by the couple as Syrian’s were being slaughtered.
But if Bashar’s grip seemed tenuous in that period, with international calls for him to step down, other factors would intervene to provide a stay of execution as Syria drifted into long years of atomising civil war that would kill 500,000 and displace half the population.
One factor would be the emergence of Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate, centred in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa in 2013, whose horrific abuses eclipsed that of even Bashar’s forces, diverting international attention from the Assad regime even as Damascus began using chemical weapons in attacks against rebel centres, most notoriously against Khan al-Assal and Ghouta in that year.
While arguments have continued over the years, based on intelligence intercepts, whether Assad personally ordered the attacks, a statement by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, released last year for the 10th anniversary of the two Ghouta attacks, was in no doubt, insisting that less momentous attacks had seen his personal approval and that it constituted regime policy.
Becoming a purported test of international resolve, the “red line” set against the use of chemical weapons by Syria by then US president, Barack Obama, however, would pass without significant repercussion, even as other forces moved into the vacuum.
First was the decision by Vladimir Putin to deploy Russian forces to sustain Assad, in a cynical manoeuvre designed to bolster Moscow’s claim to substantive influence in the wider Middle East.
Iran too moved forcefully to protect its investment in Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon, sending advisers and backing the deployment of Hezbollah fighters on behalf of the Assad regime, stabilising rule in the areas it controlled.
Never abandoning his taste for the performative, Bashar would organise sham elections in areas he controlled in 2014 under the banner of sawa – “unity”. A year later his forces would control just 25% of Syria.
Through it all, improbably Bashar al-Assad survived, even as Donald Trump, in his first presidency, ordered a strike on a Syrian airbase in 2017 for yet another chemical weapons attack on Khan Sheikhoun.
What sustained Bashar through those years would be his undoing: an essentially failed state heavily dependent of external actors and vulnerable to events, not least Moscow’s distraction in Ukraine and the diminishing of Tehran’s axis of resistance in the recent decimation of Hezbollah by Israel.
“Assad crumbled not just because of a well-planned jihadist campaign,” wrote Hassan Hassan, the editor-in-chief of New Lines and a leading expert on Syria, “but because 13 years of civil war have left his army a husk, and his soldiers demoralised.
“[Syria] the nation was Balkanised by competitive and contradictory Turkish and American protectorates in the north and east of the country and elsewhere mortgaged to Iran and Russia, which did the heavy lifting in retaking Aleppo and defeating western-backed rebels in southern Syria.”
In his last days in power Bashar continued to talk the talk, vowing to crush the rebels even as they sped towards Damascus. In the end 50 years of Assad rule unravelled in the blinking of an eye.