On the rise and fall of Syria’s dictatorial dynasty
Editor’s Note: The below is an expanded version of an article that appears in the March issue of National Review.
For decades, schoolchildren began their day with a song of praise to Hafez al-Assad, “our eternal leader.” He died in 2000. He was succeeded by his son Bashar, who received similar praises. He is not dead, but he has been overthrown. By all accounts, he is now in Russia, under the gaze of his longtime ally and partner Vladimir Putin.
Family members and money preceded Bashar to Moscow. According to the Financial Times,
Bashar al-Assad’s central bank airlifted around $250mn in cash to Moscow in a two-year period when the then-Syrian dictator was indebted to the Kremlin for military support and his relatives were secretly buying assets in Russia.
The report continued,
The Financial Times has uncovered records showing that Assad’s regime, while desperately short of foreign currency, flew banknotes weighing nearly two tonnes in $100 bills and €500 notes into Moscow’s Vnukovo airport to be deposited at sanctioned Russian banks between 2018 and 2019.
For about 54 years, two men, and only two men, ruled Syria: Hafez and Bashar al-Assad. Think of it: A Syrian has to be in his middle 60s to have really known any life before Assad rule. The Duvaliers, in Haiti, ruled for 29 years (from 1957 to 1986). In Gabon, Omar Bongo and then his son Ali ruled for 56 years (1967–2023). Ali was overthrown by a cousin.
In North Korea, three Kims — grandfather, son, and grandson — have ruled since 1948. There is no end of that rule in sight. But then, such ends can come quickly and unexpectedly. The Assads’ did: in an eleven-day sweep by combined opposition forces.
The Assads were shockingly murderous and ghastly. There was all the killing, yes. But also the endless torture, rape, and other depravity. I have said “shockingly.” But the truth is, these absolute dictatorships tend to be alike.
Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970. His party, the Baath, had ruled since 1963. This party is a socialist one, with aspects of national socialism. Hafez’s No. 2, so to speak, was his younger brother Rifaat. He was the regime’s enforcer, its bloody fist. In 1982, the Assads put down a rebellion of the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama. They killed 20,000. Rifaat earned the nickname “The Butcher of Hama.”
He was his brother’s assumed successor. Sometimes a brother is in line, rather than a son. Remember Cuba, in 2011: It was not one of Fidel Castro’s sons but his brother Raúl who succeeded him.
In 1983, Hafez al-Assad had a medical crisis — a heart attack and other problems. Rifaat saw his chance. Maybe he could become No. 1 even while Hafez was still alive? He attempted a coup, but Hafez rallied, thwarting his brother. The dictator could have done anything to this traitor. He chose a benign option: exile. Rifaat was sentenced to some of the most fashionable avenues in Europe.
Hafez and his wife, Aniseh, had six children. The eldest was a daughter, Bushra. Her father adored her and brought her into his councils. She might have succeeded him — but she was a girl.
In Haiti, Papa Doc’s daughter Marie-Denise would have succeeded him, but for her sex. Her brother, Jean-Claude, was much less suited to dictatorial rule — but he was a boy.
After Rifaat’s betrayal, the anointed was Bassel, the crown prince. He was the dictator’s eldest son and obvious successor. Bassel was a golden child, in national lore (and propaganda). Indeed, he was called “The Golden Knight,” in honor of his equestrian skills. He was glamorous, enjoying sports of various types, and fast cars. Hafez began to prepare the public for the succession. For example, he styled himself “Abu Bassel,” or “Father of Bassel.”
On January 21, 1994, something terrible happened: Bassel was killed in a car crash. It was a foggy morning, and he had been rushing to the airport in his new Mercedes coupe. Rounding a traffic circle, he struck a barricade, and the car flipped several times. Bassel al-Assad was 31.
There is a story told, not confirmed, but believable. I will tell it, as long as the reader understands that it is a tale, not fact (however credible the tale).
None of the leading generals was willing, by himself, to inform Assad of Bassel’s death. So they agreed to a strategy of “safety in numbers”: They would all troop in to give the dictator, and father, the news. When they were assembled before him — and had not yet uttered a word — Assad looked at them and said, “Okay. Which one of you has led this coup against me?”
That very day — January 21, 1994 — Assad summoned his second-eldest son, Bashar, back from London. Bashar was an ophthalmologist, age 28, doing a residency at the Western Eye Hospital. He was very different from Bassel: shy, gawky, unglamorous. No one had imagined him for dictatorial rule. But he was brought home to be groomed.
The regime put out a new slogan: “Hafez is our symbol. Bassel is our model. Bashar is our hope.” Posters depicted the three men. Foreign diplomats in Damascus cracked, “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
Bashar had six years of grooming, as his father died in 2000, at 69. Bashar was 34. Looking on from Spain was an interested party: Uncle Rifaat. He made it known that he would return to assume his rightful place on the throne. Bashar and his allies made it known to him that, if he returned, he would be killed. Rifaat stayed put.
Before assuming the throne, Bashar had to face the voters. That is, the authorities went to the trouble of staging a referendum. Did the Syrian people approve of Bashar as their new dictator? They did, by a vote of 99.7 percent to 0.3 percent. (Who were the dissenters?) Turnout, reportedly, was 95 percent. Bashar was in.
He enjoyed a honeymoon with the international press. Bashar would be different from his austere father, or so it seemed. Bashar was an amateur photographer. He liked Phil Collins, the British rock star. He also liked the Electric Light Orchestra.
Adding to the honeymoon, Bashar got married — to Asma Akhras, a London-born beauty, the daughter of Syrian parents. She had worked at Deutsche Bank and J.P. Morgan. Their first child was a son, Hafez II (a ready-made successor).
The “Arab Spring” started in December 2010. But ten years before, there was a “Damascus Spring.” In the first year or two of his rule, Bashar al-Assad liberalized. He allowed Syrians more room to breathe and speak. Ali Ferzat, a Syrian cartoonist and a famed cultural figure in the Arab world, started a satirical magazine: Al-Domari, or “The Lamplighter.” It was the first independent magazine in Syria since the Baathists took power in 1963. “There was joy on the streets,” Ferzat told me in a 2013 interview. “After 40 years of forced silence, the people had a voice. There was a magazine that expressed their concerns. I remember we sold out even before we went to press.”
The Damascus Spring lasted but a season. Evidently, Assad decided that he had allowed too much breathing room, and he tightened the noose. He cracked down hard. His enforcer — his No. 2 — was his younger brother Maher. In other words, what Rifaat had been to Hafez (before 1983), Maher was to Bashar. Yet Maher was more volatile than Rifaat.
Many families have interesting internal dynamics, and the Assads’ were exceptionally interesting. On one occasion, Maher shot his brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat (Bushra’s husband, and also a leading member of the regime). Shawkat survived. The brothers-in-law reached some modus vivendi.
After the experiment with liberalization, Syria was once more a “republic of fear.” (I have borrowed Kanan Makiya’s famous description of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.) An exile journalist, Waad al-Kateab, told me, “When I was growing up, we kids were told, ‘Be careful what you say. Even the walls have ears.’” Previously, a North Korean refugee, Yeonmi Park, had told me, “When I was four, my mother said, ‘Don’t even whisper. The birds and mice will hear you.’”
In Syria, students were made to hail Bashar al-Assad every morning, chanting, “We are his sons and daughters,” “We are his soldiers.”
He proved a formidable vote-getter. (The reader will excuse the sarcasm.) In 2007, he was reelected with 99.82 percent of the vote. In 2014, his total slipped way down to 92.2 percent — but he still got that third term. In 2021, his fourth term was assured with 95.19 percent of the vote.
Assad had a setback in 2007. His North Korean allies were building a nuclear facility for him. The Israelis destroyed it.
March 2011 was a fateful month for Syria. In the city of Daraa, some teenage boys scrawled anti-regime graffiti. They were arrested and tortured, mercilessly. On hearing of it, masses of Syrians rebelled. The regime responded with all its fury, its full arsenal.
Ali Ferzat, the cartoonist, was not killed. But security agents broke both of his hands, assuring him that, next time, it would be worse. Ferzat left the country.
From March 2011 to December 2024, Syria was engulfed in . . . civil war? Those are fighting words, in Syria: “civil war.” People of various stripes react strongly against the designation. They tend to point out the international nature of the war. Assad partnered with Putin, of course — but also with China, Iran, Hezbollah, and North Korea, among others. (In Damascus, you can visit a park named after Kim Il-sung. It was established in 2015.)
Wrangling over the term “civil war” aside — Syria has been a bloodbath.
At first, the world was shocked. A thousand dead. And then 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 . . . Could the body count rise to five digits? Yes. Ten thousand dead. And 20,000, 30,000 . . . Six digits? Yes. A hundred thousand, and then 200,000, and then . . .
At about 10,000, maybe fewer, the shock had worn off. Numbness had set in, and with numbness, indifference. This is not unknown — indeed, it is routine — in human affairs. In 2021, there were articles here and there about Syria: anniversary pieces. It had been ten years since the bloodbath began. But the world had long before “moved on.”
In the West, there was a sense that Syria offered nothing to choose from, nobody to help. It was just tribe against tribe, faction against faction, extremist group against extremist group. In 2013, Americans were debating intervention, as Assad was killing people with chemical weapons. Sarah Palin, the Republican politician, was against intervention, issuing a statement with the heading, “LET ALLAH SORT IT OUT.” That was a common line of thought.
And one that pained and vexed many Syrians. Over the years, I have met a slew of journalists, dissidents, civil-society leaders, and human-rights defenders from Syria. They are astounding. One was Raed Fares, who started Radio Fresh in 2013. He trained 2,500 students in journalism and employed 600. Because of his belief in freedom and human rights, he attracted many enemies: the Assad regime, of course, and ISIS, al-Qaeda, and so on.
His offices were raided and bombed. He was kidnapped and tortured. He was shot at, taking two bullets in his right side. Finally, in November 2018, he could dodge death no longer: Militants of one kind or another killed him.
I met him at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2017. Describing life in Syria, he cited Orwell: Animal Farm and 1984. Many dissidents do, in every corner of the globe. That English novelist, who died in 1950, somehow captures their situation, in whatever totalitarian state they live in.
When Raed Fares was killed, another Syrian journalist and activist, Abdalaziz al-Hamza, said, “Assad, ISIS, and al-Qaeda feared Raed, so they all tried to silence him. While he could have made the choice to leave Syria and escape their threats, he decided to stay and fight them, armed with his radio and his words. Raed may be gone, but his soul and bravery will always remain with us.”
Hamza himself is astounding. I met him in Oslo in 2016, when he was 24. Shaking his hand, and knowing he was returning to Syria, I wondered whether he would live to 25. He did, and is alive and working today.
So is Abdulrahman al-Mawwas, who co-founded the Syrian Civil Defense, popularly known as the “White Helmets.” They are a group of volunteers who try to rescue people from the rubble after bombings. They have saved something like 130,000. Some 300 volunteers have been killed — usually in “double taps.”
Regime and Russian forces would bomb an apartment building, hospital, or school. Then the rescuers would come. Then the bombers would bomb again, to kill or maim the rescuers. What Russians did for many years in Syria, they have done since 2022 in Ukraine.
The heroism of the White Helmets is staggering. Kremlin propaganda finds it necessary to tag them a terror group.
It was on December 8, 2024, that the House of Assad fell. The White Helmets got to work trying to dig people out of prisons, some of which have a labyrinth of cells underground. There are whole secret prisons, not yet discovered. Syrians are aware of their existence, but their locations need to be pinpointed. (Russia, too, has secret prisons. That’s why it is impossible to get a firm count of Putin’s political prisoners.)
One prison that is definitely not secret is Sednaya, outside Damascus. “Sednaya” is a name that strikes terror in the hearts of Syrians. They call it “the human slaughterhouse.” The equivalent in Tehran is Evin. The Duvaliers, in Haiti, had Fort Dimanche. All such regimes have their chambers of horrors.
On December 11, a headline from RFE/RL read, “The Horrors of Syria’s ‘Human Slaughterhouse’ Spill into Public View.” (RFE/RL is America’s combination of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.) The report began, “Some shuffled out of the Syrian prison’s gray concrete corridors like zombies rising from a graveyard. Some sobbed as they reunited with long-unseen relatives.”
A report from the Associated Press began,
They came from all over Syria, tens of thousands. The first place they rushed to after the fall of their longtime tormentor, former president Bashar Assad, was here: Sednaya Prison . . .
The White Helmets’ Mawwas told of a woman who had gone into Sednaya a 19-year-old virgin. She was freed with her four children. She does not know the identity of any of the fathers.
A report from the BBC was headed, “Victims of Syria chemical attacks speak freely for first time.” A man named Tawfiq Diam had a wife and four children. They were killed in a chemical attack in 2018. The husband and father survived, barely. (One can’t help wondering whether he wanted to.) He told the BBC, “If I’d spoken out before, Bashar al-Assad’s forces would have cut off my tongue. They would have slit my throat. We were not allowed to talk about it.”
Leila Molana-Allen is a special correspondent for PBS. After looking at corpses, she said, “I will never unsee what I saw today. The decaying, emaciated bodies of young men covered in the brutal scars of torture and starvation. Their faces drawn in a rictus of pain. Sobbing mothers searching through rows of destroyed boys for their babies.” (If the words are hard to take, the accompanying photos are more so.)
Waad al-Kateab told me why she and her family left Syria at the end of 2016, when their city, Aleppo, fell. They did not fear death, she said. Not at all. They feared arrest — and the torture that would follow. For instance, Assad’s agents tortured parents in front of their children, or vice versa.
How the new government will behave — what the new government will be — is unknowable at this juncture. A decent government in that part of the world is rare. Lots of Westerners are expressing concerns about human rights in Syria. As a rule, these people were not especially vocal in the previous 13 years and eight months (and 24 days).
Statistics can be cold and abstract. It is better to know about individual cases, many of us find. At any rate, here are some statistics. Since March 15, 2011, about 600,000 people have been killed. Some 14 million have been displaced. (At the beginning of 2011, Syria’s population was 22 million.) Half of the displaced are refugees abroad; half are displaced internally. Some 140,000 people are missing.
And these statistics do not account for the maimed, the raped, the traumatized, etc. Syria may be the most battered place on earth.
Apparently, Syria is rid of the Assads. There will be no third one on the throne. Today, Hafez II is 23. Bashar had been readying the population for the eventual succession of this son. Instead, Hafez II may live in Russia indefinitely. He is already familiar with the country, having been sent to Moscow for his higher education. (Fidel Castro’s son Fidelito, too, was sent to Moscow.)
Will there be a fourth Kim on the throne in North Korea? Probably not. But a third one seemed unlikely too.