Iron-Fisted Assad Never Quelled the Syrian Uprising that Came Back to Topple Him

A portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is pictured with its frame broken, in a Syrian regime's Political Security Branch facility on the outskirts of the central city of Hama, following the capture of the area by anti-government forces, on December 7, 2024. (AFP)
A portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is pictured with its frame broken, in a Syrian regime's Political Security Branch facility on the outskirts of the central city of Hama, following the capture of the area by anti-government forces, on December 7, 2024. (AFP)
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Iron-Fisted Assad Never Quelled the Syrian Uprising that Came Back to Topple Him

A portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is pictured with its frame broken, in a Syrian regime's Political Security Branch facility on the outskirts of the central city of Hama, following the capture of the area by anti-government forces, on December 7, 2024. (AFP)
A portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is pictured with its frame broken, in a Syrian regime's Political Security Branch facility on the outskirts of the central city of Hama, following the capture of the area by anti-government forces, on December 7, 2024. (AFP)

Syria's Bashar al-Assad used Russian and Iranian firepower to beat back opposition forces during years of civil war but never defeated them, leaving him vulnerable to their breathtaking advance when his allies were distracted by wars elsewhere.

President for 24 years, Assad flew out of Damascus for an unknown destination early on Sunday, two senior army officers told Reuters. The opposition factions declared the city "free of the tyrant Bashar al-Assad". A half-century of Assad family rule was over, army command told officers, according to a Syrian officer.

Statues of Assad's father and brother were toppled in cities taken by the opposition, while pictures of him on billboards and government offices were torn down, stamped on, burned or riddled with bullets.

Assad became president in 2000 after his father Hafez died, preserving the family's iron-fisted rule and the dominance of their Alawite sect in the Sunni Muslim-majority country and Syria's status as an Iranian ally hostile to Israel and the US.

Shaped in its early years by the Iraq war and crisis in Lebanon, Assad's rule was defined by civil war, which spiraled out of the 2011 Arab Spring, when Syrians demanding democracy took to the streets, to be met with deadly force.

Branded an "animal" in 2018 by US President Donald Trump for using chemical weapons - an accusation he denied - Assad outlasted many of the foreign leaders who believed his demise was imminent in the early days of the conflict, when he lost swathes of Syria to the opposition.

Helped by Russian air strikes and Iranian-backed militias, he clawed back much of the lost territory during years of military offensives, including siege warfare condemned as "medieval" by UN investigators.

With his opponents largely confined to a corner of northwestern Syria, he presided over several years of relative calm, though large parts of the country remained out of his grasp and the economy was shackled by international sanctions.

Assad re-established ties with Arab states that once shunned him but remained a pariah to much of the world and never managed to revive the shattered Syrian state, whose armed forces swiftly retreated in the face of opposition advances.

He has not delivered any public remarks since the opposition took Aleppo a week ago but said in a call with Iran's president that the escalation sought to redraw the region for Western interests, echoing his view of the revolt as a foreign-backed conspiracy.

Justifying his response to the opposition in its early stages, Assad compared himself to a surgeon. "Do we say to him: 'Your hands are covered in blood?' Or do we thank him for saving the patient?" he said in 2012.

Early in the conflict, as the opposition seized town after town, Assad oozed confidence.

"We will hit them with an iron fist and Syria will return to how it was," he told soldiers after taking back the town of Maaloula in 2014.

He delivered on the first pledge, but not the second. Years later, large parts of Syria remained outside state control, cities were flattened, the death toll topped 350,000 and more than a quarter of the population had fled abroad.

RED LINES

Assad was backed by those Syrians who believed he was saving them from extremists.

As al-Qaeda-inspired opposition groups gained prominence, this fear resonated among minorities. Opposition forces sought to assure Christians, Alawites and other minorities they would be protected as they advanced this week.

Assad clung to the idea of Syria as a bastion of secular Arab nationalism even as the conflict appeared ever more sectarian. Speaking to Foreign Affairs in 2015, he said Syria's army was "made up of every color of Syrian society".

But to his opponents, he was fueling sectarianism.

The conflict's sectarian edge was hardened by the arrival of Iranian-backed Shiite fighters from across the Middle East to support Assad, and as Türkiye the opposition.

Assad's value to Iran was underscored by a senior Iranian official who declared in 2015 that his fate was a "red line" for Tehran.

While Iran stood by Assad, the United States failed to enforce its own "red line" - set by President Barack Obama in 2012 against the use of chemical weapons.

UN-backed investigations have concluded Damascus used chemical weapons.

A sarin gas attack on the opposition-held Ghouta in 2013 killed hundreds, but Moscow brokered a deal for Syria's chemical weapons to be destroyed, averting a US response. Still, poison gas continued to hit opposition areas, with a 2017 sarin attack prompting Trump to order a cruise missile response.

Assad has denied accusations the state was to blame.

He similarly denied the army had dropped barrel bombs packed with explosives that caused indiscriminate destruction. He appeared to make light of the accusation in a BBC interview in 2015, saying: "I haven't heard of the army using barrels, or maybe, cooking pots."

He also dismissed tens of thousands of photos showing torture of people in government custody as being part of a foreign plot.

As fighting died down, Assad accused Syria's enemies of economic warfare.

EYE DOCTOR

Assad often presented himself as a humble man of the people, appearing in films driving a modest family car and in photographs with his wife visiting war veterans in their homes.

He took office in 2000 after his father's death, but had not always been destined for the presidency.

Hafez had groomed another son, Bassel, to succeed him. But when Bassel died in a 1994 car crash, Bashar was transformed from an eye doctor in London - where he studied as a postgraduate - to heir apparent.

Upon becoming president, Assad seemed to adopt liberal reforms, painted optimistically as "the Damascus spring".

He released hundreds of political prisoners, made overtures to the West and opened the economy to private companies.

His marriage to British-born former investment banker Asma Akhras - with whom he had three children - helped foster hopes he could take Syria down a more reformist path.

High points of his early dalliance with Western leaders included attending a Paris summit where he was a guest of honor at the annual Bastille Day military parade.

But with the political system he inherited left intact, signs of change quickly dried up.

Dissidents were jailed and economic reforms contributed to what US diplomats described, in a 2008 embassy cable released by WikiLeaks, as "parasitic" nepotism and corruption.

While the elite did well, drought drove the poor from rural areas to slums where the revolt would blaze.

Tensions built with the West after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 turned the Middle Eastern power balance on its head.

The assassination of Lebanon's former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri in Beirut in 2005 prompted Western pressure that forced Syria's withdrawal from its neighbor. An initial international probe implicated senior Syrian and Lebanese figures in the killing.

While Syria denied involvement, former Vice President Abdel-Halim Khaddam said Assad had threatened Hariri months earlier - an accusation Assad also denied.

Fifteen years later, a UN-backed court found a member of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah guilty of conspiring to kill Hariri. Hezbollah, an Assad ally, denied any role.



More Than 1,000 Syrians Died in Airport Prison Under Assad, Report Says 

A satellite image shows a hangar at Mezzeh military airport in southwest Damascus, where witnesses told the Syria Justice and Accountability Center that detainees were sentenced to death and later executed and buried nearby. Satellite image from June 3, 2014. (Maxar Technologies via Google/Handout via Reuters)
A satellite image shows a hangar at Mezzeh military airport in southwest Damascus, where witnesses told the Syria Justice and Accountability Center that detainees were sentenced to death and later executed and buried nearby. Satellite image from June 3, 2014. (Maxar Technologies via Google/Handout via Reuters)
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More Than 1,000 Syrians Died in Airport Prison Under Assad, Report Says 

A satellite image shows a hangar at Mezzeh military airport in southwest Damascus, where witnesses told the Syria Justice and Accountability Center that detainees were sentenced to death and later executed and buried nearby. Satellite image from June 3, 2014. (Maxar Technologies via Google/Handout via Reuters)
A satellite image shows a hangar at Mezzeh military airport in southwest Damascus, where witnesses told the Syria Justice and Accountability Center that detainees were sentenced to death and later executed and buried nearby. Satellite image from June 3, 2014. (Maxar Technologies via Google/Handout via Reuters)

More than 1,000 Syrians died in detention at a military airport on the outskirts of Damascus, killed by execution, torture or maltreatment at a site that was widely feared, according to a report to be published Thursday tracing the deaths to seven suspected grave sites.

In the report, shared exclusively with Reuters, the Syria Justice and Accountability Center said it identified the grave sites by using a combination of witness testimony, satellite imagery and documents photographed at the military airport in the Damascus suburb of Mezzeh after the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad in December.

Some sites were on the airport grounds. Others were across Damascus.

Reuters did not examine the documents and was unable to independently confirm the existence of the mass graves through its own review of satellite imagery. But Reuters reporters did see signs of disturbed earth in images of many of the places pinpointed by SJAC. Two of the sites, one on the Mezzeh airport property and another at a cemetery in Najha, show clear signs of long trenches dug during periods consistent with witness testimony from SJAC.

Shadi Haroun, one of the report’s authors, said he was among the captives. Held over several months in 2011-2012 for organizing protests, he described daily interrogations with physical and psychological torture intended to force him into baseless confessions.

Death came in many forms, he told Reuters.

Although detainees saw nothing except their cell walls or the interrogation room, they could hear “occasional shootings, shot by shot, every couple of days.”

Then there were the injuries inflicted by their tormentors.

“A small wound on the foot of one of the detainees, caused by a whipping he received during torture, was left unsterilized or untreated for days, which gradually turned into gangrene and his condition worsened until it reached the point of amputation of the entire foot,” Haroun said, describing a cellmate’s plight.

In addition to obtaining the documents, SJAC and the Association for the Detained and Missing Persons in Sednaya Prison interviewed 156 survivors and eight former members of air force intelligence, Syria’s security service that was tasked with the surveillance, imprisonment and killing of regime critics.

The new government has issued a decree forbidding former regime officials from speaking publicly and none were available to comment.

“Although some of the graves mentioned in the report had not been discovered before, the discovery itself does not surprise us, as we know that there are more than 100,000 missing persons in Assad’s prisons who did not come out during the days of liberation in early December,” said a colonel in the new government’s Interior Ministry who identified himself by his military alias, Abu Baker.

“Discovering the fates of those missing persons and searching for more graves is one of the greatest legacies left by the Assad regime,” he said.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are estimated to have been killed since 2011, when Assad's crackdown on protests spiraled into a full-scale war.

Both Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, have long been accused by rights groups, foreign governments and war-crimes prosecutors of widespread extrajudicial killings, including mass executions within the country's prison system and using chemical weapons against the Syrian people.

The SJAC said all the survivors it interviewed were tortured.

The report focuses on the first years of the uprising, from 2011 to 2017. But some of the testimonies from former regime officers based at Mezzeh detailed events up to the regime's fall.

The Mezzeh military airport was an integral part of the Assad government’s machinery of enforced disappearance and housed at least 29,000 detainees between 2011 and 2017, according to the report.

By 2020, according to the report, air force intelligence had converted more than a dozen hangars, dormitories and offices at Mezzeh into prisons.

SJAC, a US-based Syrian-led human rights group funded by European governments and, until the recent funding freeze by the Trump administration, the US government, said its estimate of the dead comes from two air force intelligence datasets listing a total of 1,154 detainees who died there between 2011 and 2017.

The datasets were leaked in a Facebook group monitored by SJAC as the regime collapsed and cross-checked by the organization against documents and witness testimony. The estimate does not include people who were executed after being sentenced to death by a military field court set up inside a hangar.

According to witness testimony in the report, officers and soldiers were executed by firing squad, while civilians were hanged. Two witnesses said many of those executed were buried near the hangar.

In December, the US Justice Department unsealed war crimes charges against two ranking Syrian air force intelligence officers over "the infliction of cruel and inhuman treatment on detainees under their control, including US citizens, in detention facilities at the Mezzeh Military Airport.”