How Syria’s Assad regime clings to power

Dagher: They’ve been around for 50 years. They’ve outlasted eight US presidents since Richard Nixon. So they’ve been playing this game before — using terrorism as a bargaining chip, as leverage, in their dealings with the Western powers. Right after 9/11, Bashar al-Assad initially sent a letter to George Bush saying, “I want to cooperate with you, I want to help you fight al-Qaeda.” In fact, for a short period, the infamous CIA rendition planes were making stops in Damascus, handing over al-Qaeda suspects to be tortured in regime prisons. So initially he was cooperating with the US in the fight against terrorism.

Then he feels threatened after the swift toppling of Saddam Hussein. What does he do? He supports the insurgency in Iraq. And then he rounds up all the jihadists that he had helped get to Iraq through Syria, puts them in prison, and gets, as a result, some sanctions relief from the Americans. John Kerry met with him at least five times between 2008-2009, and he gets sanctions relief. He begins to be again treated as a reformer who is trying his best in this difficult neighborhood. And then fast forward to the uprising 2011. The first thing he does, a month into the uprising, is he releases more than 1,000 militants from prison that he had put in prison a couple of years before. 

Absolutely. Extortion in its dealings with the outside world, with Western powers, but domestically, it’s a very brutal regime. I mean, they have one of the most elaborate police state systems in place. We’re talking about intelligence services made up of four directorates. Every directorate has branches in every city and town. 

Precisely. So your neighbor is watching you. Your neighbor is calling the Mukhabarat saying, “I saw something suspicious.” And I was told by people in Germany that the infamous Stasi, the secret police in former East Germany, helped Hafez al-Assad, the father, construct the Mukhabarat. 

Yeah, this is the biggest worry. We don’t have evidence of it yet. But last December, December 2018, when President Trump announced he was leaving Syria, if you recall, but then his generals and the defense secretary intervened, and he basically dialed back. And he said, “We’re going to leave at least 1,000.” And at the time, some French officials, senior French officials of the Macron administration that I’m in touch with, I met with them in Paris and they told me that one of their biggest worries at the time was that the YPG, the Kurdish faction that both the French and the Americans and the Brits and other Western powers had been cooperating with to fight ISIS, had begun talks with the Assad regime. And one of the things that the Assad regime — and again, this is based on French intelligence — one of the things that the Assad regime had asked for from the YPG was, “Give us some of these ISIS prisoners, particularly the ones that have French or British citizenship. And we will take them.” 

To basically use them as leverage to extort France and Britain and to say to France and Britain, “Either you remove sanctions on us.” Because, again, you have to remember, also, the Russians, at the time, had been asking the French and the Germans to pay for the reconstruction of Syria, and they had balked. And Assad would basically tell the French, “Look, I have your citizens.” I mean, effectively, these are French and British and European citizens.

“They’re in my prisons. What do you want me to do with them? Keep them or send them back to you? Basically, if you want me to keep them, then you have to remove sanctions. You have to give me some money to rebuild parts of Syria” that he and his main backer, Russia, had basically destroyed in their scorched-earth campaigns “and also potentially reopen your embassies.”

So that’s the game he would play, and that’s what the French officials told me. 

That was their main concern, yes. 

I don’t think so because, again, you have to remember the image we see is this soft-spoken, fit, tall, professional eye doctor with a beautiful wife. Born in Britain, speaks flawless English with a British accent, and we say, “Oh, they look like us.” I mean, look at his children. Even his kids are like, you know, this picture-perfect family. They could be anywhere, and they could be in Europe. It could be like the Danish ruling family or something. And then we find it hard to believe that someone like that would commit all these crimes. 

I spoke to people who were inside the regime, in the inner circle, who were explaining to me the tools of the deception, how all of this was orchestrated before the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad. It was a way for this regime to reinvent itself, to repackage itself. I mean, you have to remember, the context of all of this. In 2000, a decade before the Berlin Wall had fallen in ’89, the Soviet Union had unraveled — the Soviet Union being the main military and political backer of the Syrian regime. 

And the Syrian regime had to pivot to the West, had to reinvent and repackage itself. And everything they did was very deliberate, including the choice of his wife, of this match between Bashar and Asma al-Assad. 

Ruthless desire to rule and perpetuate the reign of this family. It’s as simple as that.