He didn’t look like a dictator. Awkward and gangly, his mannerisms unassuming, at least until he opened his mouth, Bashar al-Assad exuded none of the machismo of other Arab strongmen like Muammar Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein.
His wife Asma called him “duck”, presumably because he looked a little like one – although his benighted people thought he also resembled a giraffe, given his long neck.
Yet when it came to butchery, he was up there with the worst of them, presiding over 13 years of carnage that claimed the lives of well over half a million people.
X / @danny_makki
If ever there was a modern ruler who epitomised Hannah Arendt’s description of the “banality of evil”, it was surely Assad.
For a while, Iran and Russia came to his rescue, laying waste to swathes of Syria’s biggest cities until the rebels were driven out. In the end, though, it only delayed the inevitable by a few years.
As the end came, with bewildering speed, Assad’s extended family scurried for safety as quickly and stealthily as they could, seeking refuge with whichever power would have them. Only Russia seemed willing to come to the rescue.
They left with no announcement, with little clue of their intended destination, presumably fleeing, as other toppled Arab potentates did before them, with as much of their billion-pound fortune as they could stuff into their suitcases.
The only independent confirmation that Assad was no longer either in power or the country came not from any of his officials but from his patrons in Moscow, infuriated to the last in the feckless despot in which they had invested so much with such little reward.
Greeting his ally Vladimir Putin, Assad shakes hands with then defence minister Sergei Shoigu in Damascus in 2020 – Alexey Nikolsky/AFP via Getty
Russia, however, is likely to be one of Assad’s best bets as a place of exile – in fact, reports have come out that he is in Moscow and that Russia has offered him asylum.
And Russia is one of the few places where he can be confident he will not be handed over either to the new Syrian government or the International Criminal Court to stand trial.
Assad gives Putin a warm embrace in 2017, when he visited his residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi – Mikhail Klimentyev/AP
It is widely believed that Mrs Assad, battling an aggressive form of leukaemia, had already arrived in Moscow with her three children days before he finally fled.
She has always been his mainstay, her ruthlessness tempered by the kind of charisma he never had.
All strongmen have an element of caricature about them, yet there was little of Assad that fit the kind of strongman Sacha Baron Cohen spoofed in his 2012 comedy, The Dictator.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s tinpot despot in 2012’s The Dictator was no doubt partly inspired by Assad – Fred Duval/Getty
Instead, he was touchy and thin-skinned, a deeply insecure beta-male despot riled to fury by the slightest criticism.
As the Arab Spring spread through the Middle East in early 2011, Syria initially remained quiet until one night in February a group of children in the southern town of Deraa daubed graffiti on a wall. “It’s your turn next, doctor,” they wrote, taunting Assad, an ophthalmologist.
The goad infuriated the Assad clan. The local security chief, a cousin of the president, had his men round up and torture the children.
Bashar al Assad, right, seen in 2000 with army chief Ali Aslan enjoying military training games – Sana/AP
Crowds gathered to demand their release. Assad’s generals, and quite possibly Asma herself, begged him to comply, apologise and defuse the crisis.
Instead, the president gave the order to open fire on the protesters, triggering the 13-year uprising that eventually saw him dumped so unceremoniously from office.
Over the coming months, his response became ever bloodier and more ruthless.
In the following decade, his regime would kill hundreds of thousands, torture more than 14,000 prisoners to death and precipitate the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War, with half of Syria’s population fleeing.
The irony is that Assad himself could not stand the sight of blood. It was the reason why, after studying medicine in London, he became an ophthalmologist in the first place, eschewing grander forms of the science.
He was reasonably proficient at it, particularly when it came to draining cysts, former colleagues recall.
A family snapshot taken in 1985 shows then president Hafez al-Assad and his wife Anisa with behind them, from left, Maher, Bashar, Bassel, Bushra and Majd. Bassel was meant to succeed his father, not Bashar – AFP via Getty
He was not meant to become president at all. His older brother, Bassel, was the one earmarked to succeed their father Hafez, who had seized power in a coup in 1971 to mark the beginning of half a century of Assad rule.
Bassel, with his fondness for fast cars and faster women, was the opposite of his gauche younger brother, who preferred to sit quietly at home, studying, listening to Phil Collins and drinking green tea.
But then, in 1994, Bassel was killed racing his Mercedes through the streets of Damascus and Bashar found himself the heir apparent and just six years later, the president.
Asma, much to the disgust of Assad’s mother, Anisa Makhlouf, was by his side.
The young Assad family in 1974, three years after Hafez took power – Alexandra De Borchgrave/Gamma-Rapho via Getty
Born and raised in a nondescript pebbledash house in nondescript Acton in 1975, still carrying the faintest hint of an estuarine accent despite her private-school education, she was not the Gulf princess Anisa thought her son deserved.
In his early years in charge, Assad, reportedly encouraged by his wife, flirted with the idea of turning Syria into a more progressive, democratic state.
Assad and his wife Asma in Paris during an official visit to France in 2010. She is said to affectionately call him ‘duck’ – Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty
During what became known as the Damascus Spring, he released prisoners and allowed a degree of freedom of expression.
He was at the height of his popularity, his modesty helping to win over many Syrians.
“He didn’t spend most of his time in a big castle,” said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma.
“He tried to eat at restaurants downtown. Many people liked him, particularly because he was a little bit shy, particularly after his father, who had been a military man, and his brother, who was a tough guy.”
“He seemed in the beginning to be someone who was genuinely concerned about the modernisation of Syria.”
A Syrian opposition fighter sits inside an office at the presidential palace in Damascus – Omar Sanadiki
It did not last long. Gradually it dawned on Assad that democracy would mean an end to dominance by his Alawite minority, a Shia sect that made up just 10 per cent of the population.
Not only would free and fair elections mean the end of Alawite rule and the surrender of control to the Sunni Arab majority, it might also mean the extermination of the Alawites themselves and perhaps even their allies the Christians, another minority confession.
It was not an unreasonable conclusion. For some in the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, drawn from the country’s Sunni Arab majority, the Alawites were apostates – and therefore fair game.
Perhaps, Assad reckoned, his father had been right. Confronted with a violent insurrection by Islamists in the city of Hama in 1982, Hafez ordered the city to be carpet bombed. A massacre estimated to have killed 20,000 people unfolded.
Bashar was just 16 when it happened, but the memories remained with him and the lesson he took from the massacre was this, according to former regime insiders: by killing thousands of people, my father preserved stability for the next three decades.
There was some truth in it. Even when Syria exploded in 2011, Hama stayed quiet, remaining in regime hands until it fell last week to the opposition forces now in charge.
But it also ensured the hatred of the Assad name among many Syrian Sunnis.
Assad and Asma outside 10 Downing Street with then prime minister Tony Blair in 2002 – Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty
He alienated others, too. His insecurity created a tendency within him to lecture others, often in a hectoring style.
If he was in a room with economists, he would seek to prove he knew more about economics than they did, according to former insiders.
Likewise, at Arab League summits he would scold leaders far older than him for their failure to uphold Arab nationalism. Soon he was as unpopular abroad as at home – and a troublemaker, too.
Lacking his father’s natural authority, he was unable to keep Lebanon, a Syrian client state, in check, and eventually Rafik al-Hariri, its most prominent Sunni politician, sought to break the bonds with Damascus.
In 2005, Hariri was killed in a massive car bomb in Beirut, the Lebanese capital.
Assad, having threatened to “break Lebanon over Hariri’s head”, was seen as the prime suspect, accused of using Hezbollah, the Shia militia he had long armed and funded, to do the deed.
It was the final straw for his relationship with the Sunni states of the Gulf, whose acceptance his father had worked hard to win.
Bashar had no choice but to throw himself into the arms of Iran, soon finding himself in a position of dependency that only increased after the uprising forced him to become more reliant than ever on Tehran.
All smiles with his great friend Muammar Gaddafi in 2008. Three years later, the Libyan tyrant was overthrown and killed by rebels – Hassan Ammar/AFP via Getty
By then, his horizons had narrowed. In Syria he could only trust members of his close family.
As the uprising spread in 2011, his thuggish younger brother Maher was charged with suppressing dissent as ruthlessly as he could, a role he relished.
Video footage soon emerged of Maher, clad in a leather jacket, laughing as he fired shots at unarmed protesters in Damascus.
There was also his cousin Rami Makhlouf, Syria’s richest man, who controlled 60 per cent of the economy thanks mostly to his control of the country’s main mobile phone provider, Syriatel.
Makhlouf’s wealth, estimated at somewhere between £4 billion and £8 billion, was key to propping up the Assad family – although he would eventually fall out with the president and forfeit many of his assets.
How much Bashar and Asma were worth themselves is unknown, although the US state department has estimated that they personally own assets of more than £1 billion.
The only tangible insight into the Assad clan’s wealth came in 2020 when a French court charged the former president’s uncle, Rifaat al-Assad, with money laundering.
During the trial, which resulted in a four-year prison sentence, it was disclosed that Rifaat owned two vast houses in Paris, one of which was 32,000 sq ft, along with a stud farm, a chateau and more than 500 properties in Spain. Such was the wealth of a single member of the Assad clan.
During 54 years of Assad family rule, the Syrian economy stagnated and then collapsed entirely, shrinking by more than half, as the country’s president sacrificed half a million lives to cling to power.
According to the United Nations, 90 per cent of Syrians live in poverty. The Assad family were not among them.
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