In the absence of free speech, a free media and other political mod-cons in Syria, Hafez al-Assad and then his son Bashar cultivated the convenient habit of transacting business in the shadows, advancing and protecting — brutally, when necessary — the interests of the family and their fellow Alawites. But Damascus has always remained alive with intrigue and speculation. To process and disseminate that mix of conjecture and fact, a highly developed rumour mill sprang up. And for those interested in Middle East affairs — particularly Syrian affairs — London became the hub of the Syrian information exchange.
Take the unlikely succession of Bashar following the death of his father in June 2000. It wasn’t meant to be like that. Bashar, serious and studious, was heading for a career as a clinical ophthalmologist. The brawler whom Hafez had chosen to groom as his successor was Bashar’s older brother, Basel. While Bashar was at ease with his studies, Basel enjoyed the pursuits of a tyrant-in-waiting, strutting around Damascus in uniform (he was in charge of the presidential security guard) and indulging his passions for fast cars and women, horses and shooting.
Then, on 22 January 1994, it all went wrong. The 33-year-old Basel smashed his car into a roundabout and was killed. An official statement in Damascus described the event simply as a ‘tragic accident’. In fact, it was neither tragic (on the contrary, it was a blessing for the people of Syria), nor was it an accident. In a country where few events involving the Assad family are accidental, the car crash remained a mystery. How could Syria’s favourite son have been killed? More pertinently: who killed him?
The consequences of the ‘accident’ within the family were not simple. For Hafez, the death of Basel was a tragedy of cosmic proportions; for Bushra, Basel’s sister, it worked out just fine. Basel had strongly disapproved of her affair with a rising military star, Asef Shawkat, 15 years her senior and already married to two wives; he is even alleged to have beaten her over the matter, in the presence of the presidential guards. Nine months after Basel’s death, Shawkat took Bushra as his third wife and the union was blessed by the Assad family.
Shawkat was then senior in the Palestine Bureau, also known as Office 279. This had nothing to do with Palestine: it is the executive branch of the Syrian intelligence service. ‘When a man is ordered to report to Office 279 or the Palestine Bureau,’ I was told by an Arab political source with close ties to the Syrian ruling elite, ‘he is rightly terrified for his life.’ General Shawkat, as he has become, is now one of the most powerful figures in Syria. He is head of military intelligence and deputy head of the military apparatus. As such, he has been assigned the task of ‘cleansing’ the opposition to Bashar’s leadership. Shawkat, who is in his early sixties, is said to exercise power second only to his brother-in-law. And he may not have reached the pinnacle of his ambitions.
With Basel dead, Bashar was summoned home to undergo a crash course in presidency. By all accounts he did not shine and he leaned heavily on Shawkat and on his brother Maher, then another rising star in the military firmament and now head of the presidential guard.
Even so, Bashar’s passage to power was almost thwarted as Hafez lay on his deathbed. It is well known that Hafez’s brother, Rifaat, initiated a putsch, which was put down and punished by exile in Paris. Less well known was an coup attempt just days before Hafez’s death. A key figure behind this, an Arab intelligence source told me, was Mahmoud Zoubi, the veteran prime minister dismissed from office a couple of months earlier.
According to official reports, Zoubi committed suicide in a fit of depression after being fingered in a Bashar-led anti-corruption campaign. In fact, said the source, Zoubi had his throat slit by the security forces, fully five days before his ‘suicide’ was announced. His plot is of greater interest because it would have been a Sunni coup: a threat to sweep from power the Assads’ Alawite minority, which represents just 7 per cent of the population. The prominence given to Bashar’s role in accusing Zoubi of corruption, added the source, was intended to bolster his weak public image and reassure nervous Alawites.
Bashar does indeed retain some advantages as he faces down a more public, hi-tech Sunni revolution. The Alawites, once a curious Muslim-Christian blend who have, more recently, aligned themselves with the Shi’a branch of Islam, appear to retain their political, economic and military dominance in Syria (most army conscripts are Sunni, but Alawites make up some 80 per cent of the officer class). And the Iranians appear determined to protect the Syrian regime, which is their connection with Lebanon and Hezbollah. The Iranians, say my Arab sources, are unlikely to allow the Syrian regime to fall unless they are guaranteed continued influence afterwards. ‘The Iranians are ready to run the country, and they can run it, if they are not doing so already,’ one senior source told me this week. An EU report at the weekend named three Iranians who have been seconded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to actively assist the Syrians with men, materiel and technical advice ‘to suppress protests’.
What’s more, the West is reluctant to intervene, given how stretched its forces are elsewhere and the strength of the Syrian military. It’s also worried about the Islamists in the opposition – although, despite what Bashar says, these are mostly home-grown Muslim Brotherhood types rather than al-Qa’eda.
But even so, the present situation is unsustainable. If the Syrian uprising persists unchecked, western diplomatic sources estimate that the regime will collapse within six months. An Israeli defence source, who shares that assessment, says Bashar’s fate was sealed when he lost legitimacy in the eyes of his people: ‘Every week of demonstrations and deaths only makes things more difficult for him ... His dilemma is between concessions to the demonstrators — which will be seen as weakness and will intensify efforts to bring him down — and the adoption of more aggressive means of suppressing the demonstrations, which may accelerate his fall. I do not think he has a chance.’
In the meantime, however, Bashar and the wider Assad family continue doing what they do best: killing their own people in order to retain their increasingly tenuous hold on power.