From London-trained eye specialist to blood-thirsty tyrant, Bashar Assad had a hesitant rise and spectacular fall

Some journalism doesn’t age very well, one genre being fawning, tone-deaf puff pieces about the scions of Arab dictators that paint the vicious little princelings as enlightened reformers. With the flight of Bashar al-Assad from Damascus in the early hours of Sunday as jihadists destroyed his family’s murderous, half-century-old regime, there was a renewed “eesh” as memories of some old interviews resurfaced.

“Wildly democratic,” one ridiculously naive profile labeled the Western-dressed Assad family back in 2010. Among other claims, it laughably painted First Lady Asma al-Assad — a British-born former investment banker — as encouraging “active citizenship” from the rogue state’s populace. That characterization would have come as news to the many young people tortured by the regime in the Arab Spring a year later.

Over in Syria — where the reformer’s statues were being toppled, members of his family strung up on cranes, and crowds ransacked presidential palaces in the best Middle East tradition — there were more important things to think about than the blushes of Western newsrooms.

Bashar al-Assad’s sudden downfall took everyone — foreign intelligence agencies and average Syrians alike — by surprise. It threatens to shatter one of the Middle East’s central states and will remake the region. Israel has rushed to fortify its border with Syria. Tehran’s dreams of a Shiite crescent across the Middle East are over. Russia has likely lost its legacy base on the Mediterranean. Turkey — which backs the rebels who burst out of Syria’s north two weeks ago — is now ascendant.

The fall of the Assad regime is the last, drawn-out death rattle of the uprising that began in 2011. It also brings to a close the reign of a dynasty that has ruled Syria with an iron fist for six decades.

As Bashar al-Assad’s plane went dark as it left Syria early on Sunday morning, with his wife Asma and three children reportedly already in Russia, the fate of Syria’s ruling family shines a spotlight on Arab autocracies. Were Bashar al-Assad’s purported reforms ever serious? How did this son of a dictator lose his power base and end up fleeing into exile? And could rulers from Jordan to the Gulf — intermittent subjects of fawning media profiles themselves — meet their ends in the bloody vengeance of a revolt?

Assad or Burn

Bashar al-Assad is that age-old phenomenon: The weak son crushed under the burden of upholding his powerful father’s legacy. The story of Bashar’s rise and fall begins with his father, Hafez. Born in 1930, the elder Assad — Arabic for “lion” — was born into an Alawite family in French-Mandate Syria.

The Alawites — an offshoot of Shiite Islam — dominate the Syrian coastal region, but are a minority within the wider country, with traditionally tense relations with the Sunni majority. The elder Assad joined the Syrian Air Force, and then rose to power in a series of coups, beginning in 1963 with the Baathist coup.

A secular pan-Arab movement, the Baathists were officially in the business of exporting socialism. But when Hafez Assad shunted aside his coleader in 1970, emerging as Syria’s sole ruler, he ditched the state socialism and pan-Arab aspects of the regime to focus on Syrian nationalism.

That led to the rise of the Alawites as a dominant force in Syria. Once he’d jettisoned the Baathism of the original revolutionary regime, Assad turned to his own denomination as a bedrock of his regime’s support.

Despite casting socialist economic ideology aside, Assad’s pro-Russian orientation remained, as a way to extract Russian weapons and intelligence support for his battle against Israel. When Syria joined Egypt in invading Israel in the Yom Kippur War, it was with the latest model Soviet tanks and anti-armor weapons that Syrian forces flooded across the Golan Heights.

Hafez was to bequeath to his son that Russian alliance, as the post-Soviet Russian Federation retained naval and air bases in Syria. It was Russian air power that propped up Bashar al-Assad’s regime for the last decade after the rebellion began, and it was Russian naval forces’ abrupt departure last week that was a harbinger of the regime’s fall.

The Assad regime was essentially a mafia state, with the economy dominated by the Assads and a few related families. One aim of the regime was to keep the Alawite minority in power: Although a Sunni was allowed to be prime minister, the presidency, armed forces and key ministries were held by members of Assad’s tribe. To justify his repressive reign, Hafez made an implicit deal with both Syrians and foreign powers: Tolerate my rule, he said, or you’ll get something far worse.

During the Syrian civil war that raged from 2011, that power extortion was summarized in a graffiti that was sprayed by regime supporters: “Assad or we burn the country,” it read.

The alternative that Assad could point to was twofold. First were the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood who had conducted a series of attacks on regime officials, culminating in an assassination attempt on Hafez Assad himself. Assad survived, though he had to kick aside a live grenade to do so. His revenge led to a crackdown on Islamist rebels in Hama, a city in central Syria. In February 1982, Assad’s forces leveled two-thirds of the city, killing around 20,000 rebels in the process. The butchery gave the regime almost three decades of uncontested rule.

The Alawite leader could also point to Lebanon as a salutary lesson on the perils of chaos as the erstwhile “Switzerland of the East” descended into a bloodbath. In 1976 Assad intervened in his neighbor’s civil war to secure the interests of his Maronite Christian allies, and the Assads continued to exercise power in Lebanon until 2006.

An uncompromising enemy of Israel, Hafez al-Assad rejected the Egyptian and Jordanian peace treaties with Israel as treasonous to the Arab cause, and remained a staunch backer of the Palestinians until his death in 2000. Ever fearful of the next Israeli superspy in the mold of Eli Cohen, and anyway viciously anti-Semitic, the Assad regime cracked down on Syrian Jews, who lived in fear of a knock on the door from Assad’s secret police.

But despite his grim regime, Hafez al-Assad was able to eke out grudging legitimacy from Western powers as Syria’s leader. Only seven weeks before being forced from office in 1974 following the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon visited Syria. He posed for a smiling photo op with the whole Assad family — a show of friendship that went far beyond realpolitik.

Shy Dictator

The eight-year-old second son of Hafez Assad pictured in that shot might well have been named Bashful Bashar. He was never groomed for the top role in the police state — that spot was intended for his charismatic, dashing older brother, Bassel.

Unlike Bassel, who rapidly rose through the ranks of the military, Bashar was shy and introverted, uninterested in politics or the military. The son of a bloodstained dictator, Bashar was apparently squeamish, opting for a bloodless branch of medicine. Graduating as a doctor in Damascus, he then moved to London to study ophthalmology.

In a 2013 interview with Britain’s Daily Mail, Dr. Edmund Schulenburg, who trained Assad, remembered “Dr. Bashar” as a skilled surgeon, and in personal terms “sensitive, polite, and punctual” — not qualities often associated with a future warlord.

“When he left after two years,” said Dr. Schulenberg, “I remember thinking that he was really better suited to being an eye surgeon than a leading politician. I thought he was not strong enough.”

Assad’s 18 months living in London were a far cry from the normal lifestyle of the scions of Arab autocrats; there were no luxury houses and cars, carousing or parties. Instead, he lived alone in a low-key rented apartment, nursing interests in Western music, technology, and computers.

Bashar Assad only exchanged the operating theater for the dictator’s office because of his brother’s impetuousness. In 1994, firstborn Bassel Assad had a high-speed encounter with a Syrian bridge on his way to catch a plane to vacation in the Alps. He was killed instantly. Bassel’s death left a gaping hole in Hafez’s succession plans.

Bashar was told to pack up his scalpel and board a flight for Syria, where his belated and hasty tutelage for power began.

Court Intrigue

Within months of assuming power in June 2000, Bashar al-Assad made a series of alliances that would define his years in office. One was with Iran — soon to emerge as the major backer of his rule. Syria under Hafez had been the first Arab state to recognize the Iranian revolutionary regime, and despite the deep differences between the Islamic Republic and secular Syria, relations remained close.

That alliance deepened under Bashar, whose rule from the outset was far shakier than his father’s had been. From 2006, Syrian became a logistics hub for the Hezbollah buildup after the Second Lebanon War. Tehran began to manufacture weapons and conduct military research on Syrian soil, as well as providing intelligence and security service training which Assad employed to maintain his grip on power.

Assad’s second alliance was marriage, and his wife would prove to be at least his equal as a Syrian power player.

Asma al-Assad grew up far from the intrigue and power struggles of the Syrian president’s court. Her Syria-born father Fawaz was a cardiologist in a private London hospital, and the daughter was given an upwardly mobile British education. In her Church of England high school, she went by the name “Emma,” and despite her parentage, spoke no Arabic. In ’90s London, the finance sector was booming, and as bright university grad, that’s where she headed, joining JP Morgan.

Bashar and Asma were quickly hailed as a pro-Western, jet-set power couple. All too predictably, news coverage focused on their English, sartorial style and promises of reform. The same media outlets that swoon over photogenic, smooth-tongued Arab autocrats to this day fell for the sales patter.

The couple talked of wanting to bring democratic reforms to the repressive state. In 2005, the New York Times wondered whether they represented “the essence of secular Western-Arab fusion.”

Asma had grand ideas of transforming Syria’s dour Soviet-style cities into something more modern. She recruited leading Western designers to remodel central Damascus, with a cement factory slated to become a gallery, and a dirty river running through the city zoned as an urban park. With her background in finance, she took control of Bashar’s economic policy.

Mrs. Assad wanted to turn Syria into a regional version of Dubai, as a tax-free investment haven. With her experience in the world of the global elite, she was able to position herself as the friendly face of the regime, and the conduit for all Western development projects.

But the reality behind those glittering visions of modernity was ugly. In a fascinating 2021 article in the Economist, Nicolas Pelham says that those reformist wishes were frustrated because they hit the entrenched interests of no less than her own mother-in-law.

In the best traditions of court intrigue, Hafez al-Assad’s widow Anisa detested her new daughter-in-law. She had wanted Bashar to marry dynastically to strengthen the regime, and she made her antipathy clear.

The dowager Assad refused to surrender the First Lady title until her death in 2016, and stood in the way of her son’s economic reforms because they threatened the interests of her own family, the Makhloufs. Rami Makhlouf, her nephew, is worth $10 billion, a fortune made by controlling key parts of the Syrian economy.

In the battle for influence between the tycoon and his cousin, Bashar, the money man came off worse. He was imprisoned and his assets were nationalized, reportedly kept alive only because he still had the access codes to the foreign bank accounts.

Bashar found himself imprisoned in the web of entrenched interests that his father’s regime leaned on. “Hafez Assad was an octopus that controlled the tentacles,” Pelham says. “Bashar began as an octopus controlled by his tentacles.”

Glowing profiles brokered by Western PR firms aside, things were about to fall apart for the Assads. The “First Lady who thought social reform and tailoring would modernize a pariah state,” says Pelham would become “the Marie Antoinette of Damascus, shopping as her country burned.”

On the Brink

In February 2011, a 14-year-old boy graffitied “It’s your turn, doctor” on a school wall in Deraa, southwestern Syria, and triggered a 13-year-long civil war. The inscription clearly referred to Bashar al-Assad’s medical past, and held a prognosis for his shaky future. The graffiti was only off by 13 years; in retrospect, the clock began ticking for Assad from that moment.

Within months, Syria had turned into the battleground of foreign powers. Rebels were a mix of Sunni jihadists (including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the al-Qaeda affiliate that has taken the lead in this round of fighting), Kurds, former Syrian Army soldiers, and Western-supported forces. On the regime’s side were Iran, Hezbollah and Russia — the latter two providing Assad’s infantry and air power, respectively.

Iran’s interest in propping up the Assad regime was to create a Shiite land bridge from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, allowing Tehran to send weapons and fighters across the Middle East to menace Israel, its principal foe.

Russia’s motivation was to preserve Putin’s Great Power pretenses by competing with America for influence in the Middle East and by maintaining bases on the Mediterranean. Having been largely ejected from the Middle East after the United States emerged as the dominant regional power after the Yom Kippur War, Russia was able to contrast its commitment to its Syrian ally with the United States’ hesitancy.

Russian intervention was essentially green-lighted by Barack Obama’s infamous failure to enforce his own red lines over the regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria in 2012. That failure crumbled American deterrence across the board and likely led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 — a linkage that came full circle when Russia proved unable last week to come to Assad’s rescue due to its own involvement in the Ukraine war.

As Syria burned, Asma al-Assad fiddled — with her husband’s credit card, that is. Her reform projects up in smoke, she went on a spending spree, shelling out $250,000 on interior decorating. But after her mother-in-law’s death in 2016, she emerged as an undeniable power player in her own right. Her London English and elite status made her the main contact point for aid agencies. Through her Syria Trust the bulk of UN aid was soon funneled, turning the former outsider into a source of patronage. Her portrait began to appear alongside that of her husband in government offices, and there was talk of her own presidential ambitions.

Short-Sighted

Foreign military muscle stabilized Assad’s hold on power, and the ophthalmologist turned warlord shored up his own support base among the country’s Alawites and other minorities, using the time-honored Assad talking point about the language of power.

“There is no way to govern our society except with the shoe over people’s heads,” he said.

But it was all an illusion. Underneath the appearance of stability, the Assad regime had been hollowed out, and the regime itself was just a front for the Iranian, Hezbollah, and Russian forces propping it up. Underneath that façade, the two devils with which Bashar al-Assad had bargained were about to desert him as the heat was turned up.

That’s all in hindsight, though. Two weeks ago, experts assumed that the conflict had been perma-frozen. In reality, Turkey-backed rebels in the north had been preparing for an offensive for a year. That time period coincided with the growing weakness of the Assad regime, as its external props faltered.

Struggling to defeat Ukraine, Russia was unable to sustain its commitment to the Middle East. As Israel decimated Hezbollah and scythed Iran down to size, the Shiite axis splintered. When the Sunni rebels emerged out of the north, taking first Aleppo then moving down the M5 highway — the country’s north-south axis — the Syrian Army melted away and its allies stood by.

So, with barely a whimper, ended the six-decade rule of the self-styled family of lions, the Assads. To the disbelief of world leaders who’d assumed that the Cold War relic regime would survive indefinitely, the son of an air force general took the last plane out of Damascus and dropped off the radar.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1040)