Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, ruled Syria for more than half-a-century – until 8 December this year
How did the Assads come to power?
Hafez al-Assad was one of a generation of Arab strongmen who came to power from the late 1960s onwards: Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Like them, he imposed order following a period of great instability. Between 1946, when Syria gained independence, and 1970, when Assad took power, the country went through 20 cabinets, four constitutions, and multiple coups d'etat; it briefly merged with Egypt and then split from it. Assad, the son of an Alawite farmer from Syria's mountainous coastal region, was one of a group of military officers of the Ba'ath Party, an Arab nationalist secular socialist movement. He took part in the coup establishing Ba'ath rule in 1963, after which he led the air force, and in two later takeovers that established his power.
Why had Syria been so unstable?
Syria was what was left of Ottoman Syria after Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan had been detached; it was a French mandate from 1923 to 1946. From the start, the Syrian state was unstable, divided by both ethnicity and religion. Of its 2011 population of about 22 million, it was about 80% Arab and 10% Kurdish, the latter mostly concentrated on the Turkish and Iraqi borders. About 75% of Syrians are Sunni Muslim, but the northwestern coastal region is dominated by the Alawites – Arabs from a broadly Shia sect – and parts of the South by the Druze, another Abrahamic sect, while the big cities have long-established Christian populations. Socially, Syria was unstable, too, when Assad took power – with large, near-feudal rural estates but a thriving modern urban middle class. As in many post-colonial states, democracy gave way to military control; in Syria, heavy defeats at the hands of the new Israeli state added to the turmoil.
How did Assad and the Ba'ath Party bring order?
From the first Ba'athist coup, in 1963, Syria became a totalitarian one-party state. Assad's government was "a blend of military dictatorship, brutal police state, and feudal patronage", says Sam Dagher, author of Assad or We Burn
the Country. Opponents were tortured and executed from the first days of
his rule. The Mukhabarat, the secret police, modelled on East Germany's,
exerted control over every aspect of life; Syria aligned itself with the Soviet Union, though it was mostly pragmatic in its dealings with the US and Israel. A personality cult was built around Assad. He ruled through a clan system, based on a dozen cronies and their families, many if not all of them Alawites. The secular opposition was largely destroyed, leaving only the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood (a Sunni group). He portrayed himself to Christians and other minorities as a bulwark against Sunni extremists.
How did he control the Islamists?
The city of Hama was a centre of conservative anti-Ba'athist interests, and of Muslim Brotherhood guerillas. In 1982, a conflict with security forces led to a general Islamist uprising there. State forces, led by Assad's brother Rifaat, besieged the city and shelled it, before razing many of its neighbourhoods, killing not only any Islamists they found, but also large numbers of civilians. Syrian rights activists recently put the number of dead at more than 40,000. Until the civil war, it was the single bloodiest assault by an Arab ruler against his own people in modern times.
How did Bashar come to power?
Bashar was Hafez's second son. Gawky and cerebral, he trained in London as
an ophthalmologist in the 1990s, and married a British Syrian woman, Asma.
The eldest son, Bassel, a charismatic soldier and athlete, had been groomed to succeed Hafez, but he died in car crash in 1994. When Hafez died in 2000, Bashar inherited the presidency. Initially, there were hopes that he would be a reformer: during the "Damascus spring" of 2000, political prisoners were released. But he soon reverted to a version of his father's ways – in fact, he narrowed the ruling inner circle. He introduced changes to Syria's socialist economy, but allowed the Makhloufs, his mother's family, to dominate much of it. His brother Maher and Assef Shawkat, his brother-in-law, two hardliners, were his main security advisers.
What was his role in the civil war?
In March 2011, protests about unemployment, corruption and lack of freedom broke out, inspired by the Arab Spring in North Africa. Peaceful protests were met by arrests and shootings, first in the southern city of Daraa, then countrywide. Armed conflict between opposition and government soon erupted. What followed was a multi-faceted and destructive civil war, prosecuted with great ruthlessness by Assad. Some 618,000 were killed and half of Syria's people displaced. Kurds took control of Kurdish regions; Islamist and Turkish-backed rebels in the north. Islamic State founded its caliphate in the east. The Assad regime, though backed by Hezbollah and Iran, nearly fell, twice, before Russia intervened decisively on its side in 2015. Until recently, it seemed Assad had won, restricting the rebels to small enclaves; other Middle Eastern states had begun normalising relations.
Why did his regime fall?
The simplest explanation is that Assad's major backers, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, were weakened by their conflicts with Ukraine and Israel. But perhaps more importantly, the state had been hollowed out by years of US sanctions, endemic regime corruption and economic collapse. Assad had defeated his enemies, but he had nothing positive to give the Syrian people. If anything, his regime became more violent and predatory. In the end, too many Syrians were disgusted by his dictatorship, and Assad's army of conscripts wasn't prepared to die for it. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the leading rebel group, had also professionalised and coordinated its efforts effectively with rebel groups in the north and south. After 54 years, the Assad regime was toppled in 12 days.
The Syrian gulag
The Assads' one-family rule was underpinned by a secret police that terrorised the population on a vast scale. Collectively called the Mukhabarat, it consisted of four branches, each watching the people and each other, so none posed a threat to the regime. According to the UN, there were more than 100 detention facilities across the country, in every city and large town. People disappeared into them, and there they were tortured: electrocuted, burnt, starved, strangled, raped, tied to pipes and beaten so their wrists and
shoulder bones broke. Children were taught that walls had ears; those who disappeared were said to have gone "behind the Sun". In the 13 years after the 2011 uprising, around 300,000 Syrians were imprisoned. More than 100,000 people disappeared entirely. At the centre of Syria's gulag system was the notorious Sednaya military prison, 30km north of Damascus, where detainees went after months in other detention centres. It was known as the "human slaughterhouse", because mass hangings were carried out there. It was broken open last Sunday as rebels swept into the capital. Thousands of people wandered the labyrinth of passages, filthy cells and morgues full of mutilated bodies, looking for their disappeared relatives.
