6. Syria: The Assad Regime

This chapter examines the historical background to the 2011 uprising, including the social forces and political currents active in the conflict, Hafez al-Assad’s authoritarian regime and sabotage of the Palestinian struggle, the occupation of Lebanon, the transition to his son Bashar, Bashar al-Assad’s role in sponsoring Islamists during the Iraq war, and the USSR support for the Assad regime.

Hafez al-Assad and the Baath Party

When twenty-year-old Hafez al-Assad joined the newly founded Syrian air force academy in 1951, he had already been an activist of the Baath Party since the late 1940s. As Humphreys (1999, 123) writes,

He belonged to the Alawis, the largest, poorest, and most isolated of Syria’s radical Shi’ite sects, who lived in the coastal mountains of the northwest. For Asad, the first member of his impoverished peasant family to gain a formal education, a military career represented great opportunities – a free education, vastly enhanced social status, and of course a chance to be at the forefront of the nationalist struggle … It would not be correct to say that the Shi’ite sects dominated the Syrian officer corps, but they were certainly overrepresented. Moreover, their regional solidarity, class resentments, and sense of religious apartness made them an exceedingly cohesive group within the army.

In 1951, a democratic revolution was in full swing. When Akram al-Hourani, leader of the Arab Socialist Party (ASP), addressed the first peasant congress in the Arab world in Aleppo that year, he encouraged the poorest citizens of Syria to rise up against the landowners’ domination of Syrian politics and to call for equal political rights for all citizens (Thompson 2013, 207). During the 1940s, Hourani had been forging alliances with opposition leaders who shared his concerns, including the leaders of the Syrian communist party and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, but especially the leaders of the Baath Party, Michel Aflaq and Salah Bitar. In 1947, he allied with the Baath Party (Thompson 2013, 215; 216). Hourani established the ASP in 1950, calling for land reform, agricultural development, republican government, religious tolerance, and women’s rights. The response was overwhelming:

The ASP opened its Hama headquarters with a big party … Literate peasant-
gardeners rubbed shoulders with wage workers, soldiers, civil servants, shop owners, students and professionals … In June 1950, the ASP began organizing peasant revolts. Hourani toured villages near Hama, where even women and children came to cheer him and beat drums … Slowly, a powerful peasant leadership emerged northwest of Hama, altering the balance of power in the city’s rural hinterland. Christians, Alawis, Druze and Sunni Muslims joined the movement. No other party in Syria could claim such a grassroots following; no other single personality wielded more power in politics.

Hourani used the momentum of the peasant revolts to achieve a second victory: a new constitution. Syria’s September 1950 constitution stands as one of the most democratic ever adopted in the Arab world. It included a twenty-
eight-article bill of rights that guaranteed freedoms of speech and assembly as well as economic and social rights. (Thompson 2013, 221–22)

The adoption of a new constitution was followed by the hugely successful peasant congress in Aleppo, at which Hourani issued his call for a socialist revolution against feudal lords, imperialism and capitalism. As Thompson (2013, 224) argues, ‘His socialism was rooted not in Marxist theory but rather in personal experience, Arab culture, and Islamic morals.’ The irony is that all of this revolutionary ferment was taking place against the background of a military dictatorship: that of Adib al-Shishakli, an old friend of Hourani who, however, turned against the peasant movement in 1952. With the exception of four years of civilian rule between 1954 and 1958, the following decades saw a succession of military dictatorships, including that of Nasser, during the period when Syria and Egypt were merged into the United Arab Republic; this ended with a neo-Baathist military coup in March 1963, after which Hourani was imprisoned and then forced into permanent exile in 1965 (Thompson 2013, 224; 226–27; 232).

That was, effectively, the end of Syria’s mid-twentieth-century democratic revolution. ‘Although the coup was carried out by a coalition of several groups, made up of both military and civilian members, a very secretive, tight-knit military bloc within the Baath party was decisive to its success. By 1966, this military bloc had uncontested control of the government’ (Humphreys 1999, 123–24). The new regime, often described as neo-Baathist, was led by Hafez al-Assad and Salah Jadid, and proceeded to carry out nationalisations and land reforms. An internal power struggle proceeded in parallel, with the losers being exiled, imprisoned or killed. In November 1970, Assad seized full control in an internal coup; he became president and Jadid was incarcerated in Mezzeh prison in Damascus until his death twenty-three years later (Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami 2016, 10–11).

Assad’s regime was heavily Alawi and became almost immediately a single-party police state. With an extremely complex party and governmental apparatus reaching into every nook and cranny of the country, power became ‘as personalized, as focused on the kinsmen and clients of one man, as Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq’ (Humphreys 1999, 124). Hinnebusch (2001, 5; 67) describes how the personal authority of Assad was institutionalised in ‘a virtual “Presidential Monarchy”’ in which Assad controlled ‘the three major power institutions’ – the party, the military, and the government – through his combined roles as general secretary and president. Unlike Hourani, whose support base had been among the rural poor, the trade unions and left-wing intellectuals, Assad’s base was among senior army officers and the bourgeoisie (Hinnebusch 2001, 65).

However, even as Assad centralised power by carrying out a savage purge of party and army, targeting left-wingers and replacing them with Alawis loyal to himself, he sought to broaden the regime’s narrow base by wooing Sunnis, on one side, and pursuing more liberal economic policies to win over the old and new bourgeoisie, on the other. Peasants were placated by land redistribution, and the urban working class and middle classes by subsidised goods. Membership of the Baath Party offered job opportunities and better chances of promotion and access to state funds, although the patronage system also led to deep-seated corruption and incompetence (Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami 2016, 12–13). This ‘incorporation of a significant array of interests – the army and the minorities as well as sections of key social forces, including the bourgeoisie, the salaried middle class, the peasantry and the working class, gave the regime a cross-class, urban-rural social base’ at the top of which ‘Asad achieved relative Bonapartist-like autonomy, balancing between competing groups and social forces’ (Hinnebusch 2001, 88).

At the same time, all dissent was wiped out. ‘The security forces and intelligence services (mukhabarat) are multiple, pervasive in surveillance of society, and feared for the arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and torture of dissidents which they have practised’, while the army, ‘by virtue of its massive size and firepower makes rebellion very futile’; it was used to put down more than seven rebellions between 1963 and 1982 (Hinnebusch 2001, 85). Despite the totalitarian character of the state, Stalinists supported it because it dominated over the economy and was linked to the USSR, and their support continued even when the economy morphed into a neoliberal oligarchy (Hassan, O. 2017).

Initially, there was opposition from both socialists and Islamists, but this ‘degenerated under harsh repression into a sectarian assassination campaign by the armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood which alienated the minorities and most Sunnis’ (Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami 2016, 14). In response to the Brotherhood’s ambush of soldiers and attacks on officials in 1982, six to eight thousand soldiers were sent to Hama. Amnesty International reports that in the weeks that followed, ‘food and energy supplies to the city were cut off, and the incessant gunfire kept the besieged residents in constant fear … Three weeks into the assault on Hama, the military called a pro-government rally. According to Abd al-Hadi al-Rawani [a former Hama resident who now lives in London], the security forces killed large numbers of those who stayed in their homes rather than attend the demonstration’ (Amnesty International 2012). Estimates of the civilian death toll in the Hama onslaught range from ten to forty thousand, with most in the vicinity of twenty thousand.

As fearsome as the regime’s willingness to engage in massacres of civilians was its systematic use of gruesome torture. Robert Fisk (2001, 178-79) detailed some of the macabre methods:

As long ago as 1974, Amnesty International had been reporting on torture in Syria, and the details of the systematic ill-treatment of prisoners in Damascus and other locations – including cities under Syrian control in Lebanon – had become a constant theme of their reports. Beating on the soles of the feet, caning, whipping with steel cables, sexual assault, suspension by the wrists, the breaking of bones and secret executions were repeatedly catalogued. Some prisoners had been incarcerated since 1963.

An Aleppo student who was imprisoned from July 1979 to March 1980 told Amnesty that the torture room in the military security prison in Aleppo was a sound-proofed booth built inside a room where torture instruments included ‘a Russian tool for ripping out fingernails, pincers and scissors for plucking flesh and an apparatus called al-Abd al-Aswad [the black slave] on which they force the torture victim to sit. When switched on, a very hot and sharp metal skewer enters the rear, burning its way until it reaches the intestines, then returns only to be reinserted.’

By 1984, one branch of the mukhabarat had acquired a machine known as the ‘German chair’, which slowly broke the vertebrae of the victim strapped into it. It had allegedly been manufactured in East Germany, although there was later a less refined instrument which was locally produced and thus called the ‘Syrian chair’.

On December 10, 1989, activists formed the non-party-affiliated Committee for the Defense of Democratic Freedoms and Human Rights in Syria (CDF), which in April 1990 started publishing a regular bulletin, Sawt al-Democratiyya (Voice of Democracy). However, in late 1991 and early 1992, the government arrested members of the group and sentenced ten of them to prison sentences ranging from two to five years, leading to its collapse (HRW 2007).

The Push for a ‘Greater Syria’

The background to Hafez al-Assad’s intervention in Lebanon in 1976 was the fact that after the defeat of the Arab forces in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Palestinian leadership decided to make their bases in southern Lebanon the main platform for attacks against Israel. In response, and to punish the Lebanese state, Israel targeted Lebanese infrastructure. While the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had the support of Muslim and progressive or leftist forces in Lebanon, conservative and Christian groups armed themselves against the PLO. It was on the basis of this split that Lebanon’s civil war broke out. Given Syria’s claim that it supported the Palestinian cause, one would have expected Assad to side with the left-PLO alliance, but on the contrary, ‘Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad intervened in support of the Christian coalition in 1976. By doing so, he saved the latter from an impending defeat that could have ended the war’ (Haugbolle 2010, 17; 18). Fisk concurs: ‘Just like the French 116 years earlier, the Syrians had entered Lebanon to save the [Christian] Maronites from defeat … They also wanted the Palestinians crushed’ (2001, 78).

Given that the Lebanese Maronite Christians had formed an alliance with Israel when it invaded southern Lebanon in 1978, before staging an all-out invasion of Lebanon in 1982 with the purpose of driving out the PLO and establishing a pro-Israeli government (Haugbolle 2010, 17), what could explain Assad’s alliance with the same forces? One explanation is that, as Raymond Hinnebusch (2001, 156) writes, ‘Lebanon was, given the PLO presence there, key to Asad’s drive to control the “Palestinian card” … Whoever controlled Lebanon was in a strong position to control the PLO.’ A similar explanation is that Assad’s long-term policy was to impose a solution to the war that would secure enduring Syrian control over Lebanese affairs, and the war ended only when Syria broke the last resistance to a Syrian postwar order in Lebanon (Haugbolle 2010, 18). The Tripartite Accord, which legitimated the presence of Syrian armed forces in Lebanon, soon broke down, but the Syrian military remained in Lebanon, finally defeating General Michel Aoun’s ‘war of liberation’ from Syria in 1991.

In other words, this was a drive by Assad to control both the Palestinians and Lebanon. Given Israel’s drive to do the same, this has been described as ‘a contest between Greater Syria and Greater Israel’ (Hinnebusch 2001, 141). As in the case of Khomeini’s alliance with Israel and the US during the Iran-Iraq war, this should alert us to the possibility that the attempt to establish a country (Iran, Syria) as a regional power is by no means synonymous with support for the Palestinian cause or ‘resistance’ to the US and Israel. Assad’s absolute power and freedom from democratic control in Syria allowed him to take a number of unpopular foreign policy decisions: aside from the 1976 intervention in Lebanon, he also chose to side with Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, and with the Western forces against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait (Hinnebusch 2001, 148). Both these latter two decisions were driven by his hostility to Saddam.

The New ‘Presidential Monarch’

When Hafez al-Assad died in 2000 and was succeeded by his son Bashar, there were high hopes that the latter, who was young and not a military man, would introduce a period of democratisation. A report from Human Rights Watch (2007) describes the mood at the time:

A number of informal groups began meeting in private homes to discuss human rights, reform efforts, and other topics, leading to a period of relative openness often referred to as the ‘Damascus Spring.’ The ‘Damascus Spring’ was characterized by the emergence of numerous muntadat (referred to in English as ‘forums’) where groups of likeminded people met in private houses to discuss political matters. […]

Soon thereafter, intellectuals and activists mobilized around a number of political demands, expressed in the ‘Manifesto of the 99’: the cancellation of the state of emergency and abolition of martial law and special courts; the release of all political prisoners; the return without fear of prosecution of political exiles; and the right to form political parties and civil organizations.

Human rights activists seized the new-found openness to resume their activities. … Many of the human rights activists at the time were former political activists who had previously spent time in jail. For example, Haytham al-Maleh, the then-president of HRAS [Human Rights Association in Syria], had spent seven years in jail for his activities in the Freedom and Human Rights Committee of the Syrian Lawyers Union; Salim Kheirbek, another activist in HRAS, had spent 13 years in jail because of his involvement with the workers’ movement; Dr. Ahmad Fayez al-Fawaz, representative of HRAS, had spent 15 years in jail for his activities with the communist party; and Aktham Nu`aissa, had been sentenced in 1991 to nine years in jail for his activities in CDF. (HRW 2007)

Razan Zaitouneh, who was a young human rights lawyer at the time, was also a founding member of HRAS. The ‘Statement of the 1000’, released in January 2001, was bolder than the Manifesto of the 99, declaring that in Syria, ‘citizenship was reduced to the narrow concept of belonging to one party and to personal loyalty … Patronage replaced law, gifts and favours replaced rights, and personal interests replaced the general interest’ (cit. George 2003, 183). It challenged authoritarianism, calling for a multiparty system, social justice, a more equitable distribution of national wealth, and the abolition of legal discrimination against women, who were subject to sharia-based Personal Status Laws regarding the marriage age, the right to divorce, inheritance and child custody (Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami 2016, 18).

The ‘Damascus Spring’ came to an abrupt end in August 2001, when the government cracked down on civil society advocacy groups and arrested opposition leaders after they participated in a seminar during which they called for political reform, democratic elections, and a change in the constitution. It was back to the old police state, although human rights activists, including some Kurdish groups, continued to operate (HRW 2007). The arrest, incarceration and torture of political dissidents acted as a warning to the rest of the population of what would happen to them if they dissented:

Perhaps the most significant event of the extended aftermath of the Damascus Spring was the re-imprisonment, for varying periods of time, of prominent political activists including Riad Seif, Riyad al-Turk, Michel Kilo, and Mamun al-Humsi. These well-known, outspoken figures and others are only some of the thousands of political prisoners who filled Syria’s notorious prisons and whose lives refracted the conditions of the virtual political imprisonment of millions of civilians who could not speak or write in protest against the situation of the silenced country. (Sakr 2013, 75)

This striking metaphor of the whole country as a prison is a recurrent theme in Syria’s prison writings, from which we learn that, as Miriam Cooke (2012) writes, ‘the more Syrian people were punished the more determined they were to stay the course. Those who survived the cell realised that the sense of suffocation and imprisonment they experienced there was much like life on the outside, except that prison produced a political subjectivity otherwise forbidden’. What Syrians rose up against in 2011 was, as political geographer and literary thinker Rita Sakr (2013, 72) puts it, ‘a closed security system that, for several decades, has been transforming citizens into prisoners whether physically and/or psychologically … The majority of the Syrian population was compelled … to ignore the situation of the country that had become a large prison and, more seriously, to turn a blind eye to the actual prisons in which dissidents and militants who challenged the Baathist regime found themselves incarcerated, tortured, and sometimes executed.’

In terms of foreign policy, Bashar al-Assad colluded with the ‘war on terror’ (and the US colluded with his regime) by allowing Syria to be used as a destination for ‘extraordinary renditions’ where prisoners were tortured. However, he did not support the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, fearing that Syria would be next on the list of neocon targets (Yassin-Kassab and al-Shami 2016, 25–26).

In Lebanon, opposition to the Syrian occupation emerged even before the Damascus Spring; as early as March 2000, Gebran Tueni, the editor of Lebanese daily An-Nahar who would be assassinated in December 2005, published an open letter to Assad demanding Syrian troops be withdrawn from Lebanon; by spring of 2001, thousands of students throughout the country were demonstrating against the occupation, while Lebanese human rights groups launched campaigns on issues like the detention of hundreds of Lebanese political prisoners in Syrian prisons (Gambill 2001). When, in the summer of 2004, the Syrian leadership forced an amendment to Lebanon’s constitution in order to allow pro-Syrian president Émile Lahoud’s term to be extended by three years, several Lebanese politicians openly challenged the move, while the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1559, calling for the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.

The SCR 1559 led to a remarkable cross-sectarian rapprochement between leftist and Christian groups. As a result, cross-sectarian nationalist slogans became more and more prominent in oppositional discourse. The alliance was not just forged at the highest level … [It] also included student movements, women’s groups, the Lebanese Bar Association and syndicates of writers, journalists, artists, workers and industry groups … On 15 December 2004, the mur’ada (opposition) was formalised in a meeting held at the Bristol Hotel in Beirut. The meeting was attended by political parties representing the Druze and Christian communities, as well as some leftist groups. The so-called Bristol Declaration produced by that meeting … presents the crisis of postwar Lebanon as a moral crisis related to the failure of dealing with the legacy of the civil war. (Haugbolle 2010, 203–4).

Prominent among those who called for the Syrian occupation to end was rags-to-riches billionaire businessman-turned-politician Rafiq Hariri, who was responsible for much of the postwar rebuilding of Beirut. But his punishment was fearsome. On February 14, 2005, Hariri and twenty-two others were blown to bits by a massive truck bomb, which also injured hundreds in the vicinity. In response,

for the first time since the civil war, people from all sectors of Beirut felt compelled to take to the streets and show their anger and grief. The demonstrators blended serious demands of an immediate investigation into the murder with wry humour in their signs and banners, singing and chanting catchy anti-Syrian slogans that added to the atmosphere of pent-up emotions and opinions finally being allowed an expression … All political parties of the anti-Syrian opposition, the mu’arada, were present, including former enemies. (Haugbolle 2010, 206)

However, the Shi’i parties, Hezbollah and Amal, remained loyal to Assad and organised a major pro-Syrian rally on March 8. Leading the rally, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah thanked Syria for securing stability in Lebanon and warned against American interference in the region. Pictures of Lahoud, Nasrallah and Bashar al-Assad were carried by demonstrators. In response, the opposition organised an even bigger demonstration on March 14:

The sheer scale of the crowd, which had come from all parts of Lebanon, and the carnival-like atmosphere that manifested itself, captured the attention of international media and made it a globally televised exhibition of the changes taking place in Lebanon. From above, the usual landmarks in the downtown area appeared to be drowned in a sea of Lebanese flags. If the 8 March demonstration underlined that not all Lebanese supported the opposition, the 14 March demonstration showed that an even greater number of people backed its call for a speedy investigation into Hariri’s death and a full withdrawal of Syrian troops. […]

The slogans also changed. What had started as a spontaneous outcry against Hariri’s death grew in scope to encompass a program for political reform, national unity and full sovereignty. This agenda was first formulated in the Bristol Declaration. Now, the truth (al-haqiqa) about Hariri’s death was linked to the declaration’s calls for freedom (huriyya) in the political system and independence (istiqlal) from Syria. Out of this trinitarian slogan, ‘haqiqa, huriyya, istiqlal,’ reminiscent of the French ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’, came the expression intifadat al-istiqlal, or the Independence uprising. (Haugbolle 2010, 208, 209)

The Syrian army withdrew from Lebanon by the end of April, but the militias were not disbanded (UNSC 2005). Some weeks after Hariri’s murder, a UN commission was constituted to investigate it in light of concerns about Syrian influence in the Lebanese criminal justice system. The UN investigation took place against the backdrop of violent intimidation: by 2008, twenty-four prominent Lebanese opponents of Syria had been killed or injured in car bombs or attacks. As Hammer (2008) reports, ‘The first team leader, German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, stepped down from his post and fled Beirut in January 2006; after implicating senior Syrian officials in Hariri’s murder, he had been informed by Western intelligence officers of two assassination plots against him.’ Wissam Eid, a high-ranking Lebanese intelligence official who was working closely with the UN commission, was killed by a car bomb in January 2008. Under Mehlis, the commission established that ‘six anonymously purchased mobile phones were used on the day of the attack to keep the bomber informed of Hariri’s movements; … that the suicide truck moved into position one minute and 49 seconds before Hariri’s convoy passed by; and that the truck itself had been stolen on October 12, 2004, in Sagamihara City, Japan’ (Hammer 2008). The report exonerated the young Palestinian, Ahmed Abu Adas, who had been forced to read a statement confessing to the murder – the video of which was sent to Al Jazeera in Lebanon – and had then been killed. It also dismissed the authenticity of phone calls from a person with a non-Lebanese accent, purporting to be from an unknown group called ‘Victory and Jihad in Greater Syria’, claiming responsibility for the assassination, which were received by both Ghassan bin Jeddo, Al Jazeera’s chief, and Laila Bassam, the Reuters Bureau Chief in Lebanon (Asharq al-Awsat 2005).

Mehlis was succeeded by Serge Brammertz, a Belgian lawyer who had served as deputy prosecutor in the International Criminal Court. During his two years in charge, the investigation moved more slowly. This was partly because the idea of prosecuting the case in a Lebanese court had been given up due to the numerous killings of anti-Syrian critics; instead, the UN Security Council created a special tribunal, which required very high evidentiary standards. Brammertz made headway in tracing the cellphone traffic and identifying the spotters who had tracked the route of Hariri’s convoy, and also investigated and demolished alternative theories of the crime, including suggestions that it had been carried out by Al Qaeda. In January 2008, he was replaced by Daniel Bellmare, a Canadian prosecutor, and the pace picked up. However, by this point, French president Nicolas Sarkozy was inviting Assad to Paris, and the US appeared to have got cold feet about indicting the Syrian leadership. As Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, put it, ‘Israel and the United States are not eager to see this regime collapse … They are afraid of the consequences’ (cit. Hammer 2008).  

When the trial finally commenced in January 2014 – after yet another investigator had been killed by a car bomb at the end of 2012, and Mohammed Chatah, one of the chief advisors of Hariri’s son Saad, had been similarly blown up the previous month – charges were brought against four Hezbollah operatives – Salim Ayyash, Mustafa Badredine, Hussein Onessi and Assad Sabra – who were tried in absentia since Hezbollah refused to give them up (Chulov 2014a). This appears to have been a compromise between not pursuing charges at all, and targeting those with command responsibility for the bombing. A conversation with Hariri reported to the tribunal by Druze leader Walid Jumblatt – which Robert Fisk confirmed Jumblatt had conveyed to him at the time – revealed that Assad had threatened Hariri, and that the latter was terrified (Fisk 2015). Evidently the reason why Hariri was targeted was because this charismatic leader opposed the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, which Assad was determined to continue, but the tribunal did not present this argument. And, while it is inconceivable that Hezbollah would have carried out the killing without the go-ahead from their bosses in Tehran, there was no attempt to link it to the IRI leadership.

This episode provides a striking example of the ruthless manner in which Assad destroyed anyone who stood in his path. It also illustrates that despite his pretensions of being a secular leader, there were deep links between his regime and the Islamists of Iran and Hezbollah, who sabotaged every attempt to create a secular, democratic state in Lebanon. Thirdly, it contradicts the popular misconception that the US and Israel have always been hostile to Iran and Syria; in this case, they made sure that neither state was indicted, just as after the suicide bombing of the US barracks in Beirut in 1983 that killed 241 Marines, none of the voluminous evidence of Iranian and Syrian involvement was acted upon by the Reagan administration (Timmerman 2003). The spate of terrorist attacks on Lebanese politicians like Hariri, journalists like Tueni, and other activists who opposed the Syrian occupation demonstrate that suicide bombings are not the hallmark of Sunni terrorism alone.1

Assad’s Use of Sunni Islamists

In 2001, Assad allowed a Salafi agitator named Mahmoud Gul al-Aghasi (known as Abu al-Qaqa) to hold a large festival celebrating the 9/11 attacks, showing off the training his paramilitary Ghuraba al-Sham was receiving and playing Al Qaeda videos on large screens; clips from the festival were even shown on state television. According to Muhammad Habash, a former Syrian MP, ‘Aghasi had been allowed to recruit without the state interfering because he wasn’t “saying anything against the government” and had focused his wrath on the West. Al-Aghasi’s collusion with Assad’s intelligence services allowed the regime to monitor the jihadi networks on its territory, and ultimately to coopt them’ (Orton 2014).

The collaboration was activated when the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 prompted Assad to funnel jihadi fighters into Iraq. In Aleppo, one of al-Aghasi’s recruits, Abu Ibrahim, ‘went door to door encouraging young men to cross the border. Volunteers boarded buses that Syrian border guards waved through wide-open gates’ (Abdul-Ahad 2005). US intelligence discovered that another fighter, Badran Turki al-Mazidi (known as Abu Ghadiya) was put in charge of funnelling explosives and foreign fighters into Iraq through Syria; most of the recruits landed in Damascus on commercial flights, and, as one military report noted, ‘once in Syria they seek accommodations in hotels typically located near large markets or mosques frequented by foreigners, allowing [them] to blend into the general population … Within a few days facilitators contact the recruits and escort them to safehouses where they await onward movement into Iraq’ (Gordon and Morgan 2012). This was confirmed by ISIS militant Abu Ahmed. ‘The mujahideen all came through Syria,’ he said in an interview with the Guardian’s Martin Chulov (2014b). ‘I worked with many of them … A very small number had made it from Turkey, or Iran. But most came to Iraq with the help of the Syrians.’ Documents recovered after ISIS leader Haji Bakr was killed also confirm that ‘Syrian intelligence officials organized the transfer of thousands of radicals from Libya, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia to al-Qaida in Iraq. Ninety percent of the suicide attackers entered Iraq via the Syrian route’ (Reuter 2015).

In 2009, when Nouri al-Maliki was Iraq’s prime minister, Major General Hussein Ali Kamal, director of intelligence in the Interior Ministry, was in charge of counter-terrorism. Kamal had discovered through a spy, who had attended meetings between Iraqi Baathists, Syrian military intelligence officers and senior members of the Islamic State in Iraq, that major attacks in Baghdad were being planned. However, he was unable to find out exactly where, and therefore failed to prevent them.

On the morning of 19 August, the first of three flat-bed trucks carrying three large 1000-litre water tanks, each filled with explosives, detonated on an overpass outside the Finance Ministry in south-eastern Baghdad … Three minutes later, a second enormous bomb blew up outside the Foreign Ministry on the northern edge of the Green Zone. Shortly after that, a third blast hit a police convoy near the Finance Ministry. More than 101 people were killed and nearly 600 wounded; it was one of the deadliest attacks in the six-year-old Iraqi insurgency. The prime minister was livid … Iraq recalled its ambassador to Damascus, and Syria ordered its envoy to Baghdad home in retaliation. Throughout the rest of the year, and into early 2010, relations between Maliki and Assad remained toxic. (Chulov 2014b)

By this time, ISI was on the retreat in Iraq (see Chapter 5), and as Islamist militants flowed back into Syria, Assad either redirected them into Lebanon, or took them into regime custody (Orton 2014).