The mustachioed army general and his men arrived at a pole with a flag at half-staff. The general grabbed the flag—red, white, and black with a hawk in the middle1—and displayed it to the crowd with a smile. Then, raising it to his lips, he kissed the fabric.2
“Hafez, Hafez, Hafez!” the crowd shouted wildly.
It was late June 1974 and Hafez al-Assad was in his early forties. He wore a khaki army uniform, a kepi, and black leather shoes; his epaulettes were decorated with a hawk, two stars, and two crossed swords. He was commander of the army, president of the republic, secretary-general of the ruling Baath Party, and now he was on his way to becoming a living legend—paramount leader, the nation’s father, maker and giver of everything, and defender of the Arabs. There were other pretenders to this last title, including next door in Iraq where the equally ruthless Saddam Hussein aspired to similar grandeur under the mantle of a splinter wing of the Baath.
At Hafez’s side that day in June was his faithful companion and defense minister Mustafa Tlass. Next to the men were two twelve-year-old boys in matching mop-top haircuts and khaki uniforms. Hafez’s son Bassel and Mustafa’s son Manaf were friends—exactly as Hafez had decreed.
An aide showered Hafez with flowers as he hoisted the flag amid frenzied cheering and clapping. Bassel carried a camera and snapped photos of his father and the euphoric scene.3 Hafez and Mustafa stood shoulder to shoulder saluting the flag after it was raised. They had dreamed of this moment for two decades, having worked their way to the top with raw ambition, intrigue, and a trail of blood.
Hafez reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper as the two boys looked on with anticipation. He began reading a speech.
“The people’s will can never be subjugated… We must continue preparations to drive the enemy out of every inch of our occupied Arab land…” A nearby camera caught this made-for-TV moment. The ruling party said that more than 300 foreign journalists came to hear Hafez.4
“These masses will forever be the shining light of freedom… and dignity,” Hafez added.
Party officials, soldiers, and average Syrians gathered together to watch history in the making. Peasant men in red-and-white-checkered headdresses and women in flower-patterned garb jostled to catch a glimpse of the leader. They had crammed into the back of dump trucks with their children for the journey to Quneitra, a largely demolished and dusty town on the edge of the rocky Golan Heights plateau southwest of Damascus.
As Hafez concluded his speech, Mustafa turned with a smile to his son and Bassel. “When you boys grow up and become officers, you too will fight Israel,” he said proudly.5
That day in Quneitra was immortalized by the Syrian state as “Liberation Day” and Hafez became “Hero of Tishreen.” Tales of the Syrian army’s bravery under the great leader’s command would be taught in schools and commemorated year after year.
“Our masses live the joy of liberation,” pronounced the party’s daily on its front page.6
It was more like the lie of liberation that the Assads would use to subjugate Syrians.
Less than a year earlier, Hafez made the decision on October 6, 1973, the month of Tishreen al-Awal in Syria, to join Egypt, then under the leadership of Anwar al-Sadat, in launching coordinated attacks against Israel in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. The two leaders had divergent interests from the start. Sadat wanted closer ties with Washington and ultimately a deal with Israel to return the Sinai to Egypt. Sadat believed war or at least pretense of war was necessary to expedite such an outcome.7 Hafez needed war for his own reasons. He had assured the army officers who backed him in the November 1970 coup that he would reclaim the Golan and he intended to make good on that promise, in part to finally quiet those who blamed him for losing the territory to Israel in 1967.
War brought two crucial things that Hafez required to cement his grip on Syria: lots of weapons and military aid from the Soviet Union and cash from oil-rich Arab states to replenish state coffers and prop up the floundering economy. Hafez was also tempted to believe that war in 1973 could turn him into a hero of all Arabs like Sadat’s tall and charismatic predecessor, the beloved icon Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who had died a few weeks before Hafez’s 1970 coup.8
Assad and Nasser could not have been more different. Hafez was short and boxy-looking, with a protruding and expansive forehead, an aquiline nose with a somewhat bulbous tip, and unusually large ears. Public speaking was not his forte; he came across as cold and aloof. Hafez was in general conservative and risk-averse. He was a grand schemer who hated surprises and calculated every detail of all his moves.9
In what he hoped would be a Nasser-like moment, Hafez announced in a somber yet reassuring televised speech the start of war against Israel on his forty-third birthday in October 1973.10 “You are today defending the honor of the Arab nation and protecting its dignity and existence,” he told Syrians, invoking historic Muslim commanders and their conquests and triumphs. His friend Mustafa was deputy commander of the joint Egyptian–Syrian military council in charge of executing the war plans.
Israel was initially stunned by the two-pronged attack and suffered heavy losses. But a few days later Egyptian forces dug in after crossing the Suez Canal, which allowed the Israelis to concentrate on the Syrian front, mounting a counteroffensive that eventually threatened Damascus, a mere fifty miles north of the Golan. Toward the end of October 1973, a ceasefire was negotiated by the Americans and Soviets. This was followed by months of marathon meetings between US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Hafez, who was portrayed as a crafty and intractable negotiator, prone to lecturing for hours on end.11 Hafez insisted that he get back all the Golan even though his forces failed to recapture any territory during the war. The Israelis thought he was out of his mind. They fought hard for the Golan, an area of biblical and military significance and, most important, rich in water.
“He says his political survival is at stake,” Kissinger cabled the White House after a four-hour session with Hafez in Damascus in May 1974.12
Finally, as a face-saving compromise, Hafez got Quneitra, a small town in the Golan’s foothills, while Israel kept the rest of the territory.13 In June 1974, Hafez signed a disengagement agreement that stationed UN troops for decades in a demilitarized zone between Israel and Syria. The Israelis dynamited buildings and infrastructure in Quneitra before handing it back to the Syrians.
In the middle of June 1974, Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit Damascus, holding talks with Hafez even as fallout from the Watergate scandal played out at home. Diplomatic ties between Damascus and Washington, severed seven years earlier, were restored, and there was a promise of US financial aid to Syria.14
The Americans concluded that Hafez was a dictator they could do business with, just like many others they were dealing with in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Despite Syria’s proclaimed socialism, alliance with the Soviet Union, and anti-West rhetoric, Hafez cared about one thing and one thing only: his own power. There was an unspoken but mutually understood quid pro quo with the Americans. Hafez was free to do whatever needed to be done to maintain his grip on Syria as long as he never again waged war against Israel, Washington’s main regional ally.15 Hafez’s make-believe victories hardly bothered the Americans.
That year Hafez’s propaganda machine celebrated his “Tishreen Epic” with a song that went like this: Syria, my beloved, you have given me back my dignity, freedom, and identity; now I can truly call myself an Arab.16 Years later, many Arabs would realize that great harm was done to the Palestinian people from the way the Assads and other Middle Eastern dictators exploited the Arab-Israeli conflict over the years to safeguard their power.
When Hafez ousted his comrades-turned-enemies in November 1970 with the help of Mustafa and others, much of Syria was relieved. Hafez promised associates in the army and party, especially those from the Sunni majority, to reverse the anti-business and radical policies of his deposed rivals. He vowed rapprochement with the West and Sunni-led regional states. Merchants in cities like Damascus greeted Hafez’s ascent with enthusiasm. They hoped he would be less dogmatic than his predecessor and bring stability and prosperity after years of coups and countercoups.17
“We asked God for deliverance, he sent us Assad,” was the slogan adopted by Damascene merchants and clergymen.18 Shortly after seizing power in 1970, Hafez and his generals went to pray at the Umayyad Mosque, a symbol of the glory of the dynasty that once ruled Muslims from Damascus. Merchants slaughtered sheep on Hafez’s way to the mosque and blood washed the cobblestoned alleyways as the new leader smiled and waved at the crowds. “Mansour inshallah!” (“Victorious by the will of God!”), they shouted as he passed.19 It was an affirmation of allegiance and goodwill for the new leader, the custom among Arabs and Muslims for centuries.
Hafez received overwhelming backing in a referendum in 1971 that made him president for seven years. Buoyed by popular support and hope for stability, he began the process of enshrining his family rule for life. A new constitution adopted in early 1973 effectively put executive, legislative, and judicial powers in the president’s hands. Martial law and other repressive measures were maintained. Casting himself as hero and liberator after the October 1973 war, Hafez then set out to consolidate his grip on the Baath Party, turning it into a facade for his rule—a blend of military dictatorship, brutal police state, and feudal patronage.
Party membership grew dramatically, and it became a vehicle for expanding Hafez’s reach across Syria and a platform for his glorification. The party’s regional command, the equivalent of the Central Committee in communist states, was purged of those suspected of having less than absolute loyalty to Hafez.20 Among the raft of decrees Hafez passed a month after he seized power was one creating the party’s Revolutionary Youth Union “to prepare the young generation militarily.”21 Every corner of Syria down to the remotest hamlet had a chapter, and members had priority in college admission, government jobs, overseas scholarships, and military academy enrollment.
Inspired by what he saw during a visit to North Korea in the fall of 1974, Hafez ordered the creation of the Baath Vanguards Organization to indoctrinate children from grades one through six in schools and summer camps.22 Schoolchildren wore khaki uniforms, learned military discipline and skills, and perfected a “Heil Hitler”–like salute performed each morning in a ceremony before class. Later, the Syrian Scouts were suspended so as not to compete with the Vanguards.
The mukhabarat, a cornerstone of the police state, was modeled after East Germany’s State Security apparatus, or Stasi, which implemented a wide-reaching and intricate system of citizen surveillance. Likewise, Hafez put in place a web of mukhabarat departments, sections, and branches to ensure that everyone was watching everyone else everywhere and that no attempt to oust him had any chance of succeeding. Syrians would have Hafez’s eyes and ears inside their homes.
And like any dictator longing for immortality, Hafez needed colossal Soviet-like projects that his subjects could celebrate. Flush with financial assistance from oil-rich Arab states, the Soviet Union, and even, later, the United States, Hafez launched major infrastructure works, with nearly $1.5 billion earmarked for public investment in the 1971 five-year plan.23 For decades, schoolchildren memorized that it was the nation’s father, Hafez, who “subdued and tamed” the Euphrates River with the dams he built on it, starting in 1973.24 In arts class, children went from drawing bucolic nature scenes to depicting the leader and his supposedly miraculous achievements. One student received high marks for cutting out Hafez’s portrait in a magazine and pasting it over the sun in his drawing of spring.25 Just like in the parades staged by fascists, schoolchildren took part in torchlight processions to commemorate key moments of the history and narrative created by Hafez. The veneration of Hafez became a core army doctrine.
“Our Leader Forever Hafez al-Assad!” would become the army’s battle cry.
A cult of personality was constructed around Hafez, no different from that of his friends Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania and Kim Il-sung of North Korea. Shrines and statues in every town and city as well as an entire museum in Damascus built by North Korea were dedicated to Hafez and his purported Tishreen victory.
A central theme of regime agitprop was that an Assad-led Syria was a necessity for all Arabs because it was supposedly in the vanguard of perpetual resistance against the mortal enemy Israel and its Western imperialist backers. As such, any questioning of Hafez’s authority was treasonous or even sacrilegious. It was a testament to the power of lies and fear. Many Syrians believed or wanted to believe that Hafez was destined to lift Syria from its backward and feudal past and propel it toward modernization. It meant that they were generally ready to accept the regime’s lies about the Golan, the economy, the West, or any other matter. Then there was fear, fear so great it made people worship the object or person that terrified them, which bit by bit became the regime and Hafez himself.
Despite looking outside Syria for inspiration, Hafez forged his own unique identity and style as supreme leader by incorporating strong local family and clan traditions. Like a Levantine feudal lord or a Sicilian mafia boss, he ruled through a dozen or so handpicked figures underneath him. They included lifelong companions like Mustafa and other army and party chiefs and mukhabarat heads. Beyond their loyalty, they were chosen with sectarian, regional, and tribal criteria in mind. There was a sort of balancing act in the appointments. The importance of these individuals at any given moment was a function of their proximity to Hafez: those closest to the leader had the most power.26 All owed Hafez the privileges and benefits they derived from the system, and they stayed in the game as long as they respected his rules. Ministers and members of parliament merely carried out orders of this regime apparatus and its head, Hafez al-Assad. Occasionally one of these functionaries made it to the inner circle.
Like a medieval king, Hafez decided what his lords got. In the mid-1970s he favored a Sunni businessman over his brother-in-law Mohammad Makhlouf in awarding a government contract to build Syria’s first hotel chain.
As Hafez was busy consolidating his power, these early years were filled with happy memories for the Assad and Tlass children. Like most offspring of well-to-do Damascene families, they attended the Laïque school, established by France in the mid 1920s when Syria was still its protectorate. It was part of the Mission Laïque Française, or French Lay (Secular) Mission, a network of international schools set up as a counterweight to those run by Catholic orders. Young minds were supposed to be shaped by critical thinking, openness, and tolerance. But during the short-lived union with Nasser’s Egypt and the subsequent Baathist power grab, Syria’s Laïque school was nationalized like other private institutions and businesses.27 Much of the curriculum came under the Syrian state’s influence, particularly subjects like history and civics. According to a former student from that period, “They wrote history as they saw fit and taught it to us—it was brainwashing.”28
Bassel and Manaf were one grade apart but played together at recess and sometimes walked to school and back home together, trailed by presidential guards. During the October 1973 war, the boys were at school when Israeli American-made fighter jets swooped low over Damascus and dropped bombs on several targets. Sirens went off all over the city and schoolchildren ran home.29
Soon the boys were caught up in the thrill of war, seeing their dads as valiant warriors confronting the evil Israeli enemy as portrayed by the regime. They wanted to be like their fathers and were overjoyed when they accompanied them to Quneitra in June 1974 for the flag-raising ceremony. The following summer they went to the first children’s military training camp on the banks of Barada River. They dangled from ropes, jumped through flaming hoops, rode horses, and posed with assault rifles. “Bassel was a real daredevil, he had a very strong personality even as a child,” recalls Manaf.
The Assad and Tlass children, a total of eight by then, got together often at the Assad family home in Malki, a newish Damascus neighborhood mainly for well-to-do Sunni families. It was a square, two-story cement block house with an attached garden that was bequeathed to the state by a rich Saudi-Syrian doctor after Hafez took power.30
At the time, the Assads were probably the only Alawites in upscale Malki, but Hafez was determined to project ascetic tastes and manage his household with a certain degree of austerity and frugality. The furniture was basic and the kitchen counters were made of cheap pressed wood. The most ornate objects in the house were a pair of Chinese vases in the entryway. The family only had one maid, and Hafez’s wife, Aniseh, cooked lunch on most days. At mealtime she fussed over her children and their friends to make sure they washed their hands first and had eaten enough. At the table, Hafez made small talk with his children’s friends: “How was your day at school? What does your dad do?”31
At ten, Hafez’s second son, Bashar, was thin, lanky, slightly stoop-backed, and shy. His posture made him seem as if he had a constant urge to go to the toilet.32 He spoke with a pronounced lisp due to a deformity in his lower jaw. He was ignored by his father and oppressed by his older siblings, especially his sister, Bushra, an outgoing and bossy teenage girl.
“You have arrived! Do not make a mess,” Bushra often shouted at Bashar and the few friends he brought to the house.33 “Why are you making noise? Stay out of that room! Do not play with the ball there, dad is napping.”
Bushra and Bassel were the favorite children in the Assad household. They had the nicest bedrooms. Bushra was usually chauffeured alone to Laïque. Bassel got his own car at an early age. Bashar, meanwhile, was driven to school with his two youngest brothers, Maher and Majd; the latter had a developmental disability.
At school, Bashar was quiet and aloof. He was nothing like his two raucous and troublemaking cousins, Duraid and Mudhar, who were in the same class.
“Bashar was nerdy but average academically, good at memorizing. He had lots of problems. He was moody and never able to make steady and close friends,” recalled a classmate.34 “He was your friend at the start of the year, and then after midterm break he pretended not to know you. The only reason we wanted to befriend him was because he was the president’s son.”
Teachers went out of their way to accommodate Bashar, and the school principal often made a point of chatting with him during his rounds on classes. “It was the most awkward moment for Bashar,” said the classmate. “He would turn red. He did not want to be in the spotlight. He wanted the earth to swallow him.”
On some occasions, especially during extracurricular activities, Bashar’s shyness was so severe that he seemed to be crippled by it and was gripped by anxiety attacks. Classmates also remembered a mean streak. Unlike Bassel and his cousins, Bashar never seemed interested in helping anyone or sharing anything, not even a chocolate bar.35
Whereas Bassel was the natural leader and the one everyone deferred to, Bashar was an introvert and a loner. “Bashar was living in the shadow of his brother, in fact they were all living in Bassel’s shadow,” said Manaf.
Though a born leader, Bassel also had a rebellious and mischievous side. One time on the way back from school, Bassel wanted to play a trick on his guards. “Let’s lose them,” he told Manaf.36 They managed to evade them and ended up at Manaf’s home. The boys were very amused, but Bassel’s mother was not pleased when the guards told her what had happened. She called the Tlass home a bit later and Manaf’s mother assured her that the children had made it back safely.
Although Hafez al-Assad and Mustafa Tlass were intimate friends, their wives never grew close. Hafez’s wife, Aniseh, was staid and withdrawn, made few public appearances, and tended to her children and husband like a typical Syrian housewife. There was talk in Damascene social circles that Hafez seriously considered marrying a second wife—someone perhaps more charming and extroverted—to help him woo Western leaders, with whom he wanted to forge better ties, particularly after Nixon’s visit.37
Mustafa Tlass’s wife, Lamia, was a loyal housewife, too, but loved to socialize, host parties, and tell jokes. She often went out of her way to enchant guests. On special occasions she traveled personally with her driver to neighboring Lebanon to shop for the best food ingredients not found in Damascus.38
Lamia learned very early on to live with her husband’s womanizing, which became legendary. A family friend described Mustafa as a sex maniac who wanted to sleep with almost any woman he encountered.39 “As my eyes were fixated on her beautiful breasts I noticed she was wearing a white and transparent nightgown that concealed nothing of God’s creation,” Mustafa wrote in his memoirs years later about a neighbor he fantasized about for days.40 He was already married with three children.
Lamia may have realized that there were things she could not offer Mustafa but also, in any case, that she was always going to be his anchor and equal partner in what mattered to her the most: family, power, and status.
“Lamia was strong and in control; key decisions were in her hands,” said the family friend.41 “She could pick up the phone anytime and speak with Hafez, with whom she grew close. She called him Abu [father of] Bassel,” a common form of address conveying respect and familiarity and which usually refers to a father’s eldest son. Hafez respected Lamia, too, and sought her advice on certain matters. Lamia often baked Hafez his favorite chocolate cake.
Hafez’s honeymoon period in power did not last long. From 1976 through the mid-1980s, he faced a series of external and internal challenges that rocked his regime’s foundations. The regime’s vulnerabilities, contradictions, and outright lies were exposed in the process, but Hafez also demonstrated his resiliency and just how far he was willing to go to retain power. The Assads never forgot the lessons learned from this trying and bloody period. And the Tlasses were by their side all the way.
In the summer of 1976, Hafez sent troops to neighboring Lebanon at the request of the Christian president, who feared takeover by a coalition of Muslim forces including Palestinian guerillas, Arab nationalists, and radical leftists. The pretext for the Syrian intervention was protecting Lebanon’s sovereignty after the collapse of its army.42 But Syria had always seen Lebanon as an integral part of its territory, artificially carved out by colonial powers, and it was eager for the chance to bring it back under its control. More important for Hafez, being in Lebanon gave him leverage over world powers like the United States trying to settle the broader Arab–Israeli conflict.
Before intervening in Lebanon, the Syrian regime had for years armed and supported the same forces threatening the Christian-dominated government. Syrian-backed Palestinians used Lebanon as a staging ground to attack Israel to the south.43 When the principal Palestinian factions and their allies defied Hafez to pursue their own agendas, he backed their Christian-led enemies in hopes of currying favor with the West, which supported Lebanon’s Christians and Israel.
Hafez’s foray into Lebanon exemplified a core regime strategy: Fuel the menace and create the problem and then present yourself as the only one capable of ending it.44
The United States, meanwhile, hoped Hafez could rein in what it saw as Soviet-backed fanatics running amok in Lebanon. So Washington pressured its ally Israel to exercise restraint toward the Syrian intervention.45 Americans also provided Hafez with economic aid, totaling about $627.4 million by 1979, to counter communist influence and spur Syria to conclude a peace agreement with Israel.46
In 1978, Israel annexed southern Lebanon and signed a peace treaty with Egypt, thus isolating Hafez and potentially undermining all his leverage. More troubling for Hafez was the fact that some Lebanese Christian factions he previously supported were forging their own alliance with Israel, independent of him and his own agenda.47 By then Lebanon was an arena for regional and international proxy wars. Atrocities were committed by all sides. Once more Hafez, for his part, turned against those who defied him.
Hafez’s real crucible, though, was not in Lebanon but at home in Syria. It was a battle he waged with far less media attention and more brutal resolve.
In 1976, a militant wing of the Muslim Brotherhood party known as the Tali’a al-Muqatila, or Fighting Vanguard, launched a wave of assassinations and bombings targeting anyone associated with the regime, particularly members of the Assads’ Alawite minority. Ostensibly, this was retaliation for the arrest of the group’s leader Marwan Hadid (the Hama rebel from the 1960s) and his subsequent death in prison.48 While some in the Brotherhood advocated confrontation with the regime, most opposed the violence and viewed the Vanguard as a dangerous renegade group.49
Separate from the Islamist militants’ campaign, public discontent with the regime rose in 1977. Regime officials including Assad family members like Hafez’s brother Rifaat and their business partners amassed fortunes and lived lavishly while average Syrians struggled with miserable wages, soaring consumer prices, and chronic food shortages. Corruption and outright banditry plagued all levels of government, especially in the provinces.50
There was also rising discomfort among the overwhelmingly Sunni population toward what they saw as a regime increasingly favoring and empowering Hafez’s Alawite minority. Only token Sunnis known for their absolute loyalty, like Mustafa Tlass, were elevated to positions of power. New mostly Alawite settlements began to encroach on predominantly Sunni centers in Damascus and Homs as farmers flocked to the big cities for jobs in the security services and burgeoning bureaucracy. Sunnis also resented Hafez’s initial support for Christians against Muslims in Lebanon.
In 1977, teachers and factory workers all over Syria threatened to go on strike because their salaries were being outpaced by inflation. In the summer of that year, no more than 5 percent of registered voters bothered to cast their ballots in elections organized by the regime for a new rubberstamp legislature.51 More troubling for Hafez was agitation by the influential professional associations and hints of cooperation between the Brotherhood and remnants of old enemies and rivals.52
One month after Hafez’s term as president was renewed for another seven years, insurgents assassinated a senior Baath Party official and a relative of the Assads.53 The Alawite community clamored for revenge. About 15,000 suspects were rounded up by the mukhabarat.54 Hafez seized the opportunity and declared an all-out war against terrorism—a perfect pretext to crush political opponents while diverting attention from legitimate grievances.
War between Hafez and his opponents heated up in the summer of 1979 when a Fighting Vanguard militant, who later called himself the caliph (leader of all Muslims), led a bloody assault on the Aleppo Artillery School with the help of Sunni officers on the inside. During class, the main accomplice, a Sunni captain and Baath Party member, singled out Alawite cadets by name for execution. About eighty-three were killed and many more wounded.55 The blatantly sectarian atrocity split the Muslim Brotherhood as well as the Vanguard itself over the tactics and pace of what it called its jihad, or sacred and God-mandated struggle, against the regime.56 Hafez chose to wage war against the entire Brotherhood and anyone remotely associated with it.57
The Aleppo massacre exposed cracks in the army. Immediately after the killings, fighting broke out between Alawite and Sunni cadets at the Homs military academy. Mustafa personally went to the academy to restore order.58 Hafez sent his brother Rifaat to deal with Aleppo. He was part of the inner circle and commanded a praetorian guard called Saraya al-Difa’a, the Defense Companies, made up almost entirely of Alawites. Rifaat’s gruff persona and overt sectarianism helped rally fighters from the Assads’ community. Unlike his older brother, Rifaat had an established reputation as a ruthless commander who also knew how to have fun; he had multiple wives and mistresses and a seemingly boundless sexual appetite, loved to flaunt his power and wealth, and often stayed up all night smoking, drinking, and gambling. He earned the admiration of thugs and had no trouble filling the ranks. Within a matter of hours after arriving in Aleppo, Rifaat and his fighters rounded up close to 6,000 people.59
Clashes and bombings engulfed the city and spread to Hama as violence flared in the capital and around the coastal city of Latakia. Many civilian detainees became scapegoats for the insurgency and were executed in sham trials.60
Toward the end of the summer of 1979, threats inched closer to the Assads and Tlasses—endangering their households and children.
In August 1979, Mahmoud Shahade, a neurosurgeon and army doctor close to Hafez, was gunned down in an ambush in central Damascus. Fear gripped the regime and new security measures were introduced.61 The street passing by the Assad home was closed to the public, steel gates were erected, and more guards were posted on the perimeter. Similar measures were taken around the Tlass home.
Manaf and Bassel, who were in their late teens at the time, were under such tight security that they barely saw each other that summer and fall. Manaf was finishing high school, Bassel was about to start college, and fourteen-year-old Bashar was still at Laïque.
One afternoon, Bashar and his friends were strolling alone not far from home when Bassel spotted them as he drove by.62 Bassel stopped his Mercedes in the middle of the street and got out.
“Where are your guards?” Bassel screamed at Bashar.
“Take this and DO NOT move from your place,” shouted Bassel as he handed a stunned-looking Bashar a pistol. Minutes later presidential guards arrived at the scene.
Shortly after that incident, a driver for the interior minister’s children, who were friendly with Bashar, suddenly disappeared amid talk he was arrested by the mukhabarat on suspicion of plotting to kill or kidnap Bashar.63 Bashar’s physics teacher at Laïque, suspected of being a secret Muslim Brotherhood member, disappeared, too.
The lesson for the Assad children was that their enemy could be hiding anywhere; they must never take any chances.
The Americans believed much of the opposition was homegrown despite assistance to the insurgents from neighboring rival Baathist state, Iraq. That same summer, Hafez had traveled to Baghdad to try to make peace with the Iraqis, but within weeks Saddam Hussein grabbed absolute power. In a chilling televised proceeding, Saddam smoked a cigar as he presided over a show trial for a group of comrades accused of plotting to assassinate him, allegedly on Hafez’s orders. Hundreds were executed in the purge that followed.64 It was a reminder to the Assads of just how ruthless they needed to be in order to stay in power.
At the end of 1979, Syria’s Baath leadership gathered for a party congress in Damascus amid extraordinary security. Hafez spoke passionately about an American “Imperialist-Zionist” conspiracy in league with local enemies to topple him because he didn’t make peace with Israel like Egypt’s Sadat, who shocked Arabs that year by flying to Tel Aviv for a state visit.65 “While we do not want to use force against anyone, it must be understood that we will use force and violence in the appropriate manner and… time if the misguided do not repent and continue their suspicious and questionable acts linked to Camp David,” he said, referring to the Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty signed in 1978 at the presidential retreat near Washington.66 (The Assads would blame the same conspiracies for another challenge to their rule three decades later.)
While Hafez spoke to his partisans about American conspiracies, Washington, on the contrary, was very eager for him to stay strong. A cable from the US embassy in Damascus that same year assessed Hafez’s prospects in the face of internal challenges and concluded that any weakening in his position was detrimental to US interests, including Arab–Israeli peace and secure oil supplies. “We have grown accustomed to the leadership of President Al-Assad and the stability he represents,” said the 1979 cable.67 “While we have our differences with Assad, particularly in terms of tactics, many of his policies have worked to our advantage and in favor of stability in the area.” The hope of getting Hafez to negotiate with Israel could be compromised “if he felt his domestic base was wobbly,” added the cable.
During the same December 1979 party congress at which Hafez spoke, his brother Rifaat invoked Stalin’s purges and Mao Zedong’s campaign against state enemies and called for similar “national cleansing” in Syria. He proposed people’s courts to banish “everyone who diverts from the patriotic path” to desert camps for rehabilitation, where they also toiled on greening projects.68
Hafez suspected that his brother wanted to upstage him by demonstrating to regime loyalists he was more uncompromising with their enemies than even the leader himself. So Hafez abruptly ended secret talks he was holding with elements of the Muslim Brotherhood and froze prisoner releases he had initiated to appease them.69
Then came the spring of 1980, when the Tlasses were reminded that their power and privileges were contingent upon total and absolute complicity with the Assads. They had to stand by the Assads even if that meant waging war against their coreligionists, the Sunnis, or the entire Syrian population for that matter.
In early March 1980, general strikes and anti-regime protests erupted in several cities and towns across Syria, most notably Aleppo, Deir Ezzour, Hama, Homs, and Idlib.70 Damascus was minimally affected due to the intervention of a powerful Hafez ally, Badredeen al-Shallah, head of the city’s chamber of commerce and scion of a Sunni merchant family.
Protest organizers included the Muslim Brotherhood, professional associations, labor unions, communists, socialists, and secularists. It was not just fanatics, as Hafez kept insisting, but a wide and varied front of diplomats, doctors, engineers, filmmakers, intellectuals, lawyers, students, workers, and everyone else who rejected his iron-fist rule and scorched-earth methods.
They demanded release of political prisoners, an end to martial law, restoration of civil liberties, and withdrawal of the army and regime militias from towns and cities. Some of Hafez’s opponents went further, calling for an end to his rule.
Mustafa knew Hafez as someone with nerves of steel: “Not even tsunamis riled him.”71 The challenge to his authority in those early days of March 1980, however, shook Hafez to the core. He became hysterical. This was a personal affront. Why were they rebelling against him? Did he not build factories and universities and give the masses opportunities? Did he not make them proud by turning their backward country into an entity to be reckoned with? Even US president Jimmy Carter called him a “strong and moderate” leader with “a great role to play because of his experience [and the] greatness of his country.”72
As far as Hafez was concerned, the protests were completely unjustified and had to represent a grand conspiracy. The only option was to crush this challenge. He and his lieutenants took to their tasks efficiently and swiftly.
Mustafa Tlass hunkered down at the defense ministry to oversee deployment of army units to quell the protests. The first target was the picturesque northern town of Jisr al-Shughour, sitting at the crossroads between the epicenter of regime opposition in Aleppo and the Alawite minority’s strongholds in western Syria. Rioters burned down the town’s Baath Party office and raided an army barracks, seizing weapons and ammunition. Special forces arriving in helicopters surrounded the town and bombarded it until insurgents surrendered. Dozens were rounded up and executed in mop-up operations. An estimated 200 townspeople were killed within a few hours. More people were killed in similar operations in adjacent towns and villages.73
At the same time one of Hafez’s trusted Alawite army generals was recalled from Lebanon and told to advance with his armored units on Aleppo.74
In Damascus, Hafez personally mobilized students, teachers, workers, and others. Loyalists underwent crash military training, were armed and instructed to crush their enemies. Almost no day went by in March 1980 when Hafez did not speak directly to the public, inciting them to action.
He told the confederation of artisans that those protesting against him were “enemies of the artisans” and CIA agents, and he called the United States the “mortal enemy of our people and its evolution.”75 The previous day he had told farmers that he was a peasant like them and urged them to do what they saw fit to defend the regime. “If you feel you need weapons, they are available and at your disposal,” he said.76 A few days later, he told newly armed high school and college students that their enemies were not just Islamists but everyone challenging the regime, including fellow students.77 “You’re now old enough to identify the homeland’s enemies no matter what costume they wear… strike them without mercy,” said Hafez.
Bassel wore a military uniform and accompanied his father to most events and rallies held in auditoriums all over Damascus. He was with his father when he cut a deal with Shallah, head of the Damascus chamber of commerce, to make sure the city’s businesses and merchants did not strike.78 It did not matter that Shallah, with his signature red fez cap and tailor-made three-piece suits, was a symbol of the elitists and reactionaries Hafez was railing against to farmers and laborers.
In effect, the Assads, Tlasses, and other regime families, who came from peasant backgrounds but accumulated great wealth and power, were now partnering with Damascus’s business families to crush a popular uprising in the name of fighting elitists.
By early April, more than 30,000 soldiers including Rifaat’s fighters encircled Aleppo’s rebellious quarters. Artillery shells and rockets rained on residential areas, and then “cleansing operations” commenced—mass detentions, field executions, and looting when soldiers entered the neighborhoods. There is no exact count, but up to 2,000 people were estimated to have been killed and at least 8,000 detained in Aleppo alone between April and December 1980.79
At the start of the Aleppo assault, Hafez dissolved all professional associations; the mukhabarat took over their offices and arrested hundreds of members. Some were tortured to death in mukhabarat prisons, where techniques were given names like “tire,” “flying carpet,” and “black slave,” the last one involving strapping a victim onto a device which when turned on inserted a heated metal skewer into the anus.80
Depriving the protest movement of its civilian leaders and peaceful activists was crucial for validating Hafez’s lie that his only opponents were armed religious fanatics.81
The confrontation deepened and became more personal when Hafez survived an attempt on his life in the summer of 1980. He was at the presidential palace bidding farewell to a visiting African dictator when two grenades were tossed in Hafez’s direction. He pushed one away with his foot while a bodyguard threw himself on the second one and died to protect him. Hafez suffered cuts on his chest and legs and was taken to the hospital.82 The attacker fled and was never apprehended. The Muslim Brotherhood was blamed, and the next day a horrific reprisal took place. About 200 of Rifaat’s men were flown to a notorious military prison. They were let into cells of suspected Muslim Brotherhood members and began executing inmates mostly by mowing them down with their machine guns; about 1,000 prisoners were killed in the massacre. The family was taking its revenge.83
The attempt on Hafez’s life had a profound impact on his children, especially Bassel. “Bassel was nice and simple but he became aggressive, confrontational, and more complex,” said Manaf. “Before the assassination attempt he did not act like the president’s son, but after he became the president’s son.”84
Much of the country was filled with an atmosphere of terror that summer. A new law made membership to the Muslim Brotherhood punishable by death, but this, too, was simply a pretext for widening the regime’s war on anyone daring to challenge it. Checkpoints were everywhere, and no day went by without raids by the mukhabarat and pro-Hafez militias to arrest suspected opponents, critics, or anyone perceived as such simply because of their birthplace, address, or appearance.85
That same summer of 1980, Manaf joined a military training camp organized by the Revolutionary Youth Union. It was a way for the Tlasses to demonstrate that all of their family, and not just Mustafa, was doing its part in rallying around Hafez and the regime.
“Bravo, well done!” Bassel told Manaf when he found out.86
Men and women trainees were taught how to storm buildings, parachute jump from planes, throw themselves from the back of a moving truck, and other bizarre and cruel skills like biting off a snake’s head and strangling a puppy. “The universities are yours, the country is yours, everything is yours!” Hafez’s brother Rifaat lectured Manaf and others at the camp as he pumped his fist in the air.
And they took it literally. Manaf and other high school and college students who completed similar training wore camouflage and carried pistols in class.87
After the training, Manaf started his freshman year at Damascus University’s faculty of civil engineering, just like his friend Bassel.
A year later, September 1981, Manaf was with his father when they were stopped at a checkpoint by female soldiers, a unit of Rifaat’s force known as the parachutists.
“Any veiled women in the car?” snapped one of them as she banged on the car’s chassis.
“Shut up, this is the defense minister,” protested Manaf before they were let through.
That day the parachutists arrived in buses in several Damascus neighborhoods including upscale Malki and Rawda, where the Assads and Tlasses lived. They stopped all veiled women, no matter their age, and made them take off their hijabs. Those who hesitated had them torn off. Some were insulted and beaten.
When Manaf and his father got home, they found several veiled women huddled in their building’s entryway. They were hiding from the militiawomen; they thought the powerful Tlasses, Sunnis like them, could protect them.88
“Call Hafez al-Assad immediately, this should not happen, people should not be humiliated this way!” Manaf’s mother, Lamia, ordered her husband as he walked in.
“If there’s a plan to ban the veil in public, then people should be given some notice,” Mustafa told Hafez.
Hafez had no knowledge of the order and later claimed that Rifaat’s soldiers acted on their own because they were antagonized by the sight of veiled women. Two days later Hafez offered a mild rebuke of these actions during a speech in Damascus. It was a sign that he appreciated the zealotry of those defending his regime.
In fact, Hafez attended almost every graduation ceremony for the paramilitary forces headed by his brother, and it was always the same incitement. “You must look for traitors everywhere, in every corner, and you must pluck them out wherever they’re found,” said Hafez at one ceremony. “Have no mercy.”89
Women in camouflage and berets, some with braids, raised their rifles with one arm, crying: “With blood we sacrifice for you, Hafez, with souls we sacrifice for you, Hafez.”90
The myth that the regime’s brutality and excesses during this period were the work of Hafez’s brother Rifaat would spread later after a rupture between the siblings. In fact, Hafez was involved in every aspect of the terror campaign to crush the challenge to his rule. Rifaat was just a tool.
By 1981, Hafez had almost achieved what he wanted. He finished off the weakest of his opponents, such as the professionals, leftists, and students. Most were dead, rotting in jail, or exiled outside Syria. In many cases wives, children, and parents of fugitive opposition activists were arrested and tortured to pressure them to return.91
Now Hafez turned his attention to dealing a final blow to the Muslim Brotherhood, which by then was in total disarray; many of those previously advocating political activism and negotiations were compelled to move closer to the position of the extremists fighting the regime. Hama was the setting of the showdown.
In spring 1981, the city got a taste of the tragedy that befell it a year later. After insurgents ambushed security forces on Hama’s outskirts, Hafez’s forces moved into the city. Hundreds of men of all ages were arrested or executed on the streets.92
Later that year Damascus was hit by a series of massive explosions, including one in the vicinity of the Assad family residence and another not far from the children’s school, the Laïque, which killed and wounded scores, mostly civilians and children, and appeared to target the nearby Baath Party headquarters.93 Luckily the Assad children, including sixteen-year-old Bashar, had been transferred a few weeks before the bombing to another school closer to home. The regime blamed the Muslim Brotherhood, but subsequent reports suggested that the French secret service was involved, too, as retaliation for Syria’s role in assassinating France’s envoy to Lebanon earlier that year.94
In January 1982, the regime prepared a large-scale assault on Hama, the Muslim Brotherhood’s last major foothold. Troops lay siege to the city and began their incursion in early February. A call for resistance was broadcast from mosques, and hundreds of civilians joined Islamist fighters to defend their city. It took the regime ten days to completely subdue the city and twenty days to carry out “cleansing operations.” These involved house-to-house killing rampages and mass executions at public facilities, including factories that were turned into detention centers. Entire sections of the city were blown up and bulldozed. The militias and Alawite loyalists whom Hafez had trained, armed, and incited over the previous two years were set loose on predominantly Sunni Hama to kill, rape, and pillage. The death toll remains a source of controversy until this day, with groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch putting it between 7,000 and 10,000, while regime opponents saying it’s triple or quadruple that.95
There was also no precise figure of the number of people executed by the regime from the late 1970s until the early ’80s. Mustafa Tlass said he signed so many death sentences that he eventually lost count. “At times in the 1980s, 150 death sentences a week were carried out by hanging in Damascus alone,” he said.96
In many instances, Mustafa signed the sentences as a matter of bureaucratic routine after the hangings had already taken place, essentially providing official cover for mass murder.97
There was little reaction from Western governments, by then fixated on Lebanon and more concerned about threats posed by Middle Eastern terrorism in general than what a ruler like Hafez was doing to his own people. The fact that dictators like Hafez fueled and manipulated terrorism and fanaticism did not seem to matter.
“The situation in Hama does not seem to portend a general breakdown of law and order in Syria. The city is isolated and the recent uprising had largely been brought under control,” began a terse five-line update on the situation in Hama in a memorandum to the director of the CIA on February 22, 1982, as Hafez’s massacre was still underway.98
The Assad family ruled Syria uncontested for almost three decades after that.