Mustafa Tlass was home playing backgammon with friends on a cold winter night in February 1984, exactly two years after the Hama massacre. The phone rang past midnight. It was Hafez al-Assad, who was convalescing after a heart attack. In his absence, the country’s affairs were run by a six-man leadership committee including Mustafa, but still Hafez kept a watchful eye on the state.1 He was calling about a matter that could not wait.
Hafez just learned that his brother Rifaat, who commanded a forty-thousand-strong paramilitary force equipped with tanks and attack helicopters, was plotting to take over the army and oust him from power.
Hafez instructed Mustafa to put on his uniform and head immediately to the defense ministry to mobilize army units and transfer them to key positions in and around the capital. Hafez hoped to nip the conspiracy in the bud and flush out those who might side with his brother.2
“Kill whoever disobeys you, even if it’s my brother,” Hafez directed his friend, without a hint of hesitation.3 Manaf Tlass, now twenty-one years old, accompanied his father, carrying his own assault rifle and pistol. They braced themselves for the worst.4
Mustafa always obeyed Hafez’s orders without question. In the sixties, late seventies, and early eighties, Mustafa by his own admission held hastily convened tribunals to execute regime opponents and quash any threat, whether it came from the army or the people. There was no doubt where he stood.
He remembered what Hafez had told party leaders in his presence after the 1970 coup: “Mustafa Tlass is a pillar of this regime—in fact, he’s the regime’s keeper.”5
The fact that Mustafa and Hafez’s brother Rifaat thoroughly loathed one another was going to make the job easier. Rifaat openly voiced contempt for Mustafa, called him Hafez’s lapdog, ignored his orders as defense minister, and relished insulting him at every opportunity.6
Still, this was a delicate and perilous task for Mustafa; he was inserting himself in a feud between two equally strong-willed brothers. In 1980, at the height of the regime’s war on its political opponents, Hafez sided with his brother against Mustafa in a dispute over a hugely inflated military fund allocation demanded by Rifaat. Mustafa became upset and went to Moscow briefly. Hafez called Manaf’s mother, Lamia, and asked her to intervene as peacemaker.7
Four years later, Hafez was leaning on his devoted friend to confront his own brother.
Hafez dispatched two Alawite mukhabarat chiefs to support his defense minister in the dramatic face-off. The mission was going smoothly until Mustafa noticed that the special forces commander, Ali Haidar, was nowhere to be found. It seemed he was trying to hedge his bets, wait, and then support the Assad brother who emerged victorious in the showdown. Mustafa ordered Haidar’s subordinate to move a special forces unit from its base on the northeast side of Damascus to the old fairgrounds in central Damascus near Umayyad Square. The buses that transported them from one end of the city to the other were masked as Iranian pilgrim coaches.8 Special force officers disguised themselves as female pilgrims wearing black head-to-toe veils over their camouflage and hid their weapons under bus seats. Rifaat’s men had set up checkpoints all over the city.
The ruse worked and proved to Haidar that his own men were ready to mutiny against him if he switched allegiance from the president to his brother.
The next day, Haidar came to Mustafa’s office. Mustafa had his pistol on the desk. He told Haidar to call Rifaat right there and then. “Do not you know there’s only one commander, and he’s President Hafez al-Assad,” Haidar told Rifaat.9
“Son of a bitch, you’re giving me lessons in patriotism,” shouted Rifaat and hung up.
After Hafez proved to his brother that the army backed him and a coup attempt would be suicide, he tried to console him with a symbolic government post.10
Rifaat rebuffed the offer and insisted on retaining command of his paramilitary force, the Defense Companies. In a show of defiance, Rifaat deployed some of his tank units in Damascus in early April 1984. This angered Hafez, and he personally went down to the streets to confront Rifaat’s forces and order them back to their bases. He was accompanied by his eldest son, Bassel. There were extremely tense moments, with Rifaat repeatedly threatening to shell the defense ministry, but Hafez ultimately prevailed in what became a high-stakes game of wills.11 The family standoff ended later that month when Rifaat accepted his brother’s offer of $200 million and an honorary title in return for leaving Syria. Hafez got the money from his friend Muammar Gaddafi, the oil-rich Libyan dictator.12
It was as much a payoff as a token of appreciation from Hafez. Rifaat was the enforcer mobilized to mercilessly crush regime opponents in the 1970s and early ’80s and preserve Hafez’s absolute power in a campaign of state terror that killed or led to the disappearance of tens of thousands. Killing or arresting Rifaat would have been easy, but the repercussions in the family and Alawite community could be catastrophic for Hafez. When Alawite men and women joined Rifaat’s forces they believed he was their savior, too; their very existence and power and privileges under the regime were in jeopardy. Hafez reckoned that moving violently against Rifaat could have destabilized the entire regime, so treating him generously was the best option.
As their fathers worked to shore up the regime’s authority during the summer of 1984, Bassel and Manaf took their first outing in some time. After a morning spent shooting doves in the Damascus countryside, the two friends sat down for lunch.
Like most sons of rich and powerful Syrian regime officials, Bassel and Manaf were into fast cars, girls, and guns, but the events of the previous four years—the attempt on Hafez’s life, the war to save the regime, and Rifaat’s audacious bid—had had a profound impact on both of them. They were prompted to seriously ponder their future.
“What are your plans? Are you going into business?” Manaf asked Bassel, with a hint of sarcasm.13
They had talked about this for weeks, but nothing was settled one way or another. By this time Bassel had received his engineering degree and Manaf had one more year to get his.
“You’re the son of Hafez al-Assad. You can’t be a businessman or government employee,” Manaf insisted. “The best thing is for us to go to the academy and become officers. Speak to your dad, and I’ll do the same.”
They went back to Damascus, and later that day Bassel called Manaf to tell him that his dad approved of him going to the academy to become a military engineer.
Bassel went to the Homs academy that fall and Manaf planned to follow him. But convincing his parents that this was the right path for him too was not so easy.
“Do not do it. I went through a lot with your dad,” his mother, Lamia, pleaded with him. “You are better suited for civilian life, not the military.”14
Manaf, meanwhile, clashed with his father, who did not want him to follow in his footsteps. “Mustafa felt his nice son could not survive the regime’s cutthroat world,” said a close family friend.15
In the end, Manaf defied his father. “I was close to Bassel and I came from a political family, so I wanted to go,” Manaf said.16
“I was a good marksman, too,” he added with a smile.17
Mustafa probably thought a business career for his son, alongside Manaf’s older brother, Firas, was the best thing for Manaf and the family. By then twenty-four years old, Firas headed a company called MAS (an acronym for Min Ajl Souriya, “For Syria”), which had opened a cheese factory and meat-processing and canning plants and later started importing sugar, all thanks to lucrative army and government contracts secured with his father’s help. There were plans to move into construction, and Manaf, with a civil engineering degree, would be well suited for that side of the business.
Then there was Mustafa’s favorite child, Nahed, twenty-six and married to Akram Ojjeh, a Franco-Saudi billionaire of Damascene origin. Ojjeh was almost fifteen years older than her father, but he was one of the world’s richest men. He had amassed a huge fortune from hefty commissions on the sale of arms and advanced military equipment, such as radars manufactured by French companies, to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern autocracies. In gratitude for his services, the French had decorated him in the 1970s with one of their highest state orders, Commander of the Legion of Honor.18
Initially the Tlasses hoped that Nahed could marry Mansour, Ojjeh’s son from an earlier marriage, but the match did not materialize. Instead, Ojjeh senior proposed to Nahed.
They married after lengthy deliberations in the Tlass family. Ojjeh’s friends in Paris remembered Nahed when she first arrived as a timid and beautiful young girl bedecked in jewelry and gold bracelets. Nahed, though, was determined to be more than a pretty trophy wife. Ojjeh became a role model who taught her “about life” as she transformed herself into a charming and seductive Parisian socialite moving in power circles.19
Mustafa Tlass hoped that kinship with Ojjeh could also bring direct benefits to him and his family as well as his regime. Ojjeh was close to many political and business leaders around the world. The regime was battered and its resources were drained by the bloody war against internal enemies, the mess in Lebanon, and Washington’s designation of Syria as a state sponsor of terrorism. (Syria has been on the US list since its creation in 1979.)
Mustafa and Hafez believed it was time to cut deals with the West, especially France, in the area that was of greatest concern to them: terrorism. In return, Syria would enjoy more political and economic cooperation, which would reward both the Assads and Tlasses. In November 1984, François Mitterrand—a friend of Ojjeh—became the first French head of state to visit Syria since it gained independence in 1946. In his press conference with Hafez in Damascus, Mitterrand denied accusations that Syria was connected to the assassination of the French ambassador to Lebanon in 1981, the bombing of a French base in Beirut two years later that killed fifty-eight soldiers, and a slew of assassinations and bombings in France and Europe, some targeting Hafez’s exiled political opponents—allegations that had long hurt Syria’s standing with Western powers. “There is nothing to prove that Syria was responsible. Since President Assad has always asserted that this was not the case, I do not see why his word should be doubted,” Mitterrand told reporters.20
Mitterrand’s prime minister, Laurent Fabius, was furious over the visit because France possessed evidence that Hafez and his mukhabarat were connected to the ambassador’s assassination and many other attacks on French interests.21 Mitterrand overruled everyone and went to Syria anyway, hoping for some détente and cooperation with the Assads to stem the tide of violence being directed at France and other Western nations by a range of Middle Eastern radical groups.
“People understood it as realpolitik; there was no need to quarrel with a very dangerous country,” said Michel Duclos, a French diplomat who later became ambassador to Syria.22
By the late 1970s, Hafez was convinced that the battle he was waging at home and the challenges he faced in Lebanon were all part of a conspiracy by his Arab and Western adversaries to corner him and force him to accept peace with Israel. Hafez sought retribution against these perceived enemies beyond Syria’s borders. A special ops mukhabarat unit oversaw most assassinations and terror attacks and reported directly to Hafez.23 His henchmen took out hostile journalists in Lebanon in 1980, and that same year they gunned down Salaheddin Bitar, cofounder of the Baath Party, who later broke ranks with the regime and organized an opposition front from Paris.24 The following year they tried to assassinate the prime minister of Jordan, which hosted Syrian Muslim Brotherhood leaders, and a month later they killed the wife of a Brotherhood leader in Germany.25
Most regime attacks abroad, especially bombings in Europe, were conducted through proxies to allow for deniability, but several European intelligence services accused Syrian diplomats of smuggling bomb-making materials in privileged diplomatic suitcases.26 The slain French ambassador Louis Delamare, who was seen as working at cross-purposes with Syria’s agenda in Lebanon, was shot twelve times in 1981 by assailants from Sai’qa, a Palestinian militia founded by the Syrian regime.27
Lebanon’s war became more complex and chaotic in 1982 as escalating tensions between Syria and Israel culminated in the latter’s devastating invasion of Lebanon. American, French, Italian, and other foreign troops landed on Lebanon’s shores to keep the peace.28 Israel withdrew to the south and the Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat was forced out of Lebanon,29 but Hafez sought to retain and strengthen his position in Lebanon at any cost. He worked with Iran to train and support Lebanese Shiite Islamist militants and other extremists who attacked the West, seen as Israel’s patron.
These Shiite militants, who later formed Hezbollah, were responsible for some of the deadliest and most heinous attacks against the United States in 1983. A suicide bomber driving a truck packed with the equivalent of 21,000 pounds of explosives leveled the American peacekeeping mission headquarters near the Beirut airport, killing 241 service personnel and wounding scores more. Earlier that year, more than sixty people were killed in a similar attack on the embassy.30 No direct Syrian link emerged, but it was no secret that these extremists operated in Beirut and trained in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley in coordination with Syrian forces and mukhabarat.
“I bow my head—what do these Yankees really want? They cross great oceans with their ships and land on our beaches,” Mustafa said a year after the attacks, praising the suicide bombers and tacitly acknowledging Syrian regime involvement. “We will kill until the invaders withdraw… The enemy must be killed, wherever he hides, and the ground beneath his feet must glow like hell…”31
The same Assad regime–linked terrorists later hijacked a US airliner in 1985 and kidnapped dozens of foreigners in Lebanon.32
“You have Arab-Israeli confrontation and America is siding with Israel, so it’s normal for extremism to emerge,” said Manaf, offering an argument often made across the Arab world to justify terrorism but also cynically and deceitfully used by the region’s despots to protect and perpetuate their rule.33
Having ties to terrorists meant that the Assad regime could then offer its services to Western governments by passing on tips about planned attacks, convincing groups to forgo certain attacks, and helping negotiate hostage releases, all in return for concessions from these governments. “For the Syrian leadership, terrorism and intelligence are bargaining chips,” said Duclos.34
By 1984, the French external intelligence service known by its acronym DGSE had extensive dealings with the Syrian regime, especially through Hafez’s brother Rifaat.35 Hafez later used intelligence sharing to pressure the French to grant Rifaat asylum in 1984 when he got rid of him.
The Americans, too, began to recognize the value and wisdom of working with the devil, cooperating with a regime they had labeled a state sponsor of terror.
“We respect traditional Syrian influence in Lebanon and expect it to continue,” Republican Senator John Tower told Hafez in Damascus in February 1984 while praising the Syrian dictator’s “tactical victory” in Lebanon.36 Tower was accompanied by John McCain, a rising star in the House of Representatives and a former naval officer and war prisoner in Vietnam.
Hafez told the Americans he wanted “good and normal” relations.
With the regime secure at home and Western leaders coming to Damascus to meet with Hafez and seek his cooperation, Mustafa found time to dwell on his other passions: female celebrities and literary pretensions.
He established his own publishing house and promoted himself as a man of letters. His early works included a collection of poems titled The Pillow of Sleeplessness, dedicated to nineteen women he considered to be the world’s most beautiful, among them Britain’s Princess Diana and American Playboy model turned French pop singer Jeane Manson. “Manson inspired it, one day she sent me a pillow with her picture on it and a dedication. I took the pillow to bed, but could not sleep all night,” Mustafa confided to German reporters.37
His publishing career was also marked by his fascist, anti-Semitic views. He penned the The Matzoh of Zion, about Damascene Jews allegedly killing Christians in the nineteenth century to use their blood in preparing unleavened bread, matzoh. A pro-Assad Lebanese Christian priest was believed to be the shadow author.
Mustafa relished being the regime’s eccentric, brash, and larger-than-life persona. Critics called him a buffoon and a shameless sex maniac, and they joked that having him as defense minister for decades was Hafez’s way of assuring Americans and Israelis after 1973 that Syria would never again wage war on the Jewish state. But one thing was certain: nobody in the regime ever dared speak or act like Mustafa.
He used the crudest profanities to attack regime enemies in public and was one of the few people his friend Hafez al-Assad felt at ease around and fully trusted.
On special occasions Mustafa loved to dress in his full military regalia, including cap, golden aiguillettes, and some three dozen army medals and decorations hanging from his neck or pinned to his chest. To relax he was often poolside at Damascus’s Sheraton Hotel tanning, playing backgammon, and flirting with young women, according to many Damascenes who recalled seeing him there often, usually in tight, brightly colored swim trunks. He paid the pool membership of many young women.38
There also was a kindly and charitable side to him, friends said. He helped most petitioners who came from the provinces for an audience with him. In the 1980s, the Tlasses adopted a Palestinian baby girl who had reportedly lost her parents in the Lebanese civil war. She was named Sariya and raised as if she were Mustafa’s own child.
By the 1980s Mustafa seemed ready for retirement, but there was still one crucial mission he had to undertake for Hafez: protect the regime from future threats and help to prolong the Assad family’s rule.
Mustafa had no choice but to bow to his son Manaf’s stubborn determination to go for a military career, like Bassel. The fathers decided that their sons would join a recently expanded army division called the Republican Guard.39 After the many attempts to topple the regime, all military and security forces were scrutinized carefully. The Defense Companies, the notorious paramilitary force headed previously by Rifaat, was disbanded and replaced with elite divisions like the Republican Guard and others, which drew on the army’s most competent and trustworthy elements.40 Hafez’s maternal cousins oversaw the unit in charge of his personal protection, and his son Bassel commanded a Guard brigade upon his graduation from the academy ahead of Manaf, while a relative of Hafez’s wife was overall commander of the Guard.
By the early 1980s, the army and security forces had already been purged of hundreds of suspect Sunni officers to make room for more Alawites.41 Standards were lowered at the academy to churn out more Alawite officers. “Many were unfit to be officers, but loyalty became the number-one criteria,” said Manaf. Eighty percent of one batch of 3,000 officers graduating in 1983 were Alawites. “Welcome to the factory of Assad’s cubs,” read a huge sign at the academy’s entrance.
Manaf would later criticize these moves and blame them for ultimately hurting the army, but at the same time he sought to justify his family’s role in backing Hafez’s quest to protect his rule by any means. In addition to their absolute loyalty, the Tlasses were also comforted by what they saw as strong support from the United States and its allies for the regime and its continuity. For the West, a stable and cooperative Assad regime was crucial for ending the war in Lebanon, protecting Israel, and combatting international terrorism.42 Ultimately the Tlasses, too, benefited from the changes in the army. By the 1990s, they had their own annual quota of army officers filled by loyal kinsmen from their hometown Al-Rastan, which became known as “the second Qurdaha” after the Assads’ hometown.43
After graduating from the academy, Manaf underwent additional training in the fall and winter of 1986 and joined the Republican Guard as a junior officer in early 1987. By then it was clear that his childhood friend Bassel was being readied to succeed his father as leader. Syria—a dictatorship masquerading as a democratic republic—was now going to be a dynastic dictatorship disguised as a republic.
“Whenever we asked Hafez if he was grooming Bassel, he would say the decision was up to the entire leadership and not just him, but he was certainly giving his son a lot of leeway and paving the way for him to the top,” said Abdul-Halim Khaddam, Hafez’s vice president.44
It was Hafez’s shrewd tactic to come across as noncommittal in order to expose those in his regime opposed to Bassel.
With help from his father and handpicked mentors, Bassel set out first to assert his authority within the family, the Alawite community, the army, and the security forces. Everyone would have to fear him and recognize his strength. Then he needed to charm Syrians and win their admiration. Finally, he had to be exposed to the region, especially Syrian-occupied Lebanon, and the world.
The first order of business, though, was to burnish the regime’s image, tarnished as it was by its association with international terrorism and the bloody crackdown on its own people. To that end, millions of dollars were spent in the fall of 1987 to build a giant new stadium in the coastal city of Latakia to host the tenth Mediterranean Games, held under the auspices of the International Olympic Committee.
At a grandiose opening ceremony lasting more than three hours, Hafez was greeted like a triumphant but aging Roman emperor. He delivered a speech as the masses feverishly chanted his name, and then the emperor’s son Bassel, a handsome and rugged-looking young man of twenty-five years dressed in a tracksuit, spoke on behalf of Syrian athletes. “We want the [Mediterranean] Sea to be a sea of peace and friendship with seagulls, not warplanes of death and destruction, flying in its skies,” Bassel said confidently as he looked up at his father seated in his special box.45
Athletes from fourteen countries including France, Italy, and Spain paraded in the vast stadium while local students and naval academy cadets put on colorful and carefully choreographed shows set to majestic symphonic music. A massive heart-shaped portrait of Hafez lit up the giant screen. There was also a performance of “Truly Welcome to Syria,” an English song composed for the games.
In the actual games, Syria won the most medals, with Bassel getting two gold and one silver in equestrian competitions. From then on, he became the “golden knight” for the regime’s propaganda machine. “Syrians have been accused of being terrorists, and of course any Syrian knows this is false, and all those that took part in the games, Arabs and non-Arabs, now know this is not true,” Bassel told state television at the end of the games.46
Bassel was hardly just one of the athletes, as the regime sought to portray him. He bought the most expensive thoroughbreds, some costing over $200,000. He completely refurbished an old officers club and shooting range on the western outskirts of Damascus, turning it into his own equestrian club and rest house complete with an artificial lake, game room with billiard and Ping-Pong tables, swimming pools, and an English-style pub with leather armchairs.47
Bassel cruised around the city in the most expensive sports cars, such as a black Lamborghini Diablo. Regime children competed over who owned the latest and fastest model, and they all had guns in their cars. There were other toys, too.
“He kept taking off and landing in the garden all day—it drove us nuts!” said a neighbor of the Assads about the time Bassel showed off his newly acquired helicopter-piloting skills.
Bassel was quick-witted and “unbelievably” self-confident, said a childhood friend of the Assads and Tlasses who was among the regulars at the club.48
“Women were throwing themselves at him. He had real presence,” said the friend.
Those who saw Bassel with his younger brother Bashar found it hard to imagine they shared the same parents. “He [Bashar] was so shy and bland you hardly noticed if he was around,” said the friend who often spotted Bashar sitting quietly at the club’s restaurant eating a sandwich. “Bashar had a real problem with his place in a family with very strong figures—paramount leader Hafez and Bassel, who later practically ruled Syria.”
One of Bashar’s high school friends, regularly invited to the club to swim and play Ping-Pong, witnessed the dynamic between the two brothers. “For us, Bassel was the scary monster. Everyone at the club became tense and nervous when he showed up,” said Bashar’s friend.
Bassel rebuked and even berated Bashar in front of his friends. It mortified Bashar and seemed cruel to others, but Bassel thought he had a duty to toughen up his brother. “You are hopeless. I wish you would get one thing, just one thing, right in your life,” Bassel told Bashar once at the club, critiquing the way he played Ping-Pong.49 Manaf, who often accompanied Bassel to the club, said Bashar would usually leave when his eldest brother arrived because everyone understood that “this was a place Bassel made for himself and his friends.”50
Bassel developed a reputation as the enforcer of discipline, ready to strike against unruly behavior by his siblings and cousins, which he felt disgraced or embarrassed his father and family. He was presenting himself as a worthy inheritor of the role of zaeem, or chief—an established tradition in the paternalistic and male-dominated societies of the Levant and Middle East.
Bassel also clashed with his strong-willed, impulsive elder sister Bushra, who was already in her late twenties. Bushra felt she was more than qualified to be her father’s heir, if it were not for the macho and conservative culture. She became interested in state affairs and sought to assert herself in other ways. She fell in love with a divorced army officer named Assef Shawkat, who was from a humble background. Her family did not approve, but Bushra was completely taken by the mustachioed and swarthy Assef, who was highly ambitious and already a rising star in a special mukhabarat unit. His relationship with Bushra became the talk of Damascus; even regime officials noticed how the lovers kept gazing at each other one time when Bushra accompanied her father to parliament. Assef was assigned to the president’s security detail that day. Bassel strongly opposed his sister’s involvement with Assef and had him arrested and thrown into prison. He was only released after Bushra pleaded with her father. Bassel then demoted Assef to a desk job in the army draft office, a clear act of punishment.51
Hafez was convinced that Bassel possessed the qualities of a natural leader and heir, but at the same time he was uncomfortable with his son’s overt brashness toward even his family. This reminded him of his own brother Rifaat. Once, Manaf witnessed the intervention of Hafez and Bassel’s grandmother Naisa to prevent a dispute between Bassel and some of his thuggish cousins from turning into a shootout on the streets of Latakia. Hafez wished his heir to tread more carefully and be more considered. He wanted Bassel to excel as a military commander but also to be more cerebral, politically minded, and calculating, a bit more like Hafez himself in his youth.
To Hafez, Bassel seemed like someone in a hurry to have it all right away. Hafez was aware of the discomfort that Bassel’s meteoric rise was provoking among his army and mukhabarat chiefs who held prominent positions in the Alawite clans. There was no doubt in Hafez’s mind that Bassel had to be his successor, but he wanted to do it the Hafez al-Assad way, step by step and stealthily.
For his own part, Bassel quickly realized the path to being a zaeem and eventual leader of the Syria of the Assads also required economic patronage and money, lots of it.
In the late 1980s, he began to develop his own business interests and formed a conglomerate of sorts that generated a fortune mainly from commissions, protection money, and kickbacks on a range of both lawful and illicit activities in Lebanon and Syria.52
Bassel kept this part of his life private, guarding it even from Manaf. It was a smart way of raising revenue behind his father’s back, while at the same time securing the allegiance of those in his father’s inner circle who were themselves amassing fabulous wealth. His message to these men was simple: I know exactly what you’re doing and I have no problem with it as long as you play by my rules and I get my share.
Bassel identified the chief smugglers of cigarettes, currency, gold, ancient relics and treasures, medicine, and other goods and cut deals with them, sometimes in the unlikeliest settings. One evening Bassel’s assistant was driving through Abu Rummaneh when he spotted Bassel in one of his sports cars parked outside the Badr mosque. He was not alone. In the front passenger seat was a cigarette-and currency-smuggling kingpin, who was also a clan leader from the Beqaa Valley across the border in Syrian-occupied Lebanon. Bassel noticed his assistant and waved at him to go.
Shortly thereafter, many of the Beqaa Valley’s top hashish growers and drug dealers were brought under Bassel’s protection. His assistant was among those ordered to issue them special Syrian security IDs so they could easily move through Syrian army and mukhabarat checkpoints in the area.53
Another big business was smuggling antiquities from Lebanon and Syria. Bassel often had first dibs on sites known to contain treasures like gold, jewelry, and statues. His assistants nurtured contacts with local tribal leaders who provided maps and lists of possible contents. Promising areas were sealed off by forces sent by Bassel’s aides. Mustafa Tlass and others had a piece of the business, too.54 Before leaving Syria, Bassel’s uncle Rifaat seized priceless treasures buried in sites around the ancient Cherubim Monastery outside Damascus, where Aramaic and pagan Roman temples once stood.
By 1989, Bassel was on track to succeed his father. He began presenting himself as a political leader interested in world affairs, economic progress, reform, and technology—not just a tough guy who drove around in fast cars and always had pretty women at his side.
He tapped people who had studied abroad and returned to Syria to help him set up the Syrian Computer Society. The stated goal was to introduce Syrians to information technology, but naturally this would come under the regime’s strict guidance and control. Other experts prepared feasibility studies on things like new industrial and free-trade zones. Manaf accompanied Bassel on most foreign trips and introduced him to a host of people deemed interesting and worldly.
“We spoke about corruption and Syria’s image in the world. There were hints of ‘things need to change’ but nothing explicit,” said Ammar Abd Rabbo, a Syrian photographer living in France, recalling a meeting with Bassel organized by Manaf. “I mentioned a book I was reading and he said he wanted to buy it. He came across as nice, charming, respectful, not like some sons of officials who were real thugs.”55
There was a second meeting in Paris a year later. Abd Rabbo met Bassel and Manaf on a posh street off the Champs-Élysées. They visited a bookshop where Bassel bought lots of books on history and current affairs in English and French, most of them banned or unavailable in Syria. They lunched at a steakhouse, with most of the conversation revolving around the seismic political events in the world and the Middle East.
They spoke about the Gulf War and Hafez’s decision to join the US-led international coalition to drive his longtime foe Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. They also spoke about the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the chain of events that eventually led to the unraveling of the Soviet Union, Syria’s longtime patron, which came as a real shock to the Syrian regime and provoked an internal crisis. The Assad regime’s debt to the Soviets had surpassed $10 billion.56
Hafez, though, wasted no time in shifting gears. He met for several hours with US president George H. W. Bush in Geneva to express his eagerness to mend fences with Washington and talk about everything, including the situation in Lebanon, peace with Israel, and terrorism charges.57 In 1986, a British court had implicated the Syrian regime in an attempted bombing of an Israeli plane in London, which for a while triggered a diplomatic crisis and economic sanctions against Syria.58
The country’s economy was in shambles by the end of the 1980s. Inflation soared by as much as 60 percent in 1987, while gross domestic product shrank by almost 10 percent in 1989.59 A centrally planned system and a bloated public sector, combined with monopolies and mafia-like business networks benefiting regime leaders and their cronies, were wrecking the economy, especially as foreign aid dried up. “Syria was paralyzed, the country did not know which direction to take, there were not even annual budgets,” said a Syrian journalist.60
The resumption of Saudi handouts could not have come sooner. One of the immediate rewards for Hafez’s stance in the Gulf War was the return of generous financial aid from wealthy Gulf Arab states. The Saudis and their fellow Gulf monarchs greatly appreciated Hafez’s solidarity with them and his decision to dispatch Syrian troops to take part in the US-led effort to dislodge Saddam’s troops from Kuwait and thus defuse what they considered an existential threat to all the oil-rich dynasties. Previously, after he seized power in 1970, the Saudis had been among Hafez’s most enthusiastic financial backers, but they pulled their support a decade later when Hafez pursued his own agenda in Lebanon and allied Syria with the Iranians against Saddam, whom the Saudis had generously backed and funded before he invaded Kuwait.
Hafez’s maneuvering during the 1990 Gulf War not only helped him ease the bubbling discontent at home over the economy but also won him hegemony over Lebanon after the official end of the civil war there in late 1989 in a Saudi-mediated and US-blessed accord. The Syrians, a de facto occupation force, were entrusted to enforce peace.
More important for Hafez was securing the stability, financial resources, and international political support he needed in order to hand over power to Bassel at the right moment. If the make-believe victory over Israel in 1973 was the vehicle for turning Hafez into an absolute ruler, then the promise of reform and openness was what was going to help transfer the reins to Bassel. The regime took out a four-page ad in the New York Times promoting Syria’s new “open door” policies toward foreign private investment.61
In late November 1993, Manaf, a rising officer in the Republican Guard, oversaw tank training maneuvers in the desert northeast of Damascus. Bassel was watching. He was the real force in the army, negotiating foreign arms deals on behalf of his father even though his official rank was only major.62 “Bassel was already the leader of everything,” said Manaf.
It was a crucial moment for Manaf to prove himself and affirm his loyalty to the man who was about to inherit Syria, especially after doubts had emerged a few years back over Manaf’s commitment to a military career. For a while Manaf was tormented and felt demeaned by the army’s overt sectarianism and the jokes made about his father. Officially, Mustafa Tlass was Hafez al-Assad’s deputy for military affairs and he was also the paramount leader’s confidant and lifetime companion but still he was not “one of us” in the eyes of many powerful Alawites around Hafez.
Manaf’s privileged and cushy upbringing had shielded him somewhat from Syria’s realities.63
“Who do you think you are? You need to be more humble. You and your father work for us at the end of the day,” Alawite officers, including those lower in rank than him, often told Manaf.64 He thought about quitting the army but was ultimately dissuaded after a four-hour talk with his father.
“You must submit and learn to cajole and flatter. If you can’t do that then you won’t go far, perhaps no more than a brigade commander. I am still proud of you though,” Mustafa told Manaf.65 In the end Manaf stayed, with the thinking being that he would have an easier time as his childhood friend Bassel assumed more responsibilities and eventually took over from Hafez.
By 1993, Bassel’s time was divided between his Republican Guard base and a private office high up on one of the flanks of Mount Qasioun overlooking Damascus. From there he ran the government and sent daily instructions to the prime minister, even though he still had no formal title. By then Bassel had amassed a personal fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars, most of it held in Austrian bank accounts.66
Ahead of the first meeting between Hafez and US president Bill Clinton in Geneva in mid-January 1994, Bassel sounded out his network of advisers for tips on how the regime should plan the trip and what level of media access to allow. Hafez detested reporters—especially foreign ones who, from his point of view, were prone to ask annoying questions about human rights and regime links to terrorism while ignoring Syria’s right to resist its “imperialist and Zionist enemies.”
Bassel was not accompanying his father to Geneva but knew this was a crucial meeting, less for the substance—advancing peace talks with Israel, which could take years to achieve if ever—and more for the promise of improving bilateral ties with the United States and burnishing the regime’s image. There was already great chemistry between Hafez and Clinton during their phone calls and correspondence over the past year, and the Assads wanted to capitalize on that and make sure nothing disturbed the developing warmth between the United States and Syria. Hardly anyone was talking about atrocities and human rights abuses committed over a bloody reign spanning a quarter of a century. Hafez thought Clinton was no different from his predecessors, and he believed that all US presidents cared mainly about the security of Israel and the Middle East’s oil supplies, not how he treated his opponents at home. Furthermore, Clinton was eager to make history as the president who brought comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace to the region, and securing Hafez’s buy-in was crucial to his plan.
On January 16, 1994, Hafez huddled with Clinton for nearly five hours.67 During the press conference that followed, Clinton expressed admiration for Hafez’s “legendary stamina.” “I can tell you his reputation does not exceed the reality; he deserves every bit of it,” said a beaming Clinton, amid laughter.
The next day, Hafez was in an extremely good mood on the flight home to Damascus. He was out of the woods and back in the game. All his plans were on track and everything was going to turn out okay, he thought. He was confident that he was not only stabilizing the regime and paving the way for Bassel’s takeover but also shedding Syria’s pariah status and transforming Syria into a partner in America’s endeavors throughout the Middle East: rebuilding war-ravaged Lebanon, advancing Arab–Israeli peace, securing the oil-rich Gulf from the likes of Saddam, and even forging a détente of sorts with Iran’s mullahs. All roads passed through Damascus.
Hafez thought he could convince the Americans to end Syria’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism for the sake of starting formal peace talks with Israel. During his meeting with Clinton, Hafez also brought up his crucial ally, the Islamic Republic of Iran. He told the US president he could not ignore Iran and that he should try to find ways to engage with it despite the deep hostility and enmity between the two countries. Clinton promised Hafez he would discuss Iran with him later over the telephone.68
Hafez had set out to build an alliance with Iran’s clerics from the moment they seized power after the 1979 revolution. Syria was the only Arab state siding with Iran during its long and bloody war of attrition with Iraq in the 1980s. Hafez found the perfect match in Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini and his clerical regime. Like Hafez and his Alawite-led regime, Iran’s Shiite clergy had to contend with a region dominated by a hostile Sunni majority. Like him, they ruled through a blend of revolutionary dogma, terror, and pragmatism. For the Iranians Hafez was the master of Lebanon, where they set out patiently and slowly to build their first and most durable outpost among that country’s downtrodden Shiites.
Five days after Hafez’s meeting with Clinton, Bassel jumped into his Mercedes-Benz 500 E, a high-performance sedan dubbed a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” when it came out. His maternal cousin Hafez Makhlouf, a rising mukhabarat officer, sat in the passenger seat. A guard was in the back seat. It was already a quarter past seven in the morning and they needed to be at the airport at eight to catch the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. Bassel was traveling for state and personal business.69 At that moment in Germany, a trial was underway accusing the Assad regime of involvement in a bombing in Berlin in the early 1980s.70
Damascus Airport was only fifteen miles away, but he was very late and could miss the flight.
The speedometer exceeded 100 miles per hour as Bassel got on the airport road. A thick fog had rolled in that winter morning, and, by the time he realized that the road had reached a large roundabout ahead, the brakes could not slow the car in time. The car slammed into the roundabout’s concrete edge, flipping and rolling over multiple times. The crash’s impact was on Bassel’s side. He did not have the seat belt on and his head smashed into the metal frame in between the windshield and the driver’s door, killing him instantly. Hafez Makhlouf, who was wearing a seat belt, survived but suffered fractures. The bodyguard in the back crawled out through the shattered rear windshield. The Frankfurt flight was delayed for several hours because of poor visibility.
An hour later Manaf’s phone rang. It was his mother, Lamia. “I have terrible news,” she said.
Manaf had in his hands at that very moment an official letter promoting him to captain in the Republican Guard. It had been issued the day before.
“I felt my whole life flashing in front of me. He was my childhood friend, we had history together. I would be a lowlife if I said I was not devastated,” said Manaf.
At around the same time, Adnan Makhlouf, commander of the Republican Guard, called Mustafa. There was a real crisis in the leadership over how to tell Hafez. The increasingly paranoid and conspiracy-minded leader could think his son’s death was part of a coup attempt. It was decided that Hafez’s longtime friend Mustafa, army chief of staff Hikmat Shihabi, and foreign minister Farouq al-Sharaa, who had just been with him in Geneva for the Clinton meeting, would go to the president’s home. They arrived at about nine o’clock in the morning. Hafez was still in his pajamas. He had a robe over his nightclothes when he came into the living room to see them. He remained quiet when they broke the tragic news, but he looked shell-shocked and shattered. “God gives and God takes away,” mumbled Hafez after a long silence.71
Hafez went to the hospital and brought his son’s body back home. It was shrouded in a white sheet and placed inside a coffin. Hafez did not utter a word. He just locked himself in a room with the coffin and mourned over Bassel’s body all night long, emerging only at daybreak.72 Nobody slept that night, as a tearful Bushra consoled her grief-stricken mother, Aniseh. Maher and Majd stayed close by. They still could not fathom what had happened.
Bashar, who was studying ophthalmology in London, was summoned back immediately on a private jet. Unlike the others, he reacted with unusual calmness and hardly any visible emotion.
As the motorcade bearing Bassel’s coffin made its way from the family home in Malki, across Umayyad Square and down the Mezzeh highway, throngs of women from a nearby Alawite slum lined the side of the road. The women wailed and waved posters of Bassel. Soldiers pushed them back as they tried to throw themselves in the convoy’s path.
At the Mezzeh air base, the coffin was loaded onto the presidential plane. Hafez, accompanied by Mustafa and members of the leadership, waved from the plane’s window to a sorrowful crowd gathered near the runway. They flew to the Assad hometown of Qurdaha in western Syria to bury Bassel.
Syria was plunged in official mourning for days as Quran readings were broadcast day and night from mosque loudspeakers all over the country. In official state media Bassel was eulogized as the “great martyr.” “Syria was drowning in tears” and “hearts were bleeding” for the “beloved of the millions,” “the golden knight,” “the falling star.”73
“At the age of thirty-two, at the peak of his youth and promise, he left life, his people, and his homeland,” said a bespectacled and frail-looking Hafez in a televised speech mourning his son.74
What he probably did not know was that as he spoke there were tens of thousands of Syrians everywhere—in Aleppo, Damascus, and Hama—who were secretly celebrating Bassel’s death as divine retribution.