Did you kill Hariri?” Manaf asked Bashar.
“No, of course not,” said Bashar without flinching.
For weeks Manaf had been consumed by doubts as to whether the awkward boy he grew up with could turn into a brazen and cold-hearted killer. Manaf knew that Bashar thoroughly despised Hariri; Bashar often complained to him about how the billionaire politician was defying the Assads and doing what he pleased in Lebanon by bribing and co-opting senior Syrian mukhabarat officers. Manaf also knew that Bashar was determined to destroy Hariri. There were many unanswered questions.
At the same time, Manaf felt that persisting in his questioning of Bashar and probing too much into the Hariri killing was a dangerous thing to do.
His instincts were right. Eight months after Hariri’s killing, Ghazi Kanaan, a mukhabarat chief who had ruled Lebanon as a fiefdom on behalf of the Assad family for two decades before he was recalled by Bashar, was found dead in his office in central Damascus.1 The official government story was that he committed suicide with his pistol, but several regime insiders believed Kanaan was killed by the Assads because they suspected that he had information implicating them and Iran’s Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, in Hariri’s killing, and that he might share it with the Americans to clear his name.2 Kanaan posed another potential danger to Bashar. He was a charismatic and powerful general who, at the behest of the Assads, had long-standing contacts with the Central Intelligence Agency and could have been a replacement for Bashar should the fallout from Hariri’s killing lead to efforts to oust him. Kanaan hailed from an influential Alawite clan that could rival the Assads. “Bashar became scared of him [Kanaan],” said Manaf.3
The US ambassador to Damascus had been recalled immediately after the Hariri assassination, which the Bush administration called a “heinous act of terrorism.”4
Then came a UN Security Council resolution which established an international commission to investigate Hariri’s killing, followed by a resolution compelling Syria to cooperate with the inquiry or face sanctions or possibly even military action.
A few weeks before his death, Kanaan had been among the Syrian officials interrogated in Damascus by the UN commission that, days later, issued a report detailing “converging evidence” of involvement by the Syrian intelligence services (mukhabarat) and their Lebanese associates in Hariri’s killing.5 A version of the report that was leaked before it was subsequently redacted and submitted to the Security Council had names of suspects, including Bashar’s brother Maher, his brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, and Bashar’s mentor and former speech writer, Bahjat Suleiman.6
For a while after the Hariri assassination, it seemed that the West, particularly France and the United States, was finally getting tough on the Assads and their allies. Washington even looked for ways to back and fund opposition figures in and out of Syria. They included regime opponents from the short-lived Damascus Spring and a subsequent umbrella group formed in the fall of 2005 called the Damascus Declaration. Khaddam, who remained in the post of vice president after Hafez’s death, defected to his Paris mansion and began cooperating with the Americans and French.
“Hariri’s death was a turning point and the biggest test of the first five years of his [Bashar’s] rule. It was decisive,” according to Manaf.
Bashar had to strategize his next moves carefully, and he looked back to the advice he had received from his mentors when he succeeded Hafez:
1. Time is on your side, so wait and let it play out because Syria, unlike France and the United States, has no real elections, parliament, and public opinion to contend with. Their leaders come and go, rise and fall, but you stay.
2. Maneuver, stall, mislead, and lie, but use force, extreme force, when necessary. Westerners will ultimately admire your toughness and perseverance. They love strong people and winners.
3. Make sure you have leverage and the right cards to play and hit them where it hurts. They will eventually come crawling on their knees to deal with you.
“If you intend to stay in power, you must make others afraid,” Mustafa advised, a week after Hariri’s death.7 “We used weapons to assume power, and we wanted to hold onto it. Anyone who wants power will have to take it from us with weapons.” Mustafa, now in his early seventies and retired from formal service in the regime, epitomized the old guard that Bashar looked to for guidance in this trying period.
As the West’s pressure mounted, Bashar’s partnership with Iran and Hezbollah strengthened. Together, they took on the United States and its allies, and the battlegrounds were Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Iran was worried about encirclement by its US enemy, which moved into Afghanistan to the east and Iraq to the west under the guise of the war on terror and bringing democracy to the Middle East. With US troops bogged down in Afghanistan, Iran and its allies did everything to set Iraq ablaze while also going on the offensive in Lebanon and elsewhere to neutralize their adversaries’ moves. Iran said it was siding with the region’s oppressed people, supporting legitimate resistance movements, and standing up to Israel and “Zionism.”
Iran’s enemies, most notably Saudi Arabia, which had considered Hariri its man, said that Tehran wanted to destabilize the region by exporting its Islamic revolutionary ideology and militant brand of Shiite Islam. For Iran’s turbaned clerical rulers, though, their efforts were ultimately about both confronting what they saw as US hostility that threatened their grip on power, and also projecting something akin to imperial might—influence and reach from Tehran to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean via Iraq and Syria. Religion was simply the cloak for these goals and ambitions. The proud descendants of the Persian Empire yearned to be a major power again.
In the immediate aftermath of Hariri’s assassination in February 2005, a wave of demonstrations led by anti-Syrian-regime movements and parties broke out in Beirut and precipitated the withdrawal of Syrian soldiers and security forces from Lebanon. The Cedar Revolution or Independence Uprising, as it became known, was hardly the end of Lebanon’s woes. The already dysfunctional country immediately became deeply polarized and lurched from one crisis to another. Lebanese political forces backed by Saudi Arabia, the United States, and others, and comprised mainly of Christians and Sunnis, moved to dismantle the Hezbollah militia, a virtual state-within-a-state backed by Iran and Syria and supported by most Lebanese Shiites and some Christians. A wave of bombings and assassinations targeted ardent critics of Hezbollah and the Assad regime as well as those connected to the Hariri investigation. The level of violence and retribution was reminiscent of the terror campaign unleashed by the drug baron Pablo Escobar against the Colombian state for going after him in the late 1980s.
Car bombs killed Gibran Tueni, publisher of Lebanon’s most respected daily newspaper, Annahar, and Samir Kassir, an editorialist in the same paper who wrote eloquently about the short-lived Damascus Spring that followed Bashar’s ascent to power in 2000. “What you can feel is that the Syrian intelligentsia was able to regain in record speed its ability to criticize and analyze despite having been in the freezer for decades… What you can feel is that when the fear barrier collapses, it does not get rebuilt easily,” wrote Kassir in the summer of 2001.8
Facing mounting pressure to relinquish its weapons, Bashar’s ally Hezbollah killed and kidnapped Israeli soldiers in the summer of 2006 in an operation it said was intended to compel Israel to free Hezbollah prisoners. Israel responded with a blistering campaign of airstrikes that escalated into a war lasting nearly a month. More than a thousand Lebanese were killed and more than 4,000 wounded, mostly civilians, while 43 civilians and 119 soldiers were killed on the Israeli side. An estimated one million Lebanese were displaced as sections of Beirut’s southern suburbs and entire towns in southern Lebanon, all Hezbollah strongholds, were destroyed. Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets on northern Israel, with its chief, Nasrallah, boasting that his rockets could go beyond Haifa, some thirty miles from the Lebanese border.9 “During the July 2006 war,” said Manaf, “Bashar gave Nasrallah 20,000 rockets.”10 Nasrallah later said Bashar’s rocket supplies played a decisive role in the war.11
The war ended in mid-August with a Security Council–imposed ceasefire to be monitored by UN forces stationed in southern Lebanon. Israel’s failure to destroy Hezbollah, despite Israel’s vastly superior army and US support, allowed Bashar, Hezbollah, and Iran to claim victory and tout their own narrative.
Hezbollah put up billboards everywhere, proclaiming “divine victory” and asserting that the war had been part of Bush’s quest to redraw the Middle East’s political map. “This is the new Middle East,” read a Hezbollah poster affixed to a lamppost, one of few structures left standing in a southern Lebanon village leveled by Israeli bombing. “Made in the USA, Registered Trademark,” said another propped atop a flattened building in Beirut’s southern suburb.
The day after the ceasefire took effect in Lebanon, a defiant and triumphant Bashar weighed in from Damascus. He said it was he and his allies who were reshaping the Middle East by resisting America’s “systematic aggression.” “I am happy to be meeting you in the new Middle East, the way we understand it and desire it, even though the job isn’t complete yet,” said Bashar at a conference for the Syrian Journalists Union, a body controlled by his Baath Party.12
Bashar mocked as “half men” Arab leaders like a Saudi prince who chastised Hezbollah for provoking the war with its “foolhardy” actions. Bashar went on to present his own facts and theories. He said that Israel had started the war and its actions were premeditated; an extension of a US-led conspiracy to weaken his regime, assassinate Hariri and blame it on Syria, drive his forces out of Lebanon, dismantle Hezbollah, “subdue Arabs” by forcing them to accept peace with Israel, and divert attention from “the failure of the US occupation of Iraq.” It was the same US conspiracy his father had railed against in December 1979.
Bashar spoke with disdain about all UN resolutions passed against his regime and Hezbollah, and he mocked European governments for sending him letters to express concern for the failing health of a Damascus Spring leader he jailed in 2001. “They are very worried about the health of this man—what nobility, what humanity, what grandeur,” Bashar remarked sarcastically, barely containing a smile.
Bashar relished every moment of his speech; he was getting back at his tormentors and detractors, according to Manaf. Here was vengeance against all those who thought he was a soft and inexperienced leader who could be pushed around. Bashar believed that the 2006 war in Lebanon was as much his own victory as it was Hezbollah’s. He outsmarted the Americans, the French, and their allies and taught them a lesson for driving him out of Lebanon and trying to isolate him. He regained leverage. He regarded Hezbollah’s resilience as his personal achievement, too, on par with or even more important than his father’s challenge to Israel in 1973. People would talk about him from now on and stop comparing him with his father. He was sick of hearing people tell him that Hafez would have handled matters this or that way.
“Hezbollah protected us, gave us back respect, and restored our standing,” an ecstatic Bashar told Manaf after the devastating summer war.13 In fact, Bashar’s fascination with Hezbollah and its leader, Nasrallah, only intensified after the war. He commissioned a study of the lessons the Syrian army could learn from Hezbollah and wanted to create units resembling Hezbollah, which relied on asymmetric warfare.14
Manaf was unconvinced. “There’s a difference between a militia and a national army like ours with its own doctrine,” a skeptical Manaf, who was part of this army, told Bashar.
But Bashar’s instincts were right. Only Iran, Hezbollah, and sectarian militias modeled after Hezbollah could ultimately protect him and his regime. Although Syria’s army was one of the oldest and largest in the region and its generals ruled Syria following independence, Hafez neutralized the army and made it completely subservient to his agenda and power structure. This accelerated in the early 1980s after challenges to his rule. Members of his Alawite community were drafted in droves into the officer corps. Units like the Republican Guard and Fourth Division, organized on a sectarian basis and blindly loyal to the Assads, were favored over the rest of the force. Endemic corruption and lack of resources further eroded the army and its morale. Some derisively nicknamed the Syrian army jaish abou-shahata, “an army in plastic slippers.”
A few weeks before the 2006 war in Lebanon, Bashar signed a mutual defense pact with the Iranians and formalized long-term military cooperation. After the war, the facilities and concessions Bashar gave Hezbollah and Iran were unprecedented.15
Syria became a hub for the shipment of weapons to Hezbollah, and operatives from the militia and Iran had unfettered access to the Scientific Studies and Research Center, where missiles and rockets were developed and tested and a biological and chemical warfare program was already in place. A senior officer in the Republican Guard, the unit in which Manaf was a commander, was tasked by Bashar to ensure that Hezbollah and the Iranians overcame all obstacles while operating in Syria. Bashar regularly met with the leader of Iran’s overseas covert operations, Qasem Soleimani, and Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, who played a key role in the 2006 war and was on Washington’s terrorist list for major attacks against the United States in the 1980s. “They kept telling Bashar how great he was and how he was becoming leader of the axis of resistance; they knew how to charm him and inflate his ego,” remembered Manaf.
Naturally, Iran and Hezbollah had their own agenda and ultimately took over Syria’s role in Lebanon after 2005. Through deadly violence, intimidation, and shrewd deal making, Hezbollah, with Iran behind it, became the most powerful force in Lebanon—a militia with a private army but also a political movement and crucial partner in the national government. It was a successful replica and extension of Iran’s Islamic revolutionary model on the Mediterranean, but Tehran’s ambition didn’t stop in Lebanon. “Syria itself started changing, Bashar submitted to the Iranians and Hezbollah, he gave them most of his cards, he became their hostage,” said Manaf.
That’s not how Bashar saw it. As far as he was concerned, if the West and their Arab allies wanted stability in Lebanon and sought to open channels with Iran and even Hezbollah, then they had to come to Damascus first to meet him. And they did.
“What can they do about many issues in the Middle East that Syria is essential in solving them? Nothing. We are essential. They cannot isolate Syria,” Bashar told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour during a 2005 interview in Damascus when she asked him if he was worried about fallout from Hariri’s assassination.16
All roads went through Damascus, reckoned Bashar.
Iraq was another place where Bashar sought to gain leverage over the West. When the United States invaded Iraq, hundreds of former regime officials, including Saddam’s sons and his lieutenants, crossed the border into Syria with large suitcases of cash. Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, stayed for a while at the Le Méridien Hotel in Latakia but then Bashar asked them to leave after he faced pressure from the United States to give them up.17 They returned to northern Iraq and were later killed in a US raid in Mosul. But Bashar did permit several Saddam loyalists to establish bases in Syria in order to oversee and support the insurgency in Iraq.18 A pro-insurgency TV station glorifying attacks on Americans later broadcast from Damascus.
Syria also became the main transit point for Arab fighters going to Iraq to join groups like Al-Qaeda’s local affiliate, especially between 2004 and 2007. About 75 percent of suicide bombings in Iraq during a one-year period starting in August 2006 were carried out by foreigners coming through Syria.19 In return for payment, Syrian mukhabarat officers facilitated the flow of men, cash, and materiel needed to sustain Al-Qaeda’s Iraq branch.20 Jihadist training camps opened in the Syrian desert near Iraq and a network of Muslim clerics in northern Syria and around Damascus, many working secretly for the mukhabarat, raised funds for Iraqi insurgents, preached violence against the United States and its allies to religious and impoverished Syrian youth, and helped them travel to Iraq.21 “It was a chance for Bashar to get rid of Islamist fanatics at home,” said Manaf.22
As America’s Western coalition partners began to leave Iraq in the face of mounting violence, it was mainly the Bush administration and the US military that spoke out against the Syrian regime’s role in supporting the insurgency and Al-Qaeda. Bashar and regime officials flat-out denied involvement but noted that it was impossible to control the Iraq–Syria border, which they claimed was as porous as the divide between the United States and Mexico. Occasionally they justified Iraq’s insurgency as legitimate resistance against US occupation and a manifestation of the rage that this occupation provoked in Arab youth, including Syrians.
Bashar regularly offered his own explanation for suicide bombings and terrorism. “Terrorism today is a state of mind that on the one hand has to do with ignorance and on the other can be attributed to a feeling of desperation over the political situation… This appears to have been the background of this attack: a reaction to America’s policies in Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan,” he said in September 2006, referring to a foiled armed attack on the US embassy in Damascus in which the assailants and one Syrian guard were killed.23 Bashar called the attackers “isolated young men from the Damascus suburbs” inspired by Al-Qaeda. Some in the regime said that the attack was orchestrated by Bashar’s mukhabarat as a way of easing pressure from the Bush administration by reminding it of the regime’s usefulness in combatting terrorism while also highlighting the perils of not cooperating with Syria. The regime called acts like these rasayel, “messages and signals,” which it sent out from time to time.24
On top of the insurgency against the Americans and their allies, Iraq was embroiled in a Sunni–Shiite sectarian war that killed tens of thousands at its height between 2005 and 2007. Sunni rebels, ex-Saddam loyalists, and their supporters fought the Shiite-led government and its allied militias, backed by Iran. The collapse of Saddam’s regime—a fraying and decrepit structure that nonetheless held the country’s contradictory bits together—ushered in a revival of ethnic, sectarian, and tribal identity. These affiliations were people’s best protection in the chaos that ensued.
While Bashar’s support for the Sunni insurgency, also aided by Iran’s enemies like Saudi Arabia, was at odds with Tehran’s backing of Shiites, they proved in the end to be complementary.25 Both Iran and Syria wanted to make sure that America was besieged on all fronts and would ultimately withdraw in humiliation; even some of Washington’s regional allies had no interest in seeing democracy flourish in Iraq. Iraqi blood spilled for these agendas.
By the end of 2006, one of the main recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel tasked with assessing the situation in Iraq and finding a way out of the quagmire, was the need for the United States to “engage constructively” with Iran and Syria.26 Punishing Bashar for Hariri’s killing was no longer the top priority.
Six years into Bashar’s rule, reminders of Hafez were still ever-present and continued to loom large for the young leader. The Tlasses wondered how “the eternal leader” would have handled the Hariri killing crisis and other challenges swirling around the regime.
In downtown Damascus, twin billboards of Hafez and Bashar side by side rose above the racetrack at the Tishreen Stadium. Both looked severe, but Hafez stared ahead coldly and intently while a youthful Bashar glanced oddly to the side. For those who knew Bashar well, this billboard represented the “old Bashar,” someone who “never dared look you in the eyes”27—the nervous and shy young man who grappled with the Syria he inherited from his father.
But Bashar had remarkably changed in the last few years as he grew confident in his strength and the seeming limitlessness of his power. “He became someone who lied and looked you in the eyes. You knew he was lying but he dared you to call him out. He was not like that before,” said a childhood friend.28
Bashar, though, remained an enigma to outsiders. Behind the mask of Bashar the reformist and urbane young leader was Bashar the remorseless and unscrupulous autocrat, who was ready to kill if necessary.
In the first five years of his rule, Bashar learned very quickly that to preserve the power he had inherited from his father he had to crush any aspirations for genuine political reform and all challenges to the system. At the start of the sixth year, Bashar began to consolidate power and put his own imprint on the country. In the process, the old guard—people from his father’s era, like the Tlasses—gradually lost out to Bashar’s immediate family and those with cultlike loyalty to him and his vision.
In the family, Bashar’s youngest brother, Maher, was among those who amassed greater powers. Formally he was an officer in the army’s Fourth Division, but he began overseeing all of the army’s so-called elite units, dominated by members of the Assads’ Alawite minority. They were the last line of defense should the rest of the army crumble. Maher started weighing in on Bashar’s key strategic decisions and was among the few in the regime interacting with Hezbollah and facilitating its activities in Syria.29 Maher fueled the perception of himself as a shadowy, mysterious, and ruthless leader, who, though rarely appearing in public, was the real power behind the throne. He saw himself more like tough Bassel than polished Bashar, a dynamic reminiscent of the one between Hafez and his brother Rifaat. Maher also moved into the economy, cultivating a network of businessmen in the cigarette market, media and advertising, and public works, as well as government contracts to supply computers to schools. Maher’s business fronts later monopolized steel manufacturing.
“But really, the big stuff was Rami, Bashar’s partner,” Manaf recalled.30 From the start, it was clear that Bashar’s cousin Rami and the Makhloufs were going to play a central role in Bashar’s plans for the economy. Short, balding, and baby-faced, Rami was four years younger than Bashar and had a degree in civil engineering. He was previously regarded as one of Bassel’s loyal foot soldiers, but when Bassel died his allegiance transferred to Bashar.
“We are going to have economic liberalization but the family will take the lion share,” Manaf declared to his friends. Rami’s main cash cow became his control of Syria’s largest telecommunications company, SyriaTel. It was a concession that was supposed to revert to the state after the network was built. “But they found a way around it and he continued to keep most profits,” said Manaf. The Makhloufs also operated duty-free shops at Syria’s borders and airports, and both their real and front companies bid on every major government construction contract, so winning was assured.
The major transformation and entry into the big leagues, so to speak, came in late 2006, when the Assads and Makhloufs established their own business cartel, a private holding company called Cham (“Levant” in Arabic), in which some seventy businessmen, many from Syria’s Sunni bourgeois and urban families, became partners. Through a complex network of new companies and joint ventures as well as offshore shells and fronts, Cham became involved in every sector of the economy, including aviation, banking, consumer products, manufacturing, oil and gas, real-estate development, retail, and tourism. The partners contributed initial capital of $350 million and launched projects worth $1.2 billion in the first year.31 Bashar tapped Nabil al-Kuzbari, a Vienna-based Austro-Syrian tycoon nicknamed the “paper king” because of his sprawling global holdings in the paper industry, to be Cham’s board chairman. Rami was vice chairman and held the real power. Kuzbari was someone both the Assads and Makhloufs trusted, having dealt with him for decades. He was close to Bassel when he branched out into business and amassed a huge fortune starting in the late 1980s, but Kuzbari repeatedly denied being one of the Assad family’s money men.32 “Cham Holding is the project of the country’s future,” declared Kuzbari in 2007. “It takes Syrian companies from the level of the individual and family and small foreign partnerships to a truly giant and purely Syrian company.”33
Bashar sanctioned a similar but smaller holding company called Souriya (“Syria” in Arabic) that brought together younger businessmen from the same urban Sunni milieu. In effect, Bashar modernized and corporatized the mafia-like Hafez-era crony business networks which produced so much corruption by regime insiders that it drove the economy into the ground several times. Bashar believed that he could reconfigure and control this system in a way that would not only avoid past mistakes, but also generate real economic growth and prosperity. It would give the impression of reform while ensuring that he and his family were the prime beneficiaries. When it came to business and the economy, Bashar was thinking big—on a scale Hafez had never envisioned.
In another departure from his father, Bashar sought to draw in businessmen from Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and traditional economic capital, who had been shunned by Hafez because of the city’s role in the uprising against him. To help him with that task, Bashar turned to Suleiman Maarouf, the son of the family he had spent a lot of time with in London. Suleiman’s father was Alawite like Bashar, but both his mother and wife came from prominent Aleppan Sunni families, and he also held British citizenship. He was seven years younger than Bashar and moved back to Syria shortly after Bassel’s death, as Bashar was being readied to inherit power. Suleiman became a partner in the Cham and Souriya holdings and was the Assad family’s front for investments in banking, car dealerships, e-commerce, publishing, media, and tourism. Suleiman imported Apple computers and devices, Bashar’s favorites, and built a resort near the Assad family hometown called Mountain Breeze.34
As Syria looked primed for an economic boom, Syrian expatriates in Europe and Arab Gulf countries flocked in for a piece of the action. Everyone was welcome—as long as they did not infringe on the oligarchs.
Bashar’s logic was simple and practical. He wanted to secure his power by giving Syria’s Sunni majority a real stake in the regime, albeit a financial one, not political. The hope was that wealth and employment opportunities generated by this partnership would energize the economy and trickle down to average Syrians—and, more important, buy loyalty. These economic networks spawned associations, charities, and media outlets dedicated to projecting Bashar and his wife, Asma, as reformists and beloved leaders. They were going to be the role models for their youthful citizens. It was the cult of Hafez adapted to the twenty-first century. The clearest manifestation was the Menhebak (“We Love You”) campaign orchestrated by Rami and other businessmen around the May 2007 referendum to renew Bashar’s term for another seven years.
If Bashar’s cousin Rami became the poster child of the Assad regime’s corrupt class, then his equally business-savvy wife, Asma, was going to be the embodiment of soft power. By 2007, Asma grouped her NGOs and civil society initiatives under the Syria Trust for Development, in effect another Assad family cartel, but one dedicated to showing Syrians and the world that the regime was evolving and listening to its people by taking the lead in bettering Syrian society through learning and culture.
More crucially, Asma had to do her part to demonstrate to the world that the Assads were not killers and sponsors of terrorism, as some Western governments charged. These were hateful lies, just look at Syria’s first lady backing women “cycling for peace” from Aleppo to Jerusalem, countered the regime.35
Asma brought a regimented, rigorous, and at times aggressive approach to her work and life, as might be expected in the cutthroat world of London and New York investment banking but was largely unheard of in genteel Damascus, especially for women.36 She usually woke up around five o’clock in the morning, worked out, had her first staff meeting around seven to go over the day’s schedule, walked her children to school, and then went to her private office. She worked almost nonstop until 5:00 p.m., which was the start of family time. Her passion for her role and mission was real.37
“She reads reports in detail, has strategic and detailed commentary about everything, and knows where the organization is at all times. This is not somebody who just wants to keep up appearances,” said Omar Abdelaziz Hallaj, an architect and urban development expert hired by Asma as chief executive officer of her Trust.
Like any astute businessperson, Asma knew that image, public relations, and marketing were crucial both at home and abroad. She adapted her message and look to the audience. In her interactions with the West, she always brought up her investment banking experience, how she planned to go to the Harvard Business School, and why she dropped everything to help Bashar transform Syria. She wore designer outfits and shoes, wanted to seduce and charm, and was adored by fashion magazines, but at the same time she complained that too much attention was given to her appearance and not enough to her ideas and work.
In her trips around Syria, she went out of her way to bond with the people she met by listening to them and their problems. She took off her shoes before entering homes and sat on the floor, as was the custom in rural areas. She played, colored, and laughed with children at the discovery centers attached to her Syria Trust. In meetings with government officials, she urged them to be creative and take initiative and risk.
But at times she seemed oblivious to how things really worked in a country and society that had been ruled by lies, fear, and terror for decades.
“Can you imagine, these people went to Apamea but none was able to write what they saw for themselves!” she complained to Franco-Syrian photographer Ammar Abd Rabbo, who was part of a media pool accompanying her on a visit to the ruins of Apamea, near the city of Hama, with an Italian archaeologist.38 Syrian reporters on the trip asked Asma’s staff to provide press releases or instructions on what to publish.
“You know it’s more complicated than that. They must know what to write because any mistake can be very costly,” the mild-mannered Abd Rabbo explained to Asma.
“You think so? Come on, I do not believe it,” she replied.
It was perfectly understandable for someone born and bred in Britain not to be able to fathom these requests or fully appreciate what could happen to people who took too much initiative in the Assads’ Syria. This is a country ruled from top to bottom by the reports, or taqareer, that the mukhabarat and its army of agents and informants write about everyone and everything. Their reach extends to every facet of public and private life. Most ministers and senior government officials have a mukhabarat agent watching over them. The mukhabarat accords extra attention and resources to media, publishing, and propaganda. Mukhabarat agents are on the staff of the Ministry of Information and major media outlets, they pen editorials and articles posing as independent writers or researchers, and they appear as pundits on TV shows.
Unlike Asma, Bashar knew precisely the kind of regime he had inherited, and he intended to be as ruthless as his father or more if that’s what it took to preserve it. But, like his wife, he too was frustrated with the old way of doing things. He wanted to reshape the mukhabarat and his regime’s organs of terror to better reflect the modern world, recent technological advances, and the persona he sought to cultivate. They had to be less crude and obvious and more calibrated and stealthy. They needed to prioritize threats and know when to act and when to back off and give people space. Power and strength must be projected differently.
This thinking was reflected in Bashar’s obsession with his image and narrative. The last thing he wanted was to be a stereotypical dictator’s son. He wanted everyone, including those closest to him, to see a dynamic, fit, and polished leader who shunned confrontation and threats and favored calm and logical discourse. He loved to use metaphors to make his points. He often told Westerners that he chose eye surgery as a profession because it involved little blood.
Even though Bashar put a premium on the advice of trusted family members and senior mukhabarat officers, he cast the net widely, soliciting as many opinions as possible and showing that he was trying to build consensus around any decision. There were long chats, “brainstorming sessions,” and consultations with advisers, ministers, businessmen, and friends from all walks of life.39
Bashar hoped he’d be given the time to fully reshape his regime according to his vision, but he had to fight against fundamental contradictions in his own plan. He craved the rewards of engagement with the West but also fully embraced Iran, Hezbollah, and the so-called axis of resistance against the West. He was the moderate Muslim and protector of Christians and minorities but also the one who mobilized Islamist extremists when it suited him and his regime. He claimed to be the champion of reform, but it was he and his regime who decided for Syrians what this reform meant and how far it went. He urged his mukhabarat to be less intrusive but also expected them to crush any hint of threat to his power. He wanted to be seen as a legitimately elected and nonsectarian president for all Syrians but accepted the reality that his survival depended on his clan and sect—core elements of the system bequeathed to him by Hafez.
Even inside the family, Bashar could take nothing for granted and had to earn the right to be leader.
Bashar’s feisty, strong-willed, and at times “hyperactive” sister Bushra, the eldest of the Assad siblings, always doubted his worthiness to be their father’s successor.40 When Bashar came to power, Bushra had an office at the presidential palace and weighed in on important government matters. Sometimes she challenged or tried to reverse Bashar’s decisions. “You must do as I told you,” she ordered a prime minister once.41
“But the president has given me different instructions,” responded the puzzled official.
“Do as I told you. The president does not know what’s best,” persisted Bushra.
Bashar tried to rein in his sister, but tensions flared between her and his wife as Asma started to be in the spotlight because of the many overseas presidential trips and her NGO work at home. Neither Bushra nor her mother, Aniseh, who was determined to honor and perpetuate Hafez’s legacy, warmed up to Asma. Bushra was enraged by references, especially in foreign media, to Asma as Syria’s first lady; officially she was simply the president’s wife. Bushra’s thinking was that if her mother, the regime founder’s wife, was never called first lady, then certainly the privilege shouldn’t be accorded to Asma, seen by some in the family as an interloper.
The spat between the two women escalated to the point where rumors swirled at the palace that Bushra had insulted and slapped Asma, prompting Bashar’s wife to leave Syria and return to her parents’ home in London for a while.
“The dispute was ultimately settled in Asma’s favor,” said Manaf.
Bushra’s husband, Assef Shawkat, meanwhile went out of his way to gain favor with Bashar from the moment he became heir after Bassel’s death. Assef oversaw Bashar’s dealings with Saddam Hussein and his lieutenants, before and after the US invasion of Iraq.42 In 2005, Bashar named Assef to the most powerful post in the mukhabarat system, head of military intelligence, but Assef’s boundless ambition, charisma, and large following in the mukhabarat and army eventually alarmed Bashar.
Assef’s extensive ties with foreign intelligence agencies, particularly the French, were yet another worry for Bashar. For years Assef led efforts to infiltrate, co-opt, and exploit Islamist radical groups, including those linked to Al-Qaeda, to further the regime’s agendas. It was in keeping with a long-established regime tradition of nurturing the beast and then presenting itself to the West as the only one capable of slaying it—but subject to preconditions.43
In the spring of 2008, after the regime was hit by major security breaches, Bashar demoted Assef to deputy defense minister, a symbolic post. In the fall of 2007 the Israelis had bombed a facility in the desert where they believed the regime was developing a nuclear weapons program with North Korea’s help. The regime denied this.
Then came an even more serious and embarrassing blow to the regime in the heart of Damascus. Imad Mughniyeh, the senior Hezbollah commander, who regularly met Bashar and was the militia’s point man in transferring weapons from Syria to Lebanon, was killed in early 2008 by a car bomb in what was regarded as one of the city’s most secure neighborhoods. The CIA carried out the hit with help from the Israeli Mossad.44 Mughniyeh was behind some of the deadliest attacks against the United States in the 1980s. He was supposed to be operating secretly in Damascus but blew his own cover. “Mughniyeh began having lots of affairs with women and became ostentatious, with a taste for luxury. He was at the Four Seasons Hotel just before he was killed and had a briefcase full of $100 bills stolen from him there,” said Manaf.45
In the recrimination among the mukhabarat chiefs over the security breaches that allowed Mughniyeh’s killing, Assef bore the brunt, facilitating Bashar’s decision to remove him from his post and slash his powers.46
Disgraced, Assef left Damascus for his home on Syria’s western coast while Bushra decided to move to the United Arab Emirates with their children. Asma had won.
“Bushra felt Bashar broke her husband,” said Manaf.
For Manaf, Assef’s fall from grace was yet another sign of Iran’s rising power and tentacle-like reach within Bashar’s inner circle. Besides their special relationship with Bashar, Iran and its proxy Hezbollah had patiently cultivated ties with several powerful regime figures, who conspired to push Assef aside.
At least Assef was spared the fate of the general who, up until the Mughniyeh killing, had been Bashar’s point man in liaising with Hezbollah and procuring chemical and biological weapons. He was killed in mysterious circumstances.47
The Tlasses were not entirely shielded from the intrigue and crises roiling Bashar’s family and inner circle, but they were determined to do everything they could to guard their status and privileges.
Manaf was Bashar’s friend, but he was also close to the disgraced Assef and his family, which made him an enemy of Bashar’s brother Maher and his cousins the Makhloufs, who always mistrusted the Tlasses’ motives and wanted to sideline them, especially as the economic opening raised the stakes. Manaf’s enemies portrayed him to Bashar and within the regime as a “lightweight,” a “playboy,” and a “pretty boy” who was more suited to womanizing and hobnobbing with the Damascene elite than dealing with serious military and security affairs. For a period, some of Manaf’s own subordinates in the Republican Guard stopped obeying his orders. He had to ask Bashar to intervene to rectify the situation.48 Bashar’s cousin Rami also kept a watchful eye on Manaf’s businessman brother, Firas, to ensure that his activities remained subordinated to his own agenda and interests. By then Firas had grown his businesses and branched out into cement manufacturing, construction, and real estate development.
The Tlasses realized they not only needed to keep reminding Bashar of their long history with the Assads but also had to prove to him their usefulness at home and abroad in the campaign to burnish his image and reestablish ties with the West following the rupture after Hariri’s killing.
One year after her husband’s retirement, Manaf’s mother, Lamia, passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage. The increasingly eccentric Tlass family patriarch then published his memoirs in five thick volumes, tracing part of his half century journey with Hafez and offering his own telling of key events since Syria’s independence, all of it peppered by his obsession with the female figure. The memoirs were no frivolous exercise, though—they were intended as a message to Bashar that the Tlasses were a pillar of the regime and as such they expected to not only maintain but also expand their privileges as he got rid of those he called the old guard and as his cousins the Makhloufs muscled in to grab more power. Parts of the memoirs were incredibly frank, with Mustafa admitting to having executed people deemed a threat to the regime and Hafez. Then there were all the regime secrets the Tlasses were privy to. In one TV interview Mustafa claimed that one of Hafez’s former generals was a CIA spy and that Hafez tolerated it because it was one of his channels to the Americans.49 “You know, Bashar is practically my son and without me he would not have become president,” Mustafa often boasted in private gatherings.50
The general who once sentenced thousands of people to death to protect Hafez’s rule was settling into his role as the patriarch, gathering his children and grandchildren for a family lunch every week and indulging guests in viewings of his collection of medieval axes, drawings by Adolf Hitler, and his private den, a shrine for his wildest sexual fantasies.
Mustafa hoped to live long enough to see his son Manaf attain the same status that he enjoyed under Hafez. Manaf was promoted to brigadier general in the Republican Guard and held a senior position in the Baath Party, but there were no clear signals from Bashar that Manaf could be named defense minister, too, like his father.
But beyond the largely symbolic ministerial and party titles, Manaf and his wife, Thala, sought to fulfill a far more important function for Bashar. The Tlasses saw a great opportunity to regain some of their lost power in 2007, when the West and its regional allies once again did a U-turn in Syria and resumed cooperation and engagement with the Assads. The charming and stylish Tlass couple were increasingly seen by both Syrians and foreigners as conduits to Bashar and a moderating influence on him, given the ruthlessness and greed of others in his entourage.
“In Bashar’s strategy to charm the West and tell them he was ready to change, Manaf was a tool—but there was no need for a lot of manipulation. He and Thala were close to Bashar and Asma, and it came about naturally,” said a Western diplomat posted in Damascus during this period.51 “They were all part of the new Syria—a country opening to the world and young generation of beautiful people; it was exactly that.”
Manaf did everything to maintain his friendship with Bashar. They continued to play tennis and had long chats in person or on the phone. Manaf was among those providing Bashar with input beyond what he was getting from his family and intelligence chiefs. Thala’s interests overlapped with Asma’s. Thala owned a private school and was into culture and the arts, and she was restoring an Ottoman-era house in the old city. The couples often met socially, but there was little chemistry between Thala and Asma. Thala had a much closer rapport with Bashar, who valued her perspective and advice on a range of topics.
Still, Thala was expected to play her part in public.
“She’s an amazing woman,” Thala effused about Asma to Diane Sawyer, the ABC News anchor who came to Damascus in early 2007 as Bashar sought a reboot with Washington. “Ever since she got here she got deep into things in every single sector. As much as she’s working for women’s rights, she’s working on children’s rights and culture.”52
Asma, for her own part, told Sawyer that she was not ready yet for on-camera interviews, but they spent time together “at one of her private offices overlooking Damascus at sunset, where the pair sat for two hours, talking about Assad’s country in the new century and her life.”53
In his formal interview with Sawyer, Bashar said Syria was “the main player” in stabilizing Iraq and that he was ready to cooperate with the United States.54 There was also a chance to show Americans a more intimate, down-to-earth side of Bashar as he joked and laughed with Sawyer about his iPod music library and secret passion for country singers like Faith Hill and Shania Twain.
Besides helping Bashar and Asma charm the West, Manaf and Thala also mixed with Syrians from varied backgrounds. There was a hip and progressive-thinking twenty-something crowd as well as members of the closest thing Syria still had to an intelligentsia under the Assads. Many advocated reforms and were critical of the regime—all of course within boundaries of their mukhabarat-run state and never crossing the redline: the person of Bashar al-Assad.
The message conveyed by the Tlass couple in interactions with these people, some of whom they considered friends, was always more or less the same: We agree things are bad and must change, but give it time, be patient; it’s not so easy to dismantle a system like ours. As a token of his friendship, Manaf sometimes tried to assist those caught in the mukhabarat’s crosshairs—for example, helping someone get a reprieve from a travel ban. Syrians from the worlds of arts, business, and media mingled with foreigners at parties thrown by Manaf and Thala. When not hosting, the Tlasses were eagerly awaited guests.
“Manaf usually arrived at a social event like a Hollywood star, a bit late, open shirt, never a tie, and with a cigar. He drank red wine, chatted, laughed, and held everyone by the hand,” recalled a Western diplomat in Damascus.55 “He was the main attraction. Women were all over him and men were a bit jealous. Sometimes he was alone or with Thala. She’s very smart and beautiful. She’s the only one who could dim his light.”
Foreign diplomats and companies looking to do business in Syria, especially the French, courted Manaf and his family, seeing them as indispensable for access to and influence over Bashar. The Tlass name and its place in Syria’s political-business nexus was well established in French halls of power.
Upon the death of her billionaire arms-dealer husband in 1991, Manaf’s sister Nahed became a young widow with an impressive inheritance, including the Parisian hôtel particulier where they lived, a palatial town house in one of the most exclusive sections of the sixteenth arrondissement.56 The ballroom’s exquisite interior was transposed from a Venetian palazzo, while the elegant salons and drawing rooms were bedecked with crystal chandeliers and masterpieces by Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh.
It was in this sumptuous setting that Nahed hosted dinners where French titans of finance and industry mixed with political leaders and media bosses. One French newspaper called her “Madame O,” a sort of mysterious and exotic romantic-age character from the East charming her way to the top echelons of Parisian society and the circles of France’s most powerful men to nurture connections beneficial to her and her Assad-allied family and the regime.57 She had an affair with France’s foreign minister Roland Dumas in the 1990s. They often flew to Damascus on her private jet for long weekends.58 Among the gifts Dumas received from the Tlass family patriarch were four ancient mosaics from Syria’s many archaeological sites.59
Nahed also dated Franz-Olivier Giesbert, a celebrated novelist and unofficial presidential adviser who became editor-in-chief of the Le Figaro daily. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the disgraced former IMF managing director and onetime French presidential hopeful, was a member of a chess club bankrolled by Nahed. Dominique de Villepin celebrated his fiftieth birthday chez Nahed while he was foreign minister from 2002 to 2004. Nicolas Sarkozy, who became president in 2007, was a friend and a regular at Madame O’s dinners.60
Thanks to her family and late husband, Nahed had the status of a Syrian diplomat, even down to the license plate of her yellow Rolls Royce. This meant that she did not pay taxes, but she did give generously to major French museums and institutions and, like her father, sought respectability and status by striving for degrees from prestigious universities.
The Tlasses wasted no time to exploit the returning warmth in Franco-Syrian relations in 2007 under Nahed’s friend Sarkozy. French cement giant Lafarge bought a local plant in which Manaf’s brother, Firas, was a partner. In addition to the money he received from the deal, Firas was granted a share in Lafarge’s Syria operations.61 Later Firas partnered with a company from the United Arab Emirates to build condominiums on land around Aleppo, Damascus, and Latakia that, like other regime-connected businessmen, he acquired for practically nothing.62
Manaf said he never abused his friendship with Bashar for personal gain, but several Syrian businessmen said that they gave Manaf expensive watches, envelopes of cash, shares in projects, and, on one occasion, new furniture for his office in return for favors like securing an audience with Bashar.63 “This was how the entire regime operated. Manaf was no exception,” said one businessman, adding that he and others were frequently invited to Manaf’s private quarters for meetings over expensive wines and Cuban cigars. Manaf denied taking bribes, but admitted that cash envelopes were often sent to him, including by a Saudi prince once. Manaf said he rejected them all.64
But for sure Manaf enjoyed other perks.
He and Thala were the guests of honor at a banquet hosted in Damascus in 2008 by French oil giant Total, which wanted to conclude a partnership agreement with Syria to boost its presence and launch big projects.65 Although Syria’s oil production had been declining since 1995, the country still possessed significant but hard-to-extract oil and gas reserves that Total was eager to tap. Syria’s location was also attractive to oil giants like Total who needed an outpost between Europe and the major production fields of Iraq and the Persian Gulf. Total wanted to renovate and expand pipelines connecting Iraq’s fields with terminals on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.
A preliminary memorandum of understanding for a long-term partnership between Total and the Syrian state was signed by Sarkozy during a visit to Damascus in September 2008. Total’s existing license was also expanded to include new fields.66
Sarkozy’s visit was a big deal for Bashar. It was the first trip to Damascus by the leader of a major Western power since late 2001, when Bashar had only been president for a little over a year. Even though Sarkozy only stayed one night and seemed distracted throughout his brief visit, Bashar made sure that the French president left with the right impressions. In keeping with his desire to be seen as a young and dynamic leader, Bashar drove Sarkozy in his own black Audi sedan for a lunch banquet at a trendy restaurant in the old city. After dessert of baklava and fruits, Bashar took Sarkozy up to the restaurant’s rooftop to show him how church bell towers coexisted side by side with mosque minarets—proof that his was one of the Middle East’s few secular regimes where Islam is moderate and minorities like Christians are protected and treated as equal citizens.67
Sarkozy stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel and insisted on going for a morning jog. The regime thought this was a perfect chance for Sarkozy to experience firsthand how safe and secure Syria was, thanks to Bashar’s rule, even as war raged next door in Iraq.
And before Sarkozy hopped back on his jet to return to Paris, there was time for a quick quadrilateral summit and photo op in Damascus with Bashar, the emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, and Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Both the Qatari emir and Erdogan were pivotal in Bashar’s renewed outreach to France and the West.68
The maverick emir, who had seized power from his father, was determined to use his little country’s extraordinary wealth, mainly from natural gas, to become a major player in the Middle East and beyond. Qatar hosted one of the largest US airbases and it invested billions in the West, especially in France after Sarkozy came to power. The emir wanted to upstage the Gulf’s traditional leader, Saudi Arabia, which was allied with Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, and had backed Bashar early on but dropped him after Hariri’s assassination. Qatar’s emir personally pleaded Bashar’s case with Sarkozy, telling him the Syrian leader was serious about repairing ties and cooperating on a range of issues crucial to France, such as Lebanon and peace with Israel.
Starting in the fall of 2007, Sarkozy sent his chief of staff, Claude Guéant, and other senior advisers to meet with Bashar. To prove his goodwill to the French and their allies, Bashar made a couple of tactical concessions that he believed were ultimately not a big deal for his regime but would earn him significant short-term benefits. As Qatar committed to investing billions of dollars in Syria, Bashar leaned on his Lebanese allies in 2008 to back a Qatari initiative to end a nearly two-year-long political crisis in Lebanon marked by economic and political paralysis, bombings and assassinations, deadly clashes, and the takeover of central Beirut by Hezbollah and other pro-Bashar militias. To please the French, the Syrians signaled that they were ready to open an embassy in Lebanon and have normal diplomatic ties with a country they always considered part of their territory.
Once more, the Assad clan struck another one of its bargains with the West: we cease the terror in Lebanon but you stop hounding us over the Hariri killing and start treating us again with respect.
In another gesture to the West, Syria also began indirect talks with Israel, mediated by Turkey, over the Golan Heights. The Syrians said they would settle for nothing short of full return of the Golan, something the Israelis were probably never going to accept.
The immediate reward for Bashar was an invitation for him and Asma to Paris in July 2008 to attend the launch of the Union of the Mediterranean, an initiative led by Sarkozy to foster greater cooperation between the European Union and countries on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean. The French also put back on the table the possibility of a trade agreement between the EU and Syria, initially proposed by Chirac but then frozen after Hariri’s killing. Bashar and Asma were among heads of states and their spouses invited to watch the annual Bastille Day parade on the Champs Élysées.
Some French officials were incensed. How could Sarkozy include, on such a patriotic occasion, a head of a regime that they believed was responsible for killing the French ambassador and bombing the French barracks in Lebanon in the 1980s, and which was linked to acts of terror on French territory during the same period?
But Sarkozy, a showy and business-minded leader, felt this was old history and that his partnership with the Qataris, which extended into Bashar’s rehabilitation, trumped these concerns. France’s ambassador to Syria, Michel Duclos, said he and many colleagues at the foreign ministry had to reconcile themselves to the fact that Bashar was playing the same game as his father. The regime could not be circumvented and was an unavoidable interlocutor for France in the Middle East, a region whose stability was a matter of national security.69
And as Bashar met with Sarkozy in Paris, back in Damascus a daily newspaper owned by his cousin Rami Makhlouf printed a bold headline on its front page: “Full Admission by the French of Syria’s Pivotal Role.”70