On March 29, 2011, one week after the bloody storming of Daraa’s Omari mosque, Michel Samaha, a Lebanese ex-minister and diehard Bashar loyalist, arrived in Paris.
Bashar trusted the heavyset, bespectacled, and bald Samaha completely. He dispatched him to assure the French that what happened in Daraa was no more than an isolated local incident involving a group of agitators and fanatics who had illegally taken up arms and barricaded themselves inside the mosque, necessitating intervention by authorities. It was the normal procedure followed by any sovereign state, including France.
The truth was that the assault on the mosque was a cold-blooded murder of six unarmed protesters and a doctor and medic who tried to aid the wounded. Then the mukhabarat planted assault rifles, grenades, bullets, and bundles of Syrian banknotes inside the mosque, filmed these alleged finds and broadcast the footage on Syrian state television.1 Protesters were cast as members of an armed gang who had killed the ambulance crew. According to Manaf, a whole story was fabricated about protest organizers being paid agents working for Israel, the West, and hostile regional governments and liaising with old enemies like the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist extremists. The regime told Syrians it was a conspiracy while asserting to French officials that it was a simple law-and-order issue.
“The president [Bashar] will make a very important speech. He will announce major reforms. He sent me to assure you that everything will be okay,” Samaha told Claude Guéant, the French president’s point man for dealing with Bashar.2
Samaha was part of Bashar’s team that was interacting with the French since the onset of the rapprochement in 2007. He accompanied Bashar and Asma on at least three trips to Paris, including the one in December 2010, just before protests began to sweep through the Arab world.
France, the United States, and other Western countries were at first taken by surprise. They had hardly had time to assess the fast-moving events and their policy implications as pro-Western strongmen were pushed aside by the revolting masses in Tunisia and then Egypt. Later, France and its allies raced to intervene in Libya. Armed with a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force, on March 19, 2011, France was the first to bomb Gaddafi’s troops as they tried to advance on the rebellious city of Benghazi.3 Then the United States, Britain, and others followed suit. In justifying the actions of the United States and its allies in Libya, US president Obama said, “We cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy.”4
As Paris, Washington, and other Western capitals grappled with Libya, Syria now seemed like yet another place where they would have to make difficult decisions.
The day after the brazen mosque killings, many angry Daraa residents took to the streets. Women of all ages turned out in droves. Sally and her girlfriends wore jeans and wrapped keffiyehs, traditional male headdresses, around their heads, leaving only their eyes exposed. Security forces were taken aback when women intervened and freed dozens of men who had been rounded up and put on buses.
“Do not touch our boys!” shouted one woman as she boarded a bus and told the detained men to get out.
In Damascus, Manaf sensed that Bashar was lost and uncertain of what to do to bring the situation under control after the mosque assault. He seemed torn between the idea that the Daraa protests were a conspiracy warranting violence to reassert regime authority and the fact that the uprising was a popular one with genuine demands and grievances requiring him, perhaps, to be more conciliatory and accommodating.5
His brother, Maher, his cousins the Makhloufs, and mukhabarat hard-liners had pushed for maximum force from the start. They believed that shooting and killing some people would make others think twice before taking to the streets to protest; fear of the dreaded regime would be maintained. But there were those around Bashar, like Manaf, who felt that violence would only provoke more bloodshed and would complicate the situation further. Even on the night of the storming of the Daraa mosque, Bashar was wrestling with those two conflicting approaches. Or maybe he thought he could do both—a carrot and a stick.6 Bashar sacked Daraa’s governor in an attempt to appease protesters, but when they asked for the release of all detainees and were answered with the storming of the mosque, it only unleashed more anger and violence.
The day after the bloodshed in Daraa, Bashar convened an emergency meeting of the Baath leadership. Bashar now seemed more willing to support those advocating dialogue and concessions as a way to deal with the situation. One of Bashar’s advisers, Bouthaina Shaaban, held a press conference afterward to convey the meeting’s results. She said that all detainees arrested since the start of protests in Daraa would be released—precisely what protesters inside the mosque had asked for minutes before they were attacked by regime forces.
Shaaban, an Assad family loyalist to the bone, said that a committee would investigate events in Daraa, salaries of government employees would be raised, new job opportunities for the youth would be created, and the performance of the central and local governments would be reassessed. Other measures to be studied: new anticorruption mechanisms, lifting the state of emergency, a draft law authorizing political parties, a new media law, amendments to the law governing land use in border provinces like Daraa, and ending the practice of arbitrary arrests.7
At the same time, Shaaban denied that Bashar had given shoot-to-kill orders but, without being specific, conceded that there might have been “misconduct” by some security personnel. She echoed the position of the hard-liners: what happened in Daraa was a conspiracy against Syria because of its support for resistance movements like Hezbollah, and Daraa had been chosen due to the ease of smuggling weapons and money from neighboring Jordan.
She described what was going on as a standoff between the Syrian state and people and their “enemies” who wished to undermine the country’s “unity, stability, and peace.” While offering what at first seemed to be major concessions, Shaaban arrogantly added insult to injury, as far as Daraa’s people were concerned. Instead of calming down, the situation was inflamed.
The next day, March 25, people from all over Daraa and surrounding towns and villages converged on the city’s Serail Square. Sally was among those at the protest, the largest so far. She and many others held up olive branches and banners. Protesters seemed more organized than before. It wasn’t long before snipers posted on rooftops of surrounding government buildings began shooting at them.8 Several people were killed. Sally and her friends hid in a shop for hours. Regime forces also opened fire and killed people who had taken to the streets in a town north of Daraa. In response, enraged youth knocked down a statue of Hafez in the middle of Serail Square and tore down a large billboard showing a smiling, waving Bashar. Protests in solidarity with Daraa erupted across Syria that day.
In Damascus, thousands marched through the old quarter, but they were quickly infiltrated and surrounded by security forces.9 Some protesters managed to reach Marjeh Square. They chanted for freedom and dignity and climbed over the base of the steel column in the middle of the square, where Mazen Darwish and others had been violently attacked by regime thugs ten days earlier for demanding prisoner releases.10
Protests also sprang up in several large towns around Damascus. Thousands took to the streets after Friday prayers. In Douma, home to about half a million people, protesters were led by Adnan Wehbeh, a well-respected physician, longtime regime opponent, and secular figure. They occupied the town’s municipal square for several hours.11
In the central city of Homs, protesters came out in large numbers to support Daraa and to demand the ouster of the local governor, whom they accused of corruption. Later, an angry mob broke off from the main protest and attacked the city’s officers club. A guard was killed. The incident immediately brought sectarian animosities to the surface, since the guard was a member of Bashar’s Alawite community and most of the protesters were Sunni. One of the largest protests was in the coastal city of Latakia, where thousands, including women and children, marched through the streets. They briefly occupied one of the main squares to hold a peaceful sit-in. But the following day—Saturday, March 26—clashes underpinned by long-simmering sectarian tensions erupted between loyalists backed by security forces and some on the protesters’ side. At least a dozen people were killed in Latakia.12
That day Manaf spoke with Bashar by telephone.
“We give them a meter and they want two meters. We cannot just keep making concessions,” griped Bashar when Manaf argued for a bold conciliatory move toward the people of Daraa, like punishing his cousin Atef Najib.13 By then there had been about sixty deaths in Daraa alone.14
“So what do you propose we do right now?” said Bashar.
“Someone from Daraa came to see me and told me that as a first step we should consider all the dead martyrs and give their families money,” Manaf told Bashar.
“Okay, fine, let’s give them a million pounds each,” said Bashar. That amount in Syrian pounds was at the time equivalent to about 20,000 US dollars. Blood money was commonly used for conflict resolution in rural and tribal parts of Syria. Bashar’s office sent Manaf 57 million pounds in cash. They had counted fifty-seven “martyrs.” Manaf immediately sent the money to Daraa for distribution. Many families refused to take it.
Bashar hoped that the money and a few gestures he could unveil in his upcoming parliamentary speech on March 30 would be enough to appease Daraa.
But even his supporters were expecting him to do more.
“What dragged the whole country [into this situation] were the security branches in Daraa that mercilessly killed left and right,” said Yusif Abu-Roumieh, a lawmaker and Daraa tribal leader, during a parliament session ahead of Bashar’s speech. “The people of Houran were waiting for his excellency the president to come down and apologize and offer his condolences.” In a daring act, the tribal sheik publicly negated the official story about the protesters being part of a conspiracy.15
Ahead of his speech, Bashar tasked Manaf and others around him to meet with young activists as well as more traditional opposition figures like those thrown in jail around the time of the short-lived Damascus Spring a decade before. Ostensibly the purpose was to drum up ideas and solutions that could be incorporated in the speech. But it was also a useful way to identify the main protest instigators and organizers and figure out who had the most sway. Perhaps some could be convinced to cooperate with the regime to implement some of the changes Bashar was promising.
Manaf liaised with Shaaban, Bashar’s political and media adviser. “When you speak about solutions, it’s as if I am hearing our eternal leader [Hafez], rest his soul,” Shaaban gushed when she met with Manaf at the palace.16
Mohammad Nasif, the longtime mukhabarat chief and Bashar mentor who had been recalled from retirement in 2005 and appointed presidential adviser, reached out to activists like Mazen Darwish, who were believed to have more influence on the street than the better-known political opponents.
Mazen was in solitary confinement at Branch 215 of Military Intelligence, one of the four main mukhabarat agencies.17 Each agency had several branches in Damascus and across the country. Each branch was usually responsible for a geographic area down to a neighborhood or street, or had certain functions like wiretapping phone conversations, or was tasked with dealing with a specific segment of the population like doctors or known political opponents. It was common for someone to be detained, interrogated, and tortured by multiple agencies and branches. Getting cleared by one did not mean that a person was not wanted by another agency or branch.
Mazen had been arrested twice since March 16, once for organizing the protest outside the Interior Ministry and the second time for speaking out on Arab news channels about the Daraa killings, or, as the mukhabarat put it, spreading “fake news” in the service of “the nation’s enemies.”
On the evening of March 24, the door to Mazen’s cell suddenly opened.18
“You’re getting out,” said the guard.
Freedom from these mukhabarat dungeons was like being born again. As he was about to step outside, another guard said this: “There are orders this time to release you. You may have gotten away, but we’re not done with you yet. We shall meet again.”
Mazen called his wife, Yara.
“Yes, darling, we know, we are at the office waiting for you,” she said.
The office was filled with fellow activists. They cheered and clapped when Mazen arrived and then took turns to hug him. Less than thirty minutes later the doorbell rang. A man speaking with an Iraqi accent and dressed in an expensive suit stepped inside and asked to see Mazen.
“I am Hassan Jamaleddin. General Mohammad Nasif sends you his greetings, and he has asked to see you,” said the Iraqi man as Mazen took him aside.
“Now?” said a puzzled Mazen.
“Yes, now,” answered the man.
“I just came out of prison and I need to shower,” protested Mazen.
“I think your shower can wait for the sake of the country,” responded the man.
Mazen asked the man to give him a few minutes. He went inside and told his colleagues. Everyone thought he was being rearrested by another mukhabarat branch. It was decided that he should go with the man but someone would trail them to find out where he was being taken.
After a short drive Mazen found himself on the outskirts of Damascus in an area called the Assad Villages. It was past 10:00 p.m. He was outside an imposing mansion. The gate opened. Dozens of guards milled about. He was led into the house. He walked through the marble floor entryway. Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling. Mazen was taken to a lounge area with plush sofas. Shortly after, an imposing figure came down the stairs. He was an elderly man wearing a white traditional garment with a woolen cloak draped around his shoulders. This was Mohammad Nasif, one of the most powerful mukhabarat chiefs, who had served the Assad family for decades. Regime opponents imprisoned in the 1980s remembered him as a fearsome but articulate figure.
“You fools, you think there’s heaven and hell. Heaven is where I am living and hell is what you’re living through,” he often told those he interrogated and tortured.19
Nasif, also known as Abu Wael, was practically part of the Assad family and a father figure to Bashar. He had mentored him when Bashar was being groomed to inherit power from Hafez. Now, at the age of seventy-five, he was still by Bashar’s side as a trusted aide.
For almost fifteen minutes, Nasif lectured Mazen about how what was happening was a conspiracy by Syria’s enemies in the region and by the West.20
“General, with all due respect,” said Mazen, “this is the talk we hear on state television day and night. I do not think you summoned me here to discuss that.”
Mazen and his fellow activists had already started creating a body that would attempt to unify all the protest movements that were emerging across Syria and to foster greater coordination in methods and goals. But to Nasif, he presented himself as someone who was simply in touch with some protest organizers. Mazen thought that the regime probably knew everything, but he was not going to volunteer the information.
“Please call me Uncle Abu Wael,” said Nasif.
“I’ll call you Uncle when I am here on a social visit,” replied Mazen politely.
What followed was a lengthy discussion lasting for hours. Nasif was preoccupied with swaying Mazen and getting him to embrace Bashar’s latest reform promises, while Mazen spoke about all the missed opportunities for reform, starting with the short-lived Damascus Spring between 2000 and 2001 and ending with the period between 2007 and 2010, when the regime was engaging with the West.
“But all you cared about was how to prolong and protect the regime,” said Mazen. “You left people no choice but to take to the streets. They waited too long.”
“This young man [Bashar] is kind, polite, open-minded, and eager to reform,” said Nasif, sounding parental. “In fact, he’s closer to you guys than us old-timers. We must not ignore Syria’s delicate regional situation, the conspiracy, and Israel, which wants to destroy Syria.”
At some point, after several cups of strong Turkish coffee, Mazen proposed a solution. The regime could give people the chance to express themselves in a public space, a square perhaps. It could be protected by the security forces so that “infiltrators and agents of foreign powers” do not shoot at people, as the regime claimed had happened in Daraa.
“‘Square’ equals bringing down the regime! You must completely forget this idea!” Nasif shot back, beginning to lose his poise and calm, and becoming visibly agitated and angry.21
It was already 4:00 a.m. Mazen had spent almost five hours with Nasif. They agreed that Mazen would come to his office in the city later that day and hand over a list of demands, but not the idea of using a public square as a forum.
The list Mazen gave him, some hours later, included about a dozen points, such as: releasing detainees, restructuring the mukhabarat and ending its blanket immunity, and drafting a new constitution to create an independent legislature and judiciary.
“The decision is not up to me,” said Nasif. “I am simply the president’s security adviser. I will take these papers tonight to the president. Expect a call from me tomorrow.”
They met again the day after.
Nasif told Mazen that Bashar had agreed to repeal the emergency law, which he had already raised as a possibility in the press conference given by his adviser Shaaban. Mazen said that this step would be meaningless without also curbing the mukhabarat’s powers and making necessary constitutional changes.
“These things will take time but we are open to discussing them all,” said Nasif as he held up the papers which had illegible scribbles in blue in the margins. “Look, here are two sentences handwritten by the president himself. He will use them in his upcoming speech.” Certain words were circled and there were check marks next to some points.22
In the lead-up to Bashar’s speech, the signals coming from the regime were hardly conciliatory.
The regime mobilized pro-Bashar rallies across the country, ramped up its campaign of lies and disinformation, and took steps to deepen polarization among Syrians.23 Regime authorities deported a Reuters correspondent who had been reporting from Syria since 2006, alleging he was filing “fake news”; two of his colleagues were also briefly detained.24
From the start, the regime wanted to deny independent media access and freedom to report on events in Syria, leaving Syrian citizens with no choice but to rely on social media and YouTube videos.
On March 30, 2011, a few hundred people gathered in central Damascus outside parliament. Security force personnel, many in plainclothes, formed a ring around the crowd. Uniformed policemen were present, too. But this would not be a demonstration like those over the past twelve days. Almost everyone in the crowd held up a poster with Bashar’s face. Most of the men and the few women were in their late teens and twenties. They could have been from the Baath Party’s Revolutionary Youth Union, the crowds usually brought out on special occasions to show love and adoration for the president. They could also have been government employees and university students who had been told that there was a rally they must attend. There were dire consequences for disobeying such directives.25 All that mattered, though, was how this looked on camera, given that the spectacle was being broadcast live. This was the regime of make-believe.
The moment Bashar stepped out of his black Audi in front of parliament, they went crazy.26
“Allah, Souriya, Bashar wa Bas!” (“God, Syria, and Bashar only!”), they shouted.
A red carpet was rolled out on the steps leading up to the entrance.
Surrounded by his security detail in black suits, Bashar stopped as he reached the top of the stairs. He looked back at the crowd and waved and smiled broadly.
A triumphant Bashar strode into the domed chamber after the speaker of parliament introduced him as “leader of the Arab world” and guardian of the “Arabs’ last citadels.” Every single one of the deputies jumped up from their seats to clap and repeat a deafening mantra-like chant: “With our soul, with our blood, we sacrifice ourselves for you, O Bashar!”27 This was the same rubber-stamp parliament ordered by Hafez’s men a decade earlier to change the constitution so that Bashar could inherit power from his father.
An ecstatic-looking Bashar stood at the podium and joined in the clapping.
“It’s hard to say anything to that,” said a beaming Bashar in response to those chanting his name.28 He was eager to prolong the moment, wanting to make sure that those whom he believed were plotting against him saw this outpouring of total devotion and fealty, real or not.
Indeed, the next words out of Bashar’s mouth were an assertion that the protests that had started in Daraa and spread elsewhere were part of a foreign conspiracy, a sinister plot against him and against Syria. It was like the conspiracy he had faced in 2005 after Hariri’s assassination in Lebanon and the conspiracies confronted by Hafez in the 1970s and early ’80s. “We have to admit their intelligence in choosing very advanced methods,” said Bashar confidently with an undertone of derision, “but we also admit their stupidity in choosing the wrong country and people, where these types of conspiracies do not work.”29
He offered what he said was proof of this alleged conspiracy and explained that it involved people inside Syria and in both neighboring and faraway countries. He said it was timed with the uprisings across the Arab world, but that what was happening in Syria was fundamentally different.
He then echoed the same reasoning used by his mukhabarat chiefs when they assured him in their reports earlier in the year that Syria was immune from the protests sweeping the region.30 The protests in other Arab countries, he insisted, were legitimate popular expressions of dissatisfaction with old rulers who had been in place for decades and were propped up by the West. In fact, they were proof of an Arab awakening and the failure of these regimes in “taming” their people, said Bashar. He said that he was going to send “experts” to Tunisia to see what lessons, particularly regarding income inequities, could be applied in Syria.
Syria was different, said Bashar. Internally he was modernizing and opening up the economy, and externally he was challenging the dictates of neo-imperial Western powers and supporting “Arab resistance movements” like Hezbollah in Lebanon. There was no justification for a similar uprising in Syria, as far as he was concerned. The way he and the mukhabarat saw it, the conspiracy aimed to weaken and break up Syria in order to “remove the last obstacle in the face of the Israeli project.”
Bashar omitted the fact that his family has been ruling Syria and possessing its economy and resources for four decades with the help of one of the world’s cruelest police state apparatuses, and that, for the most part, Israel and the West were absolutely fine with the Assads staying in power.
Bashar promised to study all reform proposals, he assured members of his rubber-stamp parliament, but he was not going to be “hasty.”
The nearly one-hour discourse was interrupted by rapturous parliamentarians standing up to read poetic verses or to pledge their allegiance and near servitude to the Assad family. One of them told him that Syria was too small for him and that he must become leader of the entire world.
At the end, a defiant Bashar said he would welcome a war to defend his regime and reminded his audience, in his usual cold-blooded demeanor, that he and his allies Iran and Hezbollah had derailed US plans to redraw the region’s political map after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The American idea at the time was that regime change in Iraq would have a “domino effect” on the rest of the Middle East, including Iran and Syria. But instead Syria and its partners went on the offensive in Iraq and Lebanon by unleashing violence, terror, and war.
“What happened was the opposite: the plans themselves turned into dominos and we struck them and they fell one by one, and this [latest] project will fall,” vowed Bashar.