It was mid-spring 2011. The death toll was mounting as Bashar sent his soldiers and tanks to quash rebellious communities, but protesters were not giving up. Bashar’s wife, Asma, was in her office in Damascus, in the foothills of Mount Qasioun, within walking distance from the private residence in the Malki neighborhood where she and Bashar and their three children lived.
The office was in an area where relatively modern and upscale Malki met Muhajreen, a more traditional district with remnants of late-Ottoman-era architecture. An old, disused tramway line cut through the main cobblestone avenue. In the narrow alleyways, potted plants dangled from balconies of homes sandwiched next to one another. A series of old and new steps connected the parallel streets built into Qasioun’s flank.
Asma was meeting with the chief executive officer of her NGO umbrella group, the Syria Trust for Development.1 She urged Omar Abdelaziz Hallaj to press ahead with the Trust’s projects despite the protests and deadly violence spreading across many parts of Syria. Damascus and its suburbs were boiling, too. In Muhajreen, where Asma sat, young Damascenes fired up by revolution plotted weekly protests and came up with catchy slogans against Bashar, whom they called their “undesirable neighbor,”2 something Asma may or may not have known.
Regardless, Asma was determined to go about her business as if everything was normal. She had often boasted privately about the stoicism, fortitude, and work ethic instilled in her while growing up in Britain. She expected others to emulate her.
Asma told Hallaj that this was the perfect time to push the organization’s agendas, given the president’s reform plans. And reform was all that everyone was talking about day and night—so what better moment could there be, she explained to Hallaj.3 She told him that the president was personally interested in input from the Trust on how laws could be changed to restructure provincial and local administrations to give them more power, especially when it came to development and spending while also fostering accountability and transparency. Asma told Hallaj that he’d have a chance to lay out these proposals in a one-on-one with Bashar. Hallaj, a graduate of the University of Texas who previously worked on urban development and heritage conservation in other parts of the Middle East, was typical of the talent Asma surrounded herself with.
“I totally agree with you the time is right,” he told Asma, “but if I push my guys to work on reform, they need to know they’re protected.”4
“What do you mean?” replied Asma, sounding a bit puzzled. “If your team is working on reform, nobody is going to harm them.”
“But that’s not what’s happening on the streets. People who are asking for reform are being arrested,” said Hallaj.
“Well,” said Asma, “the street is one thing and working on reform is another.”
What Hallaj did not tell Asma was that among the Trust’s nearly 250 staffers were people who secretly took part in anti-regime demonstrations. Most employees, of course, attended the pro-Bashar rallies mobilized by the regime and, as was the case with many government workers, those contracted by the Trust to provide security, construction, and engineering services were also deployed to violently subdue protests. The regime called it “crowd control.”
As far as Asma and Bashar were concerned, all Syrians should embrace reform—provided it was within the parameters and at the pace proposed by Bashar. They believed that protesting against the regime on the streets was not an expression of a desire for reform and change but, rather, was knowingly or unknowingly participating in a conspiracy against Syria, as outlined by Bashar in his speech at the end of March 2011.
From Asma’s point of view, fantastic things had already started happening before protests began. There was great buzz from the December 2010 Paris trip. The Trust was taking on bigger and more ambitious projects. The partnership with France’s Louvre to renovate Syria’s museums was going to be launched later in 2011. Construction was underway on a futuristic-looking and energy-efficient building in the heart of Damascus for Massar, her children’s learning and discovery center. The space, inspired by the damask rose, was designed by the international Danish architectural firm Henning Larsen and located on one of the capital’s most prized pieces of real estate—the old fairgrounds across from the Four Seasons Hotel.5
“A shell structure allowing a playful and dazzling scenography of light into the interior spaces—like light filtering between rose petals… The center of the rose forms a large communal orientation space. This is where people meet, share knowledge, and develop new ideas together—a cross pollination of knowledge.” This was how Henning Larsen described the project, due to be completed in 2013.6
There might be delays, but the project was going to be finished as the situation calmed down, Asma told Hallaj. The construction site was already being used on the weekends by the mukhabarat as an assembly point for forces bused out to protesting areas for “crowd control.”
Asma had as much of a stake in the regime as Bashar and his clan. She saw herself as a warrior and survivor. Her enemies better not be fooled by her silk dresses and radiant smile.
By then, Asma’s touch was everywhere, both at home and in shaping Syria’s image abroad.
She completely remodeled the Assad family residence in Malki where Bashar and his siblings grew up, did the same for an old presidential mansion, and fixed up the Assads’ summer home in Latakia with the help of a famous British landscape architect.7 She spent a few million US dollars on abstract sculptures.8 In March 2011, as protests were kicking off and turning violent, Vogue magazine had a whole spread on her titled “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert.”9 The main photo was of her wrapped in a red-wine-colored pashmina and standing on top of Mount Qasioun at twilight, with Damascus visible below. Joan Juliet Buck, the writer who flew in for the piece right after Asma’s return from Paris, spent time with her and Bashar and the children at home playing and eating fondue and later singing carols at the annual Christmas concert of the children’s choir they supported.
“This is how you fight extremism—through art,” Bashar told Buck during the concert. “This is the diversity you want to see in the Middle East.”10
The article depicted them as the modern and tolerant Middle East power couple who nurtured and protected minorities like Christians. Bashar also made sure that he repeated to Buck what he often told foreigners: he had studied eye surgery because “it’s very precise… and there is very little blood.”
The article was the idea of one of Asma’s aides at the Trust, a friend from her London days.11 He approached the New York public relations firm Brown Lloyd James, which already represented several high-profile clients in the Middle East. The firm’s principal, Peter Brown, was friends with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
Two months after the article came out and as the regime’s crackdown became bloodier, Brown’s firm sent another Asma aide a memorandum with advice on “crisis communications.”12
The firm claimed that the US government “wants the leadership in Syria to survive,” despite the strongly worded condemnation of the violence by President Obama in April and the executive order he signed at the end of that month imposing sanctions on Bashar’s brother, Maher, his cousin Atef Najib, and mukhabarat chief Ali Mamlouk. It said that these were warning shots to prod Bashar to stop killing protesters and implement credible reforms. But the firm said the window was closing fast, as US media coverage was intensifying and officials like Senator John Kerry were beginning to reassess their positions.
Brown Lloyd James recommended drastic changes in the way the regime was articulating its reform agenda. The reform program needed “a face or brand,” Bashar must communicate more often with more “finely tuned messaging,” Asma must “get in the game” and do “listening tours,” and a reform “echo chamber” must be developed, especially in foreign media, focusing on Bashar’s desire to conduct reform in “a non-chaotic and rational way.”
“Refocusing the perception of outsiders and Syrians on reform will provide political cover to the generally sympathetic US government, and will delegitimize critics at home and abroad,” concluded the firm.13
The PR firm was very close to the mark in its portrayal of the prevailing thinking and mood among officials in Western capitals, at least in the first few weeks of protests in Syria.
France’s ambassador to Syria, Éric Chevallier, was one of these officials. Syria was Chevallier’s first posting, in 2009; he was a medical doctor by training and had until then worked mostly in international humanitarian assistance with the French government, as well as various NGOs and UN agencies. He accepted the Syria mission at the urging of his longtime mentor and current boss, foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, also a physician turned politician.14 The forty-nine-year-old Chevallier combined French charm and boyish good looks with a businesslike, practical approach to diplomacy.
To veteran French diplomats with long experience in the Middle East, Chevallier was the new kid on the block. From their perspective, he was impressionable and too eager to cozy up to Bashar and members of his inner circle, including the Tlasses.
Chevallier was interviewed for Vogue’s March 2011 piece on Asma. “I hope they’ll make the right choices for the country and the region,” he told the writer about Bashar and Asma in December 2010.15
While Chevallier appeared to his detractors like an enthusiastic promoter of the Assad couple, he believed he was simply advancing his country’s policies in Syria. France was among the first in the West to bet on rehabilitating the Syrian regime and Bashar, with strong encouragement from Qatar’s superrich ruling family. The Americans, the British, and others started to reengage with Bashar after France had already made overtures, sending Sarkozy to visit Damascus in 2008 and frequently hosting Bashar and Asma in Paris. Some thought that the French had moved too fast, but France believed it had a national-interest stake in trying to steer Bashar in the right direction.
“There were two ways for them to lead the country: stick to his father’s regional alliances and family policies, or try to move forward toward a more open society, stable foreign policy, and being part of the solution in the region instead of being the problem,” argued Chevallier.16
The day after the fall of French ally Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Chevallier sent a cable to Paris from Damascus. “Could we have a rose revolution in Damascus?” he wrote in the subject line, alluding to the damask rose. Chevallier reported that many Syrians were transfixed by what was happening in Tunisia, but it was too early to predict whether the country was going down a similar path.
He saw many similarities between the two countries: a youthful population hungry for freedom, sick of corruption, and eager for a share in the economic gains monopolized by regime cronies.17 But there was also a major difference: Syria had a much more formidable and deep-rooted police state. In Tunisia, significant elements of the military and police abandoned Ben Ali, precipitating his departure. Furthermore, Syria, unlike Tunisia, had a more complex social fabric and a deep alliance with Iran and its Hezbollah militia.
“It’s important to watch what happens” in Syria, Chevallier concluded his dispatch.
Later, when protests started in Syria, Chevallier reported to Paris that “people were indeed demonstrating for dignity and freedom.”18
Chevallier and other Western diplomats in Damascus believed that this was the perfect opportunity for Bashar to make the right choices and implement real and bold reform. He did not have to go like Ben Ali, Gaddafi, and Mubarak; he could be the one to buck the trend and emerge as the people’s champion, the French thought at first.
Even after the regime’s deadly response to demonstrators in Daraa, Chevallier and other diplomats held out such a possibility. Chevallier lobbied several regime figures to convince Bashar to punish his cousin Atef Najib for the actions taken in Daraa.
“Tell the Syrian people you have arrested Atef Najib,” Chevallier told one regime official. “Put this guy on Syrian state TV with a clear message: This is not the way we want to treat our people, it was a mistake. This will totally be the turning point if you do that. You will be supported by everybody.”19
Indeed, Najib was detained for a few days but then let go after his mother called her sister, Bashar’s mother, to plead for her son’s immediate release.20
The tone of Chevallier’s cables began to change in late April 2011, as the killing of protesters persisted and spread beyond Daraa.
“This will be very tough, bloody, and long,” he warned Paris.21
Chevallier believed that the clock was ticking for Bashar, and all the steps the Syrian president had taken so far were in the wrong direction.
The clock was ticking back in Paris, too. In exactly one year, April 2012, there would be a presidential election, and Sarkozy was running for a second term. The campaign had started and his socialist opponents were already hounding him about what they saw as his inconsistent approach toward the Arab Spring uprisings: he was rushing to bomb Gaddafi in Libya but hardly saying anything about Bashar, whom he had feted at the Élysée Palace four months before. Sarkozy finally spoke out at the end of April 2011, calling the situation “unacceptable.”22
In the interim, the Americans and Europeans were hoping that their allies in the region, Qatar and Turkey, could convince Bashar to stop the violence and take dramatic steps toward reform. At first, the coverage of the uprising in Syria by the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera—the Arab world’s most popular news channel—was not as intense as it was for other countries. The channel also went out of its way to air the regime’s point of view and perspective. The Qataris and Turks sent several senior emissaries to Bashar. One proposal was to rein in the mukhabarat and security forces and at the same time prepare to hold the first multiparty elections in Syria. They promised to back him as the lead candidate because they believed that he was still popular among many Syrians. Bashar listened attentively and seemed willing to follow the advice, but his actions were ultimately anything but conciliatory.23
A month into the uprising, it was clear that any overtures of reform were going to be on Bashar’s terms while hard-liners in his family and mukhabarat ratcheted up the violence against protesting areas.
“Look, we do not want to meet with people who have high expectations and unreasonable demands. We do not want to embarrass ourselves by making promises we won’t be able to deliver,” Bashar told Manaf after members of the Douma delegation were arrested and tortured for several days.24
Adnan Wehbeh, the respected doctor and protest organizer, returned to Douma bandaged and with bruises on his face and body.
“Serves you right to believe the Tlasses, they are part of the regime. How can you trust them?” many in Douma admonished Wehbeh.25
Still, Bashar met with delegation after delegation from most rebellious towns and cities to hear their grievances. The majority were vetted by the mukhabarat before they saw him and were usually dominated by regime loyalists. Manaf kept passing on to Bashar’s office names of more-credible figures with sway over protesters and urged that they be included in these delegations. Manaf found out that many of the people he recommended were instead arrested by the mukhabarat. Community leaders from the towns of Kisweh and Moadhamiya near Damascus and the town of Talbiseh near Homs were later tortured to death in detention.26
In mid-April, as protests were being met with increasing violence, Bashar named a new prime minister and government and issued several decrees, including one ending the state of emergency and another outlining the conditions and rules for protesting.
Bashar and Manaf met at the palace shortly thereafter. Bashar looked stressed but a bit more upbeat than before.27
“We made incredible concessions, but they [the protesters] are not stopping,” Bashar told Manaf with some exasperation.
Manaf argued that Bashar should have nominated a more independent figure for prime minister in order to show people that things were indeed changing, rather than selecting the classic Baath Party functionary as he had done.
“The [party’s] regional command selected him,” Bashar said.
“Come on,” Manaf pushed back, “the country is entering a dark tunnel and you tell me the regional command chose him.” Manaf was a leader in this same party and knew that its structures were simply fronts for the real power—Bashar, the family, and mukhabarat. “I thought the whole point here was to make real reforms,” continued Manaf. “People are expecting more.”
“No, the party will decide these things,” insisted Bashar.
Manaf detected duplicity when Bashar began to talk about all the delegations he was meeting with.
“We have to hear people’s demands. They have to feel that I am close to them,” said Bashar.
“But at the end people have big expectations,” said Manaf.
“I am telling everyone there is a state and institutions and that everything has to be done in accordance with the law and what’s permissible under the law,” retorted Bashar.
The family-based regime that had ruled Syria for more than forty years with fear and terror, spurned every opportunity for genuine reform over the years, and killed protesters the moment they took to the streets, was now seeking to refashion itself on its own terms and wanted Syrians and the world to buy into it. Ultimately, though, this was a family and regime interested in one thing only: survival at any cost.
Mazen Darwish, the lawyer and activist, felt it was a mistake to have engaged with Mohammad Nasif.28 It exposed him and his colleagues. But what choice did he have? They released him from prison and then dragged him to meet Nasif. The regime wanted to manipulate and co-opt him and his fellow activists—use them to lend credibility to its reform promises. And now when they refused to play the game they all became wanted by the mukhabarat, which labeled them “enemies of the leader and nation.” Some were in hiding already. Many used pseudonyms. Mazen spread rumors of discord among activists and circulated that he had broken ranks when his role as messenger between them and the regime ended.
Going forward, Mazen’s involvement in organizing and supporting the protest movement had to be kept secret. One effort that had started from almost day one of the protests in March 2011 was gathering momentum and had to be sustained despite the risks. He and his colleagues were expanding the network of what they called the Local Coordination Committees (LCCs), or tansiqiyat in Arabic. These were dozens of groups of grassroots activists spread out across the country, in city neighborhoods, towns, and villages—a mosaic of ethnic, religious, and class backgrounds. The goal was to collaborate through social media on organizing protests and adopting unified messages, both on the streets and in interactions with television stations and journalists around the region and world. They shared tips on how to harness tools like Facebook and YouTube to achieve their goals, and discussed measures and tactics to protect themselves.
Representatives of these committees, which included Syrians living overseas, held regular Skype conference calls. Many were young Syrians comfortable with technology and committed to truthfulness, accuracy, and nonviolence. They were the citizen journalists that the world was relying on to know what was happening as the regime spun its lies and false narratives and blocked or restricted access by traditional media. One of their jobs was to document atrocities and violations committed by regime forces at first and then later by all parties.
Notwithstanding personal rivalries and ideological divisions which emerged very early on among activists, they all more or less strove for one thing: finding a way to merge various protests springing up in different neighborhoods, towns, and villages into one large protest and occupy a major square in Damascus or another big city. There would be unity and strength in numbers. All the world would be watching, and the regime would perhaps think twice about killing everyone in the square, the activists reasoned.
People would stay in the square until Bashar resigned or fled. It would be just like Egypt’s Tahrir Square in Cairo. Syrians still longed for an outcome like that in Egypt and Tunisia, even though the polarization, violence, and bloodshed in the streets indicated that things could be headed toward a Libya scenario—rebels taking up arms to fight the regime.
Among those yearning for a Tahrir Square in the heart of Damascus was the painter Khaled al-Khani. He had his long-standing grudge against the regime that killed his father, but he was absolutely committed to keeping protests peaceful and unarmed, no matter the provocations by the regime. Khaled often joked to his friends that he was a coward because the slightest sound of gunfire scared him. They knew perfectly well that his fear was a result of the trauma of having lived through the Hama massacre as a seven-year-old boy.
Khaled was among those arguing strongly against any engagement with the regime or giving any credence to Bashar’s reform promises, which he believed were lies.
“Believe me,” Khaled told his friends, “you’ll get nothing through dialogue and politics. This regime is ready to destroy the country rather than dismantle its police state.”29
In the back of his mind was his own father’s experience. Hikmat al-Khani was among those in his native city of Hama who opposed the insurgency waged in the late 1970s by Islamist militants linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. But at the same time Hikmat felt that real changes needed to take place in the way the country was governed by Hafez and his regime. He and his best friend, Omar Shishakli, met with regime representatives and received promises of reform, including from Manaf’s father, Mustafa. Shishakli was later abducted by the mukhabarat in 1980.30 His mutilated body was dumped on the street.31
Khaled was among those in Damascus who were starting to head out to Douma every weekend to protest. The crowds on the streets and the town’s tightly knit community fostered solidarity and even a feeling of protection, despite the deadly violence deployed by the regime there. This solidarity was missing so far in the capital, where fear and mistrust reigned. Khaled and others believed that large protests in Douma and several towns in the capital’s eastern suburbs could be merged with protests that were starting to spring up in neighborhoods on the edges of Damascus. Protesters from all these areas could converge on Abbaseen Square, a large traffic roundabout and a major crossroads on the city’s east side paved with black basalt cobblestone. This would become the place where hundreds of thousands, and even a million people, would gather until the regime was toppled.
On his first trip to Douma, Khaled met Adnan Wehbeh, the physician and local protest leader who was tortured after meeting Bashar with Manaf’s help. They bonded immediately. Khaled saw Wehbeh as a wise and influential figure in the protest movement who, like him, was committed to peaceful struggle against the regime.
“Forget it, it’s impossible,” Khaled told Wehbeh on April 15, 2011, just before the first major attempt to get to the square was made that day. “The whole area around Abbaseen is carpeted with forces. They are ready to shoot.”32 Many protesters still wanted to try.
Some 40,000 people from Douma and surrounding towns marched about ten miles toward Damascus. The moment those in front reached the fringes of the square, regime forces unleashed a barrage of gunfire. Many were wounded and dozens were arrested. Those in the back fled if they could.33
There was another attempt a week later, on Good Friday, ahead of Easter Sunday. Protesters saw the day as an opportunity to show unity among Christians and Muslims, proving that their uprising was for all Syrians regardless of their religion. It was agreed that this time there would be two big marches from the eastern suburbs toward Abbaseen Square. One would come from the northeast and another from the east via an office tower and commercial complex. In Douma, tens of thousands flooded the main avenue. Khaled was with them, chanting and clapping.34
“The people want to topple the regime,” they shouted. “Leave! Leave!” they chanted, addressing Bashar.
“No reform with blood!” read placards carried by protesters.35
Those coming from other towns closer to Damascus arrived first. One protester carried a placard with a cross and crescent to signify Christian-Muslim unity. They were in front of the office complex when regime gunmen posted on the building’s rooftop opened fire at them. Bullets rained from everywhere.36
“Car, car, car!” screamed one man frantically, pleading for help to rush his friend to the hospital. The anguished man was on the ground with his friend in the middle of the street after everyone else had abandoned them and scattered for cover amid the crackle of machine-gun fire. His friend was motionless and slumped in a pool of blood with a big hole in the back of his head.
That day, April 22, 2011, was the bloodiest day since the start of the uprising in March. At least 110 protesters were killed by regime forces throughout Syria.37 It was the same day on which Bashar issued decrees regarding the state of emergency and right to protest, as if Bashar were signing these hollow laws with the blood of all these victims.
It was a grim week; just days before the regime killed protesters in Damascus to prevent them from occupying a square, deadly force was deliberately used to squash a brief, peaceful sit-in in the center of Homs.
On April 18, 2011, tens of thousands took to the streets for the funerals of protesters killed by security forces. The funerals spawned fresh protests. People decided to occupy one of the city’s main squares, New Clock Tower Square. They sang the national anthem and tied a large Syrian flag to the white clock tower’s base. More people joined.38 Many called on Bashar to give up power. At one point there were almost 100,000 people in the square. The mood was both defiant and joyous. By nightfall most left, but thousands decided to stay. They were going to camp in the square and demonstrate against the regime day and night.
Manaf sent two of his men to Homs to try to calm protesters and convince them to get off the streets before the regime had the chance to respond with force.39 He knew that the Assads intended to shoot everyone in the Homs square to prevent a prolonged sit-in. Maher al-Assad and Hafez Makhlouf had given the order to the Homs operations commander, General Ali Younes, who was also deputy head of the mukhabarat’s Military Intelligence Directorate.40
Manaf kept in touch with his envoys by phone from Damascus. Both men had contacts inside the mukhabarat and could act as mediators between both sides, he hoped.
The situation in Homs and the surrounding countryside was explosive when Manaf’s emissaries arrived. They first went to Manaf’s hometown, Al-Rastan, fifteen miles north of Homs city. Thousands of protesters had taken to the streets and smashed the statue of Hafez al-Assad at the town’s southern entrance, a massive white stone idol that stood on a thirty-two-foot pedestal; it had been proudly commissioned and unveiled by Mustafa Tlass in the mid-1980s, not long after Hafez’s Hama massacre.
Protesters managed to separate the head, which rolled down the hill, where a mob trampled on it while deliriously shouting curses. They kept hammering what remained of the statue until it came tumbling down.41 One person was seriously injured when a piece of the statue fell on him; he was rushed to the hospital in Homs, where he was arrested and taken to the army hospital instead. A large mob besieged the hospital and would not leave. Manaf defused the situation by getting the hospital to release the man while his envoys tried to pave the way for Manaf to meet with townspeople.
Even though many Syrians called Al-Rastan “the second Qurdaha,” comparing it to the Assads’ loyal hometown, most townspeople despised Mustafa Tlass and his sons. One of those who brought down Hafez’s statue was Nazem Tlass, a distant relative. He was proud of it.42
“Al-Rastan had to put up with tyranny and injustice, just like the rest of Syria—there was no exception,” said an army officer from the town who sided with protesters.43
Indeed, the dynamics in Al-Rastan were no different from those in any rural and predominantly Sunni area like the Aleppo countryside, Daraa, and Deir Ezzour.
There were a few natives who held senior positions in the party, army, and government, but they were always subordinate to the Alawites who had the real power, especially Assad clan members and the mukhabarat. Mustafa had been Hafez’s lifetime companion, but he was most certainly second to him. Even at the Ministry of Defense, which Mustafa headed for more than three decades, the real decision maker was his office manager, Issam Kheirbek, an Alawite general and nephew of Bashar’s mentor, Mohammad Nasif. These sectarian cleavages and imbalances were accentuated on the ground. Many in Al-Rastan and wider Homs province were angered that most local government jobs went mainly to Alawites.
The town’s fortunes began to improve when Bashar took over, which many credited to his relationship with Manaf. Al-Rastan’s quota of those accepted at the Homs officers’ academy went up to almost fifty per year, and a modern hospital that had been under construction for decades was finally completed.44
“We are the ones who secure the Assad family’s pact with Syria’s Sunnis,” Manaf would often say privately.45
It was precisely this oppressive patronage, closer to a bondage system, that people in Al-Rastan wanted to overturn when they toppled Hafez’s statue. More than four decades of bottled-up resentment and anger was finally unleashed and, for many, there was no going back.
Just like in Daraa, it was usually the elders who were afraid of the wrath of the regime and more amenable to dialogue, while the youth wanted to press ahead with their revolution and emancipation. Manaf’s envoys witnessed this firsthand when they entered Al-Rastan the day the statue was brought down.
“The whole time, we felt we were ten steps behind as developments raced ahead. Things were much bigger than us and our ability to solve them,” one of the men recalled.46
The next day, as news of the large sit-in at New Clock Tower Square spread around the countryside, many people in Al-Rastan and nearby towns flocked to Homs city. Manaf told his envoys to follow.
It was a scary scene when they arrived around midnight. Thousands of soldiers, security forces, and regime thugs were encircling the square and hunkering down on the roofs of surrounding buildings. The regime also mobilized more than 500 mostly Alawite students from the Baath University in Homs to assist in clearing the square.
Protesters were told to disperse or face dire consequences. The commander of Homs operations, Ali Younes, ordered local Sunni clerics to pressure protesters to leave. Some left, others refused. A few thousand were determined to stay in the square no matter what. After midnight, Younes received an order from Bashar’s brother, Maher: clear the square now.47
Soldiers closed in on protesters and aimed their weapons. Those on rooftops did the same. One of Manaf’s envoys grabbed a bullhorn that was in the hand of an officer at the scene and stood in the middle of the square between protesters and soldiers. He told soldiers that they could not shoot at their brothers. Protesters started cheering for a moment, thinking that the army was going to disobey orders, as had happened in Tunisia.48
Then, at about 2:00 a.m. on April 19, 2011, all hell broke loose. The crackle of gunfire echoed through Homs for more than an hour. Even now there are no precise figures for the number of people killed at New Clock Tower Square, or those who were detained or went missing afterward. Once the smoke cleared, big shovels and trucks were brought to the square to clear out the bodies of the dead and the anti-Bashar banners they had carried before they were killed. The debris was towed away and fire engines hosed the square to make sure that all looked clean in the morning.
Manaf’s peace envoys were caught in the crossfire. One, Abu Rasul, went missing for three days, turning up later in the Homs military hospital, where he was detained with horrific injuries. His partner eventually located him.
“It was a slaughterhouse,” the man remembered. “People were between life and death. Everyone was shackled to their beds. Doctors and nurses were hitting them with chains, iron rods, and chairs, especially those from Al-Rastan. A nurse ripped someone’s leg with her hands. When I found Abu Rasul his rib cage was broken, his head was swollen, his teeth were smashed, and part of his leg was missing. He was almost dead.”49
When Bashar began to deploy army units in parts of Syria to control the early protests, Manaf thought this could be a positive development, and he encouraged Bashar to do so. Perhaps the army could act as a buffer between the protesters on one side and the mukhabarat forces and pro-regime thugs on the other, similar to what had happened in Egypt. Of course, Manaf knew the structure of the army and the limits of its power. His father, Mustafa, practically built the army alongside Hafez and the other Baathist officers when they grabbed power in 1963.
The idea of the army playing a more independent and moderating role and Bashar moving away from the hard-liners was wishful thinking, if not delusion. It was soon clear that the army’s early intervention, especially in places that had a history of sectarian animosities and tense local social dynamics, made matters worse and fueled more violence.
At the end of April 2011, Bashar ordered the army to carry out military operations in several of the cities and towns that had risen up against him—Baniyas, Daraa, Douma, and Homs, among others.50The bloodiest was in Daraa, where the first two protesters had been killed by his forces a month prior.
It was April 25, 2011, just after the muezzin at the Omari mosque next to Sally’s home called for dawn prayers.51 She heard the rumbling of engines on the streets. She looked from the balcony and saw tanks, armored vehicles, and army trucks.
“Tanks!” she called to her mother when she rushed back inside.
“That’s it, we are going to be another Hama,” shuddered her mother, referring to the siege of that city in 1982 by Hafez’s forces and the massacre of its inhabitants.
Power and all telephone communications were cut off as the army entered old Daraa, or Al-Balad. Soldiers set up checkpoints on street corners and intersections, and snipers hunkered down on rooftops. A total curfew was imposed. All shops were closed. Anyone venturing on the street was shot dead. In just the first nine days of the siege, an estimated 200 people were killed, almost all by sniper fire.52 Many died from their injuries because they could not be taken to hospitals or no emergency aid was available. Some families buried their dead in the backyards of their homes.
Like all those under siege, Sally and her family survived on provisions that Syrians usually stored in their pantries, such as pickled vegetables, lentils, and rice.
Several surrounding towns and villages erupted in anger and tried to march to Daraa city to lift the siege. They were met with deadly force. On April 29, at least sixty-two people were killed trying to defy the siege.53
At the end of April, the army and security forces stormed the Omari mosque, which had become a stronghold for protesters after the assault in March. Daraa residents had reclaimed the mosque and turned its courtyard into a square for protesting, renaming it “Dignity Square.” Sally was among those involved in organizing protests there.
During the second assault in April, some of the men who had barricaded themselves at the mosque took up small arms to defend themselves. This was the perfect pretext for the army to go in. Some in Daraa said there were people among the protesters working secretly with the mukhabarat and that it was they who facilitated the procurement of weapons and urged confrontation with the army.54 Making arms available to protesters was a deliberate and systematic tactic by the regime. Manaf documented several such instances with dates, names, and places.55
As the army pressed on with its campaign in Daraa, necessities like baby formula ran out. A group of Syrian actors and other public figures posted a statement on Facebook pleading with authorities to allow milk, food, medicine, and emergency care into Daraa. They were mocked and labeled traitors by regime officials and loyalists.56 Fruit and vegetable vendors from a Palestinian refugee camp south of Daraa were shot at by the army after they smuggled in two pickup trucks carrying fresh produce.57
In early May, soldiers accompanied by mukhabarat officers raided almost every home in Daraa, arresting hundreds of young men. They were also looking for two refrigerator trucks in which Daraa residents had stored bodies of their dead for burial later.58 Sally’s teenage brothers were among those who escaped to farmland near the city as news of the sweeps spread.
When the army reached the family’s apartment they kicked open the front door.
“Where are the gunmen? Where are the terrorists? Who among you was protesting?” they shouted.
Sally’s heart sank. She had cell phones in her pockets. One of them had a Jordanian number. Since they were so close to Jordan, they could get cell phone reception from there and it was a way to communicate with the outside world after Syrian service was severed. By then Sally was one of Daraa’s leading young activists. She was deeply involved in the Daraa Coordination Committee. She helped organize the weekly protests, filmed them, posted videos on social media, and liaised with other rebellious areas around Syria. Men and women were working side by side.
To protect her identity, she used pseudonyms like “Free Girl” and “Samar al-Hourani.”
“We have nothing to do with the protests,” Sally’s mother said, addressing the officer calmly. “Search the house if you like.”
They went into the bedrooms, rummaging through drawers and knocking over a closet until Sally’s aunt, who lived in the apartment downstairs, offered the officers breakfast in her home. Sally’s cousin, the only young man who was around, offered them cigarettes, too. They did not arrest him.59
Elsewhere they pocketed money and gold that they found while searching bedrooms. Very few families were left unscathed by their visits.
By mid-May 2011, military operations expanded to many towns that had dared to demonstrate against the regime, widening the circle of bloodshed and retribution, sharpening sectarian discord, and pushing people on the streets toward militancy. One other consequence of these operations: they exposed and deepened fissures within the army.
In the town of Dael, located on the strategic highway and army supply line between Daraa and Damascus, there were deadly clashes between an army unit and mukhabarat agents after a group of soldiers tried to rescue protesters who were being shot at by the latter.60 Later, army tanks and more soldiers under mukhabarat supervision arrived to teach the town a lesson.
Manaf witnessed firsthand the consequences of plunging the army into the bloody crackdown against protesters. In late April, units of his Republican Guard alongside the mukhabarat led several assaults on Douma to crush the protest movement and detain all those connected to it. This was the same town where Manaf had tried to make peace after Bashar’s cousin the mukhabarat commander Hafez Makhlouf killed protesters.
Nearly half of Manaf’s unit, roughly 1,600 men, were deployed alongside other forces to take part in the late-April Douma assault. They were ordered to disperse protesters on the streets by shooting directly at them. The orders were not only coming from the mukhabarat but also from Manaf’s fellow commanders in the Republican Guard.61 Most of the Alawites who dominated the Republican Guard obeyed the kill orders but some Sunnis were unwilling, Douma being overwhelmingly Sunni.62 Those who disobeyed orders were executed on the spot.
“Sir, I no longer want to go to Douma, please do not send me there. I am seeing things against my conscience and principles,” Iyad Khalouf, a twenty-eight-year-old first lieutenant in Manaf’s brigade, told him in May. Khalouf was one of the brightest and most promising junior officers in Manaf’s unit. He was a Sunni from Rankous, a town on the outskirts of Damascus.
“Be patient,” said Manaf, “the president [Bashar] said things would change soon. If they do not, then I promise I won’t send you to Douma.63
Days later Khalouf committed suicide at the base by shooting himself in the head.
Manaf had no say as to whether his men could be deployed in Douma or not. The overall commander of the Republican Guard, Manaf’s fellow brigade commanders, and even his own deputy appeared to be wholeheartedly embracing the military option. Manaf was the only one among the top officers who seemed reluctant and argued for another approach. He was branded an “appeaser.”
Bashar’s brother, Maher, and cousins the Makhloufs warned Manaf to watch what he was saying about them or else they were going to clip his tongue (a common expression in the Arab world signifying a threat or warning to one’s vocal critics).64 Manaf’s enemies also ordered senior aides at the palace to stop dealing with him on anything related to the political reform track. Manaf’s only protection was his family’s special status in the regime and his father’s history with Hafez, things that Bashar still seemed to value.
Then came preparations in late May for a military assault on Manaf’s hometown, Al-Rastan. After the smashing of Hafez’s statue, the town had kept up its protests though they were met with deadly violence by security forces. Toward the end of April, almost 10,000 people had taken to the streets after an army officer was killed during the Daraa military operation and was brought back to his hometown for burial. People blocked the highway with burning tires. The army was ordered to intervene and about twenty-three people among the protesters were killed. At night, the local branches of the Baath Party and mukhabarat as well as all police stations were set on fire.65
Now the regime was determined to subdue Al-Rastan and teach it a lesson.
Manaf called Bashar and asked to see him.66
Bashar told him to meet him at Bassel’s old office in Qasioun and not at the palace. Manaf figured that Bashar did not want others, especially his brother, Maher, to know that he was still taking Manaf’s advice.
“Al-Rastan is mine, I can solve it,” said Manaf, clearly understating the severity of the situation in his hometown. “All they want is for the state to consider those who died martyrs and for their families to be compensated. They want the wounded to be treated at the government’s expense. They also want us to release detainees.” His plan might have pleased a few pro-regime town elders but it certainly would not have satisfied the demands of protesters on the ground.
But Bashar relented regardless. He picked up the telephone and called General Abdul-Fatah Qudsiyeh, commander of the mukhabarat’s Military Intelligence Directorate, to inform him of the change of plans.
Manaf was told to liaise with Qudsiyeh’s deputy, Ali Younes, the man who killed protesters in Homs on the orders of Bashar’s brother and cousin. It was agreed that a delegation from Al-Rastan would meet Younes to discuss the settlement’s terms.
The delegation went to see Younes the next day, but he refused to meet them and told them to give him their demands in writing.
The day after, there were more protests in Al-Rastan, the largest ever.
Just after, Eyad Makhlouf, an army officer and the youngest of the Makhloufs, visited Manaf at home.67 “Dad and Rami send you their regards,” said Eyad, “and they want me to tell you that you’re too nice; your solutions don’t work, you don’t know how to deal with people.”
He asked him to stay out of Al-Rastan.
“I spoke to the president and he told me Al-Rastan was mine,” said Manaf.
“It’s not. Speak to him again if you want,” said Eyad.
That night and the following morning Manaf called Bashar multiple times. Bashar never answered. He normally returned his calls within minutes.
On May 29, a major military operation was launched in Al-Rastan and three adjacent towns north of Homs city. Tanks and artillery shelled the towns and snipers shot anyone on the streets. At the end of the five-day operation, at least seventy-five people were killed.68
The orders to strike Manaf’s hometown came via his nemesis, Hafez Makhlouf, the man Manaf had wanted Bashar to punish for killing protesters.69
A few days later, one of Manaf’s cousins from Al-Rastan, a first lieutenant in the army called Abdul-Razzaq Tlass, appeared on the Al Jazeera news channel to announce his defection and urge others to follow suit. He had been stationed in Daraa.
“You joined the army not to protect the Assad family. You are an honorable officer, stay honorable—but if you are not honorable, then stay with the Assad family,” Abdul-Razzaq said, addressing fellow army officers and barely concealing his anger.70
There had been army desertions since the start of the military operations in April, but this was among the first public and televised defections.71
Within days, one of Manaf’s fellow generals in the Republican Guard was sent by Bashar to see him. Manaf had stopped calling Bashar after the assault on Al-Rastan.
“Why aren’t you calling him?” said General Bassam Al-Hassan.
“He’s a liar,” said Manaf.
“Call him,” insisted Al-Hassan.
“Bassam, he has been lying to me from the start,” said Manaf.
“How?” asked Al-Hassan.
Manaf explained what happened with Al-Rastan and all his previous peacemaking efforts in Douma and how he had been sabotaged, undermined, and threatened by Maher and the Makhloufs. Manaf concluded that Bashar was pretending he was interested in peaceful solutions while giving hard-liners the green light to crush the protests by any means.
“Go see him tomorrow—it’s important,” said Al-Hassan.
The next day Manaf met Bashar at the presidential palace.72
They discussed everything that had happened since the first day protesters were killed in Daraa and how Bashar’s brother and cousins poured fuel on the fires.
“Let’s stage a coup,” said Manaf at one point.
“Against whom?” said Bashar with a mix of bemusement and slight alarm.
“I will personally arrest Maher [Assad], Hafez [Makhlouf], and the others, but you have to be on board with this,” said Manaf in a serious tone.
Bashar started laughing.
“I am your friend and I have advised you all along not to choose the military solution,” said Manaf soberly.
“You know what’s your problem, Manaf?” said Bashar. “Your problem is that you’re too soft.”
There was an impenetrable silence for almost a minute.
“I am too soft,” replied Manaf with a hint of indignation, “but I will put in front of you two things that you no longer can ignore: poverty and sectarianism. These are now out in the open.”
Bashar remained quiet.
“Okay,” continued Manaf, “if you think I am too soft, I will step aside and sit in my office and not get involved in anything.”
“Yes, that would be best for now,” said Bashar, sounding almost relieved.
He then told Manaf that their homeland was facing a conspiracy just like the one their fathers confronted and crushed in the 1970s and early ’80s. The enemies were the same, he said. Now, like then, there was no room for compromise.