Bashar al-Assad waved to the crowds as he briskly came down the marble stairs of the Assad Library and made his way toward a stage set up in Umayyad Square in the heart of Damascus. He wore gray slacks, an open-neck light-blue shirt, and a navy blazer.1 Almost a dozen bodyguards trailed him.
On stage, a chorus of youth supporters dressed in winter jackets in the colors of the Syrian flag applauded and swayed to a song composed for Bashar. Being wrapped in the Syrian flag meant you were not a traitor but a true patriot who embraced Bashar, was the regime’s message. A cheerleader jumped up and down while another, in camouflage pants, pumped his fist in the air.
“Menhebak, menhebak, menhebak…” (“We love you, we love you, we love you…”), roared the giant loudspeakers.
Thousands of loyalists filled the square waving flags, holding up posters of Bashar, and chanting his name. They became hysterical the moment he appeared onstage.
“For your eyes, Assad, we’re shabiha forever!” they repeated feverishly, proudly associating themselves with the thugs mobilized by the regime to assist the army and security forces in their bloody crackdown on protesters. Barricades manned by dozens of guards separated the crowd from Bashar, who looked ecstatic, confident, and even brazen. Appearing beloved was the perfect riposte to his enemies.
It was early January 2012, nearly ten months since the start of anti-regime protests. Each attempt by Bashar’s opponents to rally in a similar way in a major square was met with lethal force. In April 2011, protesters were hunted and killed by regime snipers as they tried to reach Abbaseen Square in Damascus. That same month, regime soldiers and shabiha, including loyalist college students, attacked a sit-in at Clock Tower Square in Homs where more than 100,000 people had gathered at one point. Dozens were killed or wounded in the assault.2 The opposition’s occupation of Asi Square in Hama lasted weeks and attracted close to one million people on several occasions, but it ended with a military operation against the city in late July 2011. Hundreds were killed.
Now Bashar and his family and security services were orchestrating pro-regime rallies in the same squares that they were violently thwarting their opponents from holding. It was a defiant response to international efforts underway for several months to pressure the regime and force Bashar to leave power.
“For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside,” said Obama in August 2011, as he praised the courage of peaceful protesters in the face of “ferocious brutality at the hands of their government.”3
Obama also imposed sweeping sanctions against the regime, including restrictions on its ability to sell oil and oil products, one of its main sources of hard currency. After Obama spoke, leaders of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom said that Bashar had “lost all legitimacy,” while the European Union passed its own sanctions against the regime.4 That month there was already talk of the possibility of referring the Syrian regime to the International Criminal Court for “widespread… systematic attacks against the civilian population.”5
In the fall of 2011, the Syrian National Council, an opposition body made up mostly of figures living in exile, was unveiled in the Turkish city of Istanbul. Burhan Ghalyoun, the affable Paris-based professor who used to lecture about political reform during the brief Damascus Spring in Bashar’s first year in power, was chosen to head the opposition council.6 This was the body that was meant to rule Syria on an interim basis upon Bashar’s exit from power.
For the Assads, though, the battle for survival was just beginning.
Bashar was confident that his allies Iran and the Lebanese Shiite militia, Hezbollah, would do everything to defend him. They had signaled to Obama early on that any move against Bashar could trigger retaliation against Israel and Western interests in the region.
“We are related to different problems [in the Middle East]. If they isolate Syria, Syria will collapse and it’s going to be domino effect, everybody will suffer, so they don’t have interest to isolate Syria,” Bashar reminded the West when he spoke to Barbara Walters, a month before his boisterous Damascus rally at the start of 2012.7
Bashar also counted on the regime’s constant ally Russia, which was enraged over how Western powers had used an earlier UN Security Council resolution meant for the protection of civilians in Libya as cover for regime change in that country. On October 4, 2011, Russia vetoed the first proposed Security Council resolution concerning Syria since the start of protests. Russia was joined by China.8 The resolution had simply called on the regime to end its military offensives against protesting communities and spoke of the need for a political solution to the crisis.
Bashar derived added comfort from the fact that despite Obama’s tough words and calls for Bashar to relinquish power, the US president had made it clear early on that the US would not intervene militarily in Syria to oust Bashar or act without a UN mandate. Obama’s priority was to get remaining US troops out of Iraq, not plunge into another regime-change endeavor in neighboring Syria.
It became amply evident to Bashar, after he crushed the protests in Hama in the summer of 2011, that there would be no NATO military intervention in Syria against his regime, as there had been in Libya. NATO’s secretary general “completely” ruled out intervention in Syria.9 No Western powers rushed to save Hama or any other Syrian town the way they had rescued the Libyan city of Benghazi from being overrun by Gaddafi’s troops. The visit by the French and US ambassadors to Hama when it was under the control of protesters might have given the city a reprieve for a few weeks, but ultimately Bashar assaulted Hama and neither NATO nor France and the United States intervened to stop him.
“The fact is we failed to protect them. But was it so easy? Did we have a magic bullet at that time? Military intervention at that moment without Security Council resolution? Not so easy,” said France’s ambassador Chevallier afterward.10
What happened in Hama in the summer of 2011 was just the start of a string of dashed expectations and bitter disappointments for Bashar’s opponents. This sense of letdown and betrayal stemmed from the worldview of most people in Syria and the Middle East. For many, when the ambassadors of France and the United States, two powers that regarded themselves as defenders of universal liberty and human rights, visited protesters in Hama, then it should have automatically led to protection. And when the president of a superpower like the United States said Bashar had to step down, then that was going to become fact.
In contrast, Bashar and his allies quickly realized the limitations of any Western action against the regime. Bashar regarded his impunity as a given, rooted in the region and his family’s place in its history but also in the wayward and unsteady attention of those who wished to stop him.
Bashar and his allies concluded that time was on their side.
Beginning in the summer of 2011, their priorities were surviving international sanctions, closing ranks, minimizing the impact of army defections, and, most important, eliminating all those organizing peaceful resistance to the regime. Like his father before him, it was absolutely vital for Bashar to shift the narrative from one about a brutal clan and regime killing protesters and political activists to that of a state battling armed insurgents and gangs linked to a foreign conspiracy.
“We forge ahead with firm and steady steps where there’s no room for defeatists, cowards, opportunists, ignorance, and backwardness,” Bashar told the crowd at the regime-organized rally in January 2012.11 “I am confident about the future… We shall be victorious over the conspiracy without any doubt,” he continued as loyalists, who looked entranced, snapped photos of him with their smartphones.
Standing in the first row not far from the stage was Bashar’s wife, Asma, and two of their children, nine-year-old daughter Zein and seven-year-old son Karim. Asma smiled and looked adoringly at her husband. She was dressed in a black wool hat and a sleeveless beige winter jacket over black sweater and leggings. The children were bundled up in winter jackets. Karim wore a baseball cap in the colors of the Syrian flag with “Syria” emblazoned on it, and Zein waved a Syrian flag.
Not far behind Asma and the children, Bashar’s friend Manaf watched the spectacle.12 Observing Bashar at the rally, Manaf thought his friend was deluding himself, or worse. At that moment, Bashar’s quest to save the regime appeared to Manaf like a mission impossible that would end in ruin for the Assads and those associated with them, as well as the whole country.
But just as for Bashar, survival was Manaf’s priority, too.
Manaf knew that being outside the Assad family’s war consensus was becoming an untenable and perilous position. He saw the defense minister, Ali Habib, removed from his position by Bashar and put under house arrest for refusing orders to attack protesters in Hama.13 The vice president, Farouq al-Sharaa, who had been advocating dialogue and meaningful political reforms, was sidelined and later imprisoned at his home in Damascus when there was talk of him taking over Bashar’s duties as president and leading a transitional government.14 Sharaa’s decades of loyalty to Hafez and then Bashar afterward counted for little in the end.
Manaf was sidelined, too, but officially he was still a general in the Republican Guard. He could be asked to take part in military operations against opposition areas. Refusing to do so was a dereliction of duty. Manaf believed that his standoff with Maher al-Assad and the Makhloufs heightened the dangers that he and his family faced.
“You have failed in your duties; you must understand that this is an assault on all of us, a big conspiracy,” Bashar reprimanded about seventy Baath Party officials, including Manaf, that he had summoned to the palace for an urgent meeting, a few weeks before his splashy Damascus rally at the start of 2012.15
Bashar’s brother Maher stared angrily at the gathered partisans as Bashar spoke sternly about mobilizing party militias to defend the regime and the lessons learned from his father’s bloody era. At the meeting, Manaf felt like a plagued person, hardly anyone greeted him; they wanted to keep a certain distance from him.
The pressure on Manaf to definitively take sides was also coming from outside Syria. He was among several senior army officers who started receiving calls and messages on their private cell phones telling them to defect. “Don’t stay with the butcher dictator,” said one message from an American number.16
At the end of 2011, Manaf received a call from a man speaking Arabic with an Egyptian accent and identifying himself as someone from the office of Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. “You’re using violence against protesters. That’s unacceptable…,” said the man before Manaf hung up.17
By then Manaf and his family believed that the United States and its Western allies were done with Bashar.
“The Syrian people will win their battle and France will continue to do everything to assist them,” declared France’s foreign minister, Alain Juppé. “The noose is tightening around this completely ‘autistic’ regime, which continues its bloody crackdown.”18
The way the Tlasses saw it, abandoning the Assads would put them in a strong position to play a leading role post-Bashar. In December 2011, Manaf took the first steps toward a break with the family. He sent this message to the US State Department through a friend who visited Damascus that month: “I am against the killing of protesters and have nothing to do with it.”19
Around Christmas 2011, Manaf’s wife and children traveled to Paris under the pretext of visiting their relatives for the holidays.20
His wife, Thala, contacted the French ambassador to Syria, Éric Chevallier, who was in Paris at the time and whom the Tlasses considered a friend. By then France was deliberating whether to keep its embassy open after pro-Bashar mobs attacked the French consulate in Latakia and the French chancery in Aleppo. The United States had recalled Robert Ford after the regime ratcheted its incitement against him, and pro-Bashar thugs attacked his motorcade when he visited an opposition figure in Damascus.21 Embassies of several Arab countries which had called on Bashar to step down were also attacked.
Thala and Chevallier agreed to meet at a café on the Place Saint-Sulpice, not far from her apartment. “Manaf wants to get out,” Thala told Chevallier after they settled into a booth in the back of the café. “He’s no longer with the regime.”22 Waiters in white shirts and black bow ties and vests raced around with trays of drinks. Outside, Christmas shoppers perused the festive vitrines of the boutiques on the nearby Rue du Four. “It will be difficult for him to do it on his own—can you help?” continued Thala as Chevallier listened attentively.23
She spoke of threats to their lives and expressed worry for the safety of the couple’s two youngest children, Hamza and Mounzer.24 She said that the children’s bodyguard, who was normally assigned by the palace, had been changed after Manaf broke ranks with Bashar and his brother and cousins. The new bodyguard was then killed.25 Whether the bodyguard’s death posed a real or imagined threat to the children, the truth was that few understood as well as the Tlasses the vengeful and mafia-like mind-set of the Assads and Makhloufs. The change of bodyguards might have been a message or veiled threat from the Assads—a reminder that they controlled every detail of the Tlasses’ lives, including their children’s safety and welfare. But the bodyguard’s death could have also been linked to an emerging insurgency against the regime, which began to target anyone seen as connected to the ruling families. For some in the communities coming under vicious regime assault, the Tlasses looked as complicit in their suffering as the Assads.
Chevallier told Thala that he fully supported and welcomed Manaf’s decision but that he had to first talk with his superiors.26
For months, Chevallier had been passing messages at every opportunity to figures within the regime, urging them to do the right thing and defect. The Americans, French, and their regional and Western allies were all betting that a weakening of Bashar’s regime from within through defections, coupled with pressure from rebellious towns and cities, could bring down Bashar or force him to leave the country. As far as these outside powers were concerned, change was happening across the Middle East despite the bloodshed and turmoil—and Syria was no exception.
When Thala met Chevallier at the end of 2011, Libya had formed its first interim government following Gaddafi’s gruesome killing,27 Egypt was in the midst of its first post-Mubarak elections,28 and Yemen’s longtime dictator, Ali Abdallah Saleh, had agreed to resign as part of a deal brokered by Gulf Arab states.29
After his meeting with Thala, Chevallier was immersed in discussions at the French Foreign Ministry and with his country’s secret service. He spoke positively about the prospect of Manaf’s defection, but even so, he delivered a sober assessment of Manaf’s real power and significance within the regime.30 While the Tlasses had aided the Assads every step of the way in constructing and protecting their more than four-decade rule over Syria, Chevallier knew that Manaf and the Tlasses had been eclipsed before the uprising by others, especially Bashar’s maternal cousins the Makhloufs. The Tlasses were no longer in the “nucleus” or “heart” of the regime, explained Chevallier. Manaf had a reputation for being a general who liked to socialize and have a good time rather than plunge himself into the cutthroat power plays of Bashar’s inner circle. Chevallier’s point was that Manaf’s defection would in no way trigger the regime’s collapse.
Still, the defection of someone like Manaf could deal Bashar and his regime an immense psychological and symbolic blow. This was his childhood friend, after all. Manaf’s defection to France would give Paris added influence over the transitional government that would be put in place after Bashar’s hoped-for demise. Manaf could represent the interests of the Syrian army in that body. Chevallier stressed that Manaf was a part of the solution—but not an alternative to Bashar.
Weighing on the French decision to help Manaf get out was intense lobbying by his Paris-based sister, Nahed, a wealthy socialite with extensive contacts inside France’s political and business establishment all the way up to the presidency.
In a separate meeting with Chevallier at the end of 2011, Nahed vowed to do everything to bring her family, including her father, Mustafa Tlass, to France. She declared to Chevallier and other French officials that the Tlasses were making a definitive break with the Assads and were backing the opposition.31
On the first day of 2012, Thala sent Bashar an e-mail wishing him, Asma, and their children a happy new year and victory over all his enemies “from the smallest to the biggest.”32 In a prior e-mail, Thala had cursed Arab countries for suspending Syria’s membership in the Arab League. In another exchange she asked Bashar to call her, and she apologized if she was causing him “a headache from all the back and forth.”
“I would never get a headache because of you, don’t say that again, you are supposed to know me well by now and know how much respect I have for both of you,” Bashar wrote back, referring to her and Manaf.33
Maintaining a direct line to Bashar, pretending nothing had changed in the relationship, and praising some of Bashar’s moves offered protection and cover for the Tlasses as they plotted their exit. “Incredible!!!!!!” and “Masterstroke!!!!!!!” Thala wrote to Bashar in reaction to a speech he gave one day before his triumphant appearance in Umayyad Square in early January 2012.34 Manaf characterized all these contacts as a last-ditch attempt to influence Bashar and get him to stop the butchery.35
Manaf was haunted by the brutal killing of Ghayath Matar, a twenty-six-year-old protest leader from Daraya, a town on the edge of Damascus known for its tart, jewel-like grapes and wood craftsmen. Matar, a tailor by profession, was nicknamed “Little Gandhi” because he and his friends handed out flowers and bottles of water to the soldiers sent to assault them. He was part of a group called the Daraya Youth—bright and creative men and women committed to peaceful resistance.
“He had an innocent face and infectious smile,” said Manaf, who had met Matar when he received a delegation from Daraya in his office at the start of the uprising.36
In early September 2011, Matar and a group of like-minded Daraya activists were entrapped and arrested by the mukhabarat. Days later, the mukhabarat’s Air Force Intelligence Directorate called Matar’s family and told them to collect his body from the morgue; he had died after barbaric torture. His wife was pregnant with their first child.37
“It was an unbearable dose of hatred, spite, and violence,” said Mazen Darwish, as tears rolled down his face.
Matar had been part of the Local Coordination Committees (LCCs), the civil and peaceful anti-regime grassroots movement founded by Mazen and his colleagues. Among those captured with Matar was Yahya al-Shurbaji, another Daraya native and one of Mazen’s best friends; his whereabouts were unknown.
“There are few people as ethical, smart, and spiritual as him,” said Mazen about Shurbaji, who like him had been involved in reform initiatives as early as 2001. Before his arrest, Shurbaji confronted and chased out Islamist militants who had moved into Daraya farms to set up training camps in the name of fighting the regime. They were some of the militants released from prison by Bashar.38
Advocates of peaceful resistance, not the gunmen or Islamist fanatics, posed the gravest threat to Assad family rule. As they had for his father in 1980, they became Bashar’s priority in 2011. After the bloody summer 2011 assault on protesters in Hama, Bashar’s terror organs (mukhabarat branches) systematically went after prominent symbols of Mazen’s LCCs and everyone collaborating with them and sharing their vision and methods.
These largely autonomous and cell-like structures kept multiplying as, early on, the uprising gained momentum. In big cities like Damascus where the regime was omnipresent, it was common for members of one tansiqiya, or coordination unit, not to know the real identity of members of another unit—for security reasons. These groups established themselves online, especially on Facebook and YouTube, which were becoming indispensable platforms for announcements and news and videos about local protest activities and regime crimes. The committees also liaised with each other online. The regime sought to identify, infiltrate, and disrupt the activist networks operating throughout the country. The objective was to unmask and apprehend key figures and sow fear in the hearts of sympathizers as well as the general public.
In the summer and fall of 2011, there were repeated attempts to unify activists on the ground, mainly by bringing together the secularists and those with Islamist leanings. Talks had to be kept secret and mostly online in order to avoid being targeted by the regime. Activist leaders held Skype conference calls. What they did not know at the time was that among them were people secretly working for the mukhabarat. These agents were often the ones arguing the hardest for armed resistance.39
Around that time, the regime sent teams of security and military officers to Tehran for training on cyberwarfare and surveillance. Iran had developed extensive know-how in the wake of its own crackdown on protests that had erupted in the aftermath of the June 2009 presidential elections, or what became known as the Green Movement.
“The Iranians were responsible for the arrest of many activists early on,” said a Syrian officer who had taken part in the Iran training but later defected.40
The Syrian regime also obtained, via Iraq, an ally of both Damascus and Tehran, advanced internet filtering devices made by the California-based Blue Coat Systems which the regime used to block and restrict web content. Syria was subject to US sanctions, but Iraq was not.41
Fearing arrest by the regime, Mazen Darwish stopped making media appearances and instead worked clandestinely to support the LCCs. His lawyer friend, Razan Zeitouneh, was on the run because she topped the regime’s most-wanted list. Her colleagues spread rumors that she had fled to Britain.42 Many LCC leaders and members were in hiding or abroad after the assassination or arrest of several fellow activists.
Torturing protesters and returning their mutilated corpses to their families was a way for the regime to illustrate the heavy price of opposition. In Daraa, where the first regime killings had ignited the revolution, a civil engineer and leading protest organizer named Maan Odat was executed by a mukhabarat officer after being wounded when regime forces fired at a funeral turned impromptu protest. Maan could have been treated for his injuries, but instead the officer immediately took out his pistol and shot him in the mouth.43
Toward the end of 2011, Mashaal Tammo, a highly respected opposition leader of Kurdish origin who was working with Mazen and other youth activists, was killed by gunmen who stormed his house.44 The previous month Tammo had survived an attempt that he blamed on the regime. A visibly shaken Mazen was among those who went up to Qamishli (northeastern Syria) to attend the funeral.45
On the same day of Tammo’s killing, regime henchmen beat up Riad Seif at a demonstration in Damascus.46 Seif had been the leading figure in the Damascus Spring during Bashar’s first decade in power and was imprisoned for almost eight years between 2000 and 2010. Like Tammo, Seif was one of the leaders whom Mazen and his activist colleagues were eager to collaborate with in order to bolster the political credentials of their budding and youthful coordination committees.
With the methodical elimination of protest leaders and the death toll from Bashar’s crackdown surpassing 5,000 at the end of 2011,47 some of the once-peaceful activists started to support armed resistance. Money and guns trickled in, mainly via Qatar, Turkey, and groups with Islamist agendas. Those insisting on maintaining the peaceful character of the uprising were being taken out of the scene.
By the end of 2011, Bashar and his regime were a step closer to the fulfillment of the claims they had made at the uprising’s onset: There were no peaceful protesters and activists, only armed groups and terrorists waging an insurrection against the state.
The year ended with twin car bombs exploding just before Christmas outside the Damascus headquarters of the General Intelligence Directorate. Nearly all of the fifty people killed in the blasts were civilians.48
The attack coincided with the arrival of a group of Arab League monitors who had been allowed into the country after weeks of obstruction by Bashar and his regime. They were supposed to verify the implementation of a peace plan that the regime had finally agreed to and that called for, among other things, the withdrawal of the army and security forces from rebellious communities and the end of violence against protesters. The regime made sure to take the monitors to the scene of the car bombs, which it instantly blamed on Al-Qaeda.
An Iranian media adviser to the regime informed Bashar’s office that it was a mistake to blame Al-Qaeda and that the United States and Syrian opposition and their Western and regional backers should be made the culprits instead.49
“This was the gift of Burhan Ghalyoun and his friends to Syria,” claimed one of the country’s most senior religious clerics the next day, during an official funeral for the victims at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.50 It was a blatant lie, but all that mattered for the regime and its allies was vilifying the opposition and linking it to terrorism. Ghalyoun was the ally of Mazen and other secular and independent-minded activists.
For Mazen and fellow activists clinging against all odds to peaceful resistance, the explosions were an ominous event capping a year that had started with joy and hope and ended with anguish, grief, and fear.
On New Year’s Eve 2011, Mazen needed to feel there was still hope for a peaceful revolution against the regime. He and his friend Razan slipped into Barzeh, a neighborhood on Damascus’s fringes where lively protests were held almost nightly.
Barzeh was plunged in darkness after the regime started cutting the power supply to rebellious areas. The place had an almost medieval feel, yet the mood was exhilarating. Resourceful organizers had strung lights over the main square, powered by a small private generator.51 Some people held flares. The setting could not have been more different from the massive and carefully choreographed pro-Bashar rally held in central Damascus a few days later.
Mazen and Razan joined hundreds in applauding and swaying to a rhythmic chant that affirmed Barzeh’s solidarity with other rebellious neighborhoods and towns: Daraya, Douma, Hama, Midan, and others.52
“Barzeh is with you till death!” the protesters repeated in a call-out to each area.
A young man standing nearby flashed a sign that read: “Happy New Year Freedom!”
Mazen and Razan looked happy and, at least momentarily, in their element.