A few days after Bashar’s rally in Damascus in January 2012, Manaf was at his Republican Guard barracks in Al-Hameh in the arid hills above the capital. The sprawling compound, a short distance from the presidential palace, had nearly 6,000 officers and soldiers, as well as 120 tanks in addition to rocket launchers and other heavy weapons—a fraction of the arsenal protecting Bashar.1
Manaf’s deputy, Issam Zahreddine—a tall, burly, and gruff-looking man with graying hair and thick beard—came to see him.2 “The president called me and ordered us to go to Baba Amr,” said Zahreddine, referring to a neighborhood in Homs city that had become a hotbed of resistance to the regime.
Manaf’s heart sank. This news was like a punch in the gut.
“This is not our responsibility,” said Manaf, trying to remain composed. “The Republican Guard protects the president, the palace, and Damascus.”
“But I promised the president I would cleanse Baba Amr for him,” retorted Zahreddine, who relished the opportunity to upstage Manaf and position himself as a faithful servant of the Assad family.
“Issam, beware,” said Manaf. “There are a lot of civilians in there.”
At that moment, Manaf understood that the decision to bypass him and dispatch his unit to Homs despite his own reservations was a message from Bashar: My patience is running out, we are at war, and you have to do your part. Manaf was more determined than ever to get out. He was anxiously waiting to hear back from the French after his wife’s meeting with the ambassador in Paris.
Zahreddine was later promoted to the rank of major general and would earn the nickname “lion of the Republican Guard” for his unflinching loyalty to Bashar.3
By early 2012, Homs was one of the main battlegrounds in escalating street warfare pitting regime forces and loyalists against army defectors as well as private citizens who took up arms to defend themselves and their neighborhoods from the military. Entire neighborhoods like Baba Amr slipped out of regime control.
The situation in Homs, a city of about one million north of Damascus, showed how relentless bloodshed on the part of the regime was starting to tear Syria’s social fabric, fuel militancy, and polarize people along religious lines. The majority in Homs were Sunni Muslim, but there was also a sizable Christian and Alawite community, with the latter having grown further after 1970, when families flocked from the countryside as one of their own, Hafez al-Assad, rose to power.
Old animosities and grievances were rekindled in Homs from the very start of the uprising. Tensions flared after the death of an Alawite policeman during the first protest in Homs in March 2011, and for months afterward the army and mukhabarat, aided by shabiha, or thugs, from the city’s mainly Alawite sections, shot and killed protesters from mainly Sunni neighborhoods.4 Funerals of those killed in the protests were not spared, either, resulting in more deaths. Rebellious neighborhoods were raided, and suspected activists and protesters were swept up by the dozens each time. Some were tortured to death, others disappeared forever.
By the summer of 2011, regime forces had killed nearly 600 civilians in Homs province, mostly in the city.5 There was no precise figure of those killed in the assault on protesters who briefly occupied New Clock Tower Square.
The city began to witness a series of reprisal attacks, kidnappings, and assassinations involving Alawites and Sunnis. Youth in several rebellious Sunni neighborhoods, especially working-class areas like Baba Amr known for gun ownership before the uprising, took up arms and set up local checkpoints to protect themselves. They were later joined by army defectors, including Manaf’s relative Abdul-Razzaq, and called themselves rebels or the Free Syrian Army. Few Alawite citizens ventured to Sunni neighborhoods and vice versa. Many Christians, concentrated in the city’s mostly Sunni center but also present in Alawite neighborhoods, sympathized with the protesters at first but then felt squeezed by both sides as violence spiraled. The regime ratcheted up its targeting of predominantly Sunni neighborhoods, using tanks, artillery, and other heavy weapons, further fueling the cycle of bloodshed and revenge and provoking guerilla-style attacks by the rebels.
Opposition neighborhoods were cut off from one another and encircled by checkpoints.6 Still, many people inside these neighborhoods just wanted to protest and not be drawn into a military confrontation with the regime or a war with the Alawites. Whenever there was a lull in clashes and regime bombing, thousands of residents gathered day and night inside their neighborhoods to protest and celebrate their liberation, however precarious, from the regime. People chanted, played musical instruments, and performed group dances in what sometimes looked like a big party or a thrilling rave. In November 2011, no day went by without protests inside several Homs neighborhoods.7 The mood darkened in December, though, when, in the span of one day, nearly fifty civilians were killed in tit-for-tat Alawite–Sunni violence.8
Bit by bit, the uprising that had brought out the best in Syrians and projected their aspirations and yearnings was vanishing as pain, vengefulness, and war took over. It was yet another page from the playbook of Hafez as well as all the despots who clung desperately to power at the start of the Arab Spring: civil war is acceptable and even desirable to defend the leader.
Along with the regime’s brutality, struggles over leadership and ideology among Bashar’s opponents, fueled by the competing agendas of regional powers like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and others, had an equally poisonous and destructive impact on people’s quest for liberation from the Assads. It was a contest for the revolution’s heart and soul and Syria’s shape and direction after the Assads.
The sources of friction among Bashar’s opponents included money and access to funds, the role and place of Islam, the stance toward the country’s minorities (particularly Bashar’s Alawite community), and deepening schisms between urban and rural communities as well as between those committed to peaceful resistance and those embracing armed rebellion.
More fundamentally, this was a generational struggle. Youthful and idealistic activists like Mazen Darwish sparred with a cadre of older opposition leaders, who to the young seemed like a by-product of the very regime they wanted to topple—plagued by the same closedmindedness, selfishness, and tyrannical ways.
These clashing dynamics were on display in Homs when Mazen secretly visited the city in late 2011.9
Tensions flared among activists when armed men from Baba Amr started coming to an adjacent, largely bourgeois neighborhood called Insha’at to offer protection from regime attacks on protesters. Some Insha’at activists associated with Mazen felt that this marred the peacefulness of their cause. Mazen also learned that Muslim clerics in several rebellious Homs neighborhoods were handing out monthly salaries, food, and other assistance to families of protesters detained by the regime. “At a time when people like us were distributing slogans, they were giving out money and food,” said Mazen.
Money, arms, and regional agendas worked to co-opt or sideline those like Mazen who were insisting on a peaceful struggle against the regime. The group with the deepest pockets was the Muslim Brotherhood. The organization had been shattered after Hafez’s massacre in Hama in 1982, and many Syrians believed that its leaders had abandoned the city to its tragic fate. Its exiled chiefs saw the Arab Spring and Syria’s revolution in 2011 as a historic chance for a comeback and, more important, for power. Still, the group seemed sensitive to the stigma associated with its name inside Syria and went out of its way to be collaborative and build partnerships across the spectrum of Syrian opposition, and it even conceded a visible leadership role in the first Syrian National Council in which Mazen’s Local Coordination Committees (LCCs) were represented. Brotherhood representatives inside Syria enthusiastically reached out to Mazen, seeking cooperation.10
But on the side, Brotherhood-affiliated charities channeled generous aid to rebellious communities, especially in cities like Homs, in order to buy loyalty and a following. Funds came from Qatar and Turkey, two countries embracing the Brotherhood region-wide and shaping political transitions in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia to favor the movement.
The Brotherhood and its patrons were among the first to support militarization in Syria under the pretext of protecting civilians. “We had doubts from the start that civil protests could compel Bashar to abandon power,” said Brotherhood leader Mohammad Farouk Tayfour.11
In the fall of 2011, a former Muslim Brotherhood member who held Swedish citizenship organized the first shipment of arms from Libya, in coordination with the Qataris and Turks. “The Americans were monitoring the whole operation but pretended they were not seeing,” said someone with firsthand knowledge of the shipments.12 This was a reflection of both Obama’s eagerness to maintain a certain distance from the Syria file and also the West’s inability to keep up with developments on the ground.
No one could stop Libyan rebel militias backed by NATO and the West from pillaging huge arms depots scattered across the vast desert country. At one facility, trailer trucks waited to load crates of rockets, missiles, ammunition, and other armaments.13
In addition to helping funnel Libyan weapons to Syria, Qatar and Turkey also facilitated the travel of allied Libyan militia leaders to northern Syria to assist emerging local armed factions there.14 A Qatari national who had previously spent time with the Taliban in Afghanistan was instrumental in raising donations from wealthy Gulf Arabs and channeling assistance to budding anti-regime militias in Syria.15 He contacted Mazen’s LCC colleagues and flew several of them to Qatar.16 He echoed the argument that his government and Turkey were making to their Western allies: peaceful protests are futile in the face of Bashar’s killing machine; only guns will topple him.
“The regime’s barbarism and people’s rage were channeled into a violent jihadist agenda,” said Mazen. “We were mocked as ‘the flowers-and-water-bottles folks.’… We were effectively being told, ‘You mobilized the street but your role is finished.’”17 Arguing that bearing arms played into Bashar’s hands was portrayed as naïve or even worse, as complicity with the regime.
Qatar’s Al Jazeera news channel, initially seen by Mazen as an indispensable ally in the struggle against the regime, started giving more airtime to Islamists and those aligned with its owner’s agenda and its push to arm Syrian rebels.
“At the time we hardly grasped the impact of competing regional interests on our revolution,” said Mazen.
Saudi Arabia, which saw itself as a regional powerhouse and leader of Muslims worldwide, was certainly not going to sit back and allow what it considered a small and pesky upstart like Qatar to dictate the course of events in Syria and the region.
In the Saudi camp were countries like Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. Officially they were all part of the same Western and regional alliance against the Assad regime that also included Qatar and Turkey, but at the same time the Saudis and their allies went out of their way to undermine the Qataris in Syria. The Saudis saw the main Syrian opposition body, the National Council, as being in Qatar’s clutches. With vast sums of money and other inducements, they worked hard to win over council members.18
On the media front, Saudi Arabia’s answer to Al Jazeera was its Dubai-based news channel, Al Arabiya, which ramped up its Syria coverage. Several Saudi-connected religious channels also started broadcasting highly incendiary and sectarian rhetoric aimed mainly at Bashar’s Shiite allies Iran and Hezbollah as well as elements of the Syrian opposition perceived to be under Qatari control.19
A Syrian-born Sunni cleric living in Saudi Arabia named Adnan al-Arour became a sensation on these channels and gained a huge following inside Syria because of his fiery and populist style.20 He assailed one opposition leader allied to Mazen as a drunk and nonbeliever and told protesters in Homs to bang on pots all night in order to topple the regime. Bashar himself could not have come up with a better caricature of the Islamist fanatics whom he claimed dominated the protest movement. The same telegenic cleric also became a conduit for donations from Saudis and other Gulf Arabs to support armed groups fighting Bashar. An entire room in his house was stacked with cash, gold, and other valuables amassed from donors.21
One way that Mazen and his colleagues thought they could make an impact in rebellious communities was to help set up a series of field hospitals where doctors, surgeons, and other health workers sympathetic to the uprising could offer their services on a volunteer basis. It was no longer just about treating gunshot wounds; the regime was using tanks, rockets, and heavier weapons against opposition areas. Taking a wounded person who was a protester or who came from a known opposition area to a government clinic or hospital often meant arrest or even death.
Mazen and his colleague Razan convinced the French ambassador, Éric Chevallier, to help them. In the fall of 2011, Chevallier used his diplomatic status to bring nearly a ton of medical supplies into Syria.22 He stored them at the embassy and then passed them along in batches to activist networks linked to Mazen and Razan. Antibiotics, painkillers, surgical kits, syringes, needles, and other medical supplies were stuffed into garbage bags and dropped off in installments by Chevallier on his way back from a soccer field near Damascus where he and his staff and guards played each week.
“This is going to multi-confessional networks of human rights defenders and political activists, not radicals. It’s proof that we are not only talking about supporting these people but also acting,” Chevallier told his puzzled and concerned superiors in Paris when they questioned his shipment request.23
Still, this was a drop in the bucket compared to the funding and support given by Qatar and Saudi, which increasingly meant that they set the agenda and tone on the ground.
Soon heated arguments broke out between activists over what to call the main weekly protests held each Friday. People like Mazen wanted names and slogans evoking patriotism and inclusiveness, while Islamists pushed for ones with religious connotations. Mazen’s coordination committees were labeled “elitist and anti-Islamic,” while he was called a “secular Alawite.”24
These fractures were a gift to the regime and its allies, who amplified them with provocations and lies. Bashar realized he could use the same modern media tools embraced by youthful protesters to discredit his opponents, reshape the narrative, and sow fear and confusion.
For loyalists and opponents of all hues, images and videos became weapons, and social media platforms and TV channels turned into battlegrounds.
Starting in the fall of 2011, videos of pro-Bashar soldiers and thugs torturing protesters began to appear on YouTube. Some were posted by the torturers themselves, proud of what they were doing. In one video, a man identified as a protester is kicked, trampled on, hit with a stick, and told to kneel in front of a framed photo of Bashar.25 “Traitor, you want freedom? Who is your God, you animal?” demands his torturer, dressed in military fatigues. It was fodder for people’s rage and their readiness to embrace armed rebellion against Bashar.
For Bashar’s supporters, Al Arabiya, Al Jazeera, and Western media were all lying, while truth and facts were carried only by Syrian state media and Lebanese, Iranian, Iraqi, and Russian channels spreading the regime narrative.
“Do not watch Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, it’s all fake news and fake protests,” Bashar’s mother, Aniseh, warned a visitor in late 2011.26
The eighty-one-year-old Assad family matron unquestioningly believed what pro-regime media was saying at the time, namely that the protests were all fake and that channels like Al Jazeera had re-created models of Syrian cities along with their landmarks in the Qatari capital, Doha, used actors and extras as pretend protesters, and then broadcast the scenes as events in Syria. Aniseh was confident and defiant. She assured her visitor: “We’re going to overcome the crisis the same way we defeated it in the 1980s under the eternal leader.”27
Manaf, meanwhile, watched how the determination of Bashar and his family to survive and crush the challenge to their rule increased further after Hafez’s longtime ally Gaddafi was brutally lynched by a mob that had cornered him in his hometown.
Bashar and Asma then sought to project resolve and strength by maintaining routines and pursuing personal interests as if all was normal. To Manaf, they looked tone-deaf and disconnected from reality as the regime was beset by mounting internal and external pressures.
Asma walked her children to school, kept office hours at her Syria Trust, and shopped online. She browsed for a fondue set on Amazon,28 ordered designer lamps and custom-made furniture and accessories,29 and perused the latest creations by the maker of luxurious and flamboyant footwear, Christian Louboutin,30 who bought a mansion in Aleppo before the uprising and considered Asma a friend and muse. To get around international sanctions, her purchases were facilitated by friends and associates living abroad and often shipped to a front company in Dubai for onward delivery to Syria.31
“If we are strong together, we will overcome this together… I Love you…,” Asma wrote to Bashar in December 2011.32
Bashar played tennis,33 did his best to share meals and spend time with Asma and their children, and bought songs on iTunes through an account with someone else’s name and address.34
Toward the end of 2011, Bashar had agreed to allow Arab League monitors into the country as part of a proposed peace deal to end attacks on protesters and military campaigns against rebellious areas, to release prisoners, and to pave the way to a political transition.35 In fact, it was only a maneuver to ease international and regional pressure and buy time to prepare for a big offensive in Homs.
Around the same time, Bashar dispatched his brother-in-law Assef Shawkat to Homs to negotiate a truce with rebellious communities.36 Manaf considered Assef an ally and sensed that, like him, he was unhappy with the way things were being handled. Both believed that the brutality and excessive force deployed from the start to deal with protesters was progressively pushing the country toward disaster.
Like Manaf’s previous peacemaking initiatives, which had also been approved by Bashar, Assef’s Homs mission was doomed from the start. Bashar, his brother, and cousins were absolutely not interested in compromise; negotiations were just a show and a stall tactic.37
While in Homs, Assef met with local opposition activists and leaders and even tried to offer some concessions as a sign of goodwill, but all his efforts were sabotaged by the hard-liners empowered by Bashar. When one activist told him to halt the bombing of the Baba Amr neighborhood and, at least, to evacuate severely wounded people, Assef had little choice but to say, “I do not have the authority.”38
In mid-January 2012, Qatar’s emir called for the deployment of foreign troops in Syria to end the killing,39 and later that month Qatar led an Arab League initiative calling on Bashar to step down and transfer his powers to his vice president.40 The emir was hoping to convince Bashar to give up power in return for asylum for himself and his family in Qatar and a promise that he wouldn’t face charges at the International Criminal Court.
A few weeks earlier, the emir’s daughter Al-Mayassa al-Thani had tried to sway Asma, whom she had known well before the uprising. The US-educated and outgoing Al-Mayassa oversaw Qatar’s world-class museums with a multibillion-dollar budget. She spent hundreds of millions on works by Paul Cézanne, Damien Hirst, Mark Rothko, and Andy Warhol.41
“How can I help you?” Al-Mayassa wrote to Asma in mid-December. “I can’t imagine you agree with what is going on.”42
“My Dear Mayassa, I don’t have a problem with frankness and honesty, in fact to me it’s like oxygen, I need it to survive. Life is not fair, my friend, but ultimately there is a reality we all need to deal with!!! Take care, aaa,” responded Asma, signing the note as Asma Akhras al-Assad (AAA).43
After her father’s announcement, Al-Mayassa sent Asma another e-mail with a more concrete offer: Qatar was ready to grant her, Bashar, and the children asylum. “I only pray that you will convince the president to take this as an opportunity to exit without having to face charges,” she wrote.44
Al-Mayassa never heard back from Asma.
Bashar’s own response came four days later in the form of a blistering military assault on the Homs neighborhood of Baba Amr, which had become a stronghold for regime opponents, including army defectors, as well as an emblem of resistance to the Assads.
The offensive commenced on February 3, 2012, precisely on the thirtieth anniversary of the Hama massacre. In addition to the Republican Guard contingent under the command of Manaf’s deputy, Zahreddine, the forces attacking Baba Amr included units of the Fourth Division, which was under the de facto leadership of Bashar’s brother, Maher.45
“Thirty years after his father massacred tens of thousands of innocent Syrian men, women, and children in Hama, Bashar al-Assad has demonstrated a similar disdain for human life and dignity,” said Obama the following day, February 4, while also assuring Syrians that America won’t leave them to Bashar’s “killing machine.”46 “We will help because we stand for principles that include universal rights for all people and just political and economic reform,” he assured them. “The suffering citizens of Syria must know: we are with you, and the Assad regime must come to an end.”
These proved to be hollow assurances, almost immediately.
Later that same day, Bashar received a boost of international support when Russia and China vetoed a Security Council resolution demanding that his regime “cease all violence and protect its population,” and withdraw its forces from towns and cities.47
As Obama condemned Bashar and promised not to abandon Syrians, Bashar’s forces tightened the siege of Baba Amr; nobody could leave, and food, medicine, and other essentials were not allowed in. The densely populated neighborhood of cinder-block apartment buildings and old houses was then pummeled day and night with heavy artillery, rockets, and mortar shells until rebels withdrew at the end of the month and regime forces triumphantly went in.
“It’s absolutely sickening,” Marie Colvin, an American reporter with the Sunday Times, described the assault on Baba Amr to the BBC on February 21, 2012.48 She was one of a handful of journalists smuggled in by rebels to report from inside. She said that she counted fourteen shells fall on the neighborhood in the span of thirty seconds and watched a baby die of shrapnel wounds because of a lack of medical supplies at the makeshift local field hospital.
The following day, Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed in a rocket attack by Bashar’s forces on a house in the neighborhood that was serving as a media center, said witnesses.49 Photographer Paul Conroy and French reporter Edith Bouvier were injured in the same attack. A Homs-based mukhabarat commander later said targeting the reporters was “justifiable” because they had been smuggled into Baba Amr from Lebanon and had embedded themselves “with the terrorists.”50
A wounded civilian from Baba Amr who escaped on February 24, 2012, described to Human Rights Watch the intensity of the shelling. “On February 23, I was in my house when the whole building shook as if an earthquake had happened,” he said. “I looked outside the building and saw that a rocket went through the building adjacent to mine, completely demolishing the roof.
“Seconds later, another rocket hit the same building, destroying the second floor, and a few seconds later, a third rocket destroyed the first and ground floor. In three to four minutes the building had fully collapsed. I directly went outside to see if anyone survived. I pulled one woman but she had no legs. Her legs were cut off.”51
Ahmed al-Hamid, a native of Baba Amr and physician who helped set up the local field hospital, was among those fleeing as Bashar’s forces closed in on the neighborhood.52 His parents remained behind. His sister, who lived in another part of Homs, pleaded with regime forces to allow her into the neighborhood on February 26, 2012, so she could take food to her parents and other family members trapped inside. They let her in, but on her way out she was shot in the neck by a sniper and later died. Her father heard about it and went to look for her. He was kidnapped, tortured, and killed by pro-Bashar militiamen.
As the military campaign was underway in Baba Amr, Bashar’s brother, Maher, and his cousins the Makhloufs did not let up their pressure on Manaf; they were determined to draw him in and implicate him in the Homs carnage. Telling the world that, contrary to growing rumors, the Tlasses, natives of Homs province, had not abandoned the Assads would give the regime and Bashar a boost. One of Manaf’s aides walked in and told him to get on the internal army radio network for an update from inside Baba Amr by Zahreddine. He was told that Bashar, the defense minister, and the chief of staff were all listening in on the call.53
Manaf told his aide to leave the room, but he did not get on the call. He did not want to give the impression that he was involved in the military assault against Baba Amr or supportive of it. “They wanted me to have blood on my hands, too,” Manaf thought.
In total, close to 800 people, the majority of them civilians, were estimated to have been killed in the February 2012 assault on Baba Amr and other parts of Homs.54 Witnesses said more people were summarily executed in early March during mopping-up operations as pro-Bashar Alawite militiamen from Homs and elsewhere went on a rampage, looting and burning homes.55 It was a scene cut straight from the Hama massacre, three decades earlier.
“God, Syria, Bashar, and the [Republican] Guard,” Manaf’s deputy Zahreddin and his men chanted as they triumphantly paraded through the devastated streets of Baba Amr after it fell into their hands.56