It was early 2013 and John Kerry, who took over as US secretary of state from Hillary Clinton, was in the hills north of Rome meeting with representatives of the Syrian opposition and Arab and Western foreign ministers supporting their cause.
The setting was an elegant Renaissance-era villa surrounded by placid gardens that had been commissioned by the Medicis and were later appropriated by fascist leader Benito Mussolini.1 This was Kerry’s first major Syria gathering since his appointment, but he was no stranger to the country.
In his previous role as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry tried to convince Bashar in 2009, a year into the Obama presidency, to make different choices, as the Americans liked to say at the time: break away from Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, and stop exploiting terrorism and terrorists, including those linked to Al-Qaeda.
Like most Western leaders, Kerry was naturally charmed by Bashar and his British-born wife, Asma. Even if, four years later, Kerry had a better understanding of the Assad clan’s brutal nature, he still had to stick to his boss’s objectives in Syria, namely to make sure that the United States stayed at reasonable arm’s length from another messy conflict in the Middle East and thus avoid a second Iraq.
During the Rome meeting, Kerry spoke of the urgency of the situation and “concrete steps” that needed to be taken in Syria.2 “We are determined to find a way forward to a better day that we know awaits Syria, a day that will not come as long as Assad is in power,” said Kerry, who also promised $60 million in US aid to scattered rebel communities coming under daily bombardment by Bashar. The money was supposed to help them better communicate with one another and boost their local regime-free governance bodies, but no solution was offered on how to stop the planes raining down bombs on these communities day after day.
The way forward seemed more of the same on that afternoon in February 2013, two years after Bashar had smashed peaceful protests and declared war on his people and all those who tried to help them. The opposing camp was, for sure, more resolute. Iran rallied sectarian militias to defend Bashar and Russian president Putin plotted how to further his own agenda by exploiting Bashar’s desperation to survive and America’s seeming disinterest and weakness.
The thrust of the US plan, meanwhile, was to continue backing UN-led efforts to broker a political solution—a process that already seemed dead in the water. At the same time, the United States tried to convince Russia to abandon support for Bashar as it hoped that military pressure from Syrian rebels could compel him to negotiate his exit from power.
As Kerry spoke about a way forward, the man who was supposed to help orchestrate that much-hoped-for political settlement was ready to quit.
Veteran conflict mediator Lakhdar Brahimi, who had taken over the role of UN–Arab League Syria envoy after Annan’s resignation in the summer of 2012, was considering giving up, like his predecessor, after barely six months on the job.3
The white-haired and bespectacled seventy-nine-year-old Brahimi was a former Algerian diplomat and had long been a front-row witness to the tyranny, war, and agony that has roiled the Middle East, including his native Algeria—from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and colonialism to the Cold War and rise of political Islam. He was involved in Algeria’s war of independence against the French between 1954 and 1964, which killed more than a million people; a few decades later Algeria plunged into civil war.
In the late 1980s, Brahimi helped negotiate an end to the fifteen-year Lebanese civil war in which Bashar’s father was a key player. He headed the UN mission in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2004. In 2004, he took on the daunting task of mediating among Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic groups to form the first government that succeeded the US-led occupation authority installed after the toppling of Saddam.4
But to Brahimi, Syria was nothing like these other conflicts. He likened it more to the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Germany’s Hitler and Italy’s Mussolini backed their fellow fascists in Spain, the Nationalists, with arms and soldiers. The Soviets under Stalin helped the left-wing Republicans with the tacit support of Britain and France, who were not fully committed to the fight. The United States was officially neutral, but American citizens joined thousands of volunteers flocking to Spain to fight with the Republicans.
In Syria, the array of actors involved was even more dizzying, and “the interests of the Syrian people were forgotten when outside forces came,” thought Brahimi.5
Brahimi was already caught in the Qatar-Saudi feud, two US allies who were supposed to be working together to affect a solution in Syria. Bashar, meanwhile, accused Brahimi of “egregious bias,”6 and Russia backed Brahimi’s mission as long as it did not involve Bashar leaving power.
“Assad is not going anywhere,” announced Russia’s foreign minister, Lavrov.7 He even suggested that the United States and its allies were secretly thankful for all the Russian vetoes at the Security Council in relation to Syria: “No one has any appetite for intervention. Behind the scenes, I have a feeling they [Britain, France, and the United States] are praying that Russia and China go on blocking intervention.”8 Lavrov believed that it was only a matter of time before the United States came around to accept Russia’s position on Syria.
Indeed, Obama had already signaled his uneasiness with arming Syrian rebels. “We have seen extremist elements insinuate themselves into the opposition,” he said, “and one of the things that we have to be on guard about… is that we’re not indirectly putting arms in the hands of folks who would do Americans harm, or do Israelis harm.”9
Israel was one of the least visible but more crucial actors in the Syrian tragedy. It had a direct stake in the outcome, given that Syria was a neighbor. Israel preferred to deal with the adversary it already knew, the Assad family, not some unknown antagonist. Israel, however, was alarmed when Iran and Hezbollah significantly increased their military presence inside Syria to save Bashar. In response, Israel began launching in early 2013 airstrikes on targets associated with this presence.10
Still, the statements coming from Moscow and Washington around that period gave succor to Bashar. Russia was saying no departure and no to Western intervention, and America was speaking about Islamist terrorists and threats to Israel’s security. Bashar reckoned that he remained indispensable for these world powers, no matter the atrocities and war crimes attributed to him, but he was nonetheless furious with Brahimi for daring to suggest that he give up power.
They had met on the day before Christmas in 2012.
Bashar received Brahimi and his team in a large reception room at the People’s Palace on the Mezzeh plateau, overlooking Damascus and the rebel-controlled suburbs beyond.11 On that day, as was the case on most days, the suburbs were engulfed in plumes of smoke from near-constant regime bombardment by warplanes as well as heavy artillery positioned near the presidential palace.
Brahimi already knew Bashar; they had met a few times when he worked on Iraq. He had also had dealings with Hafez, whom he first met in Damascus in September 1970, shortly before Hafez’s coup against his Baathist comrades.12
After greetings and pleasantries, Brahimi and Bashar sat on two armchairs in the front of the room. On Bashar’s side were diehard Assad family loyalists such as Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem and political adviser Bouthaina Shaaban.13
A massive wooden coffee table separated them from Brahimi’s team. All windows in the room had honey-colored curtains that were tied back. On the wall behind Bashar and Brahimi were three large antique-looking wooden shutters inlaid with mother-of-pearl motifs, a touch of old Damascus.14
Bashar was in great shape—relaxed, rested, and confident. He wore a nicely cut navy blue wool suit. He was calm and well informed about the situation.15 At that point, the reports that he and his inner circle were getting from field commanders came almost hourly. Bashar sat with his long white hands clasped in front of him as Brahimi spoke.
The trilingual (Arabic, English, and French) diplomat came across as someone genteel, self-effacing, warm, and very funny at times.
“You know, Mr. President, change is indispensable. Speaking as an Algerian, we had ten years of civil war. I hope you can avoid that in Syria. We can’t govern our countries the way we governed them in the 1950s and 1960s. Times have changed—it has to be different,” said Brahimi, measuring every word and speaking calmly and deferentially.16
“Yes, of course,” said Bashar, pausing before adding, with a faint smile: “But if we’re speaking about democracy, then I have the right like every Syrian citizen to run for office if I choose to. There’s no reason to prevent me, and if people want me, I stay, and if they don’t, I go.”
“Be the kingmaker instead of the king,” said Brahimi.
“Why not?” said Bashar with a smirk as he fixed his blue eyes on Brahimi. “Really, I have not decided yet whether I want to run or not, and if I do, the people will decide if I stay or not,” he insisted.
He had already held power for a dozen years. The constitution, which had just been adopted in a regime-orchestrated referendum in February 2012, while blistering military campaigns against protesting towns and cities were in full throttle, allowed Bashar to run in presidential elections in both 2014 and 2021 for seven-year terms each time; he could rule until at least 2028.
“The situation is improving you know,” Bashar told Brahimi with a smile.17
“The only solution is chemical: we must exterminate them all, they and their families and children, all—these people do not deserve to live,” said Mohammad Jaber, an Alawite businessman and militia leader working for the Assad family, speaking about regime opponents in the privacy of his suite at a Damascus hotel in early spring 2013.18
Days later, the regime fired a rocket carrying a chemical agent, accidentally killing some of its own soldiers as it tried to thwart rebel groups, including the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, from encircling the section of Aleppo controlled by Bashar. The rebels wanted to sever the regime’s supply lines from Damascus to Aleppo.19
This had not been the first instance of suspected chemical weapons use. Three months before (December 2012) opposition activists reported that six people were killed in a poison-gas attack on a section of central Homs controlled by rebels but besieged by regime forces.20 It happened just after Obama’s second warning to Bashar against deploying chemical weapons; the first one (the famous “redline”) had been in August 2012.
“If you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons,” said Obama in December 2012 addressing Bashar, “there will be consequences, and you will be held accountable.”21
Hillary Clinton also weighed in on the same day: “We are certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur.”22
Citing information from multiple sources, US officials said that the regime was already mixing chemicals to produce sarin, a poison gas that effectively hijacks a person’s nervous system. High exposure can lead to death, mainly by suffocation due to uncontrollable secretions in the lungs.
“The intelligence that we have causes serious concerns that this is being considered,” said Leon Panetta a few days later.23
Russia’s Lavrov said that these were “rumors” and “nothing of the kind is being planned or might be planned.” He said that Russia had received from Bashar “very firm assurances that this is not going to be used under any circumstances.”24
Either Lavrov was lying, or Bashar was lying to Lavrov. Jaber, who worked for the Assads and had business dealings with the Russians, not only admitted the use of chemical weapons, he bragged about it.
Russia shielded Bashar again in the spring of 2013 from accusations of chemical weapons use and sided with him at the United Nations.
The Syrian regime’s UN representative, Bashar al-Jaafari, said that it was “armed terrorist groups” who had fired the rocket on an army position in the village of Khan al-Assal near Aleppo, killing at least twenty-five, and he demanded that the UN carry out an immediate investigation.25
Britain and France informed the UN that they suspected the regime had used chemical weapons not only in the Aleppo countryside but also in several locations around Damascus, including Adra, Daraya, and the eastern suburbs.26 Just as in western Aleppo, the regime was desperate to keep rebels around Damascus from advancing toward the capital.
For months after these chemical weapons incidents in early 2013, the Assad regime lied, stalled, and muddied the waters on the world stage, a game it has been perfecting for decades, and took maximum advantage of the rift in the Security Council and the United Nations’ notoriously protracted deliberations and procedures.
This bought time for the Assad family and its loyal henchmen to do everything that needed to be done on the ground inside Syria to ensure their survival including deploy chemical weapons again, but with far more dreadful results.
“We are General Maher’s people!” boasted Jaber, the militia leader and businessman, referring to Bashar’s brother, Maher.27 He wanted the world to know that he was part of a group of Assad family associates who planned to massacre, gas, starve, and torture all those who rose up against the regime. He dared Obama to stop them.
By the spring of 2013, Jaber was working out of a top-floor suite at a hotel in central Damascus after sending his wife and children to Moscow for safety. A heavyset man in his mid-fifties, Jaber lounged in his suite wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. He was clean-shaven and his hair was dyed jet black and slicked down with copious amounts of gel. Freshly squeezed orange juice and a massive dish of fruit were on the table in front of him. A retinue of beefy, bearded bodyguards stood outside, next to the hotel elevator.
The Assads could always count on men like Mohammad Jaber and his brother, Ayman, who was married to a daughter of one of Bashar’s cousins. The Jabers were involved in the regime’s operation to help Saddam smuggle oil from Iraq in defiance of UN sanctions, a few years before the US-led invasion in 2003, which netted hundreds of millions of dollars for the Assads and their relatives.28 In reward for their services, the Jabers became shareholders in the business cartel created by Bashar and his cousin Rami Makhlouf and were allowed to venture into the steel and iron sector. They were also involved in founding the Addounia TV channel, alongside other cronies of Maher al-Assad. The Jaber brothers’ garish mansions on the hills above the Mediterranean coast and flashy mob-like lifestyle were the talk of their hometown of Latakia in western Syria.29
As war and international sanctions besieged Bashar and his regime, diehard loyalists like the Jabers and others stepped up to confront the challenges alongside the Assads and Makhloufs. For Alawites like the Jabers, it was self-preservation and a belief that their destiny was tied to the regime’s survival—but it was also opportunity. The war was a chance to profit and elevate their status as old-time regime families like the Tlasses broke with the Assads.
“People like Firas [Tlass] have been living off the bounty of this country and then they fled… All the Damascene businessmen turned out to be traitors,” said Jaber as he peeled an apple and took a bite from it.30
Like the Assads and Makhloufs, the Jabers were on the US and European sanctions list, but through offshore schemes, as well as allies and front companies in countries like Iraq and Lebanon, the pro-Bashar businessmen worked to evade sanctions and ensure that the regime got everything it needed to sustain its killing machine.
A crucial product was fuel, which the regime had to have to run everything from tanks and warplanes to power plants and factories. Syria’s own oil production, limited to begin with and concentrated in the east near Iraq, had almost ground to a halt because of the war, so the regime had to supply most of its needs from outside. The Jabers organized oil shipments by land and sea, mainly from Iran and Iraq. They also mobilized their own armed convoys to deliver the oil within Syria—for handsome fees.
The burly and bearlike Mohammad Jaber, or Abu Jaafar as his men addressed him, often led the perilous missions. A few times he flew to Baghdad and the southern oil city of Basra with suitcases of $100 bills to buy oil for the regime and then accompanied convoys of tanker trucks by land through insurgent territory.31 Al-Qaeda-linked fighters were concentrated in the desert between Iraq and Syria, but Jaber was able to work out deals with some of them; they refrained from targeting his convoys in return for cash or other favors from the regime.32
In addition to sanctions evasion, there was another important role that men like Jaber played in helping the Assads survive the existential threat they faced: they were instrumental in rallying Alawites around the regime.
When protests broke out in early 2011, Jaber quickly mobilized thugs, or shabiha as they became commonly known. Jaber led a pack of them in April 2011 when they descended on a Turkish coastal city to disrupt one of the first opposition conferences and physically assaulted those arriving to attend it.33 Jaber also organized and led attacks on the French and US embassies in Damascus after envoys of the two countries visited protesters in Hama in July 2011.34
As the standoff escalated and began to morph into an armed struggle, and while the Syrian army was hobbled by defections and desertions, Jaber was among the Alawite bosses who actively recruited men from their sect to join militias defending the regime. Recruits received a monthly stipend, an assault rifle, a military uniform, and an ammunition vest, among other items. There were promises of compensation to their families in case they were “martyred.”
The Jabers’ sprawling steel plant on the coast, between the cities of Jableh and Latakia, became a base for militiamen and a staging ground for assaults on pro-opposition areas. The plant was also one of the sites churning out the barrel bombs that Bashar rained on these areas.35
Financial incentives were certainly a draw for many impoverished Alawites to join these militias, but there was a more fundamental and visceral motivation. Many Alawites, members of a minority sect, believed that by defending the regime they were fighting first and foremost to preserve their very existence. According to this view, a win by the opposition, dominated by members of Syria’s Sunni majority, would spell their end—their annihilation. Alawites felt that their relative advances and privileges under the Assad family, compared to the misery and marginalization they had suffered previously, were well worth fighting for.
Even though only a few Alawites enjoyed the magnificent wealth of the Assads, Jabers, and Makhloufs, and most actually struggled to make a living, many still felt that they were the rulers of Syria and not just a minority seen as uncouth and heretical by the Sunni majority.
Indeed, Alawites dominated the sprawling civil service bureaucracy, the omnipresent mukhabarat system, and the army’s top officer ranks. Some Alawites turned these positions into vehicles for extortion, bribe-taking, and business rackets of all sorts. It was sufficient for an Alawite living in predominantly Sunni Damascus or Homs to speak with the distinctive accent of Syria’s coastal region to be feared and treated with deference.
Consequently, Alawites believed that the fall of the Assads would equal their doom. It was an idea subtly and often not so subtly perpetuated by the regime from the moment protests erupted in 2011. Then the regime did not have to do much after it deliberately killed and imprisoned those in the opposition advocating unarmed resistance and sectarian coexistence. This cleared the way for the empowerment of militants and extremists on both sides of the conflict.
All Alawites who dared suggest there might be options for their community other than the Assads and war were silenced. Among them was a medical doctor and longtime regime opponent called Abdelaziz al-Khayer, a dissenter in his community who hailed from the same town as the Assads. In the 1980s Khayer, a communist, was on the run and lived underground because Hafez was hunting anyone who threatened his power. Khayer was captured in 1992 and remained in prison until 2005.36 Some have called Khayer Syria’s Nelson Mandela.
At the start of the protests in 2011, Khayer was part of an opposition group that didn’t call for the overthrow of Bashar, rejected armed struggle, and worked from inside Syria.37 Khayer and his colleagues were even regarded by other opposition groups as “traitors” and “regime stooges.”
Khayer and his stepson and another colleague were kidnapped by the mukhabarat in September 2012 as they left the regime-controlled airport in Damascus. They were part of a delegation that had returned from meetings in China and Russia, where they tried to secure support for an opposition conference they planned to hold inside Damascus. Nothing happened to the others in the delegation. The fate of Khayer has been unknown ever since.38
Taking Khayer and other like-minded Alawites out of the picture meant that those in the community pushing for a scorched-earth campaign of massacres and chemical-weapon attacks against regime opponents had the upper hand. For these people, even Bashar was not tough enough in the face of what they saw as a repeat of the events of the 1970s and early ’80s that culminated in the Hama massacre of 1982.
“If the president [Bashar] listened to us, we would not have gotten to this stage—our president was the one who embroiled us in all of this. If he had struck with an iron fist a year ago it would have been over by now,” lamented Jaber in the spring of 2013.39 “If Hafez al-Assad, God rest his soul, were still alive, none of this would have been allowed to happen.”
The 1982 massacre was forever framed in the minds of many Alawites as a necessary evil to deter Sunnis from ever mounting another challenge to the regime. The same mind-set was at work under Bashar, but the consequences were far more devastating.
“We just surrounded them and slaughtered about 250,” bragged Brigadier General Jamal Younes, a heavyset man with graying hair and moustache. Younes was Alawite and in charge of an army unit commanded by Bashar’s brother, Maher. He was speaking about an assault in the summer of 2012 on a village in the Hama countryside that harbored army defectors and opposition activists.40
It was one of a string of massacres committed by the regime in 2012 and 2013 in the Damascus suburbs, the Hama countryside, Homs city, and the western coastal region. They all followed a similar scenario, more or less. Army units that possessed the heavy weapons but lacked the necessary manpower surrounded rebellious communities and bombarded them nonstop until they had quashed any armed resistance on the inside. They were accompanied by Alawite militiamen and mukhabarat members, who were primarily responsible for going in afterward to do the mop-up operations, or what the regime called “cleansing”; this involved executing civilians and then looting and burning homes.
When finished, these forces usually sprayed graffiti like this one on the walls of the ransacked villages and towns: “Assad or nobody; Assad or we burn the country.”
General Younes was particularly proud of his partnerships with Mohammad Jaber and his men, the militia of Bashar’s cousin Rami Makhlouf, and a bloodthirsty Alawite mukhabarat colonel called Suheil al-Hassan, who went by the nom de guerre “the Tiger.”41 These were the Assad clan’s knights.
“I always tell Sunnis: Bashar al-Assad is your protector because he’s the only one [inside the regime] holding us back and preventing us from doing everything we want,” said Younes as he sat across from Mohammad Jaber in the latter’s office in the Latakia steel plant where militiamen gathered in the courtyard ahead of a fresh assault on Hama villages.42
Next to Jaber were shelves stacked with mementos, including a large framed photograph of himself in military uniform standing shoulder to shoulder with a beaming Bashar at the palace in Damascus.
While Bashar greatly appreciated what men like Jaber were doing to defend the regime and was fully aware that the only reliable fighting forces he possessed were the militiamen from his Alawite sect and those brought into the country by his Shiite allies, Iran and Hezbollah, publicly he still needed to project the image of a president for all Syrians, regardless of their religion or sect.
Bashar had to act like the commander of a national army fighting to save Syria from a “global conspiracy” and “terrorists.”
More crucially, Bashar needed to claim deniability: he had to maintain a certain distance from the bestial killers and torturers he empowered and mobilized to save his regime. So, in tandem, a whole different team worked on Bashar’s image as the sovereign and legitimate leader, and also the narrative of Bashar as the savior of Syria and even humanity from the scourge of terrorism. These image makers were the Assad clan’s soothsayers.
Bashar’s new communications director, Luna al-Chebel, an attractive and articulate former news presenter with the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera channel, worked on the president brand.
“The media conspiracy is 80 to 90 percent of the conspiracy against Syria,” proclaimed Chebel one month into the protests in 2011, labeling Arab and Western journalists covering the popular uprising as “enemies of the people” and declaring that most American reporters were “undercover spies.”43
Under Chebel, the presidency had for the first time its official Facebook page and Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube accounts. Press releases, interviews, and presidential decrees, as well as videos and photos of the official activities of Bashar and his wife, Asma, were disseminated on these platforms. Everything seemed sharper and more thought through than before. On Instagram, photographs of Bashar and Asma were mixed with photos of Syrian athletes, beauty queens, accomplished Syrians such as writers and filmmakers, soldiers fighting on the front, and volunteers painting a school allegedly damaged by “the terrorists.”44 Occasionally there was a spontaneous shot of Bashar typing on his laptop or walking up the stairs to his office with a briefcase.45
Asma’s image also transformed by early 2013. She was slowly becoming the nation’s first mother, often appearing with her hair pulled back, minimal makeup, simple attire, and flat shoes as she consoled the wives and mothers of the “army’s martyrs.” Gone were the stiletto shoes and stylish hairdos of the previous year.
“What a classy PONYTAIL for the most elegant lady in the world,” her hairdresser and fashion consultant, Milad Hannoun, known for his over-the-top and glamorous makeovers, wrote in a caption of a photo of Asma hugging a child that he posted on his Instagram account.46 He often called her his “idol” and “soul mate.” As war and sanctions engulfed the Assads, Hannoun traveled to Dubai, Paris, and New York to shop for Asma, albeit for her new deconstructed and simple look.47 He was not on the EU or US sanctions list.
Asma’s team of young, tech-savvy, and Westernized assistants at the Syria Trust pitched in to help with the new media strategy and campaign. Many of their colleagues had either joined the opposition or left the country as the Assads chose to face protesters with bullets and tanks.
On March 21, 2013—Mother’s Day as well as the first day of spring—Asma met at the presidential palace in Damascus with a group of women described as the mothers of martyrs of the Syrian army. It was the answer to regime opponents marking the second anniversary of their revolution.
The video of Asma and the women was aired on state television and shared online via social media.48 It was in essence a slickly produced recruitment video to help shore up the gutted and demoralized army with this underlying message: Here are mothers from all of Syria’s regions who sacrificed their sons and husbands; where are the rest of you, where are the men to rise up and defend the motherland, to defend our honor? Where are the knights? It was an appeal to chivalry and manhood, a resonant theme in Middle Eastern societies.
In the video, women pass one by one through large double doors and walk along a red carpet reserved for guests of honor toward Asma, who gives them long and sometimes tearful hugs. She wears a no-frills top and skirt, low-heel pumps, no jewelry, and light makeup. She crouches to greet an elderly mother in a wheelchair.
“I have four sons and I adore them, but I have consecrated them to this homeland… Let them all die. I am not sad, but may God end this crisis,” says a woman wearing a white veil that exposes some of her hair.49
The women gather in a large marble hall beneath a sign lettered in beautiful Arabic calligraphy: “With your soul we protect the jasmine.” (For Syrians, Damascus was the city of jasmine and in regime propaganda Asma was the Lady of Jasmine.)
“Every mother who has a son protecting this country is a great mother and every mother of a martyr who has sacrificed the most valuable thing in her life is an even greater mother,” Asma tells the women. “I know there are mothers who have sent sons and grandsons to protect this country, and I know some of you have packed the clothes of your own grandsons on their way to join the army… With every heartbeat of worry and fear for them, there’s another beat of determination, defiance, strength, power,” she adds, pausing after each one of these last four words.50
Although her lines and delivery were well-rehearsed and polished, with no hint of spontaneity, still she spoke with the kind of emotion, passion, and force absent from most of Bashar’s discourse and public appearances. She was trying to connect to her audience in ways he rarely did. Asma made sure to be photographed with each mother alone. The mothers were then treated to a lunch buffet. Asma herself served them lamb and rice and other Syrian specialties.
A key figure in the regime’s revamped media strategy was Khaled Mahjoub, a businessman friend of Bashar. He was a high school friend of Bassel al-Assad and Manaf Tlass, and then when Bassel died he was in the circle of friends and acquaintances that Bashar inherited from his brother.
During Bashar’s mentoring and grooming period in the 1990s, Mahjoub was often seen at social gatherings with the president-in-the-making. Many summers, Mahjoub joined Manaf, Bashar, and Bashar’s brother-in-law Assef Shawkat in Latakia.51 They often met to play cards at the Cote D’Azur, a staid state-owned beach resort from the early years of Hafez’s rule that resembled a Soviet sanatorium but was popular with regime elites. This was before Bashar’s flamboyant cousin and business partner, Rami Makhlouf, built a modern resort down the coast.
As the regime turned the 2011 uprising into war, Mahjoub, a naturalized US citizen and fluent English speaker, chose to remain by Bashar’s side. The fifty-seven-year-old wore horn-rimmed eyeglasses, was clean-shaven, and had his mostly gray hair slicked back. He often puffed on a big cigar. He could have been a Wall Street banker from the go-go 1980s.
Mahjoub was given a delicate mission by the palace: work with the mukhabarat to actively influence how the Syrian conflict was being portrayed in Western media and raise the alarm about the perils of US and European support for rebels in conjunction with their Qatari, Saudi, and Turkish allies.52
Mahjoub argued that the actions of these countries in Syria were a prelude to another 9/11—the idea being that the United States was repeating in Syria what it had done when it partnered with the Saudis to fund and arm the mujahedeen in their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, only to spawn Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden years later.
“The US and the West will start to realize that more than 90 percent of the armed opposition are Salafist Wahhabi jihadists made by petrodollars—the same type of terror that hit the US on September 11. They are going to shift and deal with the regime in order not to have a failing state in Syria next to a failed state called Iraq,” said Mahjoub confidently in the spring of 2013 over coffee at the Masa Mall, a shopping center not far from Bashar’s private residence.53
“God blessed Syria, because the opposition is more stupid than the regime,” he added with a broad smile.
Mahjoub had already arranged for two veteran Middle East reporters, the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen and the Independent’s Robert Fisk, to meet with alleged foreign fighters being held by the mukhabarat’s Air Force Intelligence Directorate at the Mezzeh Airbase.54 This was the same entity, headed by the ruthless Jamil Hassan, that was torturing and killing protesters and activists. The airbase was where Mazen Darwish and his colleagues were first taken when Hassan’s men raided his office in Damascus ten months earlier.
Bowen was allowed to interview six purported jihadists, including an elderly Algerian-French man who told him that he came from the French city of Marseilles because he could no longer bear to see dead Syrian children on TV.55 Mahjoub, for his part, claimed that he was a “civil activist” taking on this mission on his own and that Bashar had nothing to do with it.56
In collaboration with the mukhabarat, Mahjoub operated a company that bypassed the bureaucratic channels to obtain visas for Western journalists and facilitated their reporting inside Syria—for big fees.57
“Everything worked out amazingly with ABC—the explosion happened while they were here and the footage they took at the scene was spectacular!” said Mahjoub’s assistant with enthusiasm.58 One of the reports filed by ABC News anchor and correspondent Terry Moran during a February 2013 visit to Damascus was from the flaming wreckage of a blast in downtown Damascus that was claimed by the Nusra Front and that killed some fifty people, including many children.59 It was one of a series of deadly explosions in the capital that day.
The twin goal of the regime’s media campaign was to alert Westerners to the consequences of their governments’ backing of the opposition and rebels, who were painted as Islamist terrorists and fanatics, while also reinforcing a long-standing regime narrative: Bashar the secular and tolerant Arab leader, who was the protector of minorities, especially Christians.
Among those who were instrumental in promoting this idea were people like Ahmad Badreddine Hassoun, a Sunni cleric appointed by Bashar as grand mufti, the country’s highest Muslim religious authority.
In his caftan and oversize white turban, and with his warmth and smile, Hassoun was meant to represent, at least to the Western journalists and delegations he regularly met in Damascus, the Sufi and moderate brand of Islam espoused by Bashar and the supposedly righteous Sunnis who supported him. Many of the delegations included white supremacists and European radical-right political figures.60
Only a few years earlier, in October 2011, Hassoun had threatened America, Europe, and Israel with suicide bombers if the West ever intervened in Syria.61 “The sons and daughters of Lebanon and Syria will set off to be martyrs on the land of Europe and Palestine, and I say it to all of Europe and… America: martyrs in your midst are ready,” shouted Hassoun as he waved his index finger threateningly during a speech to a Christian-led Lebanese interfaith delegation visiting Aleppo.
Hassoun’s twenty-one-year-old son had been shot dead a few days earlier by what he later described as Syrian assailants allegedly paid by Saudi Arabia and Turkey because of his pro-Bashar stance.62
Hassoun’s Christian alter ego was a pro-regime Lebanese-Palestinian Carmelite nun called Mother Agnes Mariam, who confessed that she had been an itinerant pot-smoking hippie before she found God in 1971.63 The sixty-year-old nun always wore a brown habit, a white wimple, and a dark veil. A large cross dangled from her neck. She has lived in Syria since 1994 at a desert monastery between Homs and Damascus dedicated to Saint James the Mutilated, who was believed to have been beheaded for his faith in the fifth century.
As early as 2011, the nun brought Western journalists to Syria and traveled abroad in 2012 to talk about alleged beheadings being committed by forces linked to the rebels. Mother Agnes was affiliated with the Voltaire Network, a website that describes itself as an alternative media outlet, which is managed by a Damascus-based French conspiracy theorist named Thierry Meyssan.64 Mother Agnes’s role only got bigger.
Starting in 2013, many Western reporters were admitted by the regime for short visits. Most came by land via the Beirut–Damascus road, which remained the main lifeline for the regime and Syrians living under its control in the capital and surrounding areas.
Reporters moved mainly within Damascus and sometimes in parts of Homs and the western coastal region, mostly accompanied by Mahjoub’s team or other regime-designated minders and always under the mukhabarat’s watchful eyes.
In addition to being fed the regime’s narrative, reporters and visiting Western delegations had a chance to marvel at how, despite the war, life continued as normal inside Damascus—at least on the surface.
Westerners got to see clean streets, well-tended parks, busy markets, and people going to work and school. Life seemed uninterrupted, despite the security checkpoints all over the city, the regime warplanes buzzing overhead on their way to drop bombs on opposition-held areas, the thunderous sound of regime artillery firing from Mount Qasioun, and the plumes of black smoke billowing in the distance.65
A highlight for visiting reporters and Western delegations hosted by the regime was a trip to the traditional Souk al-Hamidiyeh in the city’s old quarter, brimming with shoppers, vendors, and colors amid the wafting scents of spices and handmade soaps. All along the souk’s main vaulted passageway, shops displayed lingerie, glittery evening gowns on plastic mannequins, leather goods, blankets, stacks of towels, and every clothing and household item imaginable. More sellers hawked their wares in the middle of the passageway.66
North of the souks, civil servants on lunch break crowded the cafeterias and sandwich shops around parliament and other government buildings.
“Thank you, Russia; Thank you, China,” read graffiti emblazoned on the marble column of a building to show the gratitude of Bashar loyalists to both countries for vetoing numerous Security Council resolutions condemning the regime.67
A flier plastered on an adjacent wall announced “musical performances and sumptuous dinners” at special prices on the rooftop terrace of a downtown hotel. Near the Four Seasons Hotel, where United Nations humanitarian agencies had begun to set up shop, a sushi restaurant served sashimi and California rolls made with fish trucked in from Lebanon daily.
While the regime sought to use Western media to influence public opinion in the West, its message to Arabic-speaking audiences was sharpened and broadened. In addition to its own TV channels in Syria and those of allies Hezbollah and Iran, a new channel was created in Beirut to rival Al Jazeera and promote the agenda and perspective of the regime and its allies in a slick and more professional way.
Al Mayadeen launched in mid-2012 under the direction of two former Al Jazeera anchors at a cost of about $30 million, of which $25 million came supposedly from Bashar’s cousin Rami and the rest from Iran.68 The station denied it, saying its owners were Arab businessmen, including Syrians, but refused to reveal their identities.
The regime’s messaging became much more strategic and coordinated.
In early summer 2013, Bashar met at his cozy private office with the correspondent of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s most prestigious dailies. He declared that all rebels were “terrorists” and that there were no such thing as “good” and “bad” fighters.
Bashar warned Europe against arming the rebels. “If the Europeans supply weapons, Europe’s backyard would become a terrorist haven, and Europe would pay a price for this. Terrorism would mean chaos here… The second effect would be the direct export of terrorism to Europe,” he said as he rattled off the virtues of his regime, a haven of “secularism” and “tolerance” for Christians and minorities now besieged by “terrorists.”69
At precisely the same moment that Bashar’s interview came out, his friend Khaled Mahjoub organized a tearful and emotional encounter between Tunisian mothers of alleged jihadists captured by the regime and the mothers of martyrs of Syrian soldiers, like those whom Asma had met at the palace.
The setting was the grand Umayyad Mosque, held up by the regime as a symbol of tolerance and coexistence because it was built on the ruins of a Christian basilica, vestiges of which remained. Guests of honor included the regime’s mufti, Hassoun.
“Europe today is having a new Pakistan on your border,” warned Mahjoub in an interview with Lyse Doucet, the chief correspondent of the BBC, which reaches more than a quarter-billion people around the world.70
A Tunisian mother told Doucet that her son “wouldn’t kill anyone.” And under the auspices of the regime and Mahjoub’s initiative, Tunisian and Syrian lawyers were collaborating to make sure Tunisians held by the regime were accorded “fair trials,” reported Doucet.
Nowhere in Doucet’s heartfelt television piece was a clear explanation of the circumstances and dates of arrest of these Tunisians. What Doucet did not know71 was that the Syrian mukhabarat had, early on, rounded up dozens of Tunisian male citizens who had been residing and working in Damascus for years before the uprising. Many were tortured and made to confess that they were jihadists.72
Members of a delegation of European far-right politicians who were being hosted by the regime that same week also spoke to Doucet.
“If they come back to our country, they will fight jihad not in Syria anymore but on European soil,” Filip Dewinter from Vlaams Belang, a Belgian right-wing political party, told Doucet. “This is a very, very big threat for all European countries.”73
Around the same time, Bashar’s friend Mahjoub played a central role in spreading the “sex jihad” story, a lie spun by pro-Bashar media outlets and later picked up by some Western ones—essentially that a group of Tunisian girls had allegedly gone to Syria and returned home pregnant or infected with the AIDS virus after having had sex with jihadists there.74
The lie had all the elements of the massive Russian disinformation campaign that would target the US presidential elections three years later.75
During their short stays in Damascus, few of the reporters and Western visitors met with anti-Bashar activists from all religious and economic backgrounds still determined to work clandestinely and at great risk to themselves and their families to help opposition areas being besieged and bombed by the regime. Few of the visitors were exposed to these scenes and stories:
• mukhabarat henchmen bundling a suspected regime opponent into the trunk of a vehicle in a busy Damascus market as shopkeepers and passersby watched silently
• a grandmother from a rebellious town displaced in Damascus and trying to care for her grandchildren and daughters-in-law after her husband and male sons had all been arrested by the regime
• young men hiding in their homes because they did not want to be drafted into the army
• and a barbershop owner next to Bashar’s residence sobbing uncontrollably when he recalled his nephew, who had been arrested by the mukhabarat and returned as a cold corpse to his parents because of something he had written on Facebook76
And for sure, few if any knew what was happening inside the mukhabarat’s torture chambers and dungeons, which were nestled in residential neighborhoods, on busy commercial streets, and even next to the presidential palace.
Two months after their detention at the Mezzeh Airbase, where they witnessed prisoners forced to get on their knees and make animal sounds, roll in their own urine and feces, and endure torture until they wrote demeaning confessions, Mazen Darwish and many of his fellow activists were transferred in the spring of 2012 to an underground prison run by Maher al-Assad’s army division.77 It was more of a hastily built dungeon divided into a few cells. The Assads were running out of space to put all the people being swept up by their mukhabarat.
The dungeon was accessed through a large metal door and stairs. There was one small opening in the ceiling, through which the guards above could check on the prisoners. Mazen and dozens of others were crammed into a cell measuring about five by three meters (sixteen by ten feet). Among them were teenage boys as young as fourteen. The feeling everyone had was that they had been thrown into this hole in the ground and would be forgotten forever.
Prisoners were blindfolded, had their hands tied behind their backs, and were ordered to kneel against the walls. Soldiers then descended on them with batons, cables, metal chains, and stun guns. Some soldiers carried a new torture instrument that they had fashioned and named “The Lakhdar Brahimi” after the UN–Arab League envoy had pleaded with Bashar several times to release opposition prisoners. It was a long piece of green PVC pipe with metal screws attached to one end to cause maximum pain and injury. Brahimi’s first name Lakhdar meant “green” in Arabic (akhdar).
As jailers struck people, they shouted “You want freedom, right?” and “Brahimi wants us to free you.”78
In addition to torture, soldiers emptied buckets of garbage and sewage water down on the bloodied prisoners through the opening in the ceiling. Mazen endured this for almost six months. He tried to cope by organizing discussion sessions in whispers about Syria’s history and future. Others tried to give lessons to detainees who were illiterate.
With one of the studs of his jeans Mazen wrote down the names of at least 105 prisoners on a piece of paper he hid inside his jacket’s lining when he was arrested. Two of his colleagues wrote more names on ripped strips of clothing, using their own blood.79 They thought that getting the names out was perhaps a way to hold Bashar accountable for those kidnapped and held incommunicado by the mukhabarat.
In the fall of 2012, toward the end of Mazen’s stay at the Fourth Division dungeon, a fellow detainee started hemorrhaging after a particularly bad torture session. Soldiers wanted to take him to the Mezzeh Military Hospital, known as the 601. Mazen and the others were horrified—they had heard from new arrivals at the dungeon that many of those taken to the 601 ended up dying. Bodies of those killed under torture were also piling up at the 601.
Since the start of the uprising, the hospital, which was within walking distance from the People’s Palace where Bashar met Brahimi, had been divided into two sections—one for soldiers and another for the mukhabarat’s prisoners.
An activist who was taken to the 601 saw patients chained to their beds by their ankles. The wards were filthy and smelled of feces and vomit most of the time. Surgery often meant death, nothing was disinfected, and no anesthesia was administered.80
Torture usually happened around meal-time, and at night guards with nicknames like Ezrael, the biblical name for the Angel of Death, and Abu Shakoosh (“the one with the hammer”) got very drunk and dragged patients from their beds and out to a hallway where they tortured them to death. Sometimes bodies were left in the hallway or dumped in the toilet until they were collected by other prisoners enslaved by the guards.
All bodies were eventually taken to a hangar in the hospital’s parking lot, where they were tagged with number cards and photographed before being dumped in mass graves.81
Mazen and more than a hundred others went on a hunger strike to prevent their fellow prisoner from being taken to the 601, and they demanded that a doctor be brought to the dungeon instead. A doctor came and treated the man, but the next day at dawn soldiers stormed in and took Mazen upstairs. They forced his head and legs into a car tire, a common torture technique in Syria known as the dulab (“tire”), and beat him until he nearly passed out. They tossed him inside a small toilet, a hole in the ground, and left him there for almost twenty-four hours.82
The next day, Mazen was back in the custody of Jamil Hassan’s Air Force Intelligence Directorate. This time they took him to their branch in central Damascus, not far from the old quarter’s Bab Touma, or Saint Thomas Gate. A nearby street was named after the poet and writer Gibran Khalil Gibran. On the outside, the building looked like any government building or police station. Jamil Hassan’s office was on one of the top floors.
The prison was two floors deep underground. There were more than forty individual and two group cells. Mazen was taken down the stairs and along a green-tiled passageway and then led into a tiny cell that was supposed to be for solitary confinement. But there were already five people there. They were running out of room. The ceiling was a wire mesh, above which rats scurried back and forth nonstop. Mazen got the customary torture session that all new arrivals were subjected to and then a jailer came to see him two days later.
“You are the lawyer, right?” said the man.
Mazen said nothing.
“Anyway, happy holiday, and his excellency the general [Jamil Hassan] has sent you a special gift. Please come with us,” said the man as he opened the cell door. It was late October 2012 and it was the first day of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, Feast of the Sacrifice. For a split second Mazen was comforted.
He was then led out to the hallway. There were already seven guards standing there with batons, chains, and steel rods. One of them immediately punched him in the face, knocking him down on the floor. All seven attacked him. He was unconscious minutes later. He woke up in the bathroom with the shower running over him. Blood was coming out of his mouth and nose.
“Boss, this guy is awake,” he heard a man say.
“Take him back to his cell,” a voice answered gruffly from outside. Mazen was dragged by his feet and shoved into his cell. The others made room for him. They used clothing items to stop the bleeding.
Mazen was taken out the next day and tortured the same way. He lost all his nails. On the fourth day he woke in a room under the stairs. He was on top of a motionless body. It was a dead person. Mazen wanted to scream but it seemed like he had lost his voice.83