It was the summer of 2014, thousands of guests gathered in a vast auditorium at the presidential palace in Damascus.1
They were seated in clusters according to their profession or designation; actors sat together and so did members of the clergy, ministers, mothers of martyrs, and so on. The speaker of the rubber-stamp parliament was called to the stage, where a podium had been set up. There were Syrian flags on each side. Two soldiers from the Republican Guard in their full military regalia marched in, one carried an ancient handwritten copy of the Muslim holy book, the Quran, and the other a copy of the constitution adopted by the regime two years before. They placed them next to the podium.
Outside at the palace’s main entrance, a Republican Guard officer opened the door of a black sedan with tinted windows. Bashar al-Assad stepped out onto red carpet. The presidential guard of honor stood motionless beneath the searing July sun while a band played the national anthem. To the sound of grandiose military marches, Bashar walked toward the palace entrance past formations that were supposed to represent various branches of the armed forces.
As the music turned more imperial, two honor guards opened a massive double door and Bashar strode down the red carpet laid out in dramatic contrast to an all-white marble hallway. When he entered the auditorium, the audience stood up and applauded for nearly two minutes.
Every detail of the ceremony to install Bashar as president for another seven years, from his triumphant entry down to the music and the stage color and height, was meant to replicate the grand inauguration ceremony of Russian president Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in 2012.2
Bashar’s aching and lifelong desire to be taken seriously as a strong leader was on full display. He was already a huge fan of Putin and drew parallels between the Russian leader’s confrontation with the West and his own dealings with Western powers since inheriting power from Hafez in 2000. Putin’s first presidential term had begun that same year, precisely a month before Hafez’s death.
According to the narrative eagerly embraced by Bashar and articulated at nearly every opportunity, both he and Putin were leaders who rejected a unipolar superpower system and were intent on standing up to the hegemony and arrogance of the United States and restoring the global balance that had prevailed under the former Soviet Union. And the part that Bashar loved the most was seeing himself and Putin as smooth and ruthless operators with nerves of steel, ready to do anything to attain their goals. Bashar thought it was only fitting for him to have an inauguration ceremony exactly like Putin’s.
After taking the oath of office, Bashar spoke for more than an hour, addressing his supporters as “honorable Syrians” who prevailed over “dishonorable” protesters.
“Years have gone by since some chanted for freedom, but you turned out to be the free ones in the age of enslavement, you were the masters in the age of mercenaries… They drowned in illusion, and you made reality,” said Bashar.3
Bashar’s underlying message was precisely the same as that delivered twelve days earlier by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: The righteous were those who stood with the leader—and the damned were those opposing him.
“Obey me in what I obey Allah through you,” declared Baghdadi, dressed in black robes and turban, after he stepped out of a vehicle with tinted windows and made a spectacular entry, just like Bashar’s, into the marble-columned prayer hall of the Al-Nouri mosque in the Iraqi city of Mosul to deliver a sermon.4
Just like Bashar’s inauguration ceremony, Baghdadi’s appearance and discourse was filmed by multiple cameras from different angles. The two men seemed to be moving in lockstep. The previous month, June 2014, Baghdadi’s shura (consultative) council of the mujahedeen elected him caliph, commander of a self-declared Islamic State that extended from Aleppo in Syria to Baghdad’s edges, and soon beyond, they hoped.5 That same month Bashar’s war council engineered his reelection.6 Both men praised the supposedly democratic processes that had anointed them leaders.
Even Baghdadi’s capture of Mosul and bloody rampage through Iraq that same month was tied to a fateful decision made by Bashar sixteen months before.
Baghdadi and a band of a few thousand fighters from his terror group had marched on Mosul from the Syrian border area west of the city.7 It was a vast desert frontier region encompassing the Syrian provinces of Deir Ezzour, Hasakeh, and Raqqa that Bashar decided to abandon to Islamist extremists in early 2013 as rebel forces backed by the United States and its allies increased pressure on him in Aleppo and Damascus.
“I wanted reinforcements but they refused,” said the Syrian officer in charge of Hasakeh’s Ya’arubiya border crossing, nearly seventy miles west of Mosul, about his call to Damascus at the end of February 2013 to ask for help in defending his post after it was attacked by rebels, including elements of the Nusra Front.8 Syria’s Nusra was at the time still part of Baghdadi’s Iraq Al-Qaeda franchise before splitting from it two months later.
The Syrian officer told his commanders in Damascus that he was confident he could hang on to his position, and he proposed to engage the assailants until additional forces were dispatched. The order from Damascus was unequivocal: Leave now.9 The Syrian regime even arranged with its allies in Baghdad to remove the Syrian officers and soldiers from Ya’arubiya.
Forty-eight hours later, Raqqa province and its administrative seat also called Raqqa were surrendered in a similar manner.10
This was the same border region through which Bashar had sent foreign fighters to fuel Iraq’s insurgency and bog down the United States after it toppled Saddam in 2003.
It was under Saddam’s brutal Baathist rule that Baghdadi had grown up into the Sunni fundamentalist that he became. He was detained for ten months by US troops early on in their occupation of Iraq before rising up in the ranks of Al-Qaeda’s Iraqi franchise, which eventually brought together many former operatives in Saddam’s security and military apparatuses.11 They were all cut from the same cloth as Bashar’s mukhabarat agents, something that greatly facilitated cooperation between the two sides after Saddam’s fall.
Like Saddam’s Iraq and the Assads’ Syria, the Islamic State decreed that everyone had to submit to the ruler or face dire consequences. The Islamic State’s decision to blow up border posts between Iraq and Syria in the summer of 2014 and herald the end of the 1916 Franco-British Sykes-Picot Agreement would have made every Baathist proud.12 Baathists in both Iraq and Syria saw the accord, which had carved out nation-states in the Levant and Arabian Peninsula after World War I, as a curse and conspiracy by colonial powers to divide and control Arabs and create Israel.
The fact that the Islamic State was effectively birthed from the womb of the terror regimes of Iraq and Syria hardly mattered, as truths and nuances were buried under a deluge of news, images, and videos of the apocalyptic army of black-clad militants and their barbaric crimes.
It could not have been a more perfect backdrop for Bashar’s July 2014 inauguration speech, branding all his opponents “terrorists” and “degenerates,” without exception.
“The ugly faces were revealed after the mask of freedom and revolution was removed,” Bashar charged.13
He told countries that backed his opponents to brace themselves for terror attacks on their soil.
“Isn’t what we see today in… all the countries plagued by the fraudulent [Arab] Spring… tangible and concrete proof of the credibility of what we have been warning about over and over again,” he said. “Soon we’ll see regional and Western countries that supported terrorism also paying a heavy price.”14
The audience was cheering Bashar’s coronation and what he gloatingly described as “the official death of… the Arab Spring.”
As promised by Bashar, the first attack would happen six months later in France, the same country that had suffered from terrorism in the 1980s when it was in the camp challenging Hafez in Lebanon.
Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko, Myanmar’s Thein Sein, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro were among the leaders who cabled Bashar to congratulate him15 on what was by every measure a farcical and sham election organized by his mukhabarat.
There was also a letter from Richard Black, a Virginia state senator, characterizing the elections as a “sweeping victory” and noting the “Syrians who flooded to the ballot boxes.”16 This same state legislator, who regularly appeared in Russian state-owned media, had sent a letter to Bashar the previous month praising the Syrian army for its “heroic rescue of Christians,” including thirteen nuns kidnapped by the Nusra Front in 2013.17
Residents of the ancient Christian town where the nuns had been abducted, however, said that the army had done nothing to stop militants from overrunning the town. Some of the nuns and their families were thankful to the Nusra Front for removing them from the monastery because the Syrian army had started shelling it viciously and indiscriminately after the militants’ entry. The nuns were released in a complex deal involving a prisoner swap and ransom money.18
As for the elections held in early June 2014, by then the death toll had surpassed 200,000 and the number of refugees—just those registered by the United Nations in neighboring countries—was about three million. Millions more were displaced inside Syria.19
In the lead-up to the elections, Bashar’s face was everywhere in Damascus. Loyalist businessmen competed to erect the biggest and flashiest Bashar billboards along with the catchiest slogans.20
“Yes to the leader of resistance and perseverance,” read a banner strung across a main road by a car dealership owner. It showed Bashar flanked by his brothers, Maher and Bassel, all in military uniforms.
“We’re all with you!” screamed large billboards of Bashar plastered on the facade of every government building.
Two candidates, a former minister and a member of parliament, were vetted by the mukhabarat to run as token candidates against Bashar and give the impression of reform and seriousness in implementing the new constitution adopted in 2012. Until then the Assad family’s fig leaf of legitimacy had been referendums, held every seven years since 1970, in which father and then son were the only candidates.
“The man is popular. I did not expect him to have all this popularity, but the man is very popular,” one of Bashar’s presumed challengers declared before the elections.21
On election day, workers at polling stations stuffed ballots on behalf of absent family members and friends, while civil servants and families displaced by the fighting and living in temporary shelters in Damascus were brought in government buses to polling stations and ordered to vote for Bashar.
In the Zahera Jadida neighborhood, public school teachers chanted and danced for Bashar as an official with a bullhorn instructed those lining up to vote to mark the empty white circle under Bashar’s photo and name on the ballot paper, which also had the photos and names of the two other candidates.22
In Midan, a district that had been a hotbed of protests against Bashar, mukhabarat agents posed as election workers and manned voting kiosks set up inside the neighborhood’s alleyways.23 Silent and grim-faced residents lined up to vote fearing retribution if they boycotted.
In Lebanon, at the time home to more than one million Syrian refugees and where the regime had an embassy and where its ally Hezbollah was more powerful than the dysfunctional Lebanese government, tens of thousands clogged the road to the embassy to vote after rumors circulated that not doing so could preclude them from ever returning to Syria or obtaining official documents like passports.24 It was a spectacle that the regime’s propaganda machine celebrated with gusto.
Bashar was declared the winner with 88.7 percent of the votes.25
How was Bashar’s regime, which was sustained by lies, propaganda, fear, brute force, and terror, any different from Al-Baghdadi’s self-styled and media-savvy caliphate with its legions of loyalists and supporters? In fact, they were two faces of the same coin.
But by the summer of 2014 Bashar had become a secondary preoccupation to the world, including those who had rallied to support his opponents and tried to push him out of power, like the United States and its European allies.
The Islamic State (the rebranded ISIS) pressed on with its rampage to capture more territory in Iraq and Syria, slaughtering and enslaving minorities like Yazidis and later beheading Western hostages. The ghouls of ISIS dominated the headlines.
As the ISIS monster got bigger and scarier, the more tolerable and even acceptable Bashar and his regime—and for that matter, all other oppressive rulers around the Middle East—became, no matter the crimes they committed against their people.
In fact, Bashar and his allies were more than happy to facilitate the growth and expansion of this menace. They hardly put up a fight as they relinquished to the terror group airbases, military facilities, and entire towns and regions deemed peripheral.
Senior army officers often flew out of these remote posts, leaving behind unfortunate conscripts to face their grim fate at the hands of ISIS. Regime cronies and businessmen had no problem dealing with ISIS, especially after the group captured oil installations in the east. They purchased fuel from the terror group and sold food in areas under its control.26
Bashar and Al-Baghdadi commenced preparation for their macabre coronations more than a year before that summer of 2014.
After ISIS broke away from Al-Qaeda in the spring of 2013 and declared itself an independent terror group in competition with Al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, Nusra, the first people it began killing were army defectors and members of the moderate rebel factions favored by the United States and its Western allies, providing the greatest service to Bashar.
“Iran was doing all the thinking and planning for Bashar. Iran’s intelligence services possess lethal capabilities; they have certainly maintained tactical alliances with elements of Al-Qaeda and ISIS,” said an Iraqi politician close to Bashar and the Iranians.27
Indeed, the rise of ISIS and the fact that it was waging war on all rebel factions allowed Bashar and Iran to concentrate on defending and reclaiming areas deemed vital and strategic, like the city of Homs and the suburbs of Damascus.
By the summer of 2013, rebels and their supporters were hemmed in and besieged in a few Homs neighborhoods, including the old quarter. The Iran-planned operations usually followed a pattern.28 The regime’s war planes and heavy artillery viciously bombed opposition areas, and then Iran’s Shiite fighters, led by its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, who were pumped up before the battle on the idea that they we were confronting the enemies of their faith and descendants of the killers of Imam Hussein and his companions in AD 680, went in to do the close-quarter combat.
After most civilians and rebels fled and the area was subdued, the mukhabarat and pro-Bashar Alawite militiamen did their “cleansing.”
They executed or captured anyone left behind and then looted homes and businesses and set them on fire. A mukhabarat officer’s war booty from the town of Qusair near Homs, which was captured in a Hezbollah-led offensive in June 2013, included a farm tractor, a cow, and pickup trucks laden with furniture, refrigerators, TV sets, and other household items.
“Assad or nobody; Assad or we burn the country,” was scrawled on the walls of Qusair, not far from graffiti sprayed by Hezbollah fighters paying tribute to their revered Zeinab.29
For months after being recaptured from the opposition, many Homs neighborhoods were subjected to vulture-like looting sweeps by Bashar’s militiamen with the intent of making sure nobody ever returned to these areas.30 In one neighborhood, all that was left after the dismantling of kitchen sinks, doors, windows, and tiles were the memories of former inhabitants—photo albums and books strewn on the streets.
At the same time, Bashar and his allies were merciless in confronting threats to an essential corridor of territory extending from the capital Damascus to the western coastal region via Homs.
In early May 2013, Bashar’s militiamen executed at least 300 civilians, including those killed with meat cleavers when Alawite henchmen went on a rampage in and around Baniyas, a largely Sunni city on the vital coastal highway to the regime stronghold of Latakia.31 All visible opposition to the regime in the area had been crushed in the first few weeks of the uprising in 2011, but there remained clandestine resistance involving army deserters.
After the Baniyas massacre, several Sunni clerics in the region, called for jihad in Syria to defend their Sunni coreligionists (in this context jihad means an obligation to defend fellow Muslims, not holy war as commonly construed).32
Having the opposition painted with the same brush as Sunni fanatics was precisely what Bashar, Iran, and Russia wanted, especially after the White House announced—around the same time as the jihad call—that it had concluded that the Assad regime had crossed the chemical weapons redline set by Obama, and as such the US president was now officially authorizing what was still called “nonlethal aid” to moderate rebels under the umbrella of the so-called Supreme Military Council and still with a view to “achieving a negotiated political settlement” in Syria.33
In parallel with this announcement, the CIA began a covert operation code-named Timber Sycamore to vet, train, and arm Syrian rebels.
To most regime opponents, Obama’s response to the atrocities of Bashar and his backers seemed too little too late, tone-deaf, impotent, and even downright collusive with their enemy.
People wanted vengeance and the tragic consequences played out at the start of August 2013 in remote mountain villages in Latakia province along the Turkish border.
An ISIS leader called Abu Ayman al-Iraqi was instrumental in inciting both foreign jihadists and Syrian fighters, including those with groups deemed moderate by the United States and its Western allies, to take part in a rampage on a string of Alawite villages in the area.
Abu Ayman spoke about just retribution for Bashar’s carnage in Baniyas four months earlier.34 At least 190 civilians were killed, including 57 women and 18 children.35 One Alawite woman was shot dead by an ISIS commander because she was too beautiful and a quarrel was about to break out among his fighters over who was going to have her, so he decided to kill her instead.36 Some 200 women and children were taken hostage.
Months before, Alawite civilians had begged regime authorities to boost defenses around their villages, but their pleas were in vain. The regime kept a tiny and ill-equipped army contingent in the area and stood back when the massacre and abductions played out.37
A few days after the massacre, the commander of the Supreme Military Council endorsed by Obama showed up in a rebel town from where the assault was launched to meet with his men and dismissed reports of atrocities.38 These were Obama’s “moderate rebels,” howled pro-Bashar media.
That summer other rebel commanders were determined to take the fight to Bashar in Damascus.
On August 7, 2013, on the first day of the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, rebels in the city of Douma fired a barrage of rockets and mortar shells on the Damascus neighborhood where Bashar and his family lived. They claimed to have hit Bashar’s convoy as he made his way from his home to a nearby mosque for traditional Eid prayers.39 Explosions shattered windows in the upscale Malki neighborhood as streets near the Assad residence emptied and ambulance sirens wailed. Bashar was unharmed.
“We targeted the convoy of the leader of the Nusairi gang,” declared Douma-based rebel commander Zahran Alloush on Qatar’s Al Jazeera, using a derogatory term to describe Bashar’s Alawite sect. “May we celebrate Eid in the coming years in a country cleansed from the filth of the Nusairi scoundrels.”40
Alloush was among the militants released from prison by Bashar during the first weeks of the uprising. He was from Douma, the same city where Bashar’s cousin Hafez Makhlouf shot and killed protesters a week into the uprising and where Manaf Tlass tried to mediate between locals and Bashar, only to see his efforts sabotaged by his enemies at the palace.
As peaceful protesters were silenced, Alloush formed a group called the Army of Islam, which initially received generous support from Qatar and was then bankrolled by Saudi Arabia after it squeezed out its smaller Gulf rival from leadership of the campaign to topple Bashar.
While the United States officially kept its distance from men like Alloush, he actually coordinated with rebel groups backed by a covert command center in neighboring Jordan staffed by CIA agents and their Saudi counterparts, among others.41
Precisely two weeks after the audacious attack on the perimeter of Bashar’s residence, the regime decided to launch what it called a “preemptive operation” against the Sunni-dominated and opposition-controlled eastern suburbs of Damascus. Alawite army officers said they had intelligence that rebels tied to the Jordan command center were planning a major offensive in Damascus and as such the regime needed to act first.42
The real motivation was probably this: Alawite loyalists clamored for revenge after the attack on their villages; soldiers and militiamen wondered why they should fight for the regime in Damascus when their mothers and wives back home in the coastal region were under threat.43
Bashar could not wait to turn Obama’s redline warning into a mockery.
The regime’s operation kicked off in the predawn hours of Wednesday, August 21, 2013, when large rockets laden with sarin hit Zamalka. It was one of the towns of the Eastern Ghouta, an expanse of territory east of Damascus controlled by various rebel groups—mostly local men who had taken up arms after the regime’s deadly crackdown on protests. There were still around two million civilians in these “liberated” areas, and residents tried to attend to their normal affairs despite the regime’s siege and daily bombardment.44
When the rockets hit Zamalka and surrounding areas, people were asleep in their homes. They hardly heard them, because, unlike conventional rockets carrying incendiary warheads, these rockets triggered no explosions.
“I saw people dead in their beds, and those who tried to escape from their homes collapsed at the front door or on the stairs—it was as if someone just pressed a button and people froze in their place,” said one of the rescuers.45
Smaller-caliber sarin-bearing rockets struck a few hours later, just before dawn, Moadhamiya, another rebel-controlled town southwest of the city that the regime had been desperately trying to subdue and recapture.46
The Twitter and Facebook feeds of journalists covering Syria were flooded with YouTube videos filmed and uploaded by citizen journalists inside the rebel zones. There were images of lifeless and pale-looking children still twitching with spasms and foaming at the mouth or being washed with water and injected with atropine amid the horror-filled screams of adults around them.47
Later, rows of children were wrapped in white shrouds and readied for burial, according to Islamic tradition.48 More than 1,400 people were killed, almost one third of them children.
It was impossible to reach the areas affected by the attacks, initially because their perimeter was under siege by regime forces and then also because the regime began bombing these same areas nonstop but now with conventional weapons.49
Launching chemical attacks the day after UN inspectors had arrived in Damascus to investigate earlier incidents gave Bashar perfect deniability. “Fake news!” screamed the regime. “The images and dialogue are all fabricated and maybe also prerecorded… The Syrian forces are conducting an operation in Ghouta… but with full respect to civilians and residential areas… These people are actors paid to do this silly stuff,” declared Bashar’s minister of information, Omran al-Zoubi, defiantly.50
Meanwhile, the regime stepped up its bombing of the areas it just gassed, ignoring calls by world powers to cease hostilities and give access to UN inspectors, who were already in Damascus, to investigate the opposition’s accusations.
“We are pressing ahead with our cleansing operation until we get rid of the last gunman,” said an army officer on the edge of the Ghouta as plumes of black smoke and explosions engulfed the area.51
For five continuous days, the UN chemical weapons inspection team sat at the Four Seasons as the regime rained bombs and missiles on people it had just gassed.52
In the same luxury hotel also lived and worked teams representing the UN’s various humanitarian agencies. Many had been there since the start of the year, after their agencies signed an agreement with the regime’s government, a UN member, to be able to access opposition-held areas from Damascus. Every request made since the start of the year to provide humanitarian aid to the areas that were just gassed had been rejected by the regime.
The hotel’s banquet halls were converted into work spaces for the UN teams. Amenities like a gym, a pool, an outdoor café, and an Italian restaurant functioned normally.53
“We hear the situation is very dire,” said a hotel-based UN official about one of the gassed areas, located a mere eight miles away.54
On the sixth day after the attack, the regime stopped its bombardment of the suburbs and allowed UN inspectors in to collect samples to confirm the use of chemical weapons. No medical aid was permitted, even though there were thousands of people who were still suffering from the effects of the attack and local hospitals could not cope.
Ascertaining chemical-weapons use took precedence over saving lives.
“With their gas masks they looked like aliens swooping in to take their samples,” said a resident of the Eastern Ghouta who was present when the team arrived in their white SUVs marked “UN.”55
As inspectors went in to gather samples, Bashar met with a Russian reporter in Damascus, denying he was involved in the attack and saying that he counted on Russia to back him against any attempt by the United States and its allies to use the UN investigation results against him.56
Bashar’s media office sent out from its Twitter account a barrage of nearly eighty tweets with quotes from the interview.57
In what looked like a dress rehearsal for Russia’s cyberwarfare campaign to disrupt and influence the 2016 US elections, legions of social media trolls promoted lies and fake news stories in order to negate and bury the truth that was emerging about the attack. In tandem, young hackers with names like “The Pro” and “The Shadow” from the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA),58 an outfit personally nurtured and supported by Bashar, took the New York Times website offline for twenty hours.59 The SEA’s servers were based in Russia. Others believed it was an Iranian proxy.60
The group had emerged in May 2011 with tactics like inundating Obama’s official Facebook page with pro-Bashar messages, but by 2013 its methods were more sophisticated, suggesting that it was benefiting from more-powerful cyberwarfare expertise and support. Already a few months before the chemical-weapons attack, the SEA had hacked the websites and Twitter accounts of major news organizations like the Associated Press and the Washington Post.61
On August 30, 2013, the tenth day after the chemical-weapons attack, US secretary of state John Kerry laid out the proof against Bashar62 and forcefully made the case for action as six US warships mobilized in the eastern Mediterranean near Syria, ready to strike regime targets with a barrage of Tomahawk missiles.63
Mindful of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) debacle associated with the invasion of Iraq in 2003,64 Kerry said that the intelligence regarding the Syrian chemical-weapons attack had been “reviewed and re-reviewed” multiple times.
Three days before the actual attack, regime chemical weapons personnel had been monitored on the ground as they made their preparations. Syrian regime elements close to the areas attacked were notified ahead of time and instructed to take precautions like putting on gas masks. The launch sites and impact points of the rockets carrying sarin were known with great precision. The rockets were fired from regime-controlled areas and struck opposition-controlled or contested areas.65 The intercepted communications of one senior regime official in the aftermath confirmed the regime’s responsibility for the attack.
“It matters that nearly a hundred years ago, in direct response to the utter horror and inhumanity of World War I,” said Kerry, “that the civilized world agreed that chemical weapons should never be used again. It matters because if we choose to live in a world where a thug and murderer like Bashar al-Assad can gas thousands of his own people with impunity, even after the United States and our allies said no, and then the world does nothing about it, there will be no end to… the dangers that will flow from those others who believe that they can do as they will.”66
France, too, concluded there was no shred of doubt that the Syrian regime had ordered and carried out the chemical-weapons attacks.67 Paris wanted to go ahead with military strikes against the regime even after British lawmakers voted against their country’s participation in such a mission.
The French believed that the Americans shared with them the imperative of responding to this particular regime atrocity, but it was hardly going to be like the US invasion of Iraq.68 Instead, this was going to be a series of missile strikes on set targets, intended more than anything else to send a message of resolve by Western democracies against the use of such weapons.
“I repeat: We’re not considering any open-ended commitment. We’re not considering any boots-on-the-ground approach,” said Obama on the same day Kerry spoke. “What we will do is consider options that meet the narrow concern around chemical weapons.”69
The goal was not to topple Bashar but weaken him significantly and boost the fortunes of the opposition camp. The French were on the same page. “The idea was not to destroy Bashar, not at all,” said French foreign minister Laurent Fabius. “The idea was to choose targets in a manner that would bring him to the negotiating table.”70
This was the same fixed idea that had underpinned the Western approach to the situation in Syria from the start—the notion that Bashar and his patron Iran, along with its proxy, Hezbollah, were just going to capitulate and make major concessions on the negotiating table if sufficient pressure was applied on the regime on the ground.
Still another French official said he had high expectations that the strikes could alter the equation this time and cause the regime to crumble from within. As military action was being considered, some senior regime figures sent secret messages to the French side saying they were sickened by Bashar’s actions and wanted to defect and collaborate.71
On the same day that Obama and Kerry made their public statements, Obama called French president François Hollande and told him he needed another twenty-four hours to be ready.72 The French assumed that the second call was going to be a discussion about the targets and the joint operation’s zero hour.
In the afternoon of Saturday, August 31, 2013, Hollande was in the Élysée Palace’s salon doré, an imperial bedroom converted into a presidential office. Surrounded by gilded panels and carvings, he sat behind a beautifully sculpted desk in the style of Louis XV covered with files that overflowed onto an adjacent table. This was the last weekend before the rentrée scolaire, the official start of the new school year, and he had barely taken a break all year.73
One of Hollande’s closest advisers, Paul Jean-Ortiz, had just spoken with US national security advisor Susan Rice, to prepare for the conference call with Obama during which the two leaders were supposed to make a final decision on launching military strikes to punish Bashar and his regime for the horrific August 21 attacks near Damascus.
The French were in a state of total mobilization. After speaking to Obama the day before, Hollande was planning to give the order to his military that same Saturday or the following day at the latest.74 The UN inspectors were expected to be out of Syria by then.
Rafale fighter jets taking off from French bases in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa and Abu Dhabi in the Persian Gulf were supposed to fire five Scalp missiles at preselected targets inside Syria.75 These were most likely the airbases, radar installations, and communications hubs that enabled the Syrian regime to keep up its indiscriminate bombardment of civilians in opposition areas throughout the country. Hitting these targets would also disable or significantly diminish the regime’s ability to respond to the strikes.
The French strikes were scheduled for predawn Damascus time. The green light from the French president would come the night before at 9:00 p.m. Damascus time. He would have one final chance to call it off five hours later, at 2:00 a.m. Strike time was two hours after that, at 4:00 a.m.76
The French also had a communications strategy in place, already-drafted statements, mapped-out possible scenarios, and a clear idea of the next steps to be taken. They wanted to act as quickly as possible because they were concerned that, if they waited much longer, their targets would lose their value and Bashar would have more time to prepare his defenses. They certainly wanted to do it before a G20 summit hosted by Putin in Saint Petersburg five days later on September 5.
Hollande was already bracing for Putin’s reaction. He knew the Russian leader had called Germany’s Angela Merkel to tell her the chemical-weapons attack was somehow arranged by the United States and was “part of an American-led conspiracy to justify action against Bashar.”77
“It was as if we were back to the foreign policy of the Soviet Union… just like a Cold War scenario,” Hollande commented.78
There was one scenario, though, that the French had not anticipated.
Obama called Hollande on Saturday, August 31, to inform him he needed more time. He told Hollande that the British parliament vote was a new element that had to be considered. He said that the fact that any action taken would lack a UN Security Council mandate was something that needed to be thought through carefully.79 Obama also let Hollande know that he wanted to get the US Congress involved in the decision, and this was going to require more time.
“Obama told us there would be a delay, but President Hollande and I interpreted the conversation to mean that military action was off the table,” Fabius said.80 “We could not act on our own—not because we did not have the means but because the operation was already planned as a joint intervention.”
The French leader’s instincts were right. The day before he spoke to Hollande, it seemed Obama had for the most part made up his mind and wanted to call off the strikes altogether, and thus the delay was just a retreat tactic.
Obama took a long walk on the South Lawn with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, who was the aide most opposed to military action. Obama told him that this could be a trap by the Assad regime and that Bashar could put civilians at military installations and use them as human shields.81 There was also the likelihood that Bashar and his allies could emerge more defiant and ruthless from the aftermath of the strikes.
“Official ambiguity reigned for a few days,” said Fabius, describing the period that followed Obama’s second phone conversation with Hollande.82
On the ground in Damascus, there was fear and apprehension behind the regime’s facade of defiance as the prospect of intervention seemed real and credible, at least for a few days.83 As the threat loomed, entire units of the army and mukhabarat moved into schools inside residential neighborhoods like the Satee al-Hosari middle school for girls in Abu Rummaneh. The nearby Damascus Community School, the American school, was already a military installation, and more soldiers and equipment moved in.84
Apartments that were vacant because their owners had fled the conflict were opened and occupied by senior army and mukhabarat officers. In Kfar Sousseh, home to several mukhabarat branches, antiaircraft guns and rocket launchers were positioned outside residential buildings.
Meanwhile the mukhabarat organized stunts like escorting loyalists up to Mount Qasioun to erect tents out in the open and announce to journalists that these volunteers planned to sleep there, hoping the message would dissuade the United States and its allies from bombing military installations on the mountain.85 The mountain chain was planted with missile launchers and heavy artillery guns that the regime used to bomb civilians and rebels alike in the suburbs.
At around the same time, the mukhabarat started moving groups of prisoners from its dungeons to military and security installations. A large group of prisoners was moved to the Mezzeh Air Base and a nearby base belonging to the Fourth Division.86
Bashar’s electronic army, meanwhile, attacked the US Marines’ recruitment website.
“Obama is a traitor who wants to put your lives in danger to rescue Al-Qaeda insurgents,” read a message posted by SEA and linked to the Marines website. It said it was a message from “your brothers in the Syrian army, who have been fighting Al-Qaeda for the last three years.”87
Bashar, meanwhile, said rhetorically about French parliamentarians supporting action by their president against him to boost the opposition, or the “terrorists” as he called them: “Will they support those who perpetrated the September 11 attacks in New York, or those who bombed the metro [in 2004] in Spain? How can France fight terrorism in Mali and support it in Syria?”88
Bashar vowed mayhem if the United States and France conducted airstrikes against his regime. “Once the barrel explodes, everyone loses control,” he said. “What is certain is the spread of chaos, wars, and extremism in all its forms everywhere.”89
He left the possibility of future chemical-weapons attacks hanging. He said he could not confirm or deny that he possessed such weapons, but if he did, the decision to use them was “centralized”—meaning it was his.90
Even Bashar’s eldest son, Hafez, who was eleven at the time, appeared to chime in. “12 hours we waited… 48 hours they said, we’re waiting… I just want them to attack sooo much, because I want them to make this huge mistake of beginning something they don’t know the end of it,” read a widely shared Facebook post from an account in Hafez’s name.91
Some in the regime, however, seemed genuinely concerned that the ruling clan might have finally overplayed its hand by using chemical weapons on such a large scale and that dire consequences awaited everyone. Deputy foreign minister Faisal al-Mekdad appealed to Kerry personally and called for dialogue with members of Congress.92
As for the people, they stocked up on food and bread and braced themselves for a long confrontation.93 Regime opponents in Damascus wanted the United States and its allies to strike Bashar. The feeling of many, especially after the horrific chemical-weapons attack, was that they were being held hostage by a psychopath and yearned to be freed.
Of course, loyalists like business owners and members of minority groups, especially Christians, worried that Western airstrikes could provoke the regime’s collapse and an onslaught of rebels from the suburbs, whom they saw as barbarians and extremists.94
As Obama vacillated while, technically, still waiting for a vote in Congress, and Kerry made passionate pronouncements for days about the need to punish Bashar, the Russians plotted their next moves.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, announced that he had received what he called a credible fifty-page report by Mother Agnes, the supposedly peace-loving nun who was also one of the Syrian regime’s main propagandists and a mukhabarat collaborator. The report’s central assertion was an outrageous lie: rebels transported Alawite children kidnapped in the Latakia mountains to the Damascus suburbs and used them to stage a chemical-weapons attack.95 The executioner was now the victim.
On September 5, 2013, the drama shifted to the suburbs of Saint Petersburg, where Putin was hosting a summit for the G20, a forum for the world’s top economic powers.
The setting was a monumental eighteenth-century palace commissioned by Peter the Great. Syria was not formally on the agenda but was on everyone’s mind. After an elaborate opening ceremony and a dinner for heads of state, Obama proposed that the group issue a statement condemning Bashar for his use of chemical weapons and calling for a unified and strong international response.
Putin argued that there was no proof that Bashar was responsible. Other leaders around the vast, oval-shaped dining table then took turns weighing in on the matter.96 In the presence of countries like Argentina, Brazil, China, India, and South Africa, that either supported Bashar or shared Russia’s worldview, Obama’s motion failed to win a majority.
During an exchange between foreign ministers at the same summit, France’s Fabius went through all the evidence that he said implicated Bashar personally in the chemical-weapons attack. Russia’s Lavrov gestured with his hand to pause the conversation. He looked Fabius and the others directly in the eyes and smiled.
“You have made your arguments and I have made mine,” said Lavrov calmly. “We could continue like this for a while, but Laurent, do you see that glass of fruit juice in front of you on the table? You see it orange [it was], but you know what, I see it blue. You can give me all the arguments in the world but I will continue to say it’s blue.”97
So it did not really matter to the Russians whether Bashar used chemical weapons or not. Something much bigger was at play. Putin believed that he was leading the charge to transform the world order. Russia could no longer be ignored. The West could not impose its agenda and world-view on Russia. Putin wanted to erase memories of the humiliation and weakness after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As far as he was concerned, Obama had flinched over enforcing his redline in Syria and now was his chance to showcase the strong, new Russia.
Bashar idolized Putin. For Bashar, Putin was the embodiment of what he always yearned to be: the tough and uncompromising leader who showed no hint of weakness. Someone who outsmarted his enemies and maintained his power and furthered his agenda with cutthroat resolve.
“Russia is defending its legitimate interests in the region,” pronounced Bashar after the chemical-weapons attack. He said that the United States thought that “Russia was perpetually destroyed,” but now it was back to stop the US from interfering in other countries’ affairs.98 “Russia itself has suffered and continues to suffer from such interference,” declared Bashar in what he described as a message to the Russian public.
It was the perfect match, as far as Bashar was concerned. Putin wanted glory and power, while he and his family just wanted to survive.
After the G20 summit, Bashar dispatched his foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, to Moscow at the urgent request of the Russians. The portly Damascene and veteran diplomat relished the image that regime loyalists projected of him as a fox whose deliberately slow manner of speech and sarcastic tone was enough to win any argument.
On September 9, 2013, just hours after Kerry said that a punitive strike against Bashar could be averted if he surrendered “every single bit” of his arsenal of chemical weapons, and Lavrov countered that Russia would work with the Syrians on such an initiative,99 a grim-faced Moallem appeared from Moscow to make a televised statement.
“Our commitment to the Russian initiative has the goal of ending our possession of chemical arms,” said Moallem.100
The way Putin saw it, Obama now owed him because he had helped him find a way out of his redline predicament, and as for Bashar, Putin had saved his neck and thus further opened the way for Russia to play the most dominant role in shaping events in Syria.
At the end of September 2013, a UN Security Council that for more than two and a half years could not agree on condemning Bashar’s slaughter of Syrians, passed a unanimous resolution to force him to hand over his chemical weapons and destroy his capabilities to make them.101
Bashar and his allies pressed on with a campaign to strangle rebellious communities across the country, ultimately killing people in far greater numbers and in more brutal ways. Civilians were starved into submission and pummeled with barrel bombs and airstrikes on their homes, hospitals, markets, and schools. Chlorine substituted for sarin, at least while Obama was still around.
“We won’t allow them to be nourished to kill us,” said an Alawite militiaman and Bashar loyalist enforcing a total siege imposed on Moadhamiya, one of the towns gassed two months earlier.102 He was given orders to shoot to kill anyone trying to leave or enter.
The militiaman, who said he was a law student, stood at his sniper nest of cement blocks and sandbags on a building rooftop. Empty bullet casings littered the floor. The rebel-controlled town center was a bleak and jagged landscape of destroyed apartment buildings and dense clusters of one-story homes pummeled nonstop by Maher al-Assad’s forces stationed on a nearby mountain.
Inside the siege perimeter, residents of a town famed for its olive trees were reduced to eating whatever greens they could forage.
No single event in the history of the Syrian conflict helped Islamist extremists justify their terror and message of hate more than the chemical-weapons attack and the way the international community handled its aftermath. It became a potent and resonant recruitment tool. So far, it had been mostly foreign members of Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, who were ready to take on suicide bombing missions; now Syrians, too, would be convinced to join the “martyrdom-seekers.”
Bitterness and disillusionment also gripped the most ardent secularists.
“Why does the West insist on dealing with our dead and injured as if they were less valuable than a Westerner—and as if our casualties don’t even deserve respect and compassion?” blogged Mazen Darwish’s friend and colleague Razan Zeitouneh in mid-October 2013 from the Eastern Ghouta, where she was hiding from the regime and where she had witnessed the aftermath of the chemical-weapons attack.103 “Syrians won’t forget that the international community forced the regime to dismantle its chemical weapons, yet couldn’t force it to break the siege on a city where children are dying from hunger on a daily basis.”
At the start of 2014, the UN-mediated talks in Geneva between representatives of the regime and opposition were supposed to be one of the achievements that flowed from the US-Russian collaboration on destroying Bashar’s chemical weapons. Positions, however, remained more entrenched than ever.
Saudi Arabia, which by then exercised the most sway over the Syrian opposition, did everything to keep Bashar’s patron Iran out of the talks, even though UN envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, thought that Iran’s presence was essential. The indirect talks were formally just between the two Syrian sides, but representatives of all the major states with stakes in the conflict were in Geneva, too. Publicly, the opposition delegation declared that it was only there to negotiate Bashar’s exit, while the regime insisted that the talks should be about combatting terrorism.
In closed-door sessions with Brahimi, the opposition seemed more willing to at least get the process rolling—but not Bashar’s delegation. “I am not authorized to agree to any agenda or sign any paper. I am here to discuss terrorism and terrorism only,” the regime’s UN representative, Bashar al-Jaafari, told Brahimi.104
The talks failed and Brahimi resigned, and then the world’s attention shifted elsewhere. A wave of popular protests in Ukraine ousted the Russian-backed president. Putin sent forces to the country’s Russian-speaking east and annexed Crimea, which he called “reunification.” Obama and the European Union imposed sanctions against Russia and Putin’s inner circle, and continued to call for a diplomatic solution to the crisis. War followed in Eastern Ukraine. For Putin, the rebels and separatists of Ukraine were “patriots”—as opposed to the “terrorist” rebels in Syria.
France’s foreign minister, Fabius, was convinced that Putin’s bold actions in Ukraine were the result of careful observation of how Obama responded to Bashar’s use of chemical weapons in Syria. The United States can talk tough—tell Bashar he must leave power and draw redlines barring chemical-weapons use—but ultimately it was unprepared to take action to back its threats. Putin concluded that from then on he could get away with a lot, thought Fabius.105 The world was changing.