It was the first weekend in October 2014, and fall was invading the Jardin du Luxembourg near Manaf Tlass’s Parisian apartment.
Pathways were carpeted with dry brown leaves, and what was left on the trees was colored in spectacular hues of gold and red. Joggers circled the park. Elderly men played pétanque, a game of boules, on a gravel patch while seemingly content and happy families strolled past statues and busts of queens, saints, and ancient Greek gods.
Manaf sat in a café at one of the park’s entrances, smoking a cigar and sipping espresso. Tourists at a nearby table forked bites of delicate pastries and savored hot chocolate in porcelain cups.
“Syrians are being slaughtered on the altar of international agendas,” said Manaf as he launched into a sort of monologue.1 “The regime is a third-tier player,” he continued. “Bashar is just a figurehead. He handed everything over to the Iranians, who are now negotiating directly with the Russians and others.
“Syria needs real leaders. Bashar, Maher, and Rami are kids. They are like kids who inherited a toy from dad and destroyed the toy rather than share it with others. As for the opposition, I am not even going to waste my breath on them. A game of nations is now deciding Syria’s fate.”
Manaf was turning fifty-two in one month. He still wanted to be seen as the rebellious insider. He was unshaven and wore jeans, sneakers, and a windbreaker. It had been more than two years since he left Syria.
Bashar had reached out to Manaf over the summer, right after his reelection charade, with a concrete offer. The emissary was a Syrian businessman who was a common friend of theirs.
“Abu Mustafa, it’s time to return to the homeland. The president wants you to come back. He’s willing to offer you any position you want,” said the businessman who traveled to Paris to meet with Manaf.2 “He [Bashar] loves you and has nothing against you.”
“If I wanted a position, I would have stayed in Syria. Nothing has changed since I left. It’s the same killing and destruction—why should I go back? Tell him no thank you,” said Manaf.3
This thought went through Manaf’s head but he did not share it with the businessman: “Yeah, sure, this is a very loving regime; he [Bashar] killed his own brother-in-law [Assef Shawkat] and he did not care. I do not think he [Bashar] would care much about me.”
The businessman called Manaf later to tell him that Bashar was disappointed by his answer. Manaf concluded that Bashar still saw him as a threat and bringing him back to Syria was one way to control him, if not eliminate him altogether.
By then Manaf’s life had settled into a sort of routine. Over the past year he discretely traveled to Jordan and Turkey, where the CIA ran joint-operations centers alongside representatives of its Western and Arab allies to vet, train, and arm Syrian rebels as well as plan and approve offensives against the regime.4 Manaf was among many who offered advice.
The setup exemplified Obama’s arms-length approach in dealing with Syria from the start. The CIA program was supposed to be covert because, officially, the United States was only providing “nonlethal” aid to the rebels, meaning things like vehicles, bulletproof vests, and night-vision goggles.
To many Syrians, including Manaf, the program was more about controlling what the rebels were getting from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey than providing them with the means to win battles against Bashar and his allies.
“Iran and Russia were helping Bashar in broad daylight and the American program was secret, meaning they could dump us at any moment,” said a defected army officer who knew Manaf well and headed a group that was receiving assistance through the joint-operations centers.5
When not flying to Jordan or Turkey, Manaf often met in Paris for lunch or coffee with opposition figures who were more willing to embrace him. Sometimes they invited him to their functions and meetings.
By 2014, new Syrian opposition groupings were emerging that were closer to Russia and more amenable to the idea of compromise with Bashar to end the bloodshed. They favored a gradualist approach to reform and transition that did not entail Bashar’s immediate abdication. These groups had names like “the Moscow platform” and “Cairo platform” and included Syrians like a former deputy prime minister, a former foreign ministry spokesman, the ex-wife of the son of a former mukhabarat chief, a popular actor, and others who saw the opposition that emerged at the start of the revolution as too rigid in their positions and beholden to Islamists.6
At least once a week, Manaf went over to his sister Nahed’s apartment to have lunch with his father, Mustafa Tlass, who was still alert but had lost weight and looked frail. Manaf often picked up a baguette, a bottle of red wine, or his father’s favorite Greek appetizers, and walked for more than one hour from his apartment in Saint-Germain on the left bank of the Seine to his sister’s place on the opposite side of the river, close to the Bois de Boulogne park. Sometimes they played poker.
Occasionally he took his dad out to his favorite restaurant, where the old general and once-legendary sex maniac made sure he kissed every waitress twice on the cheeks before they sat down at their table.7
“We packed a small bag, we thought we were coming for a month and that the regime would fall and we would return to Syria,” Mustafa’s longtime caregiver would often tell people in Paris. He too had to leave Syria when the Tlasses departed in 2012.8
Manaf’s wife, Thala, pursued advanced studies in art history and was more than ever determined to protect her husband and family from what she called the “bubbling cauldron” of Syria.9
But Manaf could not get Syria out of his head or the idea that he was destined to be Syria’s savior.
By the fall of 2014, Manaf was banking on a deal between Russia and the United States over Syria that could culminate in him being anointed as the compromise figure to replace Bashar: a son of the regime, an insider, and an army general, but not a killer, and at the same time a reform-friendly figure but not a radical, an Islamist, or an extremist.
Manaf hoped that the dispute over Ukraine and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the subsequent sanctions imposed on Moscow by the United States and its European allies, did not preclude these powers from collaborating to solve other pressing world crises like the war in Syria and the spread of the Islamic State.10 Their collective involvement in negotiations with Iran to freeze its nuclear program in return for sanctions relief was proof it was possible, reasoned Manaf.
“Manaf thinks he’s going to come at the moment chosen by the superpowers. This idea that the world’s intelligence services are saving him for later has really gotten into his head,” said a defected Syrian officer who was regularly in touch with him.11
Manaf had a foot in each camp. The previous year (2013) he had traveled to Berlin, Brussels, and London where he met with diplomats and intelligence and security officials in these European capitals that were backing the opposition and those fighting to oust Bashar from power.12
“We can’t repeat the Iraq experience of dismantling the army and state,” Manaf told them referring to what followed the US-led invasion of the country in 2003. “We must build bridges between the two warring sides [regime and opposition].”13
Manaf later flew to Russia, a country doing everything it could to keep Bashar in power.
“Russia can play a big role to help the Syrian people emerge from their hardship. It can put pressure at least on one side, and if there’s a true will we can get there. With the help of Russia and America, we can overcome this situation,” Manaf declared from Moscow after meeting Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.14
Manaf then returned to Paris where he met with CIA officers working on Syria. Manaf told them that they must maintain channels of communication with army officers inside Syria, who were still on the regime side but supposedly had patriotic motives like him and were not beholden to the Assad family. He argued that the United States should facilitate contacts between Alawite officers on the regime side and Sunni army defectors with the opposition and that he, Manaf, was best positioned to assist with that.15
This idea took on new urgency after the regime’s chemical-weapons attacks in suburban Damascus in the summer of 2013. Manaf received funding from a London-based Syrian businessman and support from the British government to organize meetings between Syrian officers who stood on opposite sides of the brutal war.
Manaf assembled a team and rented a villa in the Turkish capital Ankara which became the venue for these secret talks.16 Some Alawite officers, who were retired but held powerful positions in their clans, managed to get out to Lebanon and then flew to Turkey for these meetings. There were a few emotional encounters.
“There was an Alawite colonel who lost two of his brothers in the war and a Sunni colonel with the FSA [Free Syrian Army] who also had a dead brother. They hugged and said they were willing to overcome their personal grudges for the sake of Syria,” recalled Manaf.
It was possible that Bashar was aware of these meetings and considered them a useful indirect channel to the opposition and their Western backers as well as his old friend Manaf, even though Manaf denied this.
Manaf later received support from the United States, via the CIA, to continue these meetings but then the whole effort stalled.17
“The Americans met directly with a group of Alawite officers but the problem was that there was a different dynamic on the ground. My project was fragile and it clashed with bigger and more violent projects,” said Manaf.
Underscoring how messy and complex the situation had become by the fall of 2014, the United States was on the same side as Iran and its Shiite allies and proxies in Iraq in combatting the Islamic State after it captured Mosul. In Syria, Washington was collaborating with Kurdish militiamen who had ties to Bashar and Iran.
In their battle against the Islamic State, the Americans were starting to partner with the Syrian affiliate of a Kurdish separatist guerrilla movement, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkarane Kurdistan or PKK), which had been fighting the Turkish state for decades and was designated a terrorist organization by Washington.18
The Syrian regime had long-standing ties with the PKK from the days of Hafez, who also hosted their leader, but when the regime wanted to curry favor with Turkey and the West it turned against the PKK. At the start of the uprising in 2011, though, Bashar released PKK-linked figures from prison, and later he and Iran worked out an arrangement with the PKK that allowed its Syrian affiliate, known as the YPG (Yekineyen Parastina Gel), to administer northeast Syria in return for letting the regime maintain a security and military foothold there and receive the area’s oil.19
One of the first things the YPG did was to crack down on its rivals and all those who took part in peaceful protests against Bashar.20 The Kurdish militiamen had big ambitions, and they wanted to survive too.
To shield themselves from their enemies, which included Turkey, Syrian rebels, and the Islamic State, and to gain more autonomy from Bashar, the Kurdish militiamen formed an alliance with the Americans to fight the Islamic State.21 American volunteers joined the Kurds after the Islamic State beheaded American journalists and aid workers.
As Obama’s top priority became fighting the Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria, he and members of his administration, especially Secretary of State Kerry, continued to repeat like a mantra that there was no military solution in Syria, only a political one.22 They said that America’s support for the moderate rebel groups fighting Bashar was only intended to bring him to the negotiating table. The world watched these same moderates get crushed bit by bit by Bashar and the Islamic State, and hobbled by warlords in their midst and the competition between their regional backers Qatar and Saudi Arabia, two US allies.
By the fall of 2014 and following months of bloody battles against Syrian rebels opposing it, the Islamic State was largely in control of the eastern half of Syria along the border with Iraq. In addition to Iraqis and Syrians, there were more than 12,000 foreign fighters in the ranks of the Islamic State, most of them from Europe and North Africa.23
The Islamic State’s rival, the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, meanwhile was relegated to the western half of Syria, where in many places it shared territory with an array of Syrian rebel groups. Many of Nusra’s members were Syrian, but there were foreigners, too.
While Nusra was labeled a terrorist organization by the United States, and those groups receiving support from Washington were banned from dealing with it, the struggle between Qatar and Saudi Arabia over control of the Syrian opposition played to Nusra’s advantage.24 Tensions between the two neighbors had reached a boiling point in 2013, and in an attempt to defuse them Qatar’s emir agreed to abdicate the throne to his son.25
Saudi grievances were many and they included: Qatar’s outsize role in the region in the wake of the Arab Spring, its backing of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamists who had briefly taken power in Egypt, and its quest to compete with and upstage Saudi Arabia in places like Syria. The United States was also furious with Qatar over the delivery of a small batch of antiaircraft weapons to Syrian rebels despite a US interdiction on doing so.26
While Saudi Arabia sought to control both the political and armed wings of the Syrian opposition, Qatar, along with its ally Turkey, were not going to give up so easily. The duo upped their support to Islamist rebel groups allied to the Nusra Front.27
Later, Nusra and its Islamist allies led a raid on an arms depot near the Turkish border belonging to the main rebel body supported by the United States and its Western allies. They looted tons of weapons, ammunition, military gear, and vehicles. The incident had a chilling effect on US efforts to support rebels fighting Bashar.28
By the fall of 2014, the United States and its coalition partners were bombing Islamic State positions in largely desert eastern Syria while Bashar and his allies were left to concentrate all of their firepower on rebel-held towns and neighborhoods in the country’s western half—home to the major cities, including Damascus, that mattered the most to Bashar.
Bashar and his patrons Iran and Russia claimed that they, too, were fighting terrorists, given the Nusra Front’s presence in these areas. Russia supplied the weapons and Iran most of the manpower, including tens of thousands of ideologically driven Shiite militiamen from Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.29
Under the pretext of fighting terror, Bashar’s helicopters rained bombs on civilians in opposition areas. Some of the bombs were filled with chlorine, even though he had signed the convention prohibiting the use of the substance as a weapon at the same time that he agreed to give up his chemical arms in the Russian-brokered deal in the fall of 2013.30 Chlorine gas inhalation burns the lungs and causes death, depending on levels of exposure.
Rebel commanders begged their American backers to provide them with a limited batch of antiaircraft weapons, just to act as a sort deterrence against the airborne attacks that were killing the most people.
“Send minders with us to Syria, we will fire the missiles and then give you back the launchers, make them operable only through fingerprint detection, find a solution, help us!” pleaded one commander.31
Even the French, who had been the most eager to help the Syrian rebels from the start and who had discreetly provided them with some weapons starting in late 2012 before the lifting of the EU arms embargo, had no choice but to accept the restrictions.
One French official offered his government’s brutal reasoning: “By not giving them the antiaircraft missiles we could be blamed for not doing the right thing, but we were not proactively involved; on the other hand, if we gave it to them and it got in the wrong hands and a civilian aircraft came down, then we were going to be held responsible.”32
Bashar relished the fact that his jets and helicopters were unhindered as they slaughtered civilians in Syria’s western half at precisely the same time that US jets were flying over eastern Syria, also unhindered, to bomb the Islamic State. Officials in his regime offered coordination with the Americans, through the Russians.33
On the ground, Bashar could count on direct and extensive collaboration with United Nations humanitarian agencies to enable him to use access to food and medicine as another weapon to punish those who defied him and reward those who submitted to his rule.
Valerie Amos, the UN’s top relief official, had declared the situation in Syria by early 2013 an “L3” (level three)34—a humanitarian disaster that required the highest level and fastest mobilization, on par with the aftermath of an earthquake or a tsunami.
Instead of working out on-the-spot humanitarian pauses and ceasefires with all the combatants in order to allow relief to flow immediately to the worst-impacted battle zones, as required by such an extreme emergency protocol, UN aid officials sat for several months negotiating a framework agreement with Bashar’s representatives to govern every facet of their presence and activities in the country.35 They had to go through this process every six months.
“We were negotiating with them sometimes over single words in the document,” said one UN aid official who served several stints in Damascus but later spoke of the disgust and shame she and many others in the organization felt over the Syria mission.36
Regime-controlled areas across the country became home to several million Syrians displaced from opposition-held zones, besieged and bombed day and night by Bashar. These people were hardly regime supporters, but many had few other options. UN agencies could only provide aid to these people through regime entities and officially approved local NGOs that were often connected to Assad family members and regime cronies.37
To access opposition-held areas, UN agencies had to send a letter or fax to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs explaining the reason for the request, detailing the contents of every aid truck and box and providing names and ID copies of every single person who was going to be on the aid convoy. The ministry would then turn around and forward all the information to the mukhabarat, which was responsible for the most horrific atrocities against regime opponents from the moment protests began in 2011. The mukhabarat had the final say.38
Approval hardly ever came, and on the rare occasion it did, the regime nitpicked with UN agencies over what items were going to be permitted—for instance, no to surgical kits to treat war-inflicted injuries but yes to toilet paper and personal hygiene kits. Even if approval was granted, the regime often derailed the convoys by claiming that there were military operations underway and that it was unsafe to proceed.
“There were requests that remained pending for more than two years,” said the UN official. “This was deliberate punishment. The [Syrian] government’s attitude was that if these people were living in rebel-held areas then to hell with them. Those wounded in war had a right to treatment. The most basic rules of war were broken.”39
Even after the aid was dispatched toward opposition-held areas, which the UN termed “cross-line” operations, there was no guarantee that regime militias and forces besieging certain communities would not block entry or remove items from the convoy.40 In early 2014, regime soldiers used their combat knives to slash open UN food ration parcels and remove pita bread packets intended for a community south of Damascus where almost thirty people already perished from hunger and some were reduced to eating cats to survive.41
After the 2013 Ghouta chemical-weapons attack, UN food rations, largely paid for by the countries opposing the regime, became one of the main gives by Bashar in the capitulation offers he made to opposition communities under the pretext of “national reconciliation.” The terms were simple: You surrender, you eat. All males in these areas were also expected to “regularize their status” with the mukhabarat, which often meant being drafted into the army or sent to prison.42
In the winter of 2014 and in tandem with the first UN-mediated encounter between the regime and opposition in Geneva, the various world powers involved in the conflict agreed on a deal to allow food and medical aid into the old quarter of Homs, where nearly 6,000 people, half of them civilians, had been under siege by the regime for more than 600 days.43
The regime bombed from the sky and forces led by Hezbollah militiamen and elements of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps closed in on the ground.
By then many of the Homs city rebels were part of an Islamist coalition allied tactically on the ground with Al-Qaeda’s affiliate, the Nusra Front, and backed by Qatar and Turkey. Nusra often carried out car bombings in the Alawite-dominated and regime-controlled sections of Homs in an attempt to relieve pressure on those besieged in the old quarter. The casualties were always civilian.44
The regime first claimed that there were no civilians, only combatants, left in central Homs but then wanted the United Nations to evacuate only certain categories of civilians and rejected the supply of food and medicine. Many rebels wanted to make a last stand and felt that nobody had the right to drive them and the civilians out of their homes and city, even though all odds were stacked up against them.45
Finally, a tit-for-tat compromise (evacuation for food) was hammered out by Yacoub El Hillo, head of the UN humanitarian mission in Syria. The fifty-year-old Sudanese was a veteran of UN relief operations in Africa and the Middle East.46
On the first day, almost a hundred civilians came out in buses escorted by UN vehicles. Women with malnourished infants and old men, many with missing teeth, thick beards, and torn and soiled winter clothes, stepped out of the buses. They looked as if they had been living in caves for years.47 Some were so weak that they had to be carried on stretchers or put in wheelchairs.
The following day, regime militiamen in coordination with Homs-based mukhabarat chiefs48 fired mortar shells on a UN aid convoy after it crossed to the rebel side; eleven people were killed, mostly hungry and sick civilians that had gathered around the trucks.
When the operation resumed, more people, including men, wanted to leave old Homs. The regime said that they were all presumed to be combatants or that they were wanted by the mukhabarat until proven otherwise. The UN communicated this to those desperate to leave and they agreed to this condition,49 perhaps thinking that the involvement of representatives of the world body could offer them a measure of protection from the regime.
The first stop for the evacuees was a former banquet hall on the frontline. Hordes of regime militiamen and mukhabarat agents gathered all around. Graffiti was sprayed on the outer wall: “Assad or nobody; Assad or we burn the country.”50
As people got off the UN-escorted buses, regime forces began to curse and threaten to kill the men, while aid workers tried to shield them. They punched, slapped, and hit with the butts of their rifles a few of the civilians before one UN official protested loudly.51
At one point, the mukhabarat abducted about a dozen male evacuees from inside the banquet hall and herded them back into one of their own small buses before another UN official realized what had happened and rescued them.52
Hundreds of men and their families were then taken to a school where they were supposed to be vetted by the regime.53 For several nights, UN aid workers came to the school to prevent abduction by the mukhabarat and the militias.
A few were released from the school in return for signing a pledge to be loyal to the state and never again bear arms.54 It did not matter if they were never armed in the first place. They also had to pledge to vote for Bashar and attend mass-support rallies for him when asked to do so.55
The freed men were then made to take part in a release ceremony at a local high school theater presided over by the Bashar-appointed Homs governor and the UN’s El Hillo, who sat onstage.56 In the first row sat mukhabarat chiefs like Abdul-Kareem Salloum, an army general from Bashar’s hometown, who headed a Homs mukhabarat branch where hundreds of opposition activists, including women, had been tortured and sexually assaulted and in some instances executed since 2011.57
El Hillo lauded the teamwork between the UN aid agencies and the governor and other regime officials, and congratulated the freed men on being given the chance by Bashar’s government to return to their normal lives.58 The governor lectured them about the “conspiracy” that their country had allegedly been battling since 2011 and before.
Shortly thereafter, many of those escorted out of the besieged old quarter by the UN and handed over to the regime started disappearing, even those who had signed the pledges. Their families said that they were either taken to mukhabarat branches or drafted into the army. Others simply vanished.59
“The UN is not the protector of Syrians in Syria—they are under the protection of the state,” said El Hillo, who worked from a suite at the Four Seasons luxury hotel in Damascus. Behind him was a framed photograph of himself handing his credentials to the regime’s foreign minister beneath a portrait of Bashar.60
El Hillo described his work in Homs as a “successful experiment” that should be replicated elsewhere. “If I were to recommend it, I would, but obviously this is a Syrian–Syrian matter,” he said.61
In May 2014, El Hillo was invited once more by the regime to Homs, this time to monitor the complete and final evacuation of those who had remained in old Homs, mostly combatants and a few civilians.62
A deal brokered between regime patron Iran and rebel backers Qatar and Turkey called for their transfer to other rebel-held areas farther north in return for freeing an Iranian woman and seventy Alawite and Shiite Syrian civilians held by rebels.63
It was a hugely symbolic and strategic victory for Bashar, even though he was getting back an empty and destroyed city. What mattered was that Homs, a city his opponents once called “the revolution’s capital,” was again under his control.
The scale of destruction was epic, with entire streets and buildings reduced to mountains of rubble. “Assad or nobody; Assad or we burn the country” was sprayed in big bold letters on a wall along a street where Bashar’s militiamen and soldiers had looted every single apartment and then set many of them on fire.64
Going forward, Homs 2014 became more or less the model that Bashar and his allies applied in a string of other rebellious areas, including east Aleppo and those around Damascus, like Daraya, Madaya, and Zabadani.
The formula was straightforward: starve and bomb whoever was left there under the watchful eyes of the world and the UN humanitarian agencies sitting in Damascus until both fighters and civilians either surrendered or agreed to leave their homes and move out to Idlib province in the north, which was increasingly under the control of Nusra and other Islamists.
Meanwhile, in areas under regime control, relief provided by UN aid agencies flowed smoothly and abundantly. There it was in Bashar’s interest to demonstrate to destitute families fleeing rebel-held areas that they would get food and other forms of aid from the UN if they again submitted to his authority.
The aid also helped cushion the impact of price inflation and shrinking purchasing power on the constituencies whose loyalty Bashar needed in order to continue the war: Alawites and minorities, as well as soldiers and militiamen and their families. The UN agencies hardly ever distributed the aid themselves. It went to government entities and NGOs designated by the regime.
At least until the end of 2015, one UN aid worker said that the regime almost never provided detailed recipient lists, meaning that the United Nations did not know who was the final beneficiary of the aid.65
On top of that, Assad family members and cronies signed deals with UN agencies. At least two UN agencies partnered with Asma al-Assad’s Syria Trust in contracts worth millions of dollars.
UNICEF, which was supposed to defend the rights of children in the world, paid Rami Makhlouf’s charity, Jamiyet Al-Bustan Al-Khayriyeh (The Orchard Charity Foundation), almost $270,000 on one occasion.66 This charity had a militia operating under the same name and committing horrendous war crimes to defend Bashar.67 As early as the fall of 2012, Rami and other regime cronies had been awarded multimillion-dollar contracts by various UN agencies to supply them with goods and commodities they needed for their aid packages.68
In addition, the wife of the regime’s deputy foreign minister Faisal al-Mekdad worked for a full year in the office of the UN’s El Hillo, its most senior representative in the country. She handled a dossier related to human rights violations in Syria.69
Billions of dollars were earmarked for the United Nations’ Syria aid effort over the years, yet at almost every opportunity senior UN officials, including the secretary general, pleaded that they needed more money—because otherwise people were going to starve.70