It was Easter 2016, and spring had returned to Damascus. A convoy of sedans and SUVs accompanied by mukhabarat officers pulled up at the entrance of an Ottoman-era mansion in the Muhajreen neighborhood on the footsteps of Mount Qasioun.
A thirty-member French delegation that included conservative lawmakers, far right personalities, and Christian association representatives stepped out of the vehicles.1 They stood in front of a charming stone mansion with arched windows, white wooden shutters, and an expansive and well-groomed garden all around.
They walked up double stairs leading to the main entrance on the second floor where Bashar, smiling and dressed in a smart navy-blue suit and tie, waited for them.
The more than century-old Nazim Pasha mansion had undergone a multimillion-dollar remodeling overseen by Bashar’s wife, Asma.2 The marble and wood-paneled interior mixed modern with traditional—inlaid mother-of-pearl Damascene furniture, abstract art, stylish light fixtures, and simple flower arrangements.
The mansion, used by the Assad couple to receive foreign delegations and journalists,3 was supposed to reflect their aesthetic of understated elegance and also convey intimacy and Levantine charm. The family was striving once more to make the world forget its atrocities and crimes, a trick it has been perfecting for nearly five decades.
The Easter 2016 visit by the French delegation coincided with the Russian-led recapture of Palmyra,4 the ancient city that Bashar had abandoned and allowed the Islamic State to occupy for almost one year, during which IS blew up temples, carried out executions in its amphitheater, ransacked its museum, and beheaded Syria’s most prominent antiquities scholar.
Valerie Boyer was one of the lawmakers in the delegation that was received by Bashar. She would later become the spokesperson for François Fillon, a French presidential election candidate who wanted to reengage with both Bashar and Putin.
“Would you rather talk to Daesh [ISIS] or Bashar al-Assad?” said Boyer indignantly when asked by a French news channel about making contact with the man responsible for killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions.5
“Today,” she continued, “we have a common enemy [with Bashar]—terrorism… We have to be pragmatic and move forward… We are destabilized, we are in a dramatic situation… Let’s lift the Russian embargo and negotiate with those fighting Daesh—the Syrian army.”
This had been the fourth visit by French officials to Damascus since the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack;6 all were organized by the regime in collaboration with allies in France.
For months after that attack, Bashar promised the French and other Europeans more terror on their soil and described France as “the spearhead” of the campaign against him and vowed that it would pay for its “mistake” in Syria.7
“First France, second the UK—not the US this time,” Bashar told celebrated French broadcaster David Pujadas in an interview at the mansion. “Obama acknowledged that the moderate opposition is illusive—he said that it is fantasy.”
Bashar signaled that he had information about upcoming terror plots in France but that he would not share it unless the country ceased its support for the opposition and renounced its calls for him to leave power,8 a proposition rejected by Hollande.
By May 2015, France estimated about 1,700 of its nationals were fighting in both Iraq and Syria with Sunni extremist groups like the Islamic State and the Nusra Front out of a total of about 30,000 foreigners, a quarter of them from Western Europe.9 This was separate from the tens of thousands of Shiite foreign fighters on Bashar’s side.10
On November 13, 2015, at the start of the weekend, Paris was rocked by a bombing and shooting rampage at the Bataclan concert hall and a number of cafés and restaurants that left 130 dead and close to 400 wounded—the deadliest day in the country’s history since the end of World War II.11
“It’s an act of war—an act of absolute barbarity,” a somber Hollande told the French people as he announced the deployment of soldiers on the streets of Paris.12
This was like no other war France and the West would face.
Six of the ten attackers were French citizens of North African descent. Many returned to Europe from Syria tracing the same sea and land route taken by hundreds of thousands of refugees including Sally Masalmeh and her husband Malek.
The mastermind and recruiter for the Paris attacks was a Belgian of Moroccan origin turned Islamic State commander. He answered to the Islamic State’s spokesman and chief of external operations, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, who was obsessed with striking Europe, especially France.13 In an audio recording the year before, Adnani had called on Muslims to kill Europeans—“especially the spiteful and filthy French.”14
It mirrored the rage that Bashar and his henchmen felt toward France for being the “spearhead” in supporting Syrians who sought to liberate themselves from the regime.15
As it so happened, the Syrian regime was hosting multiple French delegations in Damascus at precisely the same moment as the November 2015 attacks in Paris.
A previously announced meeting of foreign ministers from several countries led by the United States and Russia to discuss Syria was also taking place in Vienna. France was expected to be among those voicing the hardest and most uncompromising position toward Bashar at that meeting.16
“We warned about what’s going to happen in Europe… and we said, ‘Don’t mess with the fault line in Syria.’ It’s going to be like an earthquake that will reverberate around the world, and unfortunately the European officials didn’t pay attention to what we said—they didn’t learn from what happened at the beginning of this year, from Charlie Hebdo,” crowed Bashar the day after the November attacks, as he stood at the entrance of the Nazim Pasha mansion speaking to French reporters.17
Europe was terrorized and practically on its knees.
All eyes were on Russia, the rising power inside Syria and Bashar’s new indispensable patron after Iran.
The Europeans had joined the US-led coalition that was bombing the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, but now they needed to show their fearful citizens that they were doing everything possible to eradicate this threat—even if it meant partnering with the devil.
Hollande rushed to Moscow two weeks after the November 2015 Paris attacks to meet Putin and make the case for a grand international coalition to fight the Islamic State and other extremists. For Hollande, another crucial part of the solution was a new transitional government in Syria that would adopt a new constitution and hold elections.
“And it goes without saying that Assad does not have any role to play in the future of his country,” Hollande told reporters as Putin stood by his side at the Kremlin.18
“I feel that President Assad’s army and he himself are our natural allies in the fight against terrorism,” retorted Putin,19 even though he knew that the army he was referring to hardly existed and that the most effective force on the ground on the regime side was made up of Iran’s Shiite militias, including Hezbollah and others.
None of these details mattered to Putin. Something far bigger was at stake.
Europe, which had tried to isolate him and had passed sanctions against Russia after his annexation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine in early 2014, was now coming to him for help in confronting the terror menace. He went from pariah to protector.
For the longest time the United States had been the dominant power broker in the Middle East, but now was Russia’s chance to change that. A new world order was emerging.
“Let’s deal with the devil: we should work with Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad in Syria,” urged London mayor Boris Johnson, who later became the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary.20
After the November 2015 Paris attacks, Putin, Bashar, and their allies were practically given license by the UN Security Council to crush all opposition to the Assad regime. A resolution was passed unanimously in December 2015 calling for a ceasefire in Syria but excluding the Islamic State, the Nusra Front, and unspecified “other terrorist groups,” which was interpreted by Bashar and his allies to mean everyone living in opposition areas, both civilians and combatants.21
Between 2016 and 2018, the world mostly watched as the Iranian-Russian-Syrian regime coalition bombed homes, hospitals, markets, and schools in opposition areas because “other terrorist groups” were there. In addition to the regime’s favorite barrel bombs and chlorine bombs, other weapons deployed by this coalition included at least thirteen types of internationally banned cluster bombs and incendiary munitions which ignited hard-to-extinguish fires and caused horrible burns.22
By February 2016, the death toll since March 2011 approached half a million, the majority of them civilians killed by the Syrian regime, not the Islamic State, the Nusra Front, or any other group.23 The number of those seeking refuge abroad touched five million. By mid-2016 almost one million people were under siege, mainly by Bashar’s and Iran’s militias, and they were deprived of food, medicine, and every other basic human necessity.24
The world looked on as babies were pulled from underneath the rubble of residential buildings in east Aleppo after being bombed by Bashar and the Russians, or were starved to death in the besieged suburbs of Damascus by the militias of Bashar and Iran.25
UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon voiced the same “grave concern” that he had been expressing since March 2011,26 while John Kerry was “outraged” by every atrocity committed by Bashar and his allies.27
In Geneva, where the regime was supposed to be holding peace talks with the opposition per the December 2015 UN Security Council resolution, Bashar’s delegation, which included a notorious mukhabarat officer, spent months wasting time on things like the agenda for the talks and its own vision for a political solution—a sprinkling of opposition figures in a new government under Bashar.28
The protection of Christians and other minorities was a crucial frame for Putin’s actions in Syria, and it resonated with many people in the region and beyond.
“Middle East Christians [are] experiencing a real genocide… Any fight against terrorism is moral—we can even call it a holy fight,” said a senior cleric in Russia’s powerful Orthodox Church on the day that Putin launched his military campaign in Syria.29
The Russian church moved in lockstep with Putin’s foray into Syria, seeing it as a historic opportunity to rebuild and strengthen its presence in the region. The Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society, an organization founded during tsarist times to tend to the needs of Russian pilgrims in the holy lands, provided massive quantities of humanitarian assistance to the Syrian regime and built a school in Damascus.30 The society also sought to restore its properties in Jerusalem and expand its activities throughout the Levant.
“‘Russian Palestine’ today is an essential instrument for consolidating Russia’s positions,” said Russian foreign minister Lavrov, a member of the society, who often labeled as “hypocritical” those calling on Bashar to leave power.31
Many in the Levant began speaking of a grand coalition of minorities including Alawites, Christians, and Shiites among others taking shape under the patronage of Iran and Russia.
As media outlets broadcast the trail of destruction left by marauding fanatics sweeping through Christian towns and villages in Syria, and as countries like Lebanon with a significant Christian population were rocked by attacks and bombings attributed to Sunni extremists, Bashar, Putin, and Hezbollah chief Nasrallah looked like the heroes waging this new “holy fight.” There was some dissent, but it was eventually drowned out.
“The Syrian regime and Daesh [ISIS] are identical in their criminality and thirst for blood—they are from the same school… Don’t make us choose between Daesh and Bashar,” pleaded a Christian Lebanese lawmaker.32
But already the influential and powerful patriarchs of nearly all Christian denominations in the Middle East, who had the Vatican’s ear, were tacitly or explicitly for Bashar.
“I know President Assad and the Syrian government, and they protect Christians in Syria,” said Ignatius Joseph III Younan, Patriarch of Antioch for the Syriac Catholic Church, sitting in business class on a flight from Beirut to Rome for a meeting with Pope Francis about Syria.33
Bashar and his media portrayed the pope as being on their side in “the fight against terrorism” after his strong opposition to any military action that would have punished the regime for killing hundreds of civilians with chemical weapons in August 2013.34
Bashar also pointed to the fact that the pope never withdrew his envoy to Damascus, who lived and worked within walking distance from the Assad residence. Bashar’s media office relished the chance to tweet photos of his meeting at the Nazim Pasha mansion with the papal nuncio, Cardinal Mario Zenari, who smiled as Bashar examined a letter from the pope.35
The truth was that Syrian Christian youth actively took part in the early peaceful protests against the regime, but they too were killed or jailed, or they fled the country during the ensuing crackdown.36
At the same time, though, many Syrian church leaders, like Gregorius III Laham, patriarch of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, staunchly defended Bashar throughout, even calling him once “a progressive from a British-Syrian milieu.”37 Others, like Greek Orthodox bishop Luca al-Khoury, collaborated with the mukhabarat and actively recruited Christian youth for pro-Bashar militias.38
A month after the November 2015 Paris attacks, around Christmas, Bashar and Asma, wearing a festive red scarf, showed up unexpectedly at the Our Lady of Damascus church. They laughed, chatted, and took selfies with adoring congregants. Video clips of their appearance were shared widely on social media.39 The message was that Christianity would cease to exist in Syria if the Assads were to be swept aside.
The chants of “Muslims and Christians, we want freedom!” by Damascene youth from both faiths during an impromptu nighttime demonstration outside that same church in March 2012 were now a distant memory.40
Bit by bit, Bashar recast himself at home and abroad from butcher of his people to protector of Christians and minorities and savior from the horrors of Muslim extremists.
“The relations that bind our two countries are not only political but also sentimental,” Bashar’s friend Hala Chawi, a Christian Damascene businesswoman, told French parliamentarians during a meeting inside the Palais Bourbon, France’s capitol building.41 Her son George Chawi had been sanctioned by the European Union at the start of the uprising for his role in the Syrian Electronic Army, but she was not and could travel freely.42
In his renewed outreach to France, Bashar could count on decades of cooperation with the country’s intelligence services, which included many people opposed to Hollande’s line in Syria. There were also long-standing ties with politicians ranging from neo-Nazis and extreme-right figures to members of Hollande’s own socialist party as well as wealthy, influential, and mostly Christian French citizens of Lebanese and Syrian origins.43
As France reeled from one deadly attack after another linked to the Islamic State, the goal of the delegations’ visits to Syria was not only to burnish Bashar’s image and break his isolation but also to use French lawmakers and other figures to pressure their government to reverse its line on Bashar and ease or lift sanctions on him and his cronies in return for information on terrorists and their plots.
Two conservative French lawmakers with ties to Putin lobbied the hardest for this in the halls of power,44 while SOS Chrétiens d’Orient and Coordination Chrétiens d’Orient en Danger, two organizations founded in 2013 to raise the alarm about what they called the “extermination” of Christians in the Middle East, raised funds from the public for humanitarian aid and missions to persecuted communities in the Levant and organized trips to Syria for French citizens.45
SOS Chrétiens, which has links to pro-Bashar Lebanese Christian leaders as well as French intelligence and far-right figures, worked directly with Bashar’s aides and the mukhabarat to organize these trips.46
The itinerary usually included a meeting with Bashar’s mufti, Hassoun, to present the “moderate face of Islam” espoused by the regime—as opposed to the “fanatics” of the Islamic State and the French government–backed Syrian opposition—and then a chat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the secular nature of the regime and its leader Bashar. There was also a visit to Maaloula, the ancient Christian town briefly captured by Al-Qaeda’s affiliate, the Nusra Front, in the fall of 2013.47
Of course, in the narrative presented to French visitors there was no room for facts like these: the regime did little to prevent the fall of Maaloula because its residents had refused to join pro-regime militias; most of the damage to Maaloula’s churches and monasteries was caused by indiscriminate shelling by regime forces; and Bashar himself released hundreds of militants from prison at the start of protests in 2011 and later intentionally ceded entire cities, regions, and bases close to the Iraqi border to ISIS.
With every fresh deadly attack in France and Europe in the spring and summer of 201648—suicide bombers at the Brussels airport and metro, and a militant in a truck mowing down Bastille Day revelers on the seaside promenade in Nice in southern France—the more voices came out calling for collaboration with Bashar and Russia and speaking of the West’s mistake in backing Bashar’s opponents.
The narrative of Bashar the ally against Islamist terrorists and protector of Christians spread to all those Western countries that initially embraced the opposition but were now confronting terror, an influx of refugees, and rising xenophobia and populism.
“It is unconscionable that the international community refuse to talk to the secular leader of a nation,” wrote Andrew Ashdown, an Anglican priest who led a British delegation to Syria that met with Bashar in the fall of 2016.49
Among those feted in Damascus by Bashar’s regime that year were members of the European Solidarity Front for Syria, a group of neo-Nazi and neo-fascist youth organizations and figures from Belgium, Greece, Italy, Poland, and Serbia, among others, that held pro-Bashar rallies throughout Europe. The group’s logo featured a map of Europe in black set against a Syrian flag.50
Paradoxically, Bashar could also count on plenty of support from the left and far left, including prominent figures in Britain associated with organizations like the Stop War Coalition, which was formed in 2001 in response to the US-led war on terror and the invasion of Iraq.
One of the coalition’s cofounders, George Galloway, a former Labor Party parliamentarian, had his own show on Russia Today, which often hosted people parroting the Syrian regime’s lies and conspiracy theories.51
In the United States, too, the tide began to shift in favor of Bashar and his allies as early as 2014, when Washington began liaising with the regime, albeit at arm’s length, so that it would not get in the way of its military operations against the Islamic State in Syria. The regime bragged about these contacts and portrayed them as a sort of reengagement with the Americans. While it accommodated the United States in its anti-ISIS campaign, the regime stepped up its bombardment of civilians in opposition-held areas. This gave the impression that there was a sort of division of labor and that Bashar had the green light from Washington to strike the enemies whom he cared most about while Americans focused on the Islamic State.
Far-right websites like Breitbart, whose executive chairman Steve Bannon would later become Donald Trump’s chief strategist, and InfoWars (founded by US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones) lauded Bashar, the supposed defender of Christians and warrior against terror.52
It was not just the fanatical fringe helping Bashar’s cause.
A former journalist named Nir Rosen, working with the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, a Geneva-based conflict resolution group, began actively promoting the idea that the United States had to abandon calls for Bashar to leave power. He said the focus should be instead on local ceasefire agreements between rebels and the regime whereby opposition-held enclaves would be allowed to run their own affairs as both sides united to fight the Islamic State and other extremists.
“It’s a race against time,” argued Rosen, “because soon there will be no partners to negotiate with on the opposition side”—that is, because all were supposedly going to join either the Islamic State or the Nusra Front.53
In the summer of 2014, Rosen boasted about his access to the regime’s most notorious mukhabarat chiefs and his regular meetings with them in Damascus. He spoke of his ongoing efforts to lobby Obama administration officials to embrace his proposal and give up on the idea of Bashar’s departure.
Rosen divided these officials into friends and foes depending on their stance on the Bashar issue.54 Enemies included Secretary of State John Kerry, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power. Friends included Robert Malley, a senior adviser to Obama on the Middle East and the anti–Islamic State campaign, and a former National Security Council director named Steven Simon, who remained influential.55
In the spring of 2015, Simon traveled to Damascus to meet with Bashar to press him to embrace the idea of the localized ceasefires and urge him to stop dropping barrel bombs on opposition-held areas and focus instead on fighting the Islamic State.56
The meeting was arranged by Khaled al-Ahmad, a businessman friend of Bashar. Al-Ahmad had previously met with Simon and Robert Ford, the US Syria envoy. Al-Ahmad was also among the Bashar cronies whom Rosen was regularly meeting and corresponding with as early as 2011 in order to share information about the opposition and assure them that the United States and its European allies were incapable of referring Bashar’s atrocities against protesters to the International Criminal Court.
“I think this is all bullshit. These guys can do nothing and the international community (meaning America and Europe) can do nothing. See you all soon,” Rosen wrote in an email in October 2011 to al-Ahmad, George Chawi from the Syrian Electronic Army, and Lebanese Bashar loyalist Michel Samaha, later accused of involvement in a Syrian mukhabarat plot to carry out bombings in Lebanon.57
Ford left the foreign service in 2014 amid frustration, and at times open dissent at the US State Department, with Obama’s policies in Syria.58
The Islamic State’s attacks in Europe, starting in early 2015, and Russia’s entry into the war that year on the regime’s side completely reversed Bashar’s fortunes.
As for the localized ceasefires Rosen was promoting, opposition-held areas were bombed and starved into submission in the name of fighting terrorism, and any ceasefire agreements with those that remained were largely on the terms of Bashar and his backers, Iran and Russia.
In August 2016, the United Nations expressed “extreme concern” over demographic changes being engineered in towns surrendering to the regime, such as Daraya, near Damascus.59
“You are sad and upset, but we are actually happy that Daraya reverted to the homeland’s bosom and we are also pleased that you’re upset,” answered Bashar from inside a destroyed and deserted Daraya as he chuckled and mocked the town’s peaceful protesters and activists whom he had killed or jailed in 2011 as “revolutionaries for hire.”60
That same summer of 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump heaped praise on Putin and said “it would be great to get along with him,” even as Russia, Iran, and the Syrian regime intensified their bloody campaign to retake the rebel-held eastern section of Aleppo.61
Russia led the aerial bombardment, while Iran’s officers and volunteers as well as the Hezbollah militia from Lebanon and Shiite fighters from Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere led the combat on the ground.
The area, roughly the size of Manhattan,62 remained by late 2016 home to more than 200,000 civilians and about 8,000 fighters, of whom about 900 were affiliated with the Nusra Front.63 For the regime and its allies, everyone was a terrorist and deserved to die.
The world stood by as Bashar and his allies closed in on those left in east Aleppo, striking homes, hospitals, and clinics with air-to-surface missiles, bunker-busting bombs, cluster munitions, barrel bombs, chlorine bombs, and incendiary weapons. More than 3,500 civilians were killed between June and December 2016, and medical facilities were attacked more than seventy times.64
Aleppo burned, but back in Damascus Asma al-Assad was busy solidifying her position as first lady.
Earlier that year Bashar’s mother Aniseh passed away at the age of eighty-six. She had eagerly backed her sons Bashar and Maher and her nephews the Makhloufs in all their bloody actions to preserve the Assad clan’s grip on Syria. For her it was also about the legacy of her husband, Hafez, father and builder of modern Syria, as she and loyalists regarded him.
After the assassination of her son-in-law, Assef Shawkat, on the orders of her sons, as Manaf Tlass and Western officials believed, Aniseh spent most of her time in Dubai with her daughter, Bushra.
“She married a leader and birthed a leader,” a TV station tied to her son Maher eulogized, showing archival footage of Aniseh and Hafez on foreign visits.65
“She shunned camera lights and showy public appearances.”
As women and children in east Aleppo buckled under the regime’s brutal assault, Asma invited a reporter from a Russian state-owned TV station to spend a week with her. The result was a documentary titled “Asma al-Assad: Between War and Peace,” which included an interview billed as her first in years.66
In simple attire, with her hair tied back in a ponytail and driving her own SUV, she is shown traveling outside Damascus and even braving a stretch of road that skirted past territory allegedly controlled by “terrorists.”67
She cries at the bedside of a soldier disabled by war. She then visits a rehab center for soldiers who had lost limbs. “We are receiving a new batch” of prosthetics, Asma assures a young soldier who had lost both legs.68
At her private office in Damascus she receives the families of dead soldiers, or the martyrs, as they were called.
“We are ready to sacrifice everything for you and Bashar al-Assad, I swear to God,” a mother who says she has lost two young sons fighting for Bashar tells Asma. “This is a gift for Bashar al-Assad,” the mother continues as she hands Asma a framed photograph of her two dead sons. They are in their late teens or early twenties at most. Both wear military fatigues and pose with their assault rifles.69
Asma is shown as the comforter of a nation traumatized by war waged by outside powers and somehow unconnected to the Assads’ actions and their determination to survive at any cost. Asma’s aides are shown following up on a flood of requests from families displaced by war or coping with the loss or disability of soldier relatives. These requests are written on scraps of paper and handed to Asma during visits to these families.
“I don’t like formalities. If it’s a sad story, you cry; if it’s a happy story, you laugh,” says Asma about her meetings with soldiers and their families as she sits down with the Russian reporter for an interview at the Nazim Pasha mansion that she has redecorated.
“I love this place because it’s right in the heart of the city,” she tells the reporter as they stroll in the garden.70
There are some of the usual talking points from her first interviews with Western media after she married Bashar, but in general she wants to project an image of resilience and toughness, of a leader’s wife doing her part in wartime.
“Being first lady was never part of my career plan… You may remember also that at some stage I was the desert rose, the elegant first lady bringing reform… What’s important is that I remain humble and true to who I really am,” Asma tells the Russian reporter, casting the West as whimsical and treacherous.71
As for her husband, Asma says he has remained an attentive and caring father despite all the burdens of war. “He’s very calm, very thoughtful, always polite… easy to talk to… He takes his role as father very seriously, he’s a very giving man,” says Asma.72
Meanwhile some of the war’s most searing images were coming out of Aleppo, which Asma’s very giving husband wanted to retake at any cost.
Civil defense rescuers known as the White Helmets pulled a baby out from the rubble of his home; he was the only survivor in his family.73
There was a man completely submerged under the wreckage except for his bloodied and dust-covered head.
A group of men cradled newborns in their arms and transported them to safety; the infants had been rescued from a hospital coming under aerial bombardment.74
A teenage boy sobbed inconsolably over his dead little brother in a body bag at the morgue.75
Then there was a boy named Omran Daqneesh, rescued from the rubble of his home, sitting stunned on an orange ambulance seat, wiping blood from his cheek and staring at the camera.76
“A lot of this is because of Hillary Clinton, because what’s happened is, by fighting Assad, who turned out to be a lot tougher than she thought, and now she’s going to say, oh, he loves Assad, she’s—he’s just much tougher and much smarter than her and Obama,” said Trump when asked, during the last debate before Election Day, about Aleppo and what he would do about it if elected.77
For months Trump and his surrogates had asserted that, if elected, Clinton would invade Syria and side with the allegedly Islamic State–linked “terrorist opposition” against Bashar and his allies, supposedly the only ones fighting terrorism.78
Electing Clinton would open “the floodgates” of “diseased,” “fanatical,” and “rapist” Muslim refugees to the United States, claimed one Trump cheerleader, a Lebanese-born Christian.79
All these lies and hysterical statements were also spread by the Russian-sponsored fake news that inundated social media, especially Facebook, around the same time.80
Later that fall, after Trump’s stunning election win, German chancellor Angela Merkel spoke at her own party’s conference, calling the indiscriminate bombardment of civilians in Aleppo a “disgrace” and expressing shock that there were not more protests in Germany and across Europe against the crimes being committed. “Something is not right,” she said.81
As far as most Europeans were concerned, though, the war was now on their streets and not just in far-off Aleppo. In Brussels, army trucks packed with soldiers crossed quaint cobblestone squares like the Place du Grand Sablon. “The European continent is on fire,” exclaimed graffiti in central Amsterdam.82
In Paris, the sight of armed soldiers patrolling the streets was now a fact of daily life. The slightest suspicion could cause an entire city block to be cordoned off for hours by assault-rifle-carrying police officers. This was also a city in mourning.
Makeshift remembrance shrines sprang up outside the bars, restaurants, and other venues attacked on November 13, 2015. People left flower bouquets and teddy bears and lit candles. In a small park across from the Bataclan concert hall, where the most people were killed, a man arranged flowers around a marble plaque with names of the victims, who included several of North African origin just like the attackers. Nearby, a lone girl sat on a bench in the drizzle and stared ahead.83
A mile or so to the west, passersby seemed hardly moved by the sight of a few dozen Bashar opponents and a handful of French sympathizers on the footsteps of the opera house known as the Palais Garnier protesting the savage campaign in Aleppo. Busts of Beethoven, Mozart, Rossini, and other composers tucked in niches high up in the columned facade looked down on the protesters as they played mournful Syrian revolutionary songs from 2011 and held up banners denouncing Bashar and Putin.84
“Syria’s democratic future is without Bashar, without Daesh!” read one. “Putin = War Criminal,” said another.
By then, though, the peaceful beginnings of the Syrian uprising and the regime’s subsequent brutality and atrocities were a fading memory as the focus in most people’s minds was on the present threats from the Islamic State and refugees fleeing to Europe.
These were key issues in France’s heated presidential election primaries in the fall of 2016. The candidate of the extreme right, Marine Le Pen, argued for collaboration with Bashar and the Russians, and so did the conservative front-runner, François Fillon, a former prime minister.85
Away from the Bataclan and the Palais Garnier, on the opposite bank of the Seine, Manaf Tlass walked through the Jardin du Luxembourg. He had just turned fifty-four, his hair was grayer, and he had a few more wrinkles on his face.
It was a sunny but cold morning. Joggers and police officers armed with submachine guns passed by, and a group of elderly men and women did tai chi moves across from a bronze monument honoring the painter Eugène Delacroix—the artist’s bust was surrounded by the angels of time and glory and Apollo in dramatic poses.
The dome of the Pantheon rose up in the distance on the hill of the Quartier Latin beyond the park’s iron fence.
“World powers are taking turns raping Syria—damn them all!” said Manaf bitterly. “The West gave us the impression they cared about the blood that was being spilled, they said the regime’s days were numbered when I left Syria… Look at them now, rushing to take photographs with Bashar,” he added, referring to the Western delegations that flocked to Damascus.86
At least 200 defected officers had gone back to Syria with the help of the Russians, he said. “They lost hope. They went back to live in subjection again just to survive. I can’t judge them—maybe some were blackmailed after their relatives were arrested by the regime. Maybe they were demeaned outside Syria,” he said.
“I can’t return. He [Bashar] sentenced me to death. He wants me to beg for forgiveness.”
In early 2015, the regime’s special counterterrorism court issued a death sentence against Manaf, but it was not final and he could appeal it if he chose to.87 All he had to do was ask Bashar to pardon him.88
“I have been stabbed in the back!” said Manaf angrily as the conversation turned to the Americans.89
His outburst was typical of his severe mood swings around that period. One day he was on top of the world, speaking of his imminent return to Damascus and being courted by world powers as Syria’s last hope. The next day, everything looked bleak and dark, and these same powers were fooling him and the innocent Syrian people. One day Bashar was finished, a hollow figurehead president flailing in the wind, and the next Bashar was still capable of getting him in Paris and harming him and his family if he divulged Assad family secrets or was too critical of the regime.
Of course, it did not help that Manaf was sidelined and jobless, living off his savings and waiting for something that, by then, neither he nor the majority of Syrians had any say over.
This time, though, his rage was all-consuming. It was frightening.
Manaf explained that he had been secretly working with the CIA for more than a year on furthering the idea of a Syrian military council composed of both army officers still with the regime and moderate rebel forces.
Manaf would return to Damascus under the protection of America and Russia, and Bashar would stay on in his position but largely with ceremonial powers, and the military council would stabilize the country and prepare for elections.
A newly reconstituted army under the military council would confront extremists, including the Nusra Front, which had embedded itself among opposition forces, as well as Hezbollah and the Iran-backed militias dominating the regime side. Manaf would be at the helm of this council.90 (Hafez al-Assad also established a transitional military council immediately after his 1970 coup.)
It was the perfect plan, in fact it was the only remaining hope for Syria and Syrians, Manaf and a coterie of his allies and advisers often repeated.
“The Americans even told me that I would meet with Putin, the Americans were liaising with the Russians, this would have been the natural and logical next step,” said Manaf.91
This sounded like a Syrian variation on what had happened in Libya around 2014 after that country was plunged into warfare between the militias that fought Gaddafi and was then plagued by extremists, including the Islamic State. There Khalifa Haftar, a former general and Gaddafi companion who had lived in exile in suburban Washington, DC, and collaborated with the CIA for years,92 was backed by Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and later Russia in his battle against what he and his outside supporters considered an Islamist-dominated government in the country’s west, in the capital, Tripoli.93
In Syria, too, Russia and the United States looked as if they were in harmony even as Moscow bombed American-backed rebels inside the country.
The two major powers convened meetings in Vienna bringing together all countries involved, including Iran and Turkey, and eventually shepherding a resolution through the Security Council outlining a road map for a political settlement, and they helped restart peace talks in Geneva in early 2016.94
The Americans also—to the delight of the Russians—softened their position on Bashar: he did not have to leave right away.95 He could remain through the transition. Manaf believed that Russia and the United States were together capable of imposing this solution and neutralizing all potential spoilers inside the regime and around the region.
Manaf said the CIA supported and funded efforts by him and his team in reaching out to various rebel factions to get them to embrace the idea of a ruling military council in Syria that would bring together those deemed honest and patriotic on both sides, regime and opposition.
Manaf’s team included two defected Syrian army lieutenant colonels loyal to him and a former movie set assistant in Syria turned opposition activist in exile,96 who penned flattering articles and Facebook posts about Manaf and his vision for “the salvation and liberation of our nation and people.”97
Starting in early 2015, Manaf’s team traveled to southern Turkey and opposition-controlled sections of northern Syria across the border where they met with rebel commanders to secure buy-in for Manaf and his project, which they touted as having the blessing of the United States and other major powers.
More than three dozen rebel commanders, including one who headed a large faction backed by Turkey, signed handwritten preliminary agreements to support Manaf and his project and pledged to work with him to “topple Bashar al-Assad and the ruling gang,” keep Syria unified, and protect Syria’s minorities among other goals.
All rebel commanders vowed to surrender their weapons upon the establishment of the military council and new army. Some said that they expected to be paid salaries in return for endorsing Manaf and his project.98
There was hardly any mention of justice and accountability for war crimes committed by all sides, especially the regime.
These agreements, along with notes and observations by Manaf’s team, were recorded in a black soft-cover Moleskin reporter notebook that was kept by Manaf.
Similar written pledges of support for Manaf were secured in 2016 by his relative Zeid Tlass,99 a defected Syrian air force colonel.
At the same time, Manaf continued to reach out to Alawite officers inside Syria.
“If there’s a solution for Syria, we are with you—but you have to hurry,” those officers still on Bashar’s side told Manaf.100
Then, just before the US presidential elections, the Americans pulled the plug on Manaf’s whole plan, paving the way for Iran and Russia to retake east Aleppo for Bashar and to bolster Bashar’s position as the figurehead leader, according to Manaf.101
“I began to sense that they [CIA] were abandoning the project, funding stopped and obstacles started to emerge,” said Manaf. “Something much bigger than me was happening and I did not fully grasp it.”
In a deal brokered mainly between Russia and Turkey (representing armed groups), east Aleppo surrendered just before Christmas 2016. Even then Bashar continued his practice of humiliating those whom he dominated; there were also summary executions by his militias.102
Thousands of families with battered suitcases and plastic bags—some carrying their pets and birdcages—marched silently in the rain as regime forces in pickup trucks sped past them flashing victory signs.103
Enforced disappearance, army conscription, or death was the fate of the young opposition activists and medics who ended up in regime custody. Among the captured was Alaa al-Shawaf, a twenty-something telecom engineer who had volunteered as a paramedic in east Aleppo. He was subsequently tortured to death by the mukhabarat.104
Bashar was not just going to be content to see the West, which he believed conspired against him, look away begrudgingly and queasily (voicing the occasional indignation) as he committed his atrocities because they deemed him the lesser of two evils and were more worried about ISIS than what he, Bashar, did to his people.
On the contrary, he wanted to revel in what he regarded as his victory over the West. Bashar demanded and expected full and total vindication. It was the Assad family way throughout a bloody reign approaching half a century.
“We say before and after the birth of Jesus Christ… before and after the fall of the Soviet Union… we will now say before and after the liberation of Aleppo in relation not only to the situation in Syria and the region but the whole world,” said a buoyant and content-looking Bashar in a video message recorded at the entrance of the Nazim Pasha mansion.105