In February 2017, Amnesty International revealed that the Assad regime had executed up to 13,000 people at its Saydnaya prison between September 2011 and December 2015.1 Most of the dead were opposition activists and protesters captured and tortured by the mukhabarat and then referred to a military tribunal at Saydnaya. Mass hangings took place in the prison’s basement, usually on Mondays and Wednesdays, in what was described as an extermination policy—another page that Bashar tore out of his father’s sinister playbook.
The same military tribunals had hanged thousands of Hafez’s suspected opponents at Tadmor prison in the 1980s and ’90s.2 The sentences were often signed on Hafez’s behalf by his defense minister, Mustafa Tlass.
Among those executed at Saydnaya was Mazen Darwish’s friend and fellow opposition activist Bassel Khartabil, a computer wizard who was instrumental in helping overcome restrictions introduced by the regime so that news of the early protests and Bashar’s deadly crackdown could reach the world via the Internet.3
Khartabil was arrested exactly one month after the raid on Mazen’s office in February 2012.4 The two friends overlapped at Adra prison, where Mazen witnessed Khartabil’s marriage while in detention to his fiancée, the love of his life, Noura.5 Shortly after Mazen’s release from prison in the summer of 2015 Khartabil was transferred from Adra to Saydnaya, where he was hanged.
“You can forge anything these days,” said Bashar when asked about the Amnesty report by American journalist Michael Isikoff, during an interview in one of the smartly decorated reception rooms of the Nazim Pasha mansion.6
“We are living in a fake news era,” added Bashar. He dismissed as “photo-shop” a photograph handed to him by the reporter of the emaciated and brutalized corpses of mukhabarat prisoners that piled up in a hangar at the 601 military hospital in Damascus.7
The election of Donald Trump was “promising,” Bashar told Isikoff, because the new US president’s priority was “to fight terrorism,”8 not support those Syrians still struggling to rid themselves of nearly five decades of Assad family rule—a regime that terrorized its people, sponsored terrorism abroad, and outlasted eight US presidents, starting with Nixon.
Here, instead, was a US president who promoted propaganda and lies and dismissed truths and facts, whose actions and words demeaned and threatened opponents, someone who had no problem polarizing and dividing his people in order to secure his position and rule—just like the Assads.
Here was a US president for whom family and absolute loyalty were the first and foremost considerations and for whom wealth, raw power, self-aggrandizement, and vanity mattered more than anything else.
The oath that President Trump took to defend democratic values seemed to mean very little, especially when viewed in the context of such statements as these: for weeks before his election victory Trump warned that his supporters might take up arms if he did not win,9 and two years into office he said that financial markets would plunge into chaos if he were ever to be impeached.10
Many asked if Trump was normalizing and empowering autocracy around the world, some even compared his leadership style to that of a Middle Eastern dictator.11
As the consequences of Trump’s election consumed America and the world, Bashar and his regime—with the support of his patrons Iran and Russia (not to mention the de facto blessing of the US and many European governments)—began to rewrite history. Like the reality-show host turned US president, Bashar constructed his own reality using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. These were the exact same tools that empowered many of Syria’s youth to express themselves creatively and openly when they took to the streets in 2011 and chanted for hurriyeh, or freedom, but were then shot dead month after month.
Some Syrian youth were tortured to death for simply posting words of protest on Facebook or viewing anti-Bashar pages. Now these same outlets were awash with photos, words, and videos of Bashar, Asma, and their children.
The eldest, Hafez, turned sixteen and was as tall as his father. The daughter, Zein, and the other son, Karim, were in their early teens. On Christmas 2016, they were shown with their parents visiting orphans at a Christian monastery near Damascus.12 In February 2017, they posed with their parents and cousin Bassel, the son of Bashar’s sister Bushra and the late Assef Shawkat, during a visit to the Assad hometown of Qurdaha in western Syria.
The publication of these photos was an attempt to dispel talk of a family rift and Bashar’s role in Assef’s death, even all these years later. They all looked happy, relaxed, and rosy-cheeked in their winter clothes with the mountains behind them.13
In summer 2017, Bashar, Asma, and their children were shown seated on the floor of a wounded soldier’s home in the Hama countryside; a caring, loving, and patriotic family—like any presidential family in Europe—that did not abandon its people and country through six years of war.14
“In Syria, history is being written by the righteous, in blood,” a defiant and somewhat jubilant Asma lectures a group of mothers from Aleppo in a video posted earlier on a Facebook page dedicated to her and her every utterance and appearance.15
Later that year, sixteen-year-old Hafez traveled to Brazil for an international math competition, where he told a local newspaper that most people were “blind” about the true nature of his father. “I know what kind of man my father is,” Bashar’s eldest son said. “As president people say a lot of things [about Bashar]… this isn’t reality.”16
In Damascus, his mother feted the sixteenth anniversary of her Syria Trust for Development and, like Bashar, spoke of the “treason,” “ignorance,” and “extremism” of those who rose up in the spring of 2011.17
Seven years later, the whole world seemed to have been turned upside down. The world looked for leadership from the strongmen of China and Russia, two nations that through their actions in Syria wanted to enshrine a new standard: Interfering to stop a regime from massacring its own people was meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign state.
Meanwhile, fear gripped Europe and the United States turned inward, managing its own scandals and controversies while turning its back on the world’s problems—or making them worse.
As for those leaders who once wanted to unseat Bashar, Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched a sweeping crackdown on his opponents, on journalists, and on free speech itself, and in the summer of 2016 he pivoted toward Russia and Putin after he accused the West of conspiring with generals in his army and an exiled cleric to overthrow him.18
Saudi Arabia, which did everything to control and co-opt Syria’s main opposition bodies, gradually walked away from them and eventually said that it had no problem whatsoever with Bashar staying in power, as long as Bashar’s protector was Putin and not Iran’s Khamenei.19
The kingdom had other priorities: the thirty-something crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman (known as MBS), needed to woo the West and remove all obstacles to inheriting the throne from his father, just like the youthful and supposedly reform-minded heir Bashar twenty years before him.
Like the Assads over the decades, the Saudi royals hunted down their critics at home and abroad and in even more barbaric fashion sometimes, as happened with Saudi journalist and author Jamal Khashoggi later in 2018.20
As for Saudi Arabia’s proxy wars with Iran, the focus shifted from Syria to Yemen, where children died from bombs, starvation, and disease in a country that also once joyously embraced the Arab Spring and chanted for freedom.21
Qatar, the wealthy emirate that championed the Arab Spring to further its agendas, pivoted toward both Iran and Turkey to stave off a trade and diplomatic boycott led by Saudi Arabia and also Egypt,22 now ruled by a ruthless army general who banned free speech and tortured detainees in the name of fighting terrorism but was admired by Trump and feted by the leaders of Britain, France, and Germany.23
Britain, which had vigorously supported Bashar’s opponents, reeled from one terror attack after another in 2017 in the heart of London and in the northern city of Manchester, while it wrestled with the looming consequences of its impending exit from the European Union.24
In France, where the Assads outlasted six presidents since Georges Pompidou, Emmanuel Macron, the boyish and charismatic president who took over in 2017, said that his country was no longer demanding Bashar’s departure from power “out of pragmatism,” even though it still considered him a war criminal who had to answer for his crimes.25 Macron said that France’s priority was to eradicate extremism and that it was up to Syrians to decide who was going to lead them.
In Germany, where Angela Merkel had called the decision to take in one million refugees in 2015 one of her nation’s “crowning achievements,”26 a far-right nationalist party called the Alternative for Germany (in German, Alternative für Deutschland or AfD) scored significant wins in parliamentary elections held in the fall of 2017 on a platform of expelling Syrian and other refugees, who were blamed for crime and terror acts like the truck attack on a Christmas market in Berlin the year before.27
AfD lawmakers later traveled to Damascus to meet with Bashar’s mufti, Hassoun, and other regime officials and to prove to their anti-immigrant constituency and Germans at large that the country was sufficiently safe to repatriate Syrians.28
The AfD delegation’s regime-planned itinerary mirrored that of Democratic US congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and former congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, but the Americans had the bonus of meeting with Bashar, the purportedly secular leader and protector of Christians whom Gabbard said should be America’s ally in the fight against “radical Islam.”29
In the summer of 2017, as Trump banned Syrians and others from majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States and pressed ahead with his plans to build a wall along the Mexico border, white supremacists gathered at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Some shouted, “Assad is the man, brother!” and vowed to “barrel bomb” their opponents in the United States just like Bashar did in Syria. One of them wore a black T-shirt with the caption “Bashar’s Barrel Delivery.”30 Later a counterprotester was plowed down and killed by a driver who idolized Adolf Hitler.
Manaf Tlass greeted Trump’s election with cautious optimism. He thought that perhaps the new American president—who admired Putin’s strength, lavished him with praise, and dismissed allegations of having colluded with him to undermine his opponent, Hillary Clinton—was best suited to work with the Russians in Syria to revive the military council solution.
And naturally Manaf thought that there was still no better candidate than himself to lead this council, which would rule Syria on an interim basis and slowly ease Bashar out.
Only weeks before this sudden burst of optimism, Manaf had been consumed by anger, regret, and depression. He wondered whether he and his family had made the right decision to flee Syria and break with the Assads. He spoke of feeling trapped in a life largely dictated by who his father was and his family’s history with the Assads.
“For forty years I have been trying to get out of this shit but I have not been able to!” he shouted as he walked one night down the busy Rue de Rennes next to his home.
Maybe he could have become a movie director, as he always dreamed, instead of an army general. He often sought respite from dwelling on his situation by going to the movies alone. Paris was a cinephile’s paradise.31
Still, Manaf and his family were rather fortunate, considering the tragedies that befell many Syrians, who often lost everything.
The Tlasses got out alive, were living under the protection of the French state, and were able to preserve some of the wealth they had amassed under the Assads. And notwithstanding his bouts of despair, Manaf was still hoping to return to Syria, to the presidential palace no less.
Under Trump, Manaf’s chances could not be better. Tough army generals and regime insiders across the Middle East were all being embraced by the West, enthusiastically or begrudgingly, as the best antidote to the region’s dalliance with democracy and freedom at the start of the Arab Spring, which, as far as many were concerned, was what had spawned terror, wars, and a massive refugee crisis.
“The military council is our last hope to prevent the breakup of Syria and to separate all the belligerents from one another—otherwise we’re headed toward a system of mandates by different world powers across Syria,” said Manaf in the winter of 2017 as he strolled on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, past designer boutiques and famous outdoor cafés.32
“The Russians, Turks, and Iranians are formulating solutions to present to Trump,” added Manaf.
By then, Putin was working with the Iranian and Turkish leaders to launch his peace plan in Syria that would, of course, guarantee everyone’s respective interests. The Turks now cared less if Bashar remained in power as long as self-rule was denied to Syrian Kurds across the border.
The Iranians, meanwhile, wanted to reap dividends from seven years of shedding blood and treasure to save Bashar, which translated into wedding themselves to the regime’s political, military, and economic power structure, something only Bashar and the Assads could guarantee.
As for Putin, he wanted the world, especially the West, to recognize him as the man who had saved humanity from the scourge of “Islamic terror.”
The West had to get on its knees and admit that it had made a huge mistake in trying to weaken Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, and of course keeping Russian military bases in Syria for many more years to come was one concrete way of projecting the might of the new Russia.
Incredibly, Trump assisted Putin in attaining these goals while regularly praising the Russian president’s moves in Syria.33
Manaf and his Syrian allies had wasted no time in reaching out to Trump, through the Russian door. A month before Trump’s election win, one of Manaf’s friends and supporters, and a protégé of the Russians, Randa Kassis, met for lunch with Trump’s son Don Jr. at the Ritz Carlton in Paris.34 The crux of her message was that Moscow and Washington had to work together in Syria to save it from Islamist radicals and that Bashar’s departure from power was not essential, at least not right away.
“But Bashar, Maher, and Rami won’t give up so easily—they amassed a huge war chest and will fight until the end,” said Manaf as he settled at a table at an outdoor café across from the Saint-Germain food market.35
“Iran, too—they have been investing in Bashar for more than fifteen years.”
“Bashar al-Assad assassinated!” shouted a man cycling past the café.
“That’s Ali, the guy I buy my newspapers from. He tells me this every time he sees me,” explained Manaf with a pained smile.36
Bashar did not die. Instead, he emerged stronger and more defiant and vengeful as Russia led a campaign that eliminated opposition enclaves in Syria one by one and bolstered the regime’s position at home and abroad. The war crimes that accompanied this effort and the additional thousands of civilians killed or displaced hardly seemed to matter.
On April 4, 2017, almost three years after the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) announced that it had shipped and destroyed Syria’s chemical weapons and won the Nobel Prize for it, and as the world did little to stop the regime’s use of chlorine-filled munitions after that initial announcement, Bashar’s warplanes attacked the opposition-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province with the nerve agent sarin, killing at least ninety people, including thirty children.37
Enraged and pained by the murder of children and also eager to show that he was tougher than Obama, Trump ordered cruise missile strikes against the airfield in Homs province from which the Syrian planes had taken off, but the Russians alerted the regime to evacuate the airbase beforehand.38
A week later, Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning the Khan Sheikhoun incident,39 even as the regime’s warplanes were again taking off from the same Homs airfield.40 The world moved on, once more.
“I want us to understand—we are not living in an isolated epoch but one which is connected to preceding periods decades ago,” a defiant Bashar said in a speech in Damascus in the summer of that year, alluding to a sort of continuum between his atrocities and those committed by Hafez.41
“It’s true, we lost our best young people as well as infrastructure that cost us a lot of money and hard work, but in return we won a healthier and more homogenous society,” he added. In other words, Bashar believed that the systematic elimination of all those who challenged his rule, or what he and his regime called the “cleansing campaign,” was bearing fruit.
Then, after six years of trying to help the Syrian rebel cause, first through regional allies and then directly albeit covertly, hesitantly, and with deeply conflicting motives and goals, Washington pulled the plug on the whole effort—much to the delight of Bashar and his Iranian and Russian patrons.
In the summer of 2017, Trump formally ended the CIA-led program to arm and train rebels fighting Bashar,42 and then he joined Russia in announcing ceasefires in the remaining opposition areas, which reverted to the regime one after another in horrendous bombing campaigns and surrender deals.43
Later, a joint OPCW-UN panel investigating the use of chemical weapons in Syria concluded that the Assad regime was responsible for the Khan Sheikhoun sarin attack,44 a finding dismissed and ridiculed as a “joke” by Russia.45
It was as if the world was telling Bashar and his patrons: we are with you in your quest to reassert regime authority over all of Syria but please do not be too bloody and if you must, then please do not use chemical weapons again.
That same summer of 2017, Mustafa Tlass, the man who had accompanied Hafez from scrappy cadet to paramount ruler and who had killed in order to defend and protect the house of Assad, passed away.
The last images of him showed a frail but happy old man in a colorful woolen sweater playing with one of his great-grandchildren in the cozy living room of his daughter Nahed’s Parisian apartment.46
The Tlasses thought of burying the family patriarch in his hometown of Al-Rastan, as he would have liked. Bashar still respected the elder Tlass and believed that the family’s decision to leave Syria had been mainly Manaf’s. It was the same way that Manaf still considered Hafez “sacred” despite his split with Bashar.
In the end, the Tlasses concluded that it was “too problematic,” as Manaf put it, to bury his father in Syria—reaching Al-Rastan would have to be facilitated by Bashar, plus many of the rebels inside Al-Rastan despised the Tlasses.47
Mustafa Tlass was buried in Paris instead.
From a cottage in a town outside Paris surrounded by forests, Khaled al-Khani, the painter who had lost his father and childhood home during the 1982 Hama massacre ordered by Hafez and approved by Mustafa Tlass as defense minister, watched history more or less repeat itself.48
In every area reverting to regime control, residents had to chant for Bashar, thank the army for liberating them, and tell TV cameras that it was the terrorists and not Bashar and his allies who dropped bombs on them, killed their children, starved them into submission, and looted and burned their homes—exactly what Khaled and his family and the others who returned to Hama after the 1982 massacre had had to endure.
Like those under Hafez, Syrians under Bashar once more had no choice but to live with the regime’s lies as the Assad’s reign of fear and terror was reinstated with more vigor.
In the first four months of 2018, almost 2,500 civilians were killed in the Eastern Ghouta near Damascus,49 the same area Bashar had gassed with impunity in 2013.
The world looked on as the Russians and Iranians helped Bashar retake the area. Putin raved about having tested more than 200 weapons in Syria,50 including air-dropped incendiary munitions that burned their victims in Ghouta alive51 while Iran supplied Bashar with artillery shells filled with chlorine-like substances that, on at least six occasions, poisoned Ghouta’s people to death.52
A bomb filled with similar chemicals was dropped from an aircraft in early April 2018, killing almost fifty people. The United States and its allies responded with airstrikes against the regime’s chemical weapons facilities, but it hardly mattered as Bashar and his patrons entered Ghouta triumphantly while cowed and terrified civilians chanted for Bashar and Putin.53
“Everyone is exhausted and fearful,” said a man in Damascus. “We must surrender to the fact that there’s nothing we can do if the entire world wants Bashar to stay.”54
Not everyone though was willing to surrender and keep silent. Bashar could declare victory, but for many Syrians nothing would ever be the same because they themselves were not the same.
One major difference from Hafez’s era and the 1980s was that, after the 2011 revolt, hundreds of thousands of Syrians forever set themselves free from deception, indignity, and fear—they were unchained from five decades of Assad family rule.
There was no turning back for these Syrians. They spoke out in every way—art, film, public advocacy, politics, theater, and words—and silencing them all would be impossible. They were like birds who were roaming the world and hoped one day to return home.
After a period of depression and major health complications, Khaled was recovering, painting more furiously, and expressing himself in ways he had never done before. His friends, now scattered all over the world, came to visit.55 They shared tastes and memories of home as Khaled cooked dishes like mloukhiyeh (a stew of greens with chicken and rice) and makloubeh (layers of rice, eggplant, and beef) in his kitchen in the French countryside.
Like many Syrians, Khaled wanted justice for all the crimes committed by the Assad family. He made a public appeal on Facebook to Syrians to come forward and join him as codefendants or witnesses in a case brought by a Swiss-based legal advocacy group against Bashar’s exiled uncle, Rifaat, for his role in the 1982 Hama massacre and other war crimes.56
The group Trial International submitted significant evidence to the Swiss attorney general, but there had been barely any advance in the case.57 Publicizing the lawsuit could spur Switzerland to take the case more seriously, especially after Rifaat’s assets in Britain, France, and Spain were frozen and charges of tax fraud and embezzlement were brought against him in France in early 2017.58
But making the case for justice and convincing the world that they had as much of a stake as Syrians, if not more, in seeing Bashar tried and punished for his war crimes was not going to be so easy.
“The Americans, Russians, and Iranians can liberate Mosul, Raqqa, and Deir Ezzour and declare victory over the Islamic State, but without justice and accountability, a change in the political system, and coming to terms with the legacy of the past fifty years, count six months or one to two years and you will have something worse than Islamic State,” said Mazen Darwish, sitting in the Berlin apartment he shared with his wife and associate, Yara Bader.59
“If they want to repatriate refugees and stop the exodus of new ones there must be justice and guarantees for people to return. Can we go back if the same organs, regime, and people remain in place? The same police state with the same sectarian, gang-like, and mafia mind-set? People—and myself included—won’t return unless there’s change. Going back would be like committing suicide.”
The ashtray in front of him was already overflowing as he smoked cigarettes and sipped bitter Turkish coffee. In the living room there were reminders of the Damascus he sorely missed. On the walls were small framed photographs of scenes from old Damascus. A little girl standing in the sun at the entrance of a traditional Damascene house with an arched entrance built of black and white stones. Elderly men playing backgammon at an outdoor coffee shop.
Next to the window was a cluster of potted plants, including a small one bearing shiny lemons, evoking the citrus trees that Damascenes were fond of growing in the courtyards of old homes.
Mazen and Yara had arrived in Berlin on November 9, 2015, on the anniversary of the day the wall fell in 1989.
For months, Mazen obsessed that his stay in Germany was temporary and that he had to return soon to advocate for the release of his friends and fellow activists who remained in Bashar’s prisons.
He got little sleep at night, and even when he did it was fitful. Sometimes he trembled so violently in his sleep that his wife had to wake him up. For a while he had trouble being in crowded places and was uncomfortable looking people in the eye. Once he was smoking next to the window when a chopper flew by at a low altitude. His immediate reflex was to jump away and cower behind the sofa.
In early winter 2016, he made the mistake of agreeing to an interview with a German news channel that was filmed inside the main prison complex operated by the State Security Service, or Stasi, of the defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR).
After reunification, the detention facilities located in what was once a restricted zone of Berlin’s Hohenschönhausen district became a memorial and reminder of the horrors of the past. Everything was kept intact—the high wall, barbed-wire fence, and watchtowers that ringed the sprawling compound, the filthy and peeling wallpaper of the interrogation rooms where confessions were extracted, the prisoner uniforms and toilet pails.60
While the GDR’s crimes paled in comparison to those of the Assads, and the Stasi’s prison complex looked like a holiday retreat compared with the mukhabarat’s dungeons, Mazen had flashbacks and could barely breathe at one point, especially in an underground section called the “U-Boot,” or submarine.61
To get there, he had to go down a flight of stairs, beneath which was what Germans called a “crawling cell”—exactly like the one in which Mazen had once found himself, lying over a lifeless body after he passed out from torture. The crypt-like underground prison consisted of rows of sixty damp solitary-confinement cells behind gray steel doors with small openings.
After that experience, Mazen was finally convinced he needed therapy.
His situation improved, but as for so many traumatized Syrians it was going to take him years to come to grips with what he had been through. One way of healing was perhaps going back to doing what he was most passionate about.
Toward the end of 2016, he received a grant from his Danish NGO partner to relaunch the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression in Berlin, almost five years after the mukhabarat raided the office in Damascus and hauled him and his team to prison.
The following year and around the sixth anniversary of what he and many Syrians still called the revolution, Mazen and a small team, including Yara, moved into an office on one of Berlin’s many colorful streets.
Their focus was Mazen’s advocacy for accountability and justice, but they broadened their work to include supporting and training independent Syrian journalists and combating hate speech.
One of the first things Mazen did was to plaster an empty wall with photographs of his missing colleagues Razan Zeitouneh, Khalil Maatouq, and others.62 (Razan, her husband, and two of their colleagues were kidnapped at the end of 2013 in Douma, when it was still under rebel control.)
Later, in a groundbreaking move that could potentially shatter nearly half a century of Assad regime impunity, seven Syrian plaintiffs joined forces with Mazen’s center, his fellow Syrian human rights lawyer and former prisoner Anwar al-Buni, and the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights to file a complaint in March 2017 with the German Federal Public Prosecutor against several mukhabarat chiefs and officers. (Germany is one of the few countries that applies the principle of universal jurisdiction.)
Two months later, the federal prosecutor in Karlsruhe—a city in southwest Germany where more than 1,000 Jews perished in Nazi purges between 1933 and 1945—heard the testimony of Mazen, Anwar, and a dozen or so Syrian witnesses and survivors of torture.63 The next step was for Germany’s chief federal prosecutor to issue arrest warrants for the defendants.
Additional cases against the mukhabarat were filed later that year, and the federal prosecutor was also given high resolution images and metadata of the photographs taken by the defected Syrian military photographer code-named Caesar. This was the first time this had happened since the world was horrified at the start of 2014 by the gruesome photographs of thousands of corpses of those tortured, starved, and mutilated at mukhabarat prisons between 2011 and 2013.64
Syria was not a signatory to the treaty that established the International Criminal Court dealing with war crimes and crimes against humanity, and referral to the ICC by the UN Security Council was not an option, either, as long as China and Russia shielded Bashar.
A UN commission had been investigating war crimes in Syria since August 2011, and a French judge was appointed by the secretary general in 2017 to head a team to collect and preserve the evidence65—testimonies of more than 5,200 witnesses and victims; photographs, videos, medical and forensic reports, satellite imagery, and even a list of suspected war criminals66 believed to include Bashar and key members of his family and regime. But no action could be taken, so the only path forward left for Mazen and his colleagues was to explore other avenues to justice and build cases against the regime in European courts in the hope that this could exert sufficient pressure on those blocking a Security Council referral to change their minds.
The road to justice, though, was filled with many challenges and perils.
In the summer of 2017, a Spanish judge rejected a case brought by a Syrian woman with Spanish citizenship under the principle of universal jurisdiction against regime mukhabarat chiefs for the arrest, torture, and execution of her brother. She had found his picture among the tens of thousands of images smuggled out by Caesar.67
These legal setbacks came amid a major shift in mood in Europe and around the world as many leaders increasingly viewed the situation in Syria as simply a civil war that had to end with a political settlement and compromise by all sides so that the focus could continue to be on combating Islamist extremists and stemming the flow of refugees—the twin menaces and priorities for the European continent.
The attitude seemed to be that if Bashar, a man once labeled a war criminal by some Western leaders, remaining in power and facing no prosecution for his atrocities was somehow going to keep terrorists and refugees at bay, then the tradeoff was acceptable.
“It does not matter who’s the victim and who’s the executioner. Today what’s important is for Syrians to find a way to live with each other,” Lilianne Ploumen, the Dutch minister for foreign trade and development cooperation, told Mazen during a meeting in the spring of 2016.68
Mazen then argued to Germany’s embattled chancellor, Angela Merkel, that Europe had to stop viewing the situation in Syria through the binary of either Bashar or Islamic State/refugees, and that it was time for an overhaul in strategy to give priority to justice and the country’s democratic, independent, and nonviolent forces.
They were both laureates of the Roosevelt Foundation’s prestigious Four Freedoms Awards, based on a historic speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941.69
“I can’t do more for Syria… My advice to you is to see Putin,” Merkel told Mazen.
Putin’s solution was for Syrians to forget what Bashar had done to them and work with him and his regime to draft a new constitution and hold elections—in which Bashar, of course, could run.70
“There won’t be peace if you want to put the justice and accountability file on the table. You must choose: accountability or peace,” Staffan de Mistura, the UN Syria envoy tasked with mediating between the regime and opposition (effectively under the auspices of the Russians), told Mazen during a meeting in Geneva.71
De Mistura was the man Putin hoped would put the stamp of approval on his peace plan. He eventually quit.72
Later, Mazen started receiving threatening messages on his cell phone from regime loyalists.
“You think you’re secure in Germany? We can reach you wherever you are and crush you under our feet… Just wait—we’re going to make an example out of you for the whole world,” one of them read.73
In June 2018, Germany’s federal prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Jamil Hassan, the director of the mukhabarat’s Air Force Intelligence Directorate and one of Bashar’s main inner-circle henchmen.74 He had personally interrogated Mazen, mocked his work as a human rights lawyer, and ordered his torture. It was a big step forward for justice.
But then that same month came a particularly brazen message from Bashar, Hassan, and other suspected regime war criminals: We killed you, tortured you, gassed you, displaced you, destroyed your lives, and now we are admitting to the whole world we did it, but you’ll never be able to get us.
In the summer of 2018, the mukhabarat and the army began issuing official death notices for thousands of activists and protesters tortured to death in dungeons and prisons or hanged by military tribunals.75
Among them were nearly two dozen of Mazen’s best friends, including fellow activists from the town of Daraya near Damascus who had handed out roses and bottles of water to the forces that Bashar sent to assault them in the spring and summer of 2011.
Those calling for Bashar’s ouster by peaceful means had to die, but Bashar was perfectly happy to work out surrender and repatriation deals with those who bore arms against him, as he did that same summer with Russia’s help and the blessing of his neighbors Jordan and Israel.
The regime reclaimed areas in southern Syria that included the city of Daraa, where Bashar had killed the first protesters in March 2011. Bashar’s forces planted flags in the exact same spot across from Israel where Hafez had once celebrated his false victory over the Jewish state.76
Hafez won “the liberation war” and Bashar won “the cleansing war,” announced the state broadcaster verbatim from Damascus.
The Israelis, who played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in Syria, liaised with both Trump and Putin and let it be known that they were fine with Bashar as long as he kept his allies Iran and Hezbollah away from the southern border.77
That summer, Putin also launched a plan to rebuild Syria and repatriate Syrians in Europe and countries like Lebanon and Turkey, but he wanted the West to foot the bill and deal with Bashar as the legitimate leader of his country.
Bashar would also get to choose who could return—and how, and when—to devastated and destroyed towns and cities like Daraa, Daraya, Homs, and others, according to the Russian plan.78
This applied to the Tlasses’ hometown of Al-Rastan, which was among the first to take up arms against Bashar and sought to rid itself of what many of its residents regarded as the stigma of the Assad-Tlass partnership. The town surrendered that same summer in a deal brokered by the Russian army.
Those that rejected the deal moved to the last rebel-held enclaves in northern Syria while the ones that stayed had no choice but to plead with the Tlasses to use their influence with the Russians to prevent Bashar’s forces from entering the town because they feared arrest or death. Nahed Tlass managed to get them a six-month reprieve.
“Do not worry, the six months can be extended. I am ready to vouch for the Russians for sixty years, not just six months,” Nahed told some of the townspeople she spoke to by telephone from Paris.79
Manaf largely stayed out of the negotiations.80
Less than six months later, Al-Rastan high school students chanted “For your eyes, Bashar!” as desperate and hungry townspeople gathered to receive food rations distributed by Russian and Syrian regime soldiers.81 The regime did return to Al-Rastan, the same town that had smashed Hafez’s statue in the first few weeks of the uprising against the Assads.
As Bashar set out to reinstate the facade of his government and state institutions, his first priority was to rebuild his army. But few wanted to serve, including those who voiced their admiration and support for him. Instead, young men wanted for compulsory military service continued to flee to Lebanon or farther afield.82
Can the Assads’ kingdom of lies, fear, and terror ever truly reassert itself? It was one of many unanswered questions as 2018 came to a close.
Bashar could declare victory—but at what price and under what conditions? He could lean on his longtime patron Iran to push back at the dictates and agendas of his other patron, Russia—but for how long?
Many Iranians, though, began to wonder why their government was backing a war criminal and mass murderer,83 and maybe Russians would at some point wonder the same.
Even Bashar’s own Alawite community still wanted him to account for the tens of thousands killed or missing in defense of the Assads,84 while warlords and militia leaders who helped save his regime were not willing to just quietly fade into the background.85
“Intra-Alawite discord is what Bashar fears the most,” said Manaf.86
Despite all the vulnerabilities, 2018 ended with Bashar never more confident in his own staying power and the longevity of his family’s reign, which was nearing the half-century mark.
Trump announced he was withdrawing about two thousand US soldiers from eastern Syria because the Islamic State was supposedly defeated, leaving Putin as the country’s uncontested power broker.87
There were no signs that Putin was going to abandon Bashar as the region’s other brutal autocrats, who also survived the Arab Spring, rushed to embrace Bashar again.88
Trump even spoke of the possibility that his Saudi allies would help Bashar and the Russians rebuild Syria.89
Manaf still hoped for a turnaround in his fortunes somehow, even if it seemed far-fetched.
“I would go back to Syria. I want salvation for my country,” he said sitting on a bench in a sun-drenched Place Saint-Sulpice. “But on condition that neither security nor military power is in his [Bashar’s] hands. I have no problem to be with him [Bashar] if he abides by these conditions and submits to the will of the people.”90
The people, though, still had a problem with Bashar.
The fight to end the Assad family’s rule was hardly over yet for people like Mazen, Khaled, the Daraa activist Sally Masalmeh, and hundreds of thousands of other Syrians.
Their quest for liberty, freedom, and dignity was no different from the long and painful struggles of the past century: the civil rights movement in the United States, the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, or the overthrow of despots in Eastern Europe.
“They are trying to bury us, but they do not know we’re the seeds of a revolution,” wrote Sally on her Facebook page as she watched the regime retake what she and others had called the liberated zone of Daraa.91
Sally and her husband, Malek, had settled in the Baltic Sea island of Rügen, which had been part of the former East Germany before reunification. It was a world away from Daraa and Syria in every sense.
This was a landscape of windswept pebble beaches, shoreline dunes, dramatic white chalk cliffs, inland forests, and a series of brackish water lagoons that the Germans called Bodden.92
Except for a brief summer, it was a desolate and cold place draped in snow most of the winter. Sally and Malek settled in the island’s main town, Bergen. Under their asylum arrangements, they received a housing allowance and a monthly stipend in return for studying the German language and civics and then finding work, all part of the so-called integration process for refugees.
They moved into a small apartment in a Plattenbau with a balcony overlooking an empty field on the edge of the old cobblestone-paved town center. (Plattenbauten are boxy East German–era public housing buildings made of prefabricated brown-and-sand-colored concrete slabs.)
They livened up the whitewashed interior with a red carpet, a framed poster of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” colorful curtains, and little mementos from home like worry beads and a small hookah.93
They immersed themselves in their German language courses. Malek began to work, while Sally prepared to go to college.
“My body is here, but my soul is still in Syria,” said Sally as she wiped away her tears.
In the evening, a neighbor, another refugee from the province of Idlib, came over with his oud. He picked out a melody as Sally sang a popular revolutionary song from her native Houran region, while Malek listened quietly.
“I walk with pride on your rose petal-covered streets / I carve your name on my eyelids, to Houran, to Houran,” sang Sally. “My people, your deliverance is near / Your defiance has mesmerized the world / Bashar, shoot your guns, to Houran, to Houran / We are up to the challenge / The revolution started here and I won’t settle for anything less than your death sentence, Bashar.”94