The extended Assad family treated Syria as their personal property, enriching themselves and buying the trust of their followers at the expense of Syrians who could be jailed or killed if they complied, or even if they didn’t.
A fighter named Ahmed, who took up arms against the regime in 2011, survived the rebel defeat in Damascus and fought his way out of Idlib with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebels, observed how the Assads live with their three brothers, all rebel fighters.
“People were living in hell, and he was in his palace,” Ahmed said calmly.
“He didn’t care about what they were going through. He made them live in fear, hunger and humiliation. Even after we entered Damascus, people only whispered to us because they were still afraid.”
I found the marble boarding house and walked through the walnut-paneled, marble-floored library where I interviewed Assad as the regime struggled to survive in February 2015.
A highlight of the interview was his denial that his forces were killing civilians. He even tried to joke about it.
Rebel fighters were now at the door and patrolling the corridors. Some of the books fell from the library shelves, but the building remained intact.
I went to the front room where Asad was giving 10-15 minutes of personal talk before the interview.
He was invariably polite, even caring, asking about my family and the trip to Syria.
Bashar al-Assad’s somewhat clumsy demeanor has led some Western observers to believe that he is a light-hearted man who can bow to pressure.
Privately, I found him confident to the point of arrogance, convinced that he was the omniscient spider at the center of a Middle Eastern web, tracking the evil intentions of his enemies and ready to strike.
His father, Hafez al-Assad, was a king in the Middle East. He was a ruthless man who built a police state that lasted more than fifty years, using fear, cunning and a willingness to destroy any threat to establish stability in Syria, a country that was a symbol of violent changes of government until he seized sole power in 1970. Mr.
I got the impression that Bashar wanted to be his father’s son, maybe even surpass him.
He killed far more Syrians than Hafez and broke the country to try to save the regime.
But Bashar’s stubbornness, refusal to reform or negotiate, and his willingness to kill sealed his fate and condemned him to one last harrowing trip to the airport with his wife and children on their last flight from Syria to Moscow.
