USA Today - 18.03.2020

NEWS USA TODAY ❚ WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 2020 ❚ 5A

He trained as an eye doctor. He likes
high-tech gadgets and country music.
And he may turn out to be one of the
most barbarous political leaders of the
21st century.
The blood-soaked regime of Syrian
President Bashar Assad – a tall, shy and,
by all accounts, unlikely inheritor and
conservator of Syrian sovereignty – has
survived nearly a decade of political re-
bellion, virulent insurgency and inter-
national condemnation.
Assad has held on to power even as
other despots in the Middle East fell, as
world leaders aggressively pushed for
his ouster and as the Syrian people
begged for peace.
Sunday marked nine years since pro-
tests in Syria calling for democratic re-
forms and greater freedoms sparked a
civil war that has spilled far outside its
borders.
What began as a hopeful uprising
ballooned into a devastating and intrac-
table conflict that contributed to the
most severe refugee crisis since World
War II. Syria’s war has led to hundreds
of thousands of deaths, displaced mil-
lions and helped spur the rise – and then
entrenchment – of the Islamic State ter-
rorist group.
It has also drawn the United States,
Iran, Israel, Russia and Turkey into a
complicated and potentially dangerous
confrontation that lacks coherent West-
ern oversight.
The story of Assad’s survival – and
Syria’s disintegration – is part personal
inhumanity, part international indiffer-
ence. Five years ago, Assad admitted in
a televised address that his army was
tired and that his military was losing
ground.
Now, most of Syria is back under As-
sad’s control as his military and its Rus-
sian allies pound the remaining patch of
rebel-held territory into submission, al-
though some well-connected Syrians
living in exile believe Assad’s rule is
coming apart at the seams.
“He’s a survivor. He’s very, very
tough,” said Robert Ford, who was U.S.
ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014
and engaged with Assad as part of that
role. Ford described Assad as someone
who “grew into the role” of butchering
his own people.

Violence runs deep

According to the United Nations, hu-
manitarian groups and Syria watch-
dogs, Assad’s violence has taken many
forms: imposing starvation sieges on re-
bel-held areas; repeatedly bombing,
with Russian assistance, hospitals and
civilian infrastructure; arresting and
torturing thousands of activists, blog-
gers and civilians, then holding them at
secret prisons deep underground,
where they languish without trial. He
has also allegedly used chlorine bombs
and sarin gas – chemical weapons –
against opposition fighters, killing chil-
dren and civilians.
“Everybody who knows Assad knows
two things about him,” said Ayman
Abdel Nour, a former friend of Syria’s
leader from their college days studying
medicine in Damascus. “First: He lies –
about everything. Second: He’s ex-
tremely jealous. If you have a nice watch
or camera, he will be sure to go out and
get a better one the next day.”
The Syrian government has consis-
tently denied all the allegations lobbed
at Assad by the West, opposition groups
and by former regime insiders, such as
Nour, who fled Syria in 2007 after Assad
threatened to imprison him because of
an online magazine he ran, “all4syria,”
that was critical of the regime.
“Conspiracies, like germs, reproduce
everywhere, every moment and they
cannot be eradicated,” Assad said in

2011. He claims to enjoy widespread
      support among Syrians inside and out-
      side the country, even as he moves to
      crush the last pocket of resistance.

Tangled web of interests

The remaining Syrian rebel holdouts
are in the Aleppo countryside and parts
of neighboring Idlib province, in north-
western Syria. While the rebels are
fiercely resisting, Assad’s forces, backed
by heavy Russian airstrikes, have sent
nearly 1 million Syrian civilians fleeing
toward the sealed border with Turkey, in
what the United Nations fears could be
the single worst displacement of the
nine-year war so far.
Many fleeing families have no hous-

ing, no food or supplies, and they are dy-

ing in refugee camps from the cold, said

Huzayfa al-Khateeb, a Syrian radio re-

porter who lives in Idlib. “There is no

single town, no single area, you can live.

And on the border, they are bombing

us.”

“The situation is fast turning into the

biggest humanitarian horror story of the

21st century,” said Hardin Lang, vice

president for programs and policy at

Refugees International, a Washington,

D.C.-based humanitarian advocacy or-

ganization.

It has also brought Turkey and Syria

to the brink of all-out war and entangled

regional and foreign powers in a com-

plex web of decision-making that risks

wider hostilities.

Turkey has taken in 3.6 million Syri-

an refugees, and President Recep Tayy-

ip Erdogan says his country can’t handle

any more. Turkey has intervened in Syr-

ia in part because it wants Syrian rebels

to help maintain a buffer zone in north-

ern Syria, near the border with Turkey.

Erdogan considers that essential to

guarding against attacks from Kurdish

separatists, which Turkey views as ter-

rorists.

On Feb. 27, at least 33 Turkish sol-

diers were killed in a Syrian military air-

strike in Idlib province, escalating an al-

ready tense and volatile situation.

Russia has long inflamed the conflict

by doing everything in its power to prop

up Assad. Russia sees the Syrian war as

a way to reassert itself as an interna-

tional power broker amid the Trump ad-

ministration’s retreat from the global

stage, experts say. Iran has also been

drawn into the fray, supporting the As-

sad regime with military intelligence

and training. Iran’s presence in Syria

and support there for Hezbollah mili-

tants has alarmed the U.S. and its most

important regional ally, Israel.

For the past few weeks, Idlib’s skies

have been relatively free of Russian and

Syrian government warplanes for the

first time in months amid a tense calm

as a cease-fire deal brokered by Turkey

and Russia appears to be holding in Syr-

ia’s northwestern province.

But there are other looming compli-

cations.

Earlier this month, Turkey opened its

frontiers with Greece and Bulgaria to al-

low fleeing Syrians and other migrants

to enter the European Union – a move

aimed at pressuring EU leaders to inter-

vene in Syria amid the refugee crisis.

Turkey’s action revived memories of

2015, when more than 1 million asylum

seekers fled to Europe from Syria, Iraq,

Afghanistan and other conflict zones. It

was a humanitarian train of people the

continent had not witnessed since the

ravages of the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, U.S. policy toward As-

sad’s Syria has roller-coastered from in-

tervention and airstrikes to resignation,

inattention and downright confusion.

Former President Barack Obama failed

to enforce his own “red line” when As-

sad allegedly used chemical weapons in

2013, killing as many as 1,400 Syrians,

including 400 children.

President Donald Trump, before tak-

ing office, said the U.S. should “stay the

hell out of Syria.” But after Trump took

office he soon found himself ordering a

U.S. airstrike against Syrian targets af-

ter another suspected chemical weap-

ons attack by Assad in April 2017. (The

Syrian leader has denied using such

weapons.)

Then, last year, Trump declared vic-

tory over the Islamic State group in Syr-

ia and moved to withdraw U.S. troops

from the country, a move he has partly

walked back.

‘The regime is suffering’

Still, there is one constant: Assad.

Firas Tlass, at one point one of Syria’s

richest men and a former close confi-

dant of the Assad family, said in a phone

interview from Dubai, where he lives in

exile, that there is a “mood within Syria

today suggesting the regime could soon

collapse, that it can’t continue economi-

cally, that it’s ultimately lost without

real international support.”

He said that while Assad may have

the upper hand territorially and mili-

tarily, it changes every few months, and

everyday life, even for regime loyalists

inside Syria, is hard: electricity black-

outs, little access to health care, few

supplies at the market.

“They had hoped that the regime

would make sure there was money for

salaries and goods and electricity. The

opposite has happened,” said Nour, As-

sad’s friend from their college days, who

now lives in the U.S., where he founded

Syrian Christians for Peace, a pro-oppo-

sition humanitarian organization that

distributes aid inside Syria.

Nour says Assad’s military gains are

disguising a regime in its dying days.

“It’s really hurting. The regime is suf-

fering,” said Haid Haid, an expert on

Syria at Chatham House, in a panel dis-

cussion March 11 at a conference about

Syria hosted by the London-based glob-

al affairs think tank.

A man with inner demons

Assad was encouraged to become a

doctor by his late father, who ruled Syria

for three decades as a virtual police

state. Hafez Assad was brutal is his

crackdowns on dissent, perpetually

paranoid, corrupt and willing to murder

friends to retain his grip on power.

Hafez Assad viewed his second son

as temperamentally unfit to be Syria’s

president – awkward in company, a

poor public speaker and afraid of the

sight of blood, according to Sam Dagher,

author of “Assad or We Burn the Coun-

try: How One Family’s Lust for Power

Destroyed Syria.” But when his eldest

son, Bassel, died in a high-speed car

crash, Syria’s leader, who had survived

several assassination attempts and was

credited with transforming his country

into a regional power, turned to Bashar

to succeed him.

At the time, this aloof and timid son

was studying to be an eye doctor at Lon-

don’s prestigious Western Eye Hospital.

It was a discipline he chose, Bashar As-

sad would later often say, according to

Dagher, because ophthalmology in-

volves little blood.

Once chosen by his father for the pre-

sidency, however, “he was on a quest to

slay his inner demons,” Dagher writes in

his book. “Bashar set out to prove that

he could be as cutthroat and ruthless as

his father, if not more so.”

Syria’s civil war has run for 9 years

Barbarity, indifference

helped Assad prosper

Kim Hjelmgaard
and Deirdre Shesgreen
USA TODAY

Displaced Syrians flee the countryside of Aleppo and Idlib provinces toward

Syria’s northwestern Afrin district near the border with Turkey, as regime forces

push on in the country's northwest.RAMI AL SAYED/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Syrian army soldiers deploy in the

southern Idlib countryside March 4.

GETTY IMAGES

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