Assad was brutal, despite less tactlessness than Saddam Hussein
Assad was brutal, despite less tactlessness than Saddam Hussein
narrow shoulders, a bed pressure and a gentle lispel tone-these are the most impressive memories of my meeting with Bashar al-Assad. It was in 2007 and the uprising against the US troops in Iraq raged right next door. The overthrown Iraqi guide Saddam Hussein, a comrade in secular Baathism like Assad, had just been executed six months earlier. But Syria's leader at the time, who had succeeded his father Hafez seven years earlier, was a stable contrast to the chaos that flooded the neighboring country.
encounter with Assad
Assad received us without much entourage and folded his long body into a chair on the head of the room. At no time we were physically searched. His security team showed absolute serenity by largely holding itself. The assumption was that the dreaded Syrian security forces had an eye on us from the moment when we landed in Damascus while probably also searching our rooms and listening to us.
climb and case
At the time, I knew little that this big, thin man would be the most bitter opponent of the Arab Spring in suit one day. He survived in places where other regional power people failed by unleash a brutal repression that his country fell into a civil war for 13 years, only to experience how his dynastic rule collapsed within a few days.luxury in secret
I was traveling with a group of more than a dozen correspondents and editors of the National Public Radio. A brisk black limousines, escorted by motorcycles, took us from a luxurious Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus to a villa on a hill with a view of the city. During a Discussion , which took place almost exclusively in English, showed various accusations against its regime. No, Syria has no role in a series of critics Lebanon played. He denied the existence of a pipeline by jihadist who travel to Iraq through Syria. When asked about the lack of freedom of the press in Syria and the system of the unit party, he went down
torture and repression
Assad was by no means as showy as his colleague Saddam, whose monstrous palaces in Iraq were covered with kitschy gold. But the Syrians, who now explore Assad's abandoned real estate, have shown that the former ophthalmologist's president certainly had his own taste for luxury. A video showed Dutzens of luxury cars, which were in the garage of the president, including a red Ferrari F50, a Lamborghini, a Rolls Royce and a Bentley.
In the meantime, the reputation of his regime for absolute brutality was consolidated long before, during the civil war, which lasted 14 bloody years. Basat al Reeh. Dulab. Falaqa. These Arabic terms for torture methods were repeated by Syrians who were arrested during the repressive measures against the opponents of the government, which were broken in 2011 throughout the country. We were soon familiar with them.personal fate
"We constantly suffered from torture," said Tariq, an opposition activist from the port city of Latakia, who told me the 40 days he had spent in solitary confinement. Dulab, said Tariq in exile in Turkey, included the victim to squeeze and hit his head into a car tire. Basat al Reeh was when a prisoner was bound and beaten on a board. Falaqa included the beating of a victim's feet.
In the province of Idlib, which was controlled by the opposition, I interviewed a dentist in 2012 who was arrested because he had secretly injured demonstrators of medical help. He said he had blows, close to drowns in buckets with toilet water and electrical shocks on his genitals during a 45-day stay in a cell that was built for 60 people but was stuffed with 130 prisoners. Finally, Assad's troops, supported by Iran, Russia and Lebanese Hezbollah, managed to regain control of large parts of Syria.
collapse and resistance
The prisons remained full of inmates and the torture continued. Then, at the end of November, as the saying says: "There are decades in which nothing happens; and then there are weeks when decades happen." A rebel offensive brought Assad's regime to a collapse in less than two weeks. The amount of desperate Syrian, the after signs of missing relatives sought, illustrates the cruelty of the dynastic assad dictatorship.
cynicism and hypocrisy
During the 53 years of the Assad dynasty in power, Damascus played an incredibly cynical game of regional politics. This extremely secular government, which bombed its own city of Hama in 1982, to cut down the Muslim brothers, later smashed Sunni jihadists to Iraq to fight the US crew. Some of these militants finally returned to fight the Syrian government. In the meantime, Iran - a theocracy - and the Hisbollah, the Shiite “worship” of Lebanon were also the closest of Syria. For decades, Damascus acted as a patron for the Kurdish PKK separatists in a long-lasting uprising against the government in neighboring Türkiye, while many Kurds born in Syria refused to fully civil rights.
Syrian officials constantly condemned the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian areas, while the Syrian army and the secret police torture ordinary people at control points in Lebanon, during a Syrian occupation that lasted almost 30 years. These ideological contradictions were amazing. They also served to project the Syrian power far beyond the country's borders.
an unforgettable impression
The hypocrisy and cynicism that Assad showed the day were a family business. In an interview with CNN in 2009, British -born wife of the President, ASMA, condemned the allegations of the human rights violations of the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip and spoke about the responsibility of being a first lady. "What do you do in the position you have?" she asked. "As a mother and as a person, as I said, we have to make sure that these atrocities stop." But three years later she was proud of her husband and ignored the atrocities that were committed by Syrian government troops during the civil war that included the repeated bombing of hospitals.
A memory of a reporting trip to Damascus still follows me today. In 2005 I went undercover and pretended to be a tourist who visited a night club on a hill with a view of the city. There, in the middle of stroboscopic lights and booming dance music, I spoke to 14 and 15-year-old girls from the neighboring, war-shared Iraq who worked as prostitutes . Some of the boys and girls who worked on this brothel were even younger.
The night club was only a few miles from Assad's presidential palace. In a country that was checked by the Syrian secret services, regardless of Dissens, it is impossible to present that the authorities were not informed about the existence of the club and the work of the children. It was difficult to understand that the narrow, lisplate man I met could rule such a system, and yet Assad ruled as president over 24 years. Smart people as I wrote about the banalization of evil. Based on what I saw a long time ago during my hour's audience with a dictator, personalized Bashar al-Assad this.