Assad was a strangely unimpressive man to meet – he was more oddball than evil
Bashar al Assad started out as a doctor and ended up a mass murdering tyrant now on the run.
The man who trained to save lives in Damascus and London would go on to take them in their hundreds of thousands, bombing hospitals and gassing his own people.
He was a strangely unimpressive man to meet. Tall, slightly gauche, with a lisp and thin tufty moustache.
Christopher Hitchens called him the human toothbrush. The writer recalled Hannah Arendt’s phrase the “banality of evil” when he remembered meeting another dictator, Argentina’s General Videla. But it applied equally well to Mr Assad.
He was ordinary, more oddball than evil, with a high-pitched awkward laugh.
Bashar al Assad and his wife Asma
Read more: Syria latest updates
It was a very different time in a very different Syria when Mr Assad and his wife invited Sky News to Damascus. We went on a walkabout with them on a warm spring evening in 2009.
Barack Obama had just been inaugurated president in America. In his reedy voice, Mr Assad said he would like to invite the young president to Syria, via Sky News. He almost giggled as he said it. His British-born wife beamed at his side.
Back then everything seemed possible but just two years later Syria erupted in protest caught up in the contagion of the Arab Spring. Mr Assad would respond with brutal force. That fateful decision put Syria on the path to a devastating civil war.
Mr Assad had become president unexpectedly and it seemed reluctantly.
His elder brother Bassel had been groomed for the job. He was everything Bashar wasn’t, good looking and confident, a special forces soldier, his father’s favourite. But Bassel died in a car crash.
Did Mr Assad’s ruthlessness later spring partly from sibling resentment? Was he needing to prove himself to his domineering dead father to be as strong as his brother? Did the weaker, overlooked Bashar overcompensate for his inadequacies with the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands?
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Take the Roys of Succession and add weapons
The Assads were quite the family. Take the Roys of Succession and add weapons, both chemical and biological.
Hafez, the cold calculating patriarch whose achievement of seizing power in Syria and dominating it for decades was threatened by his scheming, weaker children.
Bashar, the brooding heir, and Maher, his psychotic, deranged brother who has personally overseen much of the regime’s reign of terror.
When his father died in 2000, Mr Assad was called back from London, cutting short his career as an eye doctor to succeed him. At first he promised reform. The country seemed to be opening up.
Asma al Assad was brought up in West London
Assad’s wife was part of the act
Mr Assad’s telegenic wife, Asma, brought up in West London by Syrian parents, was part of the act, presenting a modernising future. She was much better at it than her husband, a natural in front of the cameras.
She told me she had travelled the country incognito after her husband took power, to help him understand its needs.
They were a normal middle-class couple she said, who loved nothing better than surprising Damascenes by popping up in restaurants on date nights in the capital.
Vogue magazine was pilloried later for calling Ms Assad Syria’s “Desert Rose” but it was not the only one taken in. There was in those days a genuine sense Syria was on a new path. Perhaps Mr and Mrs Assad believed it too.
But in the background, repression and corruption never went away.
Mr Assad was handing out lucrative privatisation contracts to cronies and family. The Assads’ secret police were stifling dissent as brutally as before.
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Toppled Assad statue dragged through streets
The eruption of civil war
Two years after that invitation to Mr Obama, Mr Assad was forced to choose between a new way forward and the repressive ways of his father.
Children had been arrested in the southern city of Deraa for protests inspired by the Arab Spring sweeping the region. The police tortured them, killed them and returned their mutilated bodies.
Protests engulfed the south. The Assad regime seemed uncertain at first how to respond. If there was an attempt at conciliation, it was shortlived.
An image of Mr Assad riddled with bullets at the provincial government office building in Hama. Pic: AP
Mr Assad returned to old family tactics. In 1982, his father Hafez had slaughtered thousands in the city of Hama after an uprising there.
Peaceful protests erupted across the country. Mr Assad ordered his security forces to crush them, opening fire on peaceful unarmed crowds. His brother Maher was filmed doing so personally.
Ultimately, Syrians had little choice but to resort to arming themselves. The uprising mutated into armed rebellion. Then outside powers joined in, turning the conflict into both a proxy and civil war.
People gather in Aleppo to celebrate the fall of Mr Assad. Pic: Reuters
Syrian opposition fighters celebrate the collapse of the government in the capital Damascus. Pic: AP
Assad could never afford to lose
Mr Assad was all in. From the minority Alawite sect, he could never afford to lose.
Desperate to prevail, he resorted to more and more desperate methods. Thousands of barrel bombs were dropped from helicopters. And then chemical weapons; chlorine gas, sarin and mustard.
Opponents disappeared in their tens of thousands into jails, where torture, sexual abuse and mass hangings were commonplace.
Mr Assad could never have held on without his allies. Russia in the air and Iran on the ground. Their support swung the war in his favour, the rebels kettled into the northwest of the country, a killing zone in the province of Idlib.
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Syrians react to Damascus being freed
Assad’s rotten and hollow regime has folded
The conflict seemed frozen for years but Mr Assad’s enemies have used the time to re-arm and learn new tactics and discipline.
His allies were distracted, Russia in Ukraine and Iran was weakened by events in Lebanon.
Mr Assad, the young eye doctor with the glamorous British wife, had become an evil murderous despot, perverted and corrupted utterly by power.
His rule lost all legitimacy years ago. Rotten and hollow, without external support, his regime has folded, a lesson to others, not least his allies, in Moscow and Tehran.
It has taken years and cost hundreds of thousands of lives but Syrians have finally overthrown their hated dictator. The dynasty Mr Assad’s father thought he was building has collapsed.
Mr and Mrs Assad may find refuge abroad, but the fate of the rest of their dreadful family remains unknown.
World
Thai prime minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra sacked for ethics violation after leaked phone call
Thailand’s prime minister has been sacked after a leaked phone call with a senior Cambodian politician caused outrage.
Paetongtarn Shinawatra, who was Thailand’s youngest PM, has been dismissed from office by the country’s Constitutional Court after only a year in power.
The court found Ms Shinawatra, 39, violated ethics in a leaked June telephone call, during which she appeared to kowtow to Cambodia’s former leader Hun Sen as the bordering countries were on the verge of an armed conflict.
She also criticised a Thai army commander – a taboo move in a country where the military is extremely influential.
Fighting erupted weeks later and lasted five days. At least 35 people were killed and more than 260,000 were displaced.
Ms Shinawatra, who was new to politics when she took office in August last year, apologised over the call and said she was trying to avert a war. She was suspended in July.
Ms Shinawatra arriving at Government House in Bangkok ahead of the verdict on Friday. Pic: Reuters
She is now the fifth Thai PM from, or backed by, the billionaire Shinawatra family to be removed by the military or the judiciary in 17 years, amid a battle for power between the country’s warring elites.
The ruling thrusts Thailand into more political uncertainty at a time of public unease over stalled reforms and a stuttering economy.
Speaking after the court’s decision, the exiting PM said “all sides” in Thai politics now “have to work together to build political stability and to ensure that there won’t be another turning point again”.
The focus will now shift to who will replace Ms Shinawatra.
Her influential, billionaire father, Thaksin Shinawatra, who also once served as Thailand’s PM, is expected to be at the heart of a flurry of bargaining to keep the ruling Pheu Thai party in power.
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
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The leader of the main opposition People’s Party has called for the next prime minister to dissolve parliament once they are installed.
The deputy PM, Phumtham Wechayachai, and the current cabinet will act as government caretakers until a new leader is elected by parliament. There is no time limit on when that must take place.
After all those raised hopes of peace, Ukraine has been hit by the second-worst night of Russian air attacks since the war began.
So much for diplomacy, despite the Alaska summit, then the Washington DC meeting.
The Kremlin says it was aiming at military targets, but yet again, the pictures tell a very different story.
Follow latest: UK summons Putin’s ambassador
Firefighters work at the site of a burning building after a Russian attack in Kyiv, Ukraine. Pic: AP
One civilian building after another was hit, more than a dozen people were killed, and British Council and EU buildings were also damaged.
So what’s going on? Why is Vladimir Putin doing it?
Because he can.
The Russian president thinks he’s winning this war, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that he’s using diplomacy to play for time while he carries on beating down the Ukrainians’ will to win.
And at the moment, no one is stopping him
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At least 14 killed in Kyiv attack
Ukraine is hitting back, particularly at Russia‘s oil installations, more of them going up in thick black smoke, after being hit by long-range Ukrainian drones.
It is taking a heavy toll on Putin’s ‘Achilles heel’, but on its own, analysts don’t expect it will be enough to persuade him to end this war.
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British Council building hit in Kyiv
The West can wring its hands in condemnation.
But it’s divided between Europe that wants a ceasefire and much more severe sanctions, and Donald Trump, who, it seems, does not – strangely always willing to sympathise with the Russians more than Ukraine.
He’s back to blaming Ukraine for starting the war, saying earlier in the week that Kyiv should not have got into a war it had no chance of winning.
It is a grotesque perversion of history. Ukraine, of course, had no choice but to fight to defend itself when it was invaded in an act of unprovoked aggression.
Every time the US president has condemned Russia for these kinds of attacks, he has never followed through and done nothing to punish them.
Rescue workers carry an injured woman after a Russian strike on Kyiv, Ukraine. Pic: AP
More worryingly for the Ukrainians, the Russians are getting the upper hand in the drones war, taking Iranian technology and souping it up into faster-moving drones that the Ukrainians are having increasing difficulty bringing down.
They expect as many as a thousand drones a night coming their way by the winter, and many, many more innocents to die.
Next week, Putin will join Chinese and North Korean leaders in a summit in Beijing, both supporting his war in Ukraine.
(L-R) Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un. Pics: Reuters
Read more from Dominic Waghorn:
Ukrainians warn they’re in danger of losing drone arms race
We are further away from peace now than we were two weeks ago
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
A war that began as one man’s mad idea has, in three and a half years, metastasised into a titanic struggle between east and west, fought increasingly with machines in a dystopian evolution of war.
If Mr Trump is not prepared to use his power to bring this war to an end, what will another three and a half years of his presidency bring?
It is a chilling question.
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