(Reuters) – Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has used Russian and Iranian firepower to repel rebels during his years-long civil war, but he has never been defeated and his allies have grown wary of other countries’ wars. While being captured, I became vulnerable to their breathtaking advances.
Assad, who has been president for 24 years, flew from Damascus early Sunday to an unknown destination, two senior military officials told Reuters. Rebels declared the city “liberated from tyrant Bashar al-Assad.” A Syrian officer said the military command had told them that the Assad family’s half-century rule was over.
In rebel-held cities, statues of Assad’s father and brother have been toppled, and pictures of Assad on billboards and government offices have been torn down, trampled, burned, and sprayed with bullets. did.
Mr. Assad became president in 2000 after the death of his father, Mr. Hafez, and has maintained his family’s iron-fisted rule, the domination of the Alawite sect in the Sunni Muslim-majority country, and his position as an ally of Iran against Israel and the United States. Syria’s position was maintained.
Although Assad’s early years were shaped by the Iraq war and the Lebanon crisis, Assad’s regime was defined by civil war. The civil war began in 2011 with the Arab Spring, when Syrians demanding democracy took to the streets and were met with deadly force.
Assad was branded an “animal” by US President Donald Trump in 2018 for using chemical weapons, an accusation he denies – but Assad is still in control of large swaths of Syria in the early days of the war. At the time of his loss, he outlived many foreign leaders who believed their death was imminent. rebel army.
With the help of Russian airstrikes and Iranian-backed militias, it has regained much of the territory lost in years of military offensives, including a siege branded “medieval” by U.N. investigators.
With hostile forces largely confined to a corner of northwestern Syria, much of the country remained out of control and the country enjoyed several years of relative calm, although its economy was hobbled by international sanctions.
Assad has rebuilt relations with Arab countries that once shunned him, but he remains an outcast in much of the world, leaving a collapsed Syria whose troops quickly withdrew in the face of advancing rebels. The country could not be revived.
He has not spoken publicly since rebels took control of Aleppo a week ago, but in a phone call with Iran’s president he said the uprising has dragged the region into Western interests. He reiterated his view that the rebellion was a foreign-backed conspiracy.
President Assad has justified his response to the initial uprising by comparing himself to a surgeon. “Do we say to him, ‘Your hands are full of blood’?” Or do we thank him for saving the patient? ” he said in 2012.
Early in the conflict, Assad exuded confidence as rebels seized town after town.
After retaking the town of Maalula in 2014, he told his soldiers: “We will hit them with an iron fist and Syria will return to normal.”
He fulfilled his first promise, but not the second. Years later, much of Syria remains outside state control, with cities destroyed, the death toll exceeding 350,000, and more than a quarter of the population fleeing the country.
red line
President Assad was supported by Syrians who believed he could save them from hardline Sunni Islamists.
This fear resonated among minorities as al-Qaeda-inspired rebels rose to prominence. Rebels this week sought to ensure that Christians, Alawites and other minorities would be protected as they advance.
Assad stuck to the idea of Syria as a bastion of secular Arab nationalism, even as the conflict appeared to be more sectarian than ever. In a 2015 interview with the Foreign Ministry, he said the Syrian army “is made up of all races of Syrian society.”
But to his opponents, he was stirring up sectarianism.
The conflict has become more sectarian, with Iranian-backed Shiite fighters arriving from across the Middle East to support Assad, and Sunni Muslim-led states such as Turkey and Qatar backing the rebels. became even stronger.
Assad’s value to Iran was emphasized by a senior Iranian official who declared in 2015 that his fate was a “red line” for Iran.
While Iran supports President Assad, the United States has failed to implement its own red line set by President Barack Obama in 2012 against the use of chemical weapons.
A UN-backed investigation concluded that chemical weapons were used in Damascus.
In 2013, a sarin gas attack on rebel-held Ghouta killed hundreds of people, but Russia brokered a deal to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons, avoiding a U.S. response. Still, poison gas continues to hit rebel areas, and the 2017 sarin attack prompted President Trump to order a response to cruise missiles.
President Assad denied that the state was responsible.
He similarly denied that the military dropped barrel bombs filled with explosives that caused indiscriminate destruction. He appeared to downplay the accusations in a 2015 interview with the BBC, saying: “I’ve never heard of the military using barrels or cooking pots.” said.
He also dismissed tens of thousands of photos showing torture of people in government custody as part of a Qatari-funded conspiracy.
Once the fighting subsided, President Assad accused Syria’s enemies of economic warfare.
But while he remains a pariah from the West, some Arab countries that once supported his opponents have begun to open up to him. When he visited the United Arab Emirates in 2022, he was greeted by a beaming President Assad.
ophthalmologist
Assad often portrayed himself as a humble citizen, appearing in movies in which he drove a modest family car and in photographs with his wife visiting the homes of veterans.
He became president in 2000 after his father’s death, but he was not necessarily destined to become president.
Hafez raised his other son, Bassel, as his successor. But when Bassell died in a 1994 car accident, Bashar, a London ophthalmologist he had studied as a graduate student, became his heir apparent.
Upon assuming office, Assad appeared to embrace liberal reforms that were optimistically described as the “Damascus Spring.”
He released hundreds of political prisoners, made overtures to Western countries, and opened the economy to private enterprise.
His marriage to British-born former investment banker Asma Akras – with whom he had three children – helped foster hopes that he could lead Syria down a more reformist path. .
High points of his early engagement with Western leaders included attending the Paris summit as the guest of honor at the annual Bastille Day military parade.
However, any signs of change soon disappeared as the political system he had inherited remained in place.
Dissidents were jailed and economic reforms contributed to what a US diplomat described as “parasitic” nepotism and corruption in a 2008 embassy cable released by WikiLeaks.
Although the elites fared well, the drought forced the poor from rural areas and into slums, where rebellions broke out.
Tensions with the West after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq have reversed the balance of power in the Middle East.
The assassination of Lebanon’s Rafik al-Hariri in Beirut in 2005 prompted pressure from the West to force the country to withdraw from neighboring Syria. Initial international investigations implicated senior Syrian and Lebanese officials in the killing.
Syria denied involvement, but former Vice President Abdel-Halim Haddam said Assad had threatened Hariri months earlier, an accusation that Assad also denied.
Fifteen years later, a UN-backed court found members of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah guilty of conspiring to kill Hariri. Assad ally Hezbollah denied any role.
