(Reuters) – Syria’s Bashar al-Assad used Russian and Iranian firepower to beat back rebel forces during years of civil war but never defeated them, leaving him vulnerable to their breathtaking advances when his allies were distracted by wars elsewhere.
President for 24 years, Assad flew out of Damascus early on Sunday to an unknown destination, two senior military officers told Reuters. The rebels declared the city “free from the tyrant Bashar al-Assad”. The half-century rule of the Assad family is over, the military command told officers, according to a Syrian official.
Statues of Assad’s father and brother have been toppled in rebel-held towns, while his images on billboards and in government offices have been toppled, trampled, burned or riddled with bullets.
Assad became president in 2000 after his father Hafez died, preserving the family’s iron-fisted rule and the dominance of their Alawite sect in the Sunni Muslim-majority country and Syria’s status as an Iranian ally hostile to Israel and the US
Shaped in its early years by the war in Iraq and the crisis in Lebanon, Assad’s rule has been defined by the civil war that emerged from the 2011 Arab Spring, when Syrians demanding democracy took to the streets in the face of deadly force.
Branded an “animal” in 2018 by US President Donald Trump for using chemical weapons – a charge he has denied – Assad has outlived many foreign leaders who believed his death was inevitable in the early days of the conflict, when he lost parts of Syria to rebels.
Aided by Russian airstrikes and Iranian-backed militias, it has reclaimed much of the territory it lost during years of military offensives, including siege warfare that UN investigators have condemned as “medieval”.
With his opponents largely confined to a corner of northwestern Syria, he reigned for several years of relative peace, although large parts of the country remained beyond his reach and the economy was shackled by international sanctions.
Assad has re-established ties with Arab states that once shunned him, but they have remained a pariah to much of the world and have never succeeded in reviving the shattered Syrian state, whose armed forces quickly retreated in the face of the rebel advance.
He has made no public remarks since rebels seized Aleppo a week ago, but told the Iranian president that the escalation was an attempt to reshape the region for Western interests, reiterating his view of the insurgency as a foreign-backed conspiracy.
In justifying his response to the rebellion at an early stage, Assad compared himself to a surgeon. “Do we tell him: Your hands are bloody? Or do we thank him for saving the patient?” he said in 2012.
At the beginning of the conflict, as the rebels took town after town, Assad radiated confidence.
“We will hit them with an iron fist and Syria will return to what it was,” he told soldiers after retaking the town of Maaloula in 2014.
He fulfilled the first vow, but not the second. Years later, large parts of Syria remained outside state control, cities were razed to the ground, the death toll exceeded 350,000, and more than a quarter of the population fled abroad.
RED LINES
Assad was supported by those Syrians who believed that he was saving them from hardline Sunni Islamists.
As al Qaeda-inspired insurgent groups grew in prominence, this fear resonated among minorities. Rebel forces have sought to reassure Christians, Alawites and other minorities that they will be protected as they advance this week.
Assad clung to the idea of ​​Syria as a bastion of secular Arab nationalism even as the conflict looked increasingly sectarian. Speaking to Foreign Affairs in 2015, he said the Syrian army was “composed of all colors of Syrian society”.
But to his opponents he incited sectarianism.
The sectarian edge of the conflict has been reinforced by the arrival of Iranian-backed Shiite fighters from across the Middle East to support Assad, and as Sunni Muslim-led states, including Turkey and Qatar, have backed the rebels.
Assad’s value to Iran was underscored by a senior Iranian official who declared in 2015 that his fate was a “red line” for Tehran.
While Iran has stood by Assad, the United States has failed to enforce its own “red line” – set by President Barack Obama in 2012 against the use of chemical weapons.
UN-backed investigations concluded that Damascus used chemical weapons.
A sarin gas attack on rebel-held Ghouta in 2013 killed hundreds, but Moscow brokered a deal to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons, avoiding a US response. Still, the poison gas continued to hit rebel areas, and a 2017 sarin attack prompted Trump to order a cruise missile response.
Assad rejected accusations that the state was to blame.
He similarly denied that the military had dropped explosive-laden barrel bombs that caused indiscriminate destruction. In a 2015 interview with the BBC, he appeared to play down the allegations, saying: “I haven’t heard of the army using barrels or maybe cooking pots.”
He also dismissed tens of thousands of photographs showing the torture of people in government custody as part of a plot funded by Qatar.
As the fighting died down, Assad accused Syria’s enemies of economic warfare.
But while he remained an outcast for the West, some Arab states that once supported his opponents began to open their doors to him. A beaming Assad was welcomed by the leaders of the United Arab Emirates during a visit there in 2022.
OPHTHALMOLOGIST
Assad has often portrayed himself as a modest man of the people, appearing in films driving a modest family car and in photographs with his wife visiting war veterans in their homes.
He assumed office in 2000 after his father’s death, but he was not always destined to be president.
Hafez prepared another son, Bassel, to succeed him. But when Bassel died in a car accident in 1994, Bashar transformed himself from an eye doctor in London – where he studied as a postgraduate – to an heir.
After becoming president, Assad appeared to adopt liberal reforms, optimistically painted as a “spring in Damascus.”
He freed hundreds of political prisoners, marched towards the West and opened the economy to private companies.
His marriage to British-born former investment banker Asma Akhras – with whom he had three children – helped fuel hopes that he could lead Syria down a more reformist path.
Highlights of his early association with Western leaders included attending the Paris summit where he was the guest of honor at the annual Bastille Day military parade.
But with the political system he inherited intact, signs of change quickly disappeared.
Dissidents were jailed and economic reforms contributed to what US diplomats described, in a 2008 embassy cable released by WikiLeaks, as “parasitic” nepotism and corruption.
While the elite were doing well, the drought drove the poor from the rural areas into the slums where rebellion would break out.
Tensions built with the West after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq turned the balance of power in the Middle East upside down.
The assassination of Lebanese Rafik al-Hariri in Beirut in 2005 fueled Western pressure that forced Syria to withdraw from its neighbor. An initial international investigation found that high-ranking Syrian and Lebanese figures were involved in the murder.
While Syria denied involvement, former vice president Abdel-Halim Khaddam said Assad had threatened Hariri months earlier – a charge Assad also denied.
Fifteen years later, a UN-backed court found a member of Iran-backed Hezbollah guilty of conspiring to kill Hariri. Hezbollah, an Assad ally, has denied any role.
