From doctor to brutal dictator: the rise and fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad

Toppled president came to power keen to show he was different from his father but proved to be as repressive

Dec 8, 2024, The Guardian

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On the face of it at least, the Bashar al-Assad of 2002 presented a starkly different figure from the brutal autocrat he would become, presiding over a fragile state founded on torture, imprisonment and industrial murder.

He had been president then for just two years, succeeding his father, Hafez, whose own name was a byword for brutality.

For a while the gawky former ophthalmologist, who had studied medicine in London and later married a British-Syrian wife, Asma, an investment banker at JP Morgan, was keen to show the world that Syria, under his leadership, could follow a different path.

Reaching out to the west, he pursued a public relations campaign to show the young Assad family as somehow ordinary despite the palaces and the ever visible apparatus of repression.

Visiting Damascus that year before Bashar’s state visit to the UK, arranged by the then prime minister, Tony Blair – the high point of that engagement – I was invited for a private coffee with Assad, who sat on a white sofa in an expensively tailored suit.

Suggesting some uncertainty, he was curious about how Syria was seen in the world, floating possibilities for a change, including a reset in the relationship between Damascus and Israel.

It was a constructed iteration of the Assads – highlighting Asma’s much-vaunted “charitable” works and Bashar’s brief embrace by the west – that nodded to an ambition to transform Hafez’s Syria into something more like a version of Jordan’s paternalistic royal family. More manicured. Certainly more PR-savvy. A dictatorship all the same.

In the midst of the conversation, however, Bashar proffered a chilling and almost throwaway line as he reflected on the previous year’s 9/11 attack on the US by al-Qaida and the subsequent American invasion of Afghanistan.

The world should know, Bashar insisted, that his father had been “right” all along in his brutal crushing of Islamist insurgents.

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