Bashar Assad falls after 14 years of war in Syria, ending decades of dynasty

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government collapsed on Sunday, capping his nearly 14-year power struggle as a brutal civil war left Syria divided and a proxy for regional and international powers. battlefield.

Assad’s fall stands in stark contrast to the first months of his unlikely tenure as Syria’s president in 2000, when many expected him to emerge as a young reformer after his father’s three decades of iron-fisted rule. The Western-educated ophthalmologist, 34, is a rather eccentric, tech-savvy computer nerd with a mild demeanor.

But when faced with protests against his rule that erupted in March 2011, Assad turned to his father’s brutal tactics to try to suppress them. When the uprising turned into an outright civil war, he deployed troops, backed by allies Iran and Russia, to bomb opposition-held cities.

International rights groups and prosecutors have accused Syrian government-run detention centers of widespread use of torture and extrajudicial killings.

Syria’s war has killed nearly half a million people and displaced half of the country’s pre-war population of 23 million. As the uprising turned into a civil war, millions of Syrians fled across the border to Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon and eventually Europe.

His departure ends the Assad family’s rule of less than 54 years. With no clear successor in sight, this plunges the country into further uncertainty.

Until recently, Assad seemed to be emerging from trouble. The long-running conflict has been resolved along frozen conflict lines in recent years, with Assad’s government regaining control of much of Syria’s territory, while the northwest remains under the control of opposition groups and the northeast is under Kurdish control under.

Although Damascus remains under crippling Western sanctions, neighboring countries have begun to accept Assad’s continued hold on power. The Arab League restored Syria’s membership last year, and Saudi Arabia announced in May the appointment of its first ambassador to Syria since it severed ties with Damascus 12 years ago.

However, at the end of November, opposition groups in northwest Syria suddenly launched an offensive, and the geopolitical tide quickly changed. Government forces quickly collapsed and Assad’s allies, preoccupied with other conflicts – including Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s year-long war with the Iran-backed militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas – seemed unwilling to Strong intervention.

Assad’s whereabouts were unclear on Sunday, with reports that he had left the country as rebels took control of the Syrian capital.

In 2000, he came to power through a twist of fate. His father had been grooming Bashar’s eldest brother Basil as his successor, but Basil died in a car accident in Damascus in 1994. Bashar ended his ophthalmology internship in London, was brought home, received military training, and promoted to colonel to build his credentials to one day rule the country.

After the death of Hafez al-Assad in 2000, parliament quickly lowered the presidential age requirement from 40 to 34 years.

A lifelong soldier, Hafez ruled the country for nearly 30 years, during which time he built a Soviet-style centralized economy and maintained such a stifling attitude toward dissent that Syrians dared not even joke about it to their friends. politics.

He pursues a secular ideology that seeks to mask sectarian divisions with images of Arab nationalism and heroic resistance to Israel. He aligned himself with Iran’s Shia clerical leadership, established Syrian rule over Lebanon, and established a network of Palestinian and Lebanese militant groups.

Bashar initially looked nothing like his strongman father.

He is tall and slender, his speech is somewhat slurred, and he gives people a quiet and gentle feeling. Before becoming president, his only official position was that of president of the Syrian Computer Association. His British-born wife, Asma al-Akhras, whom he married a few months after he took office, is attractive and stylish.

The young couple, who eventually gave birth to three children, seemed to shy away from symbols of power. They live in an apartment in the upscale Abu Brummane district of Damascus rather than in palatial mansions like other Arab leaders.

Assad began his term by releasing political prisoners and allowing for more open speech. During the Damascus Spring, intellectual salons emerged where Syrians could discuss art, culture and politics, something that had been impossible under his father’s rule.

But in 2001, after 1,000 intellectuals signed a public petition calling for multi-party democracy and greater freedoms, and others tried to form political parties, Sharon was eliminated by the feared secret police, who jailed dozens Activists.

Instead of political liberalization, Assad turned to economic reforms. He slowly lifted economic restrictions, allowing foreign banks to enter, opening the door to imports and empowering the private sector. Damascus and other cities long mired in monotony have seen a boom in shopping malls, new restaurants and consumer goods. Tourism is booming.

Abroad, he stuck to the course set by his father, based on an alliance with Iran and a policy of insisting on the full return of the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights, despite the fact that Assad never engaged in a military confrontation with Israel.

He suffered a severe blow when Syria lost its decades-old control over neighboring Lebanon following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. With many Lebanese blaming Damascus for the massacre, Syria was forced to withdraw its troops from the country and a pro-U.S. government came to power.

Meanwhile, the Arab world is split into two camps: U.S. allies such as Sunni-led Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and Syria and Shiite-led Iran, which are allied with Hezbollah and Palestinian militants. There is contact.

Throughout, Assad has relied largely on the same power base as his father at home: his Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam that accounts for about 10 percent of the population. Many positions in his government are filled by younger generations of the same families who worked for his father. Also attracted was the new middle class created by his reforms, which included prominent Sunni merchant families.

Assad also turned to his family. His brother Maher leads the elite presidential guard and will lead the effort to suppress the uprising. Their sister, Bushra, and her husband, Deputy Defense Minister Assef Shawkat, were powerful voices in his inner circle until he was killed in a 2012 bombing. Assad’s cousin Rami Makhlouf became the country’s largest businessman, leading a financial empire before the two feuded, causing Makhlouf to be pushed aside.

Assad also increasingly delegated key roles to his wife, Asma, until she announced in May that she was undergoing treatment for leukemia and withdrawing from the spotlight.

When protests erupted in Tunisia and Egypt, eventually toppling their rulers, Assad dismissed the possibility of the same happening in his country, insisting that his regime was more in the interests of the people. After the Arab Spring wave did spread to Syria, his security forces launched a brutal crackdown, and Assad has always denied that he faced a popular rebellion, instead blaming “foreign-backed terrorists” for trying to destabilize his regime.

His comments resonated with many of Syria’s minority groups – including Christians, Druze and Shiites – as well as some Sunnis, who are even more fearful of the prospect of rule by Sunni extremists Disgust with Assad’s dictatorship.

Ironically, on February 26, 2011, two days after Egypt’s Mubarak was toppled by protesters and before the wave of Arab Spring protests swept through Syria – in a 2012 email released by WikiLeaks – Assad e-mailed a joke he stumbled upon, mocking the Egyptian leader’s stubborn refusal to step down.

“New words added to the dictionary: Mubarak (verb): to stick or glue something. … Mubarak (adjective): slow to learn or understand,” it reads.