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BBC2's recent three part documentary series, A Dangerous Dynasty:House of Assad, was, like this year's earlier House of Saud:A Family at War, a thorough, insightful, and clear-headed analysis of a family that became a regime. A bloodthirsty, bellicose, lying, and corrupt regime that would cheat, maim, and kill even other family members to retain their grip on power.
It was timely too. As most observers are assessing the Syrian Civil War that has raged for over seven years and cost approximately half a million lives is coming to its endgame. Most of those same observers can't see anything other than a victory for the Assad family who have been supported during the conflict by Russia, Iran, and the Lebanon based Hezbollah.
No doubt when this bloody episode, fought between at least four opposing sides, finally comes to an end those who are left standing will dust themselves down and be brought in front of the BBC cameras for their own dissection of what the fuck happened but, for now, we've got this extensive story of how the Assad family came to power, how they clung to power, and how that ended up with the country of Syria in ruins.
As ever with these kinds of programmes there's a wealth of talking heads to offer perspective, hindight, and reportage. A US peace envoy, a former head of MI6, Syrian journalists, Bashar's former advisor, his former biographer, his wife Asma's childhood neighbour, Walid Jumblatt, former US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and even the former Tory MP for Braintree, Brooks Newmark!
Also, as ever with these programmes, it traces a narrative arc that should it be a work of fiction would beggar belief. We start in the unlikely environs of the Western Eye Hospital in London's Paddington in 1993 where a young Phil Collins fan (alarm bells should be ringing already) works as an ophthalmologist and, during a visit by a Middle Eastern woman, he's revealed to be the son of the Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad.
The quiet, hard working doctor, Bashar, hadn't mentioned it to his colleagues. So how did this former science student who claimed to enjoy humanitarianism, apart from In The Air Tonight, and appreciated being opened up to other cultures end up committing war crimes and gassing his own people?
To find out the programme makers take us back four decades to learn the story, and the dynamics, of the Assad family. Bashar was the middle, slightly unloved, child and his elder brother Bassel was the chosen heir. Their mother Anisa was a tough cookie, very much the strong woman behind the strong man that was her husband, and Bashar's father, Hafez.
It was Hafez who started the dynasty and it was a brutal one. He was almost a caricature of a violent Middle Eastern dictator. During military parades male soldiers would be forced to shoot puppies in front of him while female soldiers were ordered to bite the heads off snakes (there's footage to prove this). Hafez lived in a world of tremendous brutality, conspiracy, and paranoia.
Born in Qardaha, into extreme poverty in 1930, and one of eleven children, Hafez and his brother Rifaat, joined the army and worked their way up the ranks until, in 1970, they launched a coup which saw them assume power of Syria and put the former president, Nureddin al-Atassi, in jail where he would remain for twenty-two years. Finally being released so he could receive medical treatment in Paris where he would die within a fortnight.
Diplomats reported that during the first few years of the Assad regime you could travel around the country fairly easily and if you didn't bother the Assads they didn't bother you. But if you did?
In 1982 the Muslim Brotherhood rebelled in the hope of turning Syria into a strict Islamic republic so Hafez and Rifaat bombed the city of Hama, their stronghold, killing approximately 20,000 people. When asked about this Hafez said ""have our enemies enough power to survive fighting us?", words you can't help feeling have echoed down the years as Bashar slowly exterminates all his enemies, real or imagined
While Hama was reduced to rubble, in the hills overlooking Damascus the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange was put to work constructing a home for the family. The Presidential Palace, which mostly consisted of huge empty rooms clad in Carrara marble, cost over a billion dollars. There was a summer palace too. This one was situated near the Mediterranean and not just for the sunbathing. Hafez had identified the location as being a good spot to escape from should his people ever rise up against him.
At the same time as Bashar was studying, and then working, in London there was, across town, another Syrian student from a much less exalted background. Asma Ahkhras commuted each day from her home in Acton to King's College to study for a computer science degree. Asma had been born and raised in London to two Syrian parents but when her mother Sahar, who worked at the Syrian Embassy, found out Bashar was in town she saw an opportunity for her daughter. A daughter who'd always dreamed, one day, of 'helping' Syria!
Meanwhile, in Syria, Bassel, the heir apparent, was being moulded into presidential material. He was a champion horse rider (though this was made easier by imprisoning a rival who had beaten him), he loved BMWs and Porsches and drove round, wildly, with guns laying around the cars. Where Bashar was shy and diffident, Bassel was cocksure and unafraid.
Then, as so often with people who have no fear of death, he died. On 21st January 1994, at the age of 31, in, and this is no surprise, a car accident. This left a vacancy for the heir. His sister Bushra was immediately ruled out by her sex, another brother Majd was a drug user with mental health issues, and yet another, Maher, was, despite being Anisa's favourite, young and hot-headed.
With Hafez's brother Rifaat blowing his chance after being exiled following a failed coup this left Bashar as the only viable option and so the 28 year old eye doctor left London immediately for Damascus to take what essentially amounted to a crash course in dictatorship. He was fast tracked through the military and then given 'international diplomacy' lessons.
This meant learning what's known as 'the hamburger trick'. It's worked well for the Assad family in the past and it still does now. They pretend to cosy up to the US/UK/West, give the impression of being allies who'll help them, before, at the last minute pulling all the meat out of the deal leaving their supposed partners wrongfooted and with a bun with no burger in it.
Asma, who'd been working as an investment banker at JP Morgan, turned down a chance to attend Harvard to join Bashar in Damascus. She says she did this for love and she may be telling the truth but there's no denying she gained an enormous amount of power when she fell in love with that particular man and she seems, to this viewer, to be modelling herself on another woman who married into a very wealthy, and very suspicious, family. None other than the ol' people's Princess herself, Diana Frances Spencer.
10th June 2000. Hafez dies aged 69. Syrian newsreaders weep. MPs weep. People on the streets weep. Bashar becomes the leader of Syria and the army are ordered to arrest Rifaat if he returns to the country. Hafez's funeral is a perfect opportunity for both the regional and global powers to attempt to curry Bashar's favour under the cover of showing their respects for Hafez. A man, remember, who ordered puppies to be shot in front of him.
Iran, Palestine, USA, France, and Russia all send someone over. Robin Cook's there representing the UK but there's one tiny little problem. The Syrian constitution insists the country's leader must be at least 40 years old and Bashar is, at this point, just 34. So they change the constitution and hold an election in which Bashar's name is the only one on the ballet paper and, what do you know? He only goes and wins.
Bashar and Asma are soon married, and later give birth to a son they name Hafez in honour of his murderous grandfather, and then on 11th September 2001 something happens that takes the story on a very different arc. I think you probably know what it was that happened on 9/11 in New York and elsewhere in America, and then what happened in retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, but this shows events through a specifically Syrian prism.
The invasion of Iraq, specifically, left Syria in a key strategic position and Assad, remembering what he'd been taught by his father, tried the 'hamburger trick' once more. George W Bush and Tony Blair were given a guided tour of Damascus. Souks, mosques, billion dollar palaces, all the main sights and then a final offer of support from Bashar al-Assad which he never even remotely intended to come good on.
We can all recognise this obvious form of gamesmanship now it's been adopted by the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson but the Assads have been at it for decades. When Bashar and Asma visit the UK to meet the Queen before the Iraq war starts Asma looks in her element. From Acton to Buckingham Palace, she's living a fantasy princess life.
But the life of a dictator's wife and that of a fantasy princess are very different. Back in Syria they start erecting refugee camps near the Iraqi borders for the expected influx of displaced persons caused by the conflict but journalists who try to cover this story are threatened and when the invasion finally happens Bashar seems to realise on which side his bread is buttered and secretly releases Islamic fundamentalists from prison, arms them, and sends them over the border to Iraq to fight the Americans. Something the US, who were bombing civilians to their death, considered a 'hostile act'.
There doesn't seem to be a single world leader who's come out of the Iraq war looking good and, of course, these released prisoners were al-Qaeda sympathisers who would, a few years later, cross back into Syria with the aim of creating an Islamic State. In one act of carelessness and political gamesmanship Assad helped to consolidate the foundation of ISIS just at the same time the US and coalition forces were providing plenty of willing recruits to their cause.
As the US led coalition fights the Taliban in Afghanistan and topples, and kills, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Syria finds itself in a position of strategic importance. The West wants the support of Assad and Assad wants to be seen as a reputable leader on the world stage. Asma, on one of her regular charm offensives, speaks of being a "beacon of progress", the epitome of a modern woman, but her in-laws don't share that ambition.
Bushra, Bashar's sister, is a chip off the old block and her husband, Assef Shawkat, is a charismatic military man who appears to have his eyes on the presidency. Bashar's younger brother Maher is considered evil and crazy and his mother, Anisa, is the toughest, most hardline, of all of them. Even if she only expresses her views behind closed doors. She is a woman after all.
While Asma and Anisa jostle for position of 'first lady', something they both consider themselves to be, Bashar is discovering he's inherited a country of crumbling infrastructure with an abominable human rights record and he's worried that Syria will be the next US target after the fall of Iraq. They've been named as part of the 'axis of evil' after all.
Bashar flies a US biographer, Professor David Lesch, to Syria to attempt to tell his side the story in a sympathetic light but it's at the same time that things start happening to the west of Syria. The Lebanese politicians Walid Jumblatt and Rafic Hariri (then the PM of Lebanon) want to stop the Syrians ruling Lebanon, an independent country, as a virtual province and to embrace democracy.
Bashar's father had been responsible for the death of Jumblatt's father and, in a chilling episode very reminiscent of the recent MBS/Khashoggi case, forty days after that murder Jumblatt found himself shaking hands with Hafez. Despite that Jumblatt and Hafez, eventually, became friends, of sorts. Jumblatt has less respect for the 'simple' Bashar than he does the man who killed his own father.
When the UN takes the Lebanese side Bashar finds himself, again, with a dilemma. Should he accept the UN decision and be respected internationally or should he be 'strong' and refuse, making Syria, a 'rogue state'?
It seems that Anisa exerted pressure on Bashar to respect Hafez's legacy and not kowtow to UN pressure and on 14th February 2005 Hariri is assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut. All fingers point towards Syria and the UN launches a special investigation that identifies Maher and Assef Shawkat as the chief suspects. But it's less clear how much involvement Bashar had of the extrajudicial killing.
Bashar goes on television to, of course, deny all knowledge while in the US George W Bush insists Syria pull their troops out of Lebanon. Something to which Assad initially agrees but Anisa, again, is unhappy with this. The other first lady, Asma, too is also finding things not going to her liking. Her dream of being a beacon of progress, a role model for modern women, is in tatters as she realises, possibly not for the first time, she's married into a family of ruthless killers. They're not going to change. So she does.
That, however, does not stop Bashar and Asma rolling out another charm offensive and when Pope John Paul II dies his funeral in Rome in April 2005 is just the occasion. Bashar and Asma can be seen mixing with the likes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as the pontiff is laid to rest and the media can focus on Asma's lovely shoes and nice hair instead of all that rather inconvenient murdering business.
Soon Bashar sidelines Hafez's former advisors, the old guard, and removes any serious power from his rival Assef but that doesn't mean Syria is becoming more liberal. Quite the opposite. Bashar refuses to co-operate with the UN investigation into Hariri's murder and then a series of events occurs showing just how far the Assads will go to make all this go away.
Another car bomb kills a Lebanese journalist investigating the case, a key witness commits 'apparent suicide', the star witness retracts his statement live on Syrian TV, and a spy thought to be involved in the case is found with a bullet in his head. The UN chief investigator quits in fear of his life and the case collapses. Not for the first, or last, time intimidation wins the day and the murderers go free.
Bashar learns that if you're tough with the 'cowards' of the West you can get away with murder. After the upheavals of 9/11, the Iraq War, and the assassination of Hariri not only is Bashar al-Assad still standing but he's more emboldened than ever before. He's almost a different person now. A textbook dictator who soon embraces all the trappings of the job:- statues, flags, songs, huge portraits hanging from tower blocks, and to celebrate winning the 2007 election, in which, again, his name was the only one on the ballot, a parade of tens of thousands through the streets of Damascus carrying torches and wearing t-shirts with Bashar's face emblazoned on them. If only his proud dad could see him, eh?
Even Bushra and Anisa are pushed to the margins as writers and political activists are tortured and sent to prison without trial. There's work for Maher though. He oversees the torture and even the killing of civilians and at least seventeen prisoners for protesting against torture. Observers say Maher 'The Chief' al-Assad is 'violent', 'completely crazy', and 'psychologically ill'. They say if you crossed him he'd think nothing of killing your entire family or destroying your whole village in retaliation.
While Maher proudly administers these atrocities his older brother Bashar is in Paris to meet Nicolas Sarkozy for talks about the Iraq War, now in its fifth year. It's another publicity drive for Bashar and Asma and one that culminates in a spectacularly mistimed interview Asma does for Vogue magazine on 17th November 2010, the same day that a fruit seller in Tunisia sets himself on fire in protest against corruption and starts the chain of events that becomes known as the Arab Spring.
The then US ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, asks Bashar, indirectly and obliquely but in a way that Bashar definitely understood, if he was worried that the winds of change would reach Syria and he would be overthrown. Bashar coolly replied that that would not happen in Syria as his government had the full support of the Syrian people. "Syria is not Tunisia" he said.
Then the Arab Spring reached Libya and Bashar fine tuned his refrain. "Syria is not Libya" he riffed. But by the time the revolution reached Egypt things were getting a little bit too close for comfort and then in 2011, in the south western city of Daraa, a group of students daubed a wall with graffiti reading, in Arabic, "your turn next doctor".
Whilst Asma was appearing on the cover of Vogue as the 'Desert Rose', an 'element of light in a country of shadows', and touring the country 'inspiring' students, Bashar's cousin, Atef Najib - Daraa's head of security, was having the students responsible detained and tortured. An event that, predictably and correctly, caused further demonstrations in Daraa.
The hot-headed Najib cursed the protestors and offered to impregnate their wives so they could give birth to better children. Whilst Bashar was assuring, and lying to, Walid Jumblatt and others that he'd try to avoid further bloodshed the killing commenced and the situation escalated. Each transgressive act on the part of the Assad regime saw further protests and each protest saw Bashar refuse even the slightest reforms and crack down further, goaded on by cheers from his arse licking government of cowards and bullies and under pressure from his mother, Anisa, to respect his dead father's legacy.
Bashar's Quranic citation, saying that rebellion is worse than murder, basically amounted to a declaration of war upon his own people. He feared even the most meagre compromise would weaken the Assad regime and so it was that the deaths of protestors started to rise into the hundreds.
In a particularly gruesome case a thirteen year old boy, Hamza Ali Al-Khateeb was taken by the Syrian intelligence forces and his corpse returned to his family some days later covered in cigarette burns, showing further signs of torture, and with his penis cut off. Bashar denied the mutilation but admitted to the murder. It was a message to the Syrian people. This is what happens to protestors.
That's a rare instance of Bashar admitting to murder but most of the time he would deny, deny, and deny some more. Lie through his teeth. Try to give the impression that the army and the intelligence forces were somehow separate from him but documentation smuggled out of Syria by a defector reveals that Bashar not only knew, but ordered and signed off, the killings and torture.
It's suggested that, by this point, Bashar's brother Maher was virtually sharing power with Bashar in some kind of duopoly. A good cap/bad cop scenario in which both cops were rotten to the fucking core.
By 2011, with some members of the military now defecting to join the uprising against the Assads, the largest demonstration so far took place in Hama. A peaceful protest with flowers proffered and doves released. But remember Hama '82, Hafez bombing the Muslim Brotherhood and taking 20,000 lives? With Maher in Rifaat's role the fear is the protests will be crushed just as murderously and comprehensively.
More than one hundred deaths occured as the demonstration was extinguished but nothing on the scale of 1982's atrocity (though that comes soon enough) suggesting that Maher's grasp of history is better than his grasp of morality. Uprisings began in Aleppo and Homs, a Sunni town - the Assads belong to the Alawite sect, became the capital of the rebellion.
In this lethal chess game Bashar al-Assad made a surprise move by bringing his brother-in-law, and rival to the seat of power, Assef Shawkat in from the cold. If Assef could deliver Homs to the regime he will have passed the test Bashar has set for him whilst doing Bashar a huge favour. Homs was shelled and the hugely respected war correspondent and humanitarian Marie Colvin described it as the worst civilian crisis she'd seen in her life - and she'd seen a few.
The Assads, as we know, do not like bad PR. So they used the satellite positioning of Colvin's phone to locate her - and kill her too. Donald Trump and other populist leaders dog-whistle so hard against journalists that enough hatred is whipped up for people to take their own violent action against them. In Syria the method is more direct. You disrespect the Assads. They send somebody to kill you.
Colvin was killed in Homs and that's where Asma's family hail from. Asma, however, didn't seem too concerned about the plight of the people of Homs. She was busy ordering expensive luxury goods from Harrods while all this was happening.
In June 2012 the UN declared Syria to be in a state of civil war and as the situation worsened, with no endgame in sight, Assef, of all people, made overtures suggesting he was willing to negotiate to bring the war to an end. But Anisa did not like 'appeasers' and the Assads demand loyalty at all times. On 17th July 2012 Assef Shawkat was killed by a bomb inside the Ministry of Defence. Bashar and Asma did not attend his funeral.
What Bashar did do, however, was make a speech about getting rid of 'germs'. As a doctor he cleansed the body of germs and as the leader of Syria he is cleansing the country of germs. Some with a bomb and others, thousands of others - many of them children, with chemical weapons.
It's considered one of the most painful ways a human being can die and there is some very disturbing footage which leaves you in no doubt that even by the brutal, homicidal standards of the Assad regime this is something utterly horrific. Those were the pre-Trump days when the US was still considered the world's policeman so Barack Obama was petitioned to do something about it. Obama decided he didn't want the US to go it alone so he put it to Congress. A Republican dominated Congress had no desire to support Obama and the US public, so soon after Iraq and Afghanistan, had no stomach for being dragged into another bloody, messy war in the Middle East.
So Assad got away with it - and the chemical weapons attacks continued. In 2013 various fundamentalist Islamic groups merge, including many whom we saw Bashar secretly releasing from prison earlier, to form ISIS and declare their intention to behead Bashar al-Assad and take over Syria. Bashar is, remarkably, no longer the biggest cunt in Syria.
Millions leave the country. Not just for a better life but so they don't get killed. The vague threats of Katie Hopkins to turn the gunboats on them at this time less worrying than the genuine threats of being killed by either ISIS or Assad's forces.
Bashar's mother Anisa dies and on his way to her funeral Bashar survives an assassination attempt. The rockets sent to kill him instead take the lives of several members of his entourage but Bashar is unhurt. Still, the fact that his enemies are getting so close to him underlines that Bashar's days are looking numbered. At one point the Assads control only 20% of Syria. The ancient Semitic city and archaeological site Palmyra is destroyed by ISIS who are soon only three miles from the gate of the Presidential Palace.
While not a tear would be shed by a single right minded person should ISIS have carried out their wish to separate Bashar al-Assad's head and body it's hard to imagine ISIS taking control of Damascus would have ended well. But then it's not ending well with Bashar still in control either. The person he has to thank for his continued rule, and probably his continued existence, is Vladimir Putin.
The help of the mighty Russian military, presided over by the sinister yet unremarkable figure of Putin - dressed like a middle manager in a small town bank, turns the war in Assad's favour and that's where we are now. Waiting for, and expecting, Assad to retain power and Putin to be further emboldened on the world stage. As a man who can murder, and attempt to murder, his own people in foreign countries, the Skripals, Litvinenko, and interfere in foreign elections, his power is already both terrifying and completely unchecked.
Assad will get away with murder just as Putin got away with murder and just as the House of Saud will get away with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Powerful people can do whatever the fuck they want and the rest of us just have to negotiate our way through a world we were supposed to share but one that the violent, the rich, the lying, the homicidal, and the genocidal have taken over.
At least, with programmes like this we can see there are people with platforms bold enough to speak truth to power. It was not an easy watch and there is no way that it should have been an easy watch. But it was an important watch and one I'm glad I invested my time in. A confusing narrative was exquisitely drawn out and a picture painted of what Hannah Arendt memorably called the 'banality of evil'. As Bashar al-Assad sits in his office casually signing off death warrants for his own people his wife orders designer clothes and children have their genitals mutilated and die in agony having been bombed while lying in their hospital beds.
The programme ends with a picture drawn by a Syrian child. There are helicopters dropping barrel bombs and there are mutilated and bloodied corpses lying in the wreckage of the destroyed cities of Syria but the most telling detail is that the dead children are smiling and the living children are crying. Bashar al-Assad, the quiet, hard-working doctor who claimed to enjoy humanitarianism, has left Syria such a hell on Earth that the best a child born there could hope for is their own imminent death.
