Standing Firm, Assad Wages War Shielded With a Smile
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and BEN HUBBARD
President Bashar al-Assad’s public activities — in which he acts as if
nothing untoward is happening in Syria — mask his increasing aggression
in battle and belie his supporters’ fears of an American attack.
Crisis in Syria
SANA, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
President Bashar al-Assad, center, at morning prayers marking the end of Ramadan last month.
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and BEN HUBBARD
Published: September 3, 2013
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria appeared to be in a jovial mood late
last week, even while facing a threatened American attack, joking with a
visiting Yemeni delegation about the political mess in nearby Egypt and
deriding his regional rivals as “half men.”
Tracking the Syrian Crisis
The Times is providing updates, analysis and public reaction from around the world.
Damascus was tense — streets deadly quiet, residents stockpiling food,
wives and children of the elite sent hastily abroad. But Mr. Assad kept
up appearances, greeting visitors at the entrance to the boxy white
presidential palace atop a hill or to his small personal office in a
wooded glen nearby. “He is not hiding,” a Syrian journalist noted.
That has been his strategy, echoed in the public activities of his
glamorous wife, Asma, since the March 2011 beginning of the conflict —
to act as if nothing untoward is happening, as if the gory civil war
that has laid waste to Syria is taking place in a different realm. Mrs.
Assad, rail thin, was even photographed recently wearing a trendy
fitness band on her wrist.
“He doesn’t give the impression that he is bloodthirsty or that he’s a
man of war,” said Talal Salman, the editor of Al-Safir newspaper in
Beirut, who was once close to the Syrian leader but broke with him early
over the bloody crackdown against peaceful protesters. “He does not
give the sense that he’s going to battle.”
But behind the veneer of normality, Mr. Assad has grown increasingly
aggressive, declaring his determination to wipe out the opposition,
insisting that he is standing against an imperialist enemy. Gone from at
least his public statements is any talk of finding a political
settlement, while he ratchets up his military drive to try to regain
lost territory.
For two and a half years, the president has never wavered from his
position that the uprising is a foreign plot — and he continues to
refuse to express any responsibility or remorse for the blood washing
over Syria. He has steadfastly rejected calling it a civil war.
In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro published on Monday,
Mr. Assad said, “In the beginning, the solution should have been found
through a dialogue from which political measures would have been born.”
That is no longer the case, he said, repeating his constant refrain that
90 percent of the opposition fighters are terrorists affiliated with Al
Qaeda. “The only way to cope with them is to liquidate them,” he said.
“Only then will we be able to discuss political measures.”
Mr. Assad, who turns 48 next week, was never meant to rule. Bashar was
the second son, summoned home from his training as an ophthalmologist in
Britain in 1994 after his macho older brother, Bassel, died driving his
Mercedes-Benz too fast on the Damascus airport road. But even before he
inherited the presidency from his father, Hafez, in 2000, Syrians had
hoped he would bring change. They even called him “The Hope.”
He championed computers at a time when the government still registered
fax machines. He spoke English. He married a well-educated, beautiful
woman and drove her to the opera in the family Audi. He described the
oppressive Baath Party that his father had built as “a corpse on his
shoulders,” Mr. Salman remembered.
But Mr. Assad ultimately balked at challenging his father’s legacy.
Instead the president never seriously entertained the idea that reform
required fundamentally altering the police state that his father had
begun constructing in 1970.
To this day he believes that system can be resurrected.
“This is his mood,” said Samir al-Taqi, a heart surgeon once close to
the president who fled into exile even before the uprising. “He thinks
he can return and resume ruling as he did before.”
Abdullah al-Maqtari, a Yemeni Parliament member from a party that
supports Mr. Assad, said the president exhibited “high morale” during an
hourlong discussion with his delegation on Thursday.
The Syrian government has a long history of bloody rivalry with the
Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement. So when one of the guests
referred to Mohamed Morsi, the deposed president of Egypt and a
Brotherhood leader, as a donkey, Mr. Assad interjected that the remark
insulted the animal, Mr. Maqtari said in an interview in Beirut.
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The Instagram account
established by the presidential palace pumps out a constant stream of
carefully staged pictures showing the president and his wife carrying
out their official functions. Here he is giving a speech about economic
development, even as the economy has virtually ceased to function. There
she is sweating over a huge vat of food to be distributed to the
families of fallen soldiers for the feast marking the end of the holy
month of Ramadan.
Some observers noted with glee that Mrs. Assad, a former investment banker raised in Britain, sported on her right wrist
a turquoise Jawbone Up, a trendy, roughly $100 gadget to track diet,
sleep and exercise routines. The constant data stream is meant to goad
users to improve their habits.
The war has curbed the couple’s unscripted public appearances. Mortar
shells have crashed into Malki, the leafy upscale neighborhood of
Damascus where they still live with their three children.
In early August, mortars struck in the vicinity of the presidential
motorcade as Mr. Assad left home for the morning prayer marking the
close of Ramadan, opposition activists said. One activist said everyone
walking on the street at the time was arrested — with a friend’s brother
released after two weeks. “They are very nervous,” she said of
government leaders.
The reality is that the war has entered a stalemate, and while Mr.
Assad’s forces have scored some recent victories, he presides over a
fraction of Syria. His violent reaction to the uprising led what was
once a proudly secular society into a largely sectarian conflict between
the majority Sunni Muslims and his small minority of Alawites, an
obscure branch of Shiite Islam.
“For him there is nothing to lose,” a Damascus-based analyst said,
speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “He cannot
compromise. He has to see this through. He cannot rebuild; he cannot
reconcile. He is stuck. He can rule over a pile of rubble — that is the
best he can do.”
The state propaganda apparatus seized on President Obama’s decision to
submit the proposed attack to a Congressional vote as a great victory
for Mr. Assad, referring to it as a “historic American retreat” and
portraying anyone insufficiently vocal in support of the government as a
“traitor.”
“The fact that it is being threatened is a very comfortable zone for
this regime, which has been under threats and sanctions for decades,”
said Fadi Salem, a Syrian political analyst based in Dubai, United Arab
Emirates. “It is a playground where they are very good at playing.”
If Mr. Assad maintained a calm demeanor, the threat of an American
attack rattled many, particularly government supporters. Syrians
wondered how far the Americans would go — something drastic or something
limited to signal disapproval of what the White House said was a poison
gas attack that killed more than 1,400 people in the Damascus suburbs
on Aug. 21.
Ayman Abdel Nour, a college friend of the president’s who now opposes
him, said Mr. Assad had been assuring those around him — including the
knot of relatives who remain his closest advisers — that the West was
bluffing. The president argued that Washington would not move to unseat
him because the main alternative, the increasingly Islamist opposition,
was far worse in Western eyes. That also appears to be the main basis
for much of the support he has left among Syrians.
“This is what Bashar Assad has told the top elite: that it will be a
cosmetic attack,” Mr. Abdel Nour said in a telephone interview from Los
Angeles. “They believe it deeply.”
With such an opaque government, discerning its real thoughts can be a
challenge. But many analysts believe that a cosmetic attack would help
rejuvenate Mr. Assad’s fortunes, at least temporarily, adding to the
decades-long list of confrontations with the West in which Syria has
prevailed merely by waiting out the uproar, by surviving.
International pressure over accusations that Mr. Assad’s government
carried out the 2005 assassination of Lebanon’s leading politician,
Rafik Hariri, was once so great, that he was forced to withdraw all
Syrian troops from Lebanon, for example. But the outrage gradually
dissipated.
The Assads think that they will prevail this time as they always have.
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