Monday, May 16, 2011
I confess. I never watched The Sopranos. I didn’t
need to; I already had my fill of blood, murder, mayhem,
fratricide and evil by observing the Assad family saga since
the early 1970s, when Hafez Assad carried out his coup in Syria.
I admit that as an intern reporter for the Near East
Report, I predicted that, as was the way of Syrian
leaders up to that point, Assad’s tenure would be brief and
would probably end with acute lead poisoning. Of course, he
went on to lead Syria for almost 30 years, and then passed
on the gavel – and stiletto, bomb and pistol – to his son
Bashar in 2000.
Bashar Assad wasn’t supposed to be the successor. That was
the role intended for the favorite son, army officer Basil,
who died in a car crash in 1994. But no death in Syria or
Lebanon is accepted as natural or accidental, and it was
suggested that Basil was killed for his role in suppressing
the Syrian- Lebanese drug trade in the Bekaa Valley.
Ironically, that massive drug trade helped make Syria’s
ruling elite wealthy, and today the Bekaa, now under
Hezbollah rule, still continues to fill the veins of addicts
around the world. Money laundering, weapons and drug dealing
are very lucrative businesses for the Assads and their
associates.
The Assad regime was clearly
behind Sunday’s incursion into Israeli-held Majdal Shams on
the Golan Heights. Besides serving as a diversion from the
ongoing repression, the gathering of hundreds of
“demonstrators,“ purportedly Palestinians, could only have
been organized by Assad’s government in collusion with
Hamas, headquartered in Damascus. No gathering of more than
five people is tolerated in Syria, not to mention the busing
of hundreds across a country under martial law.
Bashar's coronation in 2000 didn’t go over well with his
brutal uncle, Rifaat, who over the years had sought to grab
the Syrian reins. When president Hafez suffered a heart
attack in 1984, Rifaat’s large private army, the Saraya al-Difa
guard, began to seize strategic sites in Damascus. Hafez
pulled himself out of his sick bed, rallied his loyalists
and banished Rifaat to Europe.
Rifaat had served his brother loyally just a few years
earlier, when he was dispatched to eradicate the Muslim
Brotherhood insurrection in Hama in 1982. In 1980, in
response to an attempted assassination of the president,
Rifaat’s army massacred 1,000 Brotherhood members held in
the dreaded Tadmor Prison.
Rifaat’s war on the Brotherhood was ruthless. Tom Friedman
described in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem how
“throughout the next year, surprise searches of Hama,
Aleppo, and other Muslim Brotherhood strongholds became a
weekly event. During these roundups, curbside executions
were regularly carried out.”
By 1982, Friedman wrote, Assad “decided to end his Hama
problem once and for all... playing by his own rules... Hama
Rules.”
Friedman details the horrors of Rifaat’s troops torturing,
pulverizing, gassing and massacring Hama’s residents.
Telephone and telegraph links
“between Hama and the rest of humanity” were cut. Directing
deadly tank fire, artillery and attack helicopters, Rifaat’s
troops carried out his order, “I don’t want to see a single
house not burning.” Rifaat later boasted to a Lebanese
businessman that his troops had killed 38,000 people in
Hama, Friedman reported.
After his exile, Rifaat reportedly tried cozying up to the
Americans and purchased a mansion in Mclean, Virginia, not
far from Teddy Kennedy’s home. Apparently this was too much
for Hafez. Rifaat’s home was torched by arsonists, and
Rifaat was never known to step on American soil again. He
resides in Britain today.
The Hafez-Rifaat homicidal partnership is a family
tradition, now bequeathed to President Bashar and his
brother, Maher, the commander of the Syrian Army’s Fourth
Division. That division has been tasked with taming Deraa by
any means necessary, including Hama Rules. Deraa is where
the popular uprisings began in February.
Why does Deraa have the distinction of becoming the new
center for rebellion?
The Turkish press revealed the answers:
“Ten children living in the Syrian city of Deraa were inspired by the Arab Spring and wrote an expression of freedom on walls,” reported the Hurriyet daily. “They were arrested by the intelligence agency [headed by Assad’s brother-in-law Assef Shawqat]. Families of the children applied to the Office of the Governor, but that didn’t help. They went to the intelligence offices. That didn’t help either. Finally, the Office of the Governor was raided and the children were taken back. There was a problem, however: Some of the nails of the children had been removed, and some had been raped. The families went ballistic, and their tribes were outraged. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets, burned down the intelligence headquarters and the phone company belonging to [Assad’s billionaire cousin] Rami Makhlouf. This is how the fear threshold against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria was passed.”
Besides running Syria’s government with an iron fist, the
Assad clan and its associates control Syria’s media, army,
phone companies, intelligence service, tourism services and
banks. They’re also involved in smuggling, the drug trade
and arms dealing in and out of the region. Lebanon, a
regional financial center and smuggling hub, is important
for Syria’s kleptocrats, and Syrian hegemony in Lebanon is
critical for the clan’s financial success.
If the Assad associates are not blood relatives or from the
Alawite sect, then they’re likely connected through
marriage.
Both Hafez and Rifaat were married to women from the wealthy
Makhlouf clan, and the Makhloufs play leading roles in the
economy and the army.
Another one of Rifaat’s four wives is the sister-in-law of
Saudi King Abdullah, which reflects some of the long-playing
intrigues between Syria and Saudi Arabia, possibly including
the 2005 assassination of Saudi favorite and Hezbollah/ Iran
nemesis Rafik Hariri.
One of the world’s leading arms dealers and drug traffickers,
Syrian Monzer al-Kassar, had close relations with Syrian
officials. His father, Muhammad, was
an official in Hafez Assad’s
government. His wife is the sister of a former Syrian
intelligence head. One of Rifaat’s daughters was reportedly
Monzer Kassar’s mistress. Of his many passports, one was Syrian,
NBC Dateline reported. His name has been tied to the
Lockerbie terrorist bombing and even to the Iran- Contra weapons
deal. Kassar was also a close friend and quartermaster for
terrorist leader Abu Abbas, leader of the Achille Lauro
cruise boat attack. Kassar was reported to have served as
liaison between the Syrian government and Argentine president
Carlos Saul Menem, and his name was raised as a suspect in the
bombings of the Israeli Embassy and the AMIA Center in Buenos
Aires. Kassar was finally arrested in a sting operation to sell
arms to South American terrorists. He was convicted in a US
federal court in 2008.
US and British officials have suggested that Bashar Assad could
still emerge as a “reformer.”
But the systemic corruption, brutality and evil of Syria’s
leadership is well beyond reform. The cancerous ganglia of the
Assad clan, growing and metastasizing for 40 years, must be
excised, even at the risk of losing
the patient.