From a palace to a dacha: the Assads in Moscow. The Syrian dictator has fled to Russia with his family. Their life in the suburbs will be as semi-guests, semi-prisoners of Putin, says Simon Sebag Montefiore. Asma and Bashar al-Assad have been granted asylum in RussiaGAMMA-RAPHO; GETTY IMAGES. Tuesday December 10 2024, 12.01am, The Times. The rise and fall of the House of Assad is the story of Syria and the Arab world over the past century. At its most fundamental it is about a family and power. At its height, the Assads resembled a royal family, courted by American and British leaders, praised for their wisdom, authenticity, anti-western radicalism and glamour by western academics, activists and progressives — and even Vogue magazine. But they ended more like a murderous mafia clan, enriched by drug dealing, empowered by the mass killing of 40,000 people in a week, of 600,000 in a decade, butchery unequalled in the Middle East in modern times.. Their fall has been awesomely fast. And now the former dictator Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma face the prospect of a withering life of obscurity — semi guests, semi prisoners — although they may feel at home as they browse Moscow’s gilded shopping malls, protected by the security organs and cushioned by the vast wealth they are said to have spirited away. Their new home may be a government dacha in the Muscovite suburbs or one of their own properties. The Assads are said to have a huge portfolio in Moscow, including 18 flats in the City of Capitals skyscraper complex.. Vladimir Putin is loyal to his vassals and the Assads’ Russian connections run deep into the Soviet past: Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, was a frequent visitor to Soviet leaders from Brezhnev onwards and the children of Bashar and Asma also have Russian connections. Hafez, 21, the oldest son, named after the grandfather, just graduated from Moscow State University in number theory, and Asma attended the graduation; their other children — daughter Zein, 20, and youngest Karim, 19 — are likely to study there. Although their aunt Bushra lives quietly in the UAE, their uncle Maher may well be in Moscow too — he has vanished for the moment.. Assad with Vladimir Putin in Moscow this year. VALERY SHARIFULIN/POOL/AFP. The family leave a ruined Syria behind them, divided, war-torn, fragmented into fiefdoms. And as some foreigners — Russians, Hezbollah Lebanese, Iranians — evacuate, others occupy swathes of the country. Today, as Islamists and secularists negotiate a new government in Damascus, the Turks attack Kurds and expand their occupation, the Israelis destroy chemical weapons and hit jihadist factions, the Americans strafe Islamic State positions — and in the capital, a chameleonic former al-Qaeda jihadist warlord al-Jolani promises tolerance. All the while in the Assads’ nightmarish Sednaya prison, prisoners are buried so deep in his subterranean Hades of torture and murder that some can still be seen on cameras in cells that can’t be found …. The founder of the family power was Bashar’s father Hafez, born into a poor Alawite family in Latakia, who the new Syrian airforce where he rose fast. He joined a radical socialist-nationalist pan-Arabist Baath (Arab Resurrection) Party — anti-Western, anti-Israel. In 1948 the new Syrian state attacked the new Israeli state but was defeated in battle, a trauma that sparked a series of military coups throughout the Fifties and Sixties. Marrying a relative, Anisa Makhlouf, a member of a connected Alawite clan, Assad started a family but lived for politics, formed by the struggle against Israel and inspired particularly by the rise of Gamal Abdul Nassser, the charismatic Egyptian dictator.. Advertisement. In 1963 Assad was one of the Baathist officers who seized power, navigating the fissiparous factional feuds to emerge as Defence Minister in 1966 – just before Nasser overreached by leading the Arab powers including Syria into the catastrophic Six Day War. In 1969 Assad and his ruthless brother Rifaat launched a coup: Hafez became president, Rifaat commander of a praetorian Battalions for Defence of the Revolution. In 1970 meant that Assad aspired to be the new leader: he flew to Moscow to make an alliance with the Soviet leader Brezhnev who in return for naval base Tartus armed the Syrians enabling them to surprise Israel in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 which restored Arab military kudos.. But Assad’s Egyptian ally Anwar Sadat betrayed Assad by making peace with Israel; Assad rejected any peace. When civil war broke out in Lebanon, Assad intervened, sending in 30,000 Syrian troops. At home Assad now ruled like Stalinist autocrat with a cult of personality. In 1979 the Shah of Iran was overthrown by Imam Khomeini, a Shiite revolution that sparked a surge of fundamentalist fervour across Shiites and Sunnis. Assad, a secular Alawite nationalists, became the trusted ally of Khomeini and his successor Ali Khamenei who still rules Iran today.. In 1982 Assads crushed a Moslem Brotherhood uprising in Hama brutally with Rifaat slaughtering jihadist prisoners in prisons then butchering around 40,000 civilians in just a few days – by far the greatest slaughter of Arab civilians in modern history. In royal dynasties the greatest danger is always from those closest to the ruler: when Hafez suffered a heart attack, Rifaat tried to seize power and was then exiled. Instead he turned to his swaggering eldest son Bassel.. Bashar’s father Hafez had five children. Photographs and cine-camera family movies are classics of 1970s modest luxury, showing how their life revolved around the tough old autocrat — they resemble a mix of a royal and a mafia family. The Mukhubarat secret police were run by one cousin, the other agencies by another, the presidential guard by another. The Alawite family promised to protect all the groups in Syria — Christians, Kurds, Sunnis — but Assad ruled through terror. Nonetheless Hafez impressed western academics and anti-Israel, anti-American progressives with his supposed Arab authority, authenticity, wisdom and wiliness: they called him the Sphinx of Damascus.. • Bashar al-Assad’s British wife Asma in exile as Syrians celebrate in UK. Advertisement. His eldest daughter Bushra was said to be toughest, cleverest and closest to her father, and she married Assef Shawkat, head of military intelligence; the eldest son Bassel grew up macho, flamboyant, trigger-happy and sporty, driving fast cars, winning equestrian championships and taking on control of the presidential bodyguard. Assad propaganda promoted him as the Arab hero, the Golden Knight, and Assad himself as Abu Bassel — Father of Bassel. But in 1994 Bassel was killed driving his Mercedes: some believed the brakes were tampered with. In any case Hafez now recalled his next son, Bashar, who was the very opposite of dashing Bassel: pin-headed, chinless and lispy, an eye surgeon trained in London who had married into a middle-class Sunni family in London, to Asma, educated at the posh London private school Queens College, where she was known as Emma. Now they went home, where Bashar joined the military and took control of his father’s Lebanese rule, learning how the family enforced their control through terror and assassinations.. When his father died in 2000, he was buried in a sumptuous marble tomb in his Latakian home town beside the fallen knight Bassel. Bashar succeeded aged 34. Asma seemed more delicate than the brutal cousinhood of Assads; Bashar’s fearsome mother, the widow Inisa, and his sister Bushra were hostile to the haughty Asma. But she had her uses.. Assad with Asma and their children, Hafez, Karim and Zein. AFP. Bashar launched a publicity drive to present himself and Asma as liberal reformers, a campaign that won over gullible westerners with her talk of fashion and philanthropy: a Vogue article entitled “Desert Rose” was a classic of its type, praising “the long-limbed beauty with the trained analytical mind”. The great poet and wit Clive James wrote a brilliant poem about her:. Asma unpacks her pretty clothes … the torturers arrive by bus at every change of shift, while victims dangle from their cracking wrists, beaten with iron bars, young people pray to die soon … Her husband’s doing, The screams never reach her where she is … We sort of knew but he seems so modern with Asma beside him.. In 2011 revolutions broke out against dictators across the Arab world and spread to the police state of Syria. Russia had inherited Soviet alliances with Arab leaders including Gaddafi and Assad; now Putin saw the fall of Arab dictators as a threat. In Syria, Bashar embraced the murderous brutality of the family business, shooting protesters including schoolchildren and intensifying a secret police terror.. Advertisement. • Who are HTS? Syrian rebels who toppled Assad. As the revolution spread, Assad deliberately released jihadist terrorists to taint the liberal revolution, complicating the uprising in which Islamist paramilitaries now fought alongside liberal revolutionaries and Kurdish fighters. When Assad was in danger of falling, his Iranian allies rushed to help him with their al-Quds Force mastermind General Soleimani orchestrating his own Revolutionary Guards and an influx of Hezbollah militia while his Russian ally Putin bombed the rebels. Using the slogan “Assad or the country burns”, Assad unleashed his secret police and militias in a brutal terror on a scale unseen before or since in the Arab world: hundreds of thousands of civilians were murdered by Assad, whose enforcers were run by family members like his mad dog brother Maher and brother-in-law Shawkat, while hundreds of thousands of others were arrested and ferociously tortured; Assad photographers took photos of the heaps of dead bodies; millions of Syrians fled abroad.. At the Elysee palace in Paris, 2008. DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP. Beleaguered in the presidential palace, Assad was isolated as he and his brother Maher terrorised the country. In 2013 Assad used chemical weapons on his own people but though the British PM David Cameron tried to organise his overthrow, parliament refused and President Obama, despite announcing this as a red line, did nothing, instead focusing on his appeasement of Iran. Maher was attacked and lost a leg; their brother-in-law, Bushra’s husband Shawkat, assassinated. Asma was diagnosed with cancer …. Just as Assad’s fortunes hit their nadir, Bashar’s policy of unleashing the jihadists paid off: out of Iraq and eastern Syria, a new jihadist movement, Islamic State, conquered half of Iraq and Syria, enslaving women, burning and beheading prisoners. The horrified world, led by the US, united to destroy IS, while on the ground US allies, the courageous Kurdish peshmergas, defeated the monstrous Islamists — as Assad and his backers Russia, Iran and Hezbollah focused on their own oppositionists.. • How will Donald Trump deal with Syria?. Advertisement. Asma’s cancer went into remission; her eldest son was studying in Moscow and she spent her time ordering fashion, including a pair of £7,000 crystal-spangled shoes and £350,000 of furniture online while leaked emails show Bashar flirting with his worshipful female aides and quoting his beloved country songs as the country burnt. The Assads were now transformed from royal family to mafia clan surviving on murder, loot and drugs.. The death of the matriarch Anisa Assad liberated Asma to become a potentate in her own right, approving appointments, carving up the state and economy to grant her own family stakes in telecoms, property and banking. The tiny ruling clique of Assad cousins now divided up the economy while the real business became the manufacture of a new cheap drug, Captagon, that was now the family business, smuggled through the Arab world by Hezbollah and Assad cousins. The Economist declared Asma “banker princess warlord: the many lives of Asma Assad”, revealing how the Desert Rose became the Lady of Jasmine, key regime player, finally winning acceptance from the brutal Assads. The family financier, uncle Mohammed Makhlouf, had now consumed so much of the Syrian economy that Assad demanded half of it back. The Assads raked in cash that they probably invested in Russian property — and gold bullion.. The Rublyovka region is a prestigious residential area in the western suburbs of Moscow. By the 2020s, it seemed as if Assad had won. President Erdogan’s Turkish army invaded from the north, occupying a zone and arming their own Syrian militia; Islamists under the former al-Qaeda and IS warlord al-Jolani occupied Idlib in the north; the Kurds ruled the entire northeast with American backing — but ultimately Iran, Hezbollah and Russia won the war for Assad. Russian military success in Syria gave so much confidence to Putin that it was one of the factors that led to his invasion of Ukraine. An Iranian empire was surging: a Shia crescent from Iran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon. The Gulf states started to open relations with Assad, while in western Europe and America progressives, academics and anti-colonialist activists, along with underinformed media panjandrums, praised Assad: indeed, even a week ago, a notorious UN rapporteur was still defending him. Now he is in exile in Russia.. As long as Putin is dictator, the Assads should be safe there, albeit irrelevant and ignored. Meanwhile, their palaces have been sacked, Asma’s couture looted, Bashar’s sports car collection exposed, family statues felled. One can only celebrate the fall of the House of Assad but no one knows if this is the end of Syrian agony or just the start of another round of its tournament of brutal power.. It is said they escaped with Russian help and $2 billion (though this is the figure always given for fleeing dictators) but did they manage to save two sacred family treasures? Al-Jolani threatened to turn the marbled pristine Assad mausoleum in Qardaga into a “public latrine”.. Advertisement. As far as we know the tomb where the bodies of Hafez and Bassel lie in Assad’s home town still stands, but are the bodies still there? In AD750 when the Umayyad dynasty fell to the black-flagged Abbasids, who like IS fought their way across Iraq, they exhumed the bodies of the Umayyad monarchs, beheaded them, had them whipped, skulls shattered and crucified. A last gruesome spectacle may await the Sphinx and the Golden Knight.Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of The World: a Family History of Humanity and Jerusalem: a History of the Middle East. What the fall of Assad means for Israel and Turkey. December 09 2024, 7.02pm. Catherine Philp. , World Affairs Editor. PHOTOGRAPHY. 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