30/07/2012

Late in the afternoon of Dec. 1, 2010, I got a call from a features editor atVogue. She asked if I wanted to go to Syria to interview the first lady, Asma al-Assad.

SANA-AP

“Absolutely not,” I said. “I don’t want to meet the Assads, and they don’t want to meet a Jew.”

The editor explained that the first lady was young, good-looking, and had never given an interview. Vogue had been trying to get to her for two years. Now she’d hired a PR firm, and they must have pushed her to agree.

“Send a political journalist,” I said.

“We don’t want any politics, none at all,” said the editor, “and she only wants to talk about culture, antiquities, and museums. You like museums. You like culture. She wants to talk to you. You’d leave in a week.”

A week: clearly my name was last on a list of writers that the first lady had rejected because they knew nothing about Mesopotamia. I didn’t consider the possibility that the other writers had rejected the first lady.

“Let me think about it,” I said. I had written four cover stories that year, three about young actresses and one about a supermodel who had just become a mother. This assignment was more exciting, and when else would I get to see the ruins of Palmyra?

I looked up Asma al-Assad. Born Asma Akhras in London in 1975 to a Syrian cardiologist, Fawaz Akhras, and his diplomat wife, Sahar Otri. Straightforward trajectory. School: Queen’s College. University: King’s College. Husband: president of Syria.

Syria. The name itself sounded sinister, like syringe, or hiss. My notions about the country were formed by the British Museum: the head of Gudea, king of Lagash, treasures from Ur, Mesopotamia, Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon—all of which had occupied what is now Syria. Both Aleppo and Damascus had been continuously inhabited for more than five millennia. This was where civilization was born, 6,000 years ago.

I knew the country’s more recent past was grim, violent, and secretive. The dictator Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970 and, until his death in 2000, ran the country as cruelly and ruthlessly as his idol Stalin. He was an Alawite; he dealt with a Sunni Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama in 1982 by killing 20,000 of its men, women, and children.

Bashar al-Assad looked meek. He’d been studying ophthalmology in London in 1994 when his older brother, the heir to the presidency, died in a car accident. Bashar was brought home, put into a series of military uniforms, and groomed for power. At Hafez’s death, a referendum asked whether the 34-year-old Bashar should become president. There was no other option. He “won.” At first he was perceived as a reformer, but his only reforms were to do with banking.

Under Bashar al-Assad, Syria was still oppressed, but the silence and fear were such that little of the oppression showed, apart from vast numbers of secret police, called Mukhabarat.

“You have to choose between being secure and being … psychotic,” Bashar al-Assad told me. (Bulent Killc / AFP-Getty Images)

Syria and Hizbullah were the suspects in the 2005 car-bomb murder of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Damascus was home base for Hizbullah and Hamas; Syria was close to Iran. But these alliances also made Syria a viable interlocutor for the West, even a potential conduit to peace in the Middle East. In December 2010, Obama had just named a new ambassador, the first since George W. Bush had broken off diplomatic relations in 2005.

In 2010 Syria’s status oscillated between untrustworthy rogue state and new cool place. A long 2008 piece on Damascus in the British Condé Nast Travellerdescribed its increasing hipness. It was the Soviet Union with hummus and water pipes. In the worldview of fashion magazines, Syria was a forbidden kingdom, full of silks, essences, palaces, and ruins, run by a modern president and an attractive, young first lady. Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry had visited, as well as Sting, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Francis Coppola.

It was also a Pandora’s box.

Syria was a dictatorship, which was the default mode throughout the region. Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a veteran of 30 years in the CIA, says: “Until a year ago, every Arab state was a police state—some cruel, some not so cruel.”

In 2010 I didn’t call Bruce Riedel.

I called Barbet Schroeder, who’d made the ultimate documentary about a dictator, General Idi Amin Dada.

“Hafez al-Assad was the worst evil genius in the world, but I think his son is trying to be a reformer,” said Schroeder.

Someone who had a house in Aleppo said that Asma al-Assad was a bright, energetic woman, to all appearances English, who drove herself everywhere. And, unlike other heads of state he knew, “the Assads really care about their people.”

An aesthete who went to Syria for its ruins raved about Damascus, mentioned in passing some men seen hanged outside the Four Seasons Hotel, and then raved about Palmyra.

I should have said no right then.

I said yes.

It was an assignment. I was curious. That’s why I’d become a writer. Voguewanted a description of the good-looking first lady of a questionable country; I wanted to see the cradle of civilization. Syria gave off a toxic aura. But what was the worst that could happen? I would write a piece for Vogue that missed the deeper truth about its subject. I had learned long ago that the only person I could ever be truthful about was myself.

Asma al-Assad’s stated mission: “Empowering Syrian children to build a civil society.” (Wael Hmedan / Reuters)

I didn’t know I was going to meet a murderer.

There was no way of knowing that Assad, the meek ophthalmologist and computer-loving nerd, would kill more of his own people than his father had and torture tens of thousands more, many of them children.

In December 2010, there was no way of knowing that the Arab Spring was about to begin, and that it would take down the dictators of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt.

There was no way of knowing, as I cheered the events in Tahrir Square, that I would be contaminated because I had written about the Assads. There was no way of knowing that this piece would cost me my livelihood and end the association I had had with Vogue since I was 23.

I met the devil and his wife, with full fashion-magazine access to their improbable fishbowl apartment where they lived out their daily lives on display to the eyes of thousands, like a Middle-Eastern version of The Truman Show. They showed off their fantasy lives for me.

Assad told me just who he was, but I didn’t use it; he repeated it a year later to Barbara Walters, but no one heard him.

The Assads’ PR firm, Brown Lloyd James, took care of my visa. In the offices, flat-screen televisions mounted on walls played only Al Jazeera—one of their clients, along with Gaddafi’s son Saif and the government of Qatar. Lloyd and James were absent, but Brown turned out to be Peter Brown, a bearded Englishman with a languorous voice who’d once managed the Beatles.

Asma al-Assad was about to sign an agreement with the Paris Louvre, about Syrian antiquities. We sat with Brown’s associate Mike Holtzman. I wanted to know about the ancient cities, Aleppo, Damascus. They brought in their intern, a 22-year-old named Sheherazade Ja’afari, the daughter of the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations. She and Holtzman would be in Damascus with me.

Friends knew Gaia Servadio, an Italian author based in London who had been hired by Asma al-Assad to set up an arts festival in 2008. I went via London to meet her. She told me she liked the first lady, but, due to certain factions in power who did not, the festival had never taken place.

I landed in Damascus in the snow late on the night of Dec. 12, 2010. Sheherazade was waiting on the runway in a government car, incongruously with a bouquet. She handed me a Syrian cell phone. “Your American one won’t work here,” she said.

The next day a large woman pulled my toes and cracked my back with indifferent dexterity in the Hammam Amouneh, where the flagstones were worn soft by eight centuries of unbroken use. Sheherazade took me through Damascus; in the dark early-evening streets, I felt uneasy. Mustached men stood in our path, wearing shoes from the 1980s and curiously ill-fitting leather jackets over thick sweaters.

Holtzman came with us to the Umayyad Mosque, empty after evening prayers, huge enough to hold 6,000 people. I didn’t know until last week, through WikiLeaks, that Holtzman had emailed Sheherazade that day saying that I had “No impression at all of Syria” and “not to mention anything controversial, lists Syria may be on, rumor, etc.,” that what I saw “must be 100 [percent] affirmative.”

We three dined together in the hotel restaurant, as we would almost every night. I reset my geographical coordinates. Egypt to the west of us. Water supply questionable. Avoid raw salad.

The next day, Dec. 14, I left my laptop on the desk. A government car conveyed us to the first lady’s office, a fairly anonymous little white building in a residential neighborhood. I was to meet her alone.

Asma al-Assad was informal and cheery. A good-looking woman of 35, she wore a pale blue jacket and dark trousers. Her curly chin-length hair was sprayed into place, her eyebrows delineated in the Syrian manner. She was as brisk as a prefect, as on-message as a banker, as friendly as a new acquaintance at a friend’s cocktail party. She sounded like the kind of young Englishwoman you’d hear having lunch at the next table at Harvey Nichols.

She was on show, “on,” and delivered a well-rounded and glossy presentation of a cozy, modern, relaxed version of herself, her family, and her country to an American fashion magazine. With a London accent.

Her parents came from Homs. She’d grown up with two younger brothers in what she called Ealing and what the London press calls the less upscale Acton: she rode horses; her school friends called her Emma; she cut class to hang out on Oxford Street and got her degree in computer science at King’s College. She briefly worked at Deutsche Bank in New York, and was back in London at Morgan Stanley, about to take up an M.B.A. at Harvard, when, on holiday at her aunt’s in Damascus in 2000, she remet Bashar al-Assad, a family friend. She was 25, he was 35. She said she began to go to Damascus on weekends to see the president’s son. The word president rang as glamorous in her mouth as movie star. The word dictator never got in.

“You don’t plan to do this,” she said. After Hafez al-Assad died and Bashar became president, she quit her Morgan Stanley job and moved to Damascus. They married, and now had three children: Hafez, 9; Zein, 7; and Karim, who was about to turn 6.

She liked secrets. Their wedding, she said in a conspiratorial tone, was held in secret, its exact date still private. She spent her first three months as Mrs. Assad traveling through Syria with people who, to her delight, did not know who she was. She was not wearing a wedding ring. Her husband did not either. “When you meet him, you’ll understand why,” she said. It was a little coy.

I wanted to hear what the Louvre’s experts were going to do in Syria. She wanted to tell me about Massar, the series of youth “discovery centers” she was setting up. The first Massar was in Latakia, where the Assad family came from. A huge center was about to be built in Damascus.

“Massar in Arabic means path, destiny,” she said, “and destiny is created by the choices you make. Our project is about empowering this generation of young people to become active citizens, able to be part of the change the country’s going through.”

Almost half the Syrian population was under 14, she said, and Massar “Green Teams” had gone around the country to share its tenets of active citizenship with 200,000 children.

I asked if we could see Palmyra or, if not, a museum?

“That’s what we’re doing right now!” she said, and drove us to a museum for a meeting with a group of Italian archeologists and the Italian ambassador. There was nothing to see there but offices.

Wednesday I sat with Holtzman, unfed, through long meetings about fundraising for the Syria Trust.

“Doesn’t she stop for lunch?” I asked one of her aides.

“Never,” the aide said proudly.

Before the next meeting sandwiches were served. I avoided the lettuce; Holtzman did not.

Asma unwittingly gave me a glimpse into the Assad way of thinking: “I told my kids yesterday there’s a journalist going to be writing about me,” she said, “and my eldest, Hafez, asked, ‘What’s she going to say?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And he asked, ‘How can you get her to write about you if you don’t know what she’s going to say?’?”

A chic Damascus lady took me to the souk. At last I saw the town in daylight. The older buildings were sagging, dusty, derelict. This was clearly an earthquake zone without public services. I later described Damascus, too subtly, as a Mediterranean hill town in an Eastern-bloc country. The souk’s entrance was topped with milky plastic, its roof corrugated tin like a Quonset hut, but it followed the path of “the street called straight” in the Bible. Turkish families in heavy coats trudged through the souk, and sat in clumps in an ice-cream parlor, under a large picture of Bashar al-Assad. The same mustached men in leather jackets and curious shoes dawdled among the wares, kaffiyehs, jewelry, erotic underwear, and blackout hijabs.

I was told there was no crime in Damascus. A few days later, on a pretext involving wooden spoons, I returned to the souk alone except for a driver I could not shake. I think I saw why there was no crime.

A mysterious metal box on wheels was parked outside the souk. It was about seven feet long, six feet high, with one barred window in the back. Its surface was dangerously unfinished, raw, full of metal splinters. It looked like a mobile prison. Later, I asked a local about the box. He said he’d never seen such a thing.

That night, Sheherazade was going out to dinner and Holtzman was in bed with food poisoning. I ate a bowl of stew in my hotel room and uploaded photos and reference videos to an American website. I used the Ethernet cord from the bureau drawer.

The next day was Friday, the Muslim day of rest.

Sheherazade called, sounding like a very old man with a sore throat. “I ate salad last night,” she said, “and I had the driver take me straight to the hospital. They pumped my stomach. It hurt my throat.”

The first lady was making lunch at the presidential residence. It would be fondue, the family’s favorite.

Holtzman met me in the lobby, still pale. He had a bouquet for the first lady. We set off for the old apartment of Hafez al-Assad, which they had redone, over five years, into three stories of modern, child-friendly open space.

Both Assads were in jeans and sweaters. Bashar turned out to have a neck so long that he looked like something you might glimpse breaking the water in a Scottish loch. He spoke with a slight lisp. He showed me his cameras, described the wide variety of lenses now available, and showed me framed photos he’d taken on family holidays in Qatar. He didn’t strike me as much of a monster.

And he wanted to talk. I thrust the recorder at him and asked the most innocuous question I could think of.

Why had he wanted to become an eye doctor?

“Because it’s never an emergency,” he said. “It’s very precise, and there is very little blood.”

Never an emergency. Very little blood.

He wanted to talk about computers. “When we met, I was Mac and she was PC!” he said.

Their daughter, Zein, a 7-year-old with curly hair, watched Alice in Wonderland on her father’s iMac. Asma’s iMac faced a side window.

The entire back half of the apartment was glass, rising from the lower level through the main reception floor above, and perhaps even farther up. Other residential buildings with hundreds of windows had an unobstructed view of the Assads’ doings. The apartment was like a custom-built habitat in which a rich first family could go about its domestic life in front of a large audience.

I wondered how this meshed with the secrecy Asma seemed to prize. I wondered who lived behind all those windows out there, and who they worked for.

Nosy neighbors, Asma said, had commented on their orange seating area.“This curiosity is good,” said the president. “Even if you want to be secure, you have to choose between being secure and being … psychotic.”

The kitchen, at the opposite end from the windows, was the only place that wasn’t exposed to public view.

Asma pulled open three boxes of fondue mix. The base of the saucepan she used was bright and brand new. The president attempted to ignite a little can of Sterno with a match. “I’ve never tried it, this is the first time,” he said.

If this was a set, the props were well chosen: rubber boots and slickers piled by the lower-level door, a collection of completed Lego projects—trucks, buildings, a shark, all perfect—lining the edge of the plate-glass walls, a decorated Christmas tree. There was no staff to be seen, no nannies, maids, or cooks. Friday, the staff’s day off?

The 9-year-old, Hafez, asked sharp questions about the workings of Congress. He was blond, like his brother, Karim, who, the first lady reminded me, had just turned 6 the day before.

I had brought nothing.

I rooted in my bag for something that could pass as a birthday present for a 6-year-old. Aha. Star Wars flash drive. R2-D2, blue and white.

It was all I had.

I showed R2-D2 to Holtzman, who said “Why not?” I asked the president if I could give his son a Star Wars flash drive of mine. He asked if I wanted to clean it up before I handed it over, and led me to his wife’s iMac. I put the R2-D2 flash drive in the socket, and a Word document popped up on her screen. I wasn’t going to open the Word document with the president of Syria leaning over me. As far as I could remember, it was a few transcribed lines about her taste for mathematics. But had I added anything more personal? Had I let rip about the security, the secrecy? About the metal box outside the souk?

I sat in his wife’s chair, wondering what to do. The president suggested I might want to put the document in the trash. I pulled it to the trash. “Empty it,” he said. He did. I didn’t dare look at Asma. I handed the R2-D2 flash drive to Karim, who was only mildly impressed.

We all clustered around the dinette table in the kitchen and dipped squares of bread into the fondue. Assad told jokes; they weren’t funny. Everyone laughed.

After lunch, Asma announced we were going to Massar in Latakia.

It was Dec. 17, 2010. In Tunisia that day, the Arab Spring began when Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old street fruit vendor, set himself on fire.

We arrived in Latakia in sleet. An SUV waited, identical to the one we had left in Damascus. Asma drove us to Massar; it was sleek, well designed, and looked expensive. It was also noisy and crawling with kids.

I was told they were learning “action and process”: they had rid Latakia of plastic bags and run marathons to fund a dialysis machine for the hospital.

The teenage boys had wide, unformed faces, bad haircuts, breaking voices, and used their arms to create their own territory. The girls had sloping shoulders and tapered limbs. They all stood up when Asma came in, and then cleared their throats and pulled at their sweaters and debated and argued and proudly showed off for their first lady. Massar, where they came to change their town and build the future, was her gift.

Dressed like them, in jeans and a cardigan, she listened to a long debate about standardizing the spelling of the word Syria. Then she rose and made an announcement.

She said: “There isn’t enough money for Massar, and this center has to close down so that we can open another further up the coast.”

Some kids’ mouths fell open. Shoulders rose. Heads went down. Boys and girls went silent. Some cried.

A boy stood up.

The translator whispered: “He says, ‘I understand why this should happen, but it’s not fair.’?”

Another boy spoke. “He says we’ll show them how to start up their own center, we’ll help.”

Asma al-Assad said: “What about we fire the person who gave me this bad idea to close this center?”

Another boy responded: “Let’s debate with him instead.”

She spoke again, this time with a big smile. The translator relayed:

“Now she’s saying that this center isn’t really closing. It was just a test to see how much they cared.”

It took a moment before the kids showed any joy or any relief. The little ride they’d just been on was no fun.

I wandered out among the kids. Boys clustered around me, sweet teenagers. They had a poor grasp of personal space, spoke English, were eager, intense. They wanted to know everything about New York and movies.

More teenagers clustered around Asma as she headed for the door. She didn’t seem to want to leave.

I asked her why she’d made the fake announcement about closing the Massar center.

“There was a little bit of formality in what they were saying,” she said. “It wasn’t real—it was just nerves, or respect. So the idea was to get them out of their comfort zone, throw them off. I do it all the time. We need to get past the formalities if we are to get anything done.”

Back in my hotel room, I found the Ethernet cable ripped out of my laptop so violently that the plastic tab on the end had broken off.

The next day, Dec. 18, demonstrations broke out across Tunisia as Mohamed El Bouazizi lay in a coma in hospital, dying of his burns.

I went to the main museum. I expected a profusion of extraordinary treasures. It was modest, unheated, sparse, and dusty.

Snowstorms in London trapped me in Damascus for two more days.

I never made it to Palmyra. I attended a concert. Two hundred children sang carols, Broadway hits, and Arabic rap. The president shook a little bell to “Jingle Bell Rock.” The priest in charge promised that next year all the songs would be in Arabic.

I found myself in the opera-house foyer with the Assads.

“Do you understand now?” Asma asked, looking at her ring finger and then at her husband.

“Yes,” I said. I understood nothing. That was our parting.

I sat in the hotel bar with the French ambassador and asked what was really going on in Syria. He took the battery out of my Syrian cell phone and then did the same with his. This must have set off an alert, because suddenly Sheherazade materialized in front of us.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Aren’t you sick?” I asked. “Go back to bed.”

The ambassador drew maps of Syria’s shifting boundaries, with dates.

The next day Sheherazade took me to Ma’loula, the village where they still speak Aramaic, the language of the Bible.

She said: “We don’t want you to talk to the French ambassador.” “You can’t talk to me that way,” I said.

When I opened my laptop at the Vienna airport on the way back to New York, an icon on the screen announced itself as the server for someone named Ali.

I arrived in New York on Dec. 21, 2010, and quarantined the compromised laptop.

I watched Al Jazeera on my other computer as I transcribed. A small uprising in Algeria at the end of December was quickly squashed. In Tunisia on Jan. 4, 2011, Mohamed Bouazizi died of his burns, and the country erupted.

I watched the protests in Lebanon, Jordan, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. In my earpiece as I transcribed, I heard the voice of Asma al-Assad talking, on and on, about empowering children to build a civil society.

I watched Al Jazeera constantly. I didn’t want to write this piece. But I always finished what I started.

I handed in the piece on Jan. 14, the day President Ben Ali fled Tunisia. “The Arab Spring is spreading,” I told Vogue on Jan. 21. “You might want to hold the piece.”

They didn’t think the Arab Spring was going anywhere, and the piece was needed for the March “Power Issue.”

I got an expert to clean Ali out of the laptop. “They weren’t very skilled, but they were thorough,” he said.

On Jan. 25, protesters massed in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Sunni Muslims in Lebanon staged a “day of rage” against Hizbullah. It felt like 1989, when CNN gave us a front row to history. Back then the plot was basic, binary: communism ends.

But binary had gone out the window with the end of the Cold War. This was tweets and blogs and Al Jazeera online and the BBC, and CNN roughed up in Tahrir Square. You couldn’t say what the plot was: power to the Arab people, or the end of secularism and the rise of an ominous tide of pan-Arab fundamentalists?

On Jan. 31, Bashar al-Assad gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal. He made no sense. “There is nothing called behavior,” he said. “As states we depend on our interest, and not on our behavior.”

On Feb. 11, Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in Egypt. I cheered, inspired and touched by Tahrir Square. There were protests in Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, Bahrain, then, unbelievably, in Libya.

I asked Vogue’s managing editor if we could meet to discuss how to handle the Assad piece. A meeting was held, without me. I was asked not to speak to the press.

On Feb. 25, as Libyan protesters demanded an end to Gaddafi, my piece on Asma al-Assad went online at Vogue.com. They had excruciatingly titled it “A Rose in the Desert.”

I was attacked as soon as it went up. How dare I write about Asma al-Assad? By describing Syria’s first lady in Vogue, I had anointed her.

Syria stayed quiet until the middle of March, when a small incident set off the horrifying massacres that have now gone on for 17 months. In a town called Daraa at the end of February, 15 children broke the country’s silence. I don’t know if it was the euphoria of the Arab Spring or if they had been empowered by the Green Team from Massar.

The boys, ages 9 to 15, wrote, “The people want to topple the regime” on the walls of their school.

The police arrested them. When they had not been released after two weeks, their families staged a protest on March 15.

At a second protest, on March 18, Syrian forces fired on the crowd and killed four people.

The boys were released from prison. Their families saw that they had been tortured and took to the streets. On March 23, a grenade was hurled into a crowd of protesters in the Daraa mosque.

Assad’s forces began to kill Syrians every day. They fired on mourners at funerals, men gathered in mosques, women and children in the street.

They arrested more children. They tortured more children.

On April 29, a chubby 13-year-old boy named Hamza Ali al-Khateeb was arrested during a protest in Saida, near Daraa.

On May 24, Hamza’s mutilated body was returned to his parents. The report by Al Jazeera said: “The child had spent nearly a month in the custody of Syrian security, and when they finally returned the corpse, it bore the scars of brutal torture: lacerations, bruises and burns to his feet, elbows, face, and knees. Hamza’s eyes were swollen and black and there were identical bullet wounds where he had apparently been shot through both arms, the bullets tearing a hole in his sides and lodging in his belly. On Hamza’s chest was a deep, dark burn mark. His neck was broken and his penis cut off.”

Asma al-Assad had said that “Massar” meant destiny.

Bashar al-Assad blamed the uprising of the Syrian people on terrorists from both al Qaeda and the United States.

Through 2011, I wondered about Asma al-Assad, the woman who cared so much about the youth of Syria. How could she not know what was happening? How could she stand by and do nothing while the Syrian regime ate its young?

In May of 2011, Vogue took the piece off its website. I kept my word and did not speak to the press. At the end of the year my contract was not renewed.

I was now free to react to the Syrian carnage with the only medium I had: Twitter.

Last December, Bashar al-Assad told Barbara Walters the truth on ABC: “No government kills its people, unless it’s run by a crazy person.”

I wondered what their massive windows looked like now, and whether they still lived on show to the gaze of thousands.

Was Asma locked up, or back home in Ealing, or Acton? When pictures of her appeared making charity packages with her husband or voting—voting!—in a referendum, I wondered if she was drugged, compliant, indifferent, complicit.

Most of all, I wondered about Massar and her project to empower 6 million young Syrians to become “active citizens.” “Part of the change,” she’d said.

Was she conscious that by empowering the children of Syria to take charge of their destinies, she was feeding them to her husband’s torturers?

What is consciousness when you are first lady of hell?

I will never know.

Joan Juliet Buck is writing a memoir.

***

June 2012 statement from Vogue editor Anna Wintour (the magazine decided to take down its article on the Assads in spring 2012):

“Like many at the time, we were hopeful that the Assad regime would be open to a more progressive society. Subsequent to our interview, as the terrible events of the past year and a half unfolded in Syria, it became clear that its priorities and values were completely at odds with those of Vogue. The escalating atrocities in Syria are unconscionable and we deplore the actions of the Assad regime in the strongest possible terms.”

July 2012 statement from Brown Lloyd James following disclosure in Al Aribaya of a memo on the firm’s public-relations strategy regarding Joan Juliet Buck’s Vogue interview:

“It is important for your readers to place our role in Syria in the proper context. We do not currently represent any Syrian interests. We have not set foot in the country since 2001. Our last recommendation was an unsolicited attempt to spare the country further bloodshed.

“Our limited work in Syria, which began with an American-sponsored project to bring together and educate children with disabilities, ended more than one year ago.

“We stand by our work in Syria, which occurred during a period of peace and optimism that Syria could be a constructive partner in the international community. We are profoundly saddened by the horrific violence taking place today. Our memo from over a year ago was volunteered as a last ditch attempt to tell the regime that it must listen to its people. Had that memo been heeded, Syria would be a much different place today. Alas, the regime chose to save itself rather than the country. We fully stand by the memo and our work.”

He is a Republican Guard brigadier and son of Syria’s longest-serving defence minister. But most of all Manaf Tlas is a friend of President Bashar al-Assad, a member of his inner circle and a prominent figure in the Damascus “young guard.”

Reuters / Handout

Syrian Brigadier-General Manaf Tlas in Damascus in April 2011.

Or he was. Rebels and a news website with links to the Syrian security apparatus said Thursday Brig. Tlas had fled to Turkey. If confirmed, he would be the first real insider to defect from the embattled elite fighting off a revolt against the Assad clan.

Tlas has long been a rare Sunni name within a ruling clique dominated by Mr. Assad’s fellow Alawites; the brigadier’s flight may reflect a growing sectarian divide and eroding support for the dynasty among richer Sunnis, who have been slow to join a revolt launched by poorer sections of the majority population.

A handsome man in his 40s with a beautiful wife, Brig. Tlas cut a dashing figure on the Damascus social scene, entertaining diplomats, artists and journalists, and rooting for what he saw as reformist policies of his president friend.

An enthusiast of fancy cars, he smokes cigars and his favourite holiday spot is the French Riviera.

But he grew increasingly disillusioned with the system that awarded his family rank and privilege.

His playboy father, Mustafa Tlas, attended military academy with Hafez al-Assad and remained his friend, confidant — and defence minister — through his three decades in power.

When Hafez died in 2000, Mustafa Tlas helped arrange a smooth transition for his son Bashar; at the same Baath party congress that anointed the younger Assad, Mr. Tlas’s son Manaf was elevated to the Central Committee of Syria’s ruling party.

The elder Tlas and another son have both left Syria since the revolt against Mr. Assad began last year. Mustafa Tlas left for France for what he described as medical treatment some months ago. Opposition sources say he is still there, though his whereabouts could not be independently confirmed. His son Firas, a business tycoon, left for Egypt; he is now thought to be in Dubai.

Like their fathers, Manaf Tlas and Bashar al-Assad are old friends and underwent military training together. Brig. Tlas helped introduce Bashar, now 46, to the Sunni Damascus social scene when he was being groomed for power in the 1990s.

In the decade that followed, Brig. Tlas spoke of reform but defended its cautious, some said glacial, pace under the Assads: “You need time. You need years,” he told The Washington Post in 2005. “There’s a generation you have to push forward.”

But the 2011 uprising rocked his cosy world. His father’s home town Rastan, about 160 kilometres north of Damascus, was among the first to rise up against Mr. Assad — and get hammered by the army for its defiance.

Peaceful demonstrations were silenced by the gun, prompting Rastan’s residents, many of whom served in the army and had the patronage of the Tlas family, to take up arms.

Brig. Tlas was privy to the inner working of the military crackdown by the core Alawite forces. As a senior officer in the Republican Guard, he would have been in regular contact with its commander, Bashar’s feared younger brother Maher, an architect of repression.

AFP PHOTO/LOLO/AFP/Getty Images

A destroyed Syrian army tank is abandoned after fighting with rebels on the side of a highway between Aleppo and Damascus Wednesday.

He did not like what he saw, and tried to do something to ease the crackdown, friends and opposition sources say. They credit him with intervening to negotiate local ceasefires.

“Manaf has been growing increasingly frustrated for months,” one friend said. “Being from Rastan, he felt increasing dishonour as his hometown was being leveled and hundreds of his relatives fell dead or injured.

“He started to tell people he trusted that he wanted out, and that he has respect among the Free Syrian Army,” the friend said, referring to the rebel force that has attracted many Sunni officers and soldiers from Rastan.

A Western diplomat who served in Damascus said Brig. Tlas, with his boyish good looks and fluent English and French, a taste for paintings and concerts, stood out among an officer corps drawn largely from the historically disadvantaged Alawite minority and often poorly educated.

He and his wife Tala regularly spent weekends in Paris, where his sister Nahed, widow of billionaire Saudi arms dealer Akram Ojjeh, is a prominent socialite.

“Manaf does not give the impression that he is a thug,” the diplomat said.

“But he mattered in the military. His defection is big news because it shows that the inner circle is disintegrating.”

Others take a different view.

“If his defection is confirmed I do not think it will have any impact. The Tlas family has distanced itself for some time from what is happening,” said a Lebanese official close to the Damascus government.

“It will not change anything in the balance of power inside the country. They do not have any influence on the ground. They have made promises that they did not deliver.

“The main goal for this defection will be to cause a moral shock. The Americans will try to use it to the maximum.”

Syriasteps, the website with Syrian security links that reported Brig. Tlas’s defection, quoted a security official for Assad’s administration saying, “His desertion means nothing.”

With files from Agence France-Presse

July 06, 2012 12:49 AM By Ali EzzatyarThe Daily Star

Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/2012/Jul-06/179504-syrias-kurds-can-be-persuaded-to-revolt.ashx#ixzz1zn8bKqJs
(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb) 

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and ALAN COWELL

Published: July 5, 2012

Two large suburbs of Damascus came under heavy tank bombardment on Wednesday following renewed Free Syrian Army attacks on forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, opposition activists said.

How the Son Learned to Quash a Rebellion From His Father

Patrick Seale

March 20, 2012

In Damascus last month, supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad wearing T-shirts with images of al-Assad, left, and his father, the late president Hafez. (Khaled Al Hariri / Courtesy Reuters)

Ever since the Baath Party came to power in Syria in 1963, it has faced a challenge from the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic militants. These Islamists were — and still are — bitterly opposed to the Baath Party’s secular policies and to the prominence in its leadership of Syria’s minorities, notably Alawis, whom extremist Sunnis consider heretics.

The smoldering resentment burst into open conflict during the 30-year rule (1970-2000) of Hafez al-Assad, and again during the rule of his son, Bashar, who took over the presidency after his father’s death. In February 1982, Hafez al-Assad put down a rebellion in the city of Hama by his Islamist opponents. Three decades later, in February 2012, Bashar al-Assad faced down a rebellion in Homs, a sister city of Hama in the central Syrian plain. Both responded with great brutality to these regime-threatening uprisings, as if aware that they and their community would face no mercy if the Islamists were ever to come to power.

The regime’s onslaught continues and armed rebels refuse to put down their guns, yet there is a slim chance that Annan could succeed.

These two epoch-making events were remarkably similar. Both Hafez and Bashar had been slow to recognize and address the groundswell of complaint against rising poverty, corruption, and government neglect that would fuel the uprisings. Preoccupied with foreign affairs, they failed to pay sufficient attention to the domestic scene, often turning a blind eye to the abuses and profiteering of their close associates, including members of their own family. More fundamentally, both Hafez and Bashar believed in those moments of crisis that they were wrestling not only with internal dissent but with a large-scale American and Israeli conspiracy to unseat them, backed by some of their Arab enemies. 

In Hafez al-Assad’s mind, his physical battle with Islamist guerrillas was an extension of his long, unsuccessful struggle with Israel and the United States over the nature of the political settlement after the October War of 1973 — a war that Hafez al-Assad and Egypt’s leader Anwar al-Sadat waged together against Israel with the aim of regaining territory captured by Israel in the 1967 war. Once the war was over, Hafez al-Assad had bitterly opposed Henry Kissinger’s 1975 Sinai disengagement agreement, which removed Egypt from the confrontation with Israel. Similarly, he interpreted the U.S.-sponsored Camp David Accords of 1978, and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of the following year, as a conspiracy to leave the Arab world defenseless in the face of Israeli power. This was only the latest, as he saw it, in a long string of Western plots to divide and enfeeble the Arabs, dating back to World War I.

In much the same way, Bashar al-Assad’s immediate reaction to the uprising of this past year was to view it as the domestic wing of a foreign conspiracy by the United States, Israel, and some Arab states to bring down his regime and Iran’s as well — and with them the whole Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah axis, which, he believed, was the only real obstacle to American and Israeli hegemony.

The foreign conspiracies with which Hafez and Bashar have had to deal were, without doubt, very real. America’s unflagging support for Israel — including an airlift of weapons during the October War — put the Arab armies at a grave disadvantage, while Kissinger’s diplomacy removed the most powerful Arab state from the Arab lineup, allowing Israel the freedom to invade Lebanon in 1982 and remain there for 18 years. But focusing on foreign conspiracies blinded both Hafez and Bashar to the legitimate grievances of their angry populations, and caused them to overreact, using excessive force when putting down their domestic opponents.

Hafez and Bashar both accused their foreign enemies of supplying the insurgents with sophisticated American-made communications equipment, as well as with weapons and cash. In 1982, the regime confiscated some 15,000 machine guns. Last month, when the regime regained control of the Baba Amr quarter of Homs, it also claimed to have captured a rich haul of foreign-supplied weapons and equipment.

There were differences, however, in the trajectories leading up to the deadly uprisings. In Bashar’s case, the revolution began as peaceful urban protests. In his father’s case, it began with a campaign of assassinations of important men close to him, and other acts of extreme violence. One of the most dramatic of these was the gunning down of 83 Alawi officer cadets at the Aleppo Artillery School in June of 1979. From their safe haven deep in the ancient warrens of Aleppo and Hama, where cars could not enter, the guerrillas emerged repeatedly to bomb and kill. 

Between 1979 and 1981, terrorists killed more than 300 people in Aleppo, mainly Baathists and Alawis. In response, the security forces killed some 2,000 Muslim opponents over the same period, and thousands more were rounded up and thrown into jail, where they were often beaten and tortured.

Having failed to bring down the government by assassinations, the Islamist insurgents then attempted the bolder strategy of organizing large-scale urban uprisings in cities across the country. The uprisings culminated in the Islamists’ seizure of Hama in early February 1982, when hundreds of fighters rose from their hiding places and slaughtered some 70 leading Baathists overnight. The triumphant guerrillas declared the city liberated.

With Bashar al-Assad it was the other way around: the uprising against his rule started a year ago, with large urban demonstrations. It was only when the regime responded with live fire that the opposition took up arms and started carrying out hit-and-run attacks, ambushes, and assassinations against soldiers, policemen, and government targets. The showdown culminated in the rebel Free Syrian Army’s seizure of the Baba Amr quarter of Homs. They were aided by jihadists smuggled in from Iraq, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia.

In 1982, it took three grim weeks for the regime to regain control of Hama and hunt down the insurgents. Some 10,000 people were killed. In 2012, the battle for Homs lasted nearly a month. As at Hama 30 years ago, there was heavy collateral damage and great suffering by the local population, which was deprived of food, water, and fuel during a harsh winter. Having routed the rebels at Homs, Bashar has now sent his army to bombard and overrun other rebel strongpoints, notably at Idlib, in the north of the country.

So far, in the rebellion against Bashar, the Muslim Brotherhood seems to have been the main recipient of weapons and financing from Libya, Qatar, and elsewhere. Although they do not seem to be one cohesive group, but, rather, four or five different currents with different external backers, these Islamist guerrillas operate under the umbrella of the opposition Syrian National Council based in Turkey. They certainly seem to have been involved, together with army defectors and freelance fighters, in the battle for Baba Amr. Most observers agree that the Muslim Brotherhood is the best-organized and the best-funded of all the opposition factions. Still more extreme than the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda jihadists, smuggled in from neighboring countries, also appear to have entered the battle in recent months, and to have been responsible for a number of suicide bombings of government targets. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who took over the leadership of al Qaeda after Osama bin Laden’s death, has called for a global jihad against the Syrian regime.

The long campaign of terror against Hafez al-Assad from 1976 to 1982 was political insanity. By defeating it, Hafez won himself nearly two more decades of rule. Similarly, the arming of the opposition against Bashar al-Assad seems not to have advanced the opposition’s cause but to have given the regime the justification for crushing it. 

The regime’s victory at Homs has opened a new phase in the crisis, in which negotiations, presided over by Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general, might now be given a chance. Annan has been mandated by both the Arab League and the United Nations to bring about a ceasefire and create the conditions for a dialogue between the regime and its opponents. He has condemned the arming of the opposition and declared that his immediate goal is to stop the killing.

Although the regime’s onslaught continues and armed rebels refuse to put down their guns, there is yet a slim chance that Annan may succeed. In both camps there are men who now realize that there can be no military solution to the crisis — either in Syria or in Iran. Indeed, Annan’s Syrian venture is mirrored by the efforts of the EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, to open a dialogue with Iran. The peacemakers should be given a chance. But there are still plenty of hawks about — in the United States, in Israel, and in some European and Arab capitals — who dream of regime change in Tehran and Damascus, and will be content with nothing less. 

Both Hafiz and Bashar used brute force to crush their opponents. Hafiz — widely feared and admired — triumphed over his enemies and ruled for 30 years, until his death from natural causes. Bashar, more fallible, enigmatic, and perplexing than his father, is clearly not cast in the traditional mold of an Arab leader. He has managed to survive the yearlong uprising, but it seems unlikely that he will equal his father’s record.

Syrian president Bashar Assad’s wife Asma is pictured at the Bristol hotel on December 11, 2010 in Paris. (MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/Getty Images)

By Maria Golovnina

LONDON, March 19 (Reuters) - She was supposed to be the gentler face of a would-be reformist regime. Now Asma al-Assad has become a hate figure for many.

Syria’s London-born first lady, once breathlessly described as a “rose in the desert”, is ensconced at the heart of the shadowy inner circle of President Bashar al-Assad.

As Syria slides towards civil war and foreign powers watch for cracks within the ruling clan, understanding Asma could prove vital to understanding the Assads and the future of the Syrian crisis.

A British-educated former investment banker, Asma cultivated the image of a glamorous yet serious-minded woman with strong Western-inspired values who was meant to humanise the increasingly secretive and isolated Assad family.

That image crumbled when her husband responded to an anti-government rebellion with extreme violence a year ago. Asma had clearly decided to stand by her man despite international revulsion at his actions. Assad himself says he is fighting an insurrection, involving foreign-backed “terrorists”.

Asma’s ancestral home is the city of Homs, now a symbol of the revolt which has been subjected to particularly fierce attack by her husband’s tanks to become ground zero in the year-long conflict.

With her penchant for crystal-encrusted Christian Louboutin shoes and Chanel dresses, Asma is a puzzle for many. The opposition roundly rejects suggestions that she is effectively a prisoner of conscience in the presidential palace.

“She was very much, as we would say, left wing. She (created) a very, very good impression. She seemed to be very bright, very respectful of others,” said Gaia Servadio, a writer and historian who has worked with Asma on several art projects.

“It’s a very nasty regime … Thousands of people have been killed. So it’s very difficult to say: poor woman. She certainly should have found a way to talk.”

The world was smitten by her immaculate facade. In the Western media, Asma, a 36-year-old mother of three, was described as sophisticated, elegant, confident, with a “killer IQ” and an interest in opening up Syria though art and charity.

For those who pinned their hopes on Assad as a potential reformer, his photogenic wife bolstered that image, lending a touch of glamour to his awkward public appearances.

A glowing article in Vogue magazine described her as “a rose in the desert” and her household as “wildly democratic”. A French newspaper said she was an “element of light in a country full of shadow zones”.

People were charmed by her classy demeanour, liberal views and British accent. She received the Gold Medal of the Presidency of The Italian Republic for humanitarian work in 2008 and won an honorary archaeology doctorate from La Sapienza university in Rome.

“THE REAL DICTATOR”

Yet emails published by Britain’s Guardian newspaper this month from accounts believed to belong to the family offer a different portrait, showing her as a capricious dictator’s wife spending tens of thousands of pounds on jewels, fancy furniture, and a Venetian glass vase from Harrods.

“I am the real dictator, he has no choice,” she apparently said in one of the emails in a comment about her husband.

Her London contact, a Syrian businessman, appears to send emails to her using an address he has nicknamed “Party party”.

The story of how the London-born daughter of a Sunni Muslim Syrian doctor married into Assad’s family, members of the powerful minority Alawite sect, reads like a cautionary tale.

She was born in the west London suburbs, whose sleepy streets are lined with neat houses, just like her family’s. Twelve years after she married Assad, the family home appears almost abandoned, its curtains drawn. Neighbours said her father still lives there with his wife, a former diplomat.

“We know they are there but we don’t see them,” said one neighbour, a veiled Arab woman who asked not to be named. No one answered the door bell when Reuters called at the weekend.

A Syrian dissident from Aleppo, who lives nearby and asked to be identified only by his nickname, Zayed, said most Syrians in Britain despised Asma now.

Zayed, angrily comparing Asma to Marie Antoinette or the wife of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, called on the Syrian leader’s wife to “make a stand for your own sake, for your own people … She never did.”

A senior member of the British Syrian Society, set up with Assad’s help to promote business ties, said he has met the first couple in London and used warm words to describe them.

“They were quite impressive to talk to. He came across as someone who wanted to listen, get ideas, get advice, open to everybody, he made it plain that he wanted Syrians abroad to help building the country again. He was welcoming and warm.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity in a gentlemen’s club in a smart London neighbourhood, he added: “We all felt there was an opportunity that he, the president, representing the younger generation, could lead Syria to a new age of change.

“Perhaps he feels betrayed. Why are they (the West) ganging up on him? Now some people say, he is in full control, others say that he is not. Maybe he is shocked by the fact that … in the end they all turned against them.”

Asma’s father, Fawaz Akhras, a cardiologist and founder of the British Syrian Society, has not responded to a Reuters request for a meeting, made through an intermediary.


“WARLORDS, ONE AGAINST THE OTHER”

Known as Emma to her British friends, Asma spent the first 25 years of her life in North Acton, went to a smart London girls school, Queen’s College, and read computer science at King’s College London.

She was a rising star at JP Morgan when she met Bashar, who had studied ophthalmology in London but was sent home to be groomed for the presidency after his elder brother, Basil, died in a car crash in 1994.

“I was always very serious at work, and suddenly I started to take weekends (off), or disappear, and people just couldn’t figure it out,” she told Vogue. “What do you say - ‘I am dating the son of a president?’”

They married in 2000. What followed was a life full of glamour. They once dined with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in Syria. Bashar joked, according to Vogue: “Brad Pitt wanted to send his security guards here to come and get some training!”

One photograph from happier days depicts them playing with their children, toys scattered around on the carpet.

The Assad side of the clan, however, didn’t like Asma, not least because of her Sunni Muslim origins.

“Certainly the Assad family doesn’t like her, to put it mildly … She was constantly under watch, her telephone, she was very careful,” Servadio, who spent time with the family in Syria before the uprising, told Reuters in London.

“She was shouted at. How odd, frankly, (that) somebody who is meant to be the wife of the president who is an autocrat, can be shouted at in this way.” She added: “It was like a mediaeval power, warlords, one against the other.”


CHILLING GLIMPSE

Asma’s husband was elected president with 97 percent of the vote in 2000 after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, who had ruled Syria with an iron fist for decades.

Before the start of the 2011 uprising, there was hope Syria could change. Syrians saw his choice of wife as proof that things were about to change.

“When he came to power, people said, ‘Okay … let’s give him a chance and see what he’s going to do,’” said Ghassan Ibrahim, Global Arab Network’s London-based editor. “What happened is that he made corruption even more organised, Mafia appeared, poverty grew sharply … (But) she is standing by the criminal and she supports him.”

Emails leaked by Syria’s opposition offer a chilling glimpse into the lavish lifestyle the couple enjoyed even as Assad’s troops shelled opposition strongholds.

The tone of those emails is incongruously jokey. In one, Asma’s husband disparages his own reforms as “rubbish”. He also shares a pun playing on the words “elections” and “erections”.

Asma appears to have written in an email: “If we are strong together, we will overcome this together … I love you.”

As the revolt unfolded she gradually disappeared from public view but broke her silence in February, saying in a statement: “The president is the president of Syria, not a faction of Syrians, and the first lady supports him in that role.”

In a haunting interview with CNN, looking nervous, she once said: “We are losing time. We are working against the clock. Three thousand and three hundred people injured. More than that, 22,000 people have been displaced from their homes … This is the 21st century. Where in the world could this happen?”

She was talking in 2009 about an Israeli operation in Gaza.


“VIRTUALLY A PRISONER”

Some believe she is a propaganda tool of the Assad family, a liberal going through a moral crisis in Damascus, unable to speak up or escape.

“She is virtually a prisoner. The two of them missed their boat,” said Servadio. “I would certainly accuse him (Assad) of being a coward. … I think he is a puppet, very much used.

“For them (the family) it’s wonderful to have a scapegoat, these two people at the top who are absorbing all the hatred.”

Ibrahim disagreed. “It’s not true at all. Assad has been in power for over 12 years. He is in full control. Giving such excuses to him is unacceptable. They are like the Mafia.”

As battles raged across Syria, Asma kept spending on designer baubles from London, according to the emails.

For ordinary Syrians, Asma al-Assad is now a hate figure.

“They have stolen Syrian money. She is squandering it here in London,” said Fawaz, a man who came to an opposition fund-raising event in London wrapped in a Syrian flag.

“She and her father are accomplices to this crime. They learned nothing from the democracy here in the UK.” (Writing By Maria Golovnina Editing by Giles Elgood)

“Russia enjoys good and strong military technical cooperation with Syria, and we see no reason today to reconsider it,” Antonov told reporters.

Russia has shielded Syria, its last ally in the Arab world, from U.N. sanctions over the Assad regime’s bloody suppression of an uprising against his government.

Moscow has been a steadfast ally of Syria since Soviet times, when the Middle Eastern nation was led by the current president’s father, Hafez Assad, and has long supplied Damascus with aircraft, missiles, tanks and other heavy weapons.

The Syrian port of Tartus is now the only naval base Russia has outside the former Soviet Union. A Russian navy squadron made a call there in January in what was seen by many as a show of support for Assad.

Also in January, a Russian ship allegedly carrying tons of munitions made a dash for Syria after telling officials in EU member Cyprus, where it had made an unexpected stop, that it was heading for Turkey. Turkish officials said the ship had instead charted course for Tartus.

Antonov said Russia’s supply of weapons to Syria is in line with international law and will continue. “Russian-Syrian military cooperation is perfectly legitimate,” he said.

“The only thing that worries us today is the security of our citizens,” Antonov said in a reference to Russian military personnel in Syria that are training the Syrians in the use of weapons supplied by Russia.

He declined to say how many of them are currently stationed in Syria.

“It’s part of our contractual obligations,” said Antonov, who oversees military technical cooperation with foreign countries. “When we supply weapons, we have to provide training.”

Antonov angrily dismissed allegations that Russia has sent special forces officers to assist government forces.

“There are no (Russian) special forces with rifles and grenade launchers running around,” he said.

Syria is another instance of Western sympathy for despotic regimes.

Nancy Pelosi and Bashar Al-Assad meet in Syria in 2007.

By Mona Charen 

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a firm statement to the Syrian elite this week, urging them to overthrow the regime of Bashar Al-Assad. “The longer you support the regime’s campaign of violence against your brothers and sisters, the more it will stain your honor,” she advised.

Only now? Only after thousands of men, women, and children have been murdered, tens of thousands wounded, and countless homes destroyed by artillery shells has the Obama team finally shed its illusions about the Syrian regime?

A mere eleven months ago, when peaceful demonstrators in the streets of Dara and other cities were met with bullets, Secretary Clinton referred to Assad as a “reformer.” She was not alone. Last year, Germany’s foreign minister Guido Westerwelle visited Assad and declared him indispensable for a “constructive solution” to the Middle East’s problems. A leading German think tank, which advises the foreign ministry, called Assad a “modernizer.”

Rare is the sceptered thug who does not attract fawning admiration from some in the free and democratic West. Fidel Castro was the darling of the smart set in the 1960s, and Che Guevara, one of his “wet work” assistants, adorns t-shirts worldwide to this day. Sean Penn is a shill for Hugo Chavez, and Robert Scheer had admiring things to say about Kim Il-Sung.

The more repressive and vicious the regime, the more some in the West will strain to find benign intentions in their leaders. One after another of the old Soviet general-secretaries was hailed, when he first ascended the greasy pole of Kremlin politics, as a “moderate.” Yuri Andropov, we were assured, loved American jazz, good Scotch, and “cynical political jokes with an anti-regime cast.” He went out of his way to meet with dissidents, we were advised. Perhaps he was drunk on Chivas Regal when he shot down civilian airliner KAL 007.

Similarly, when Syrian dictator Hafez Al-Assad (the butcher of Hama) died and was replaced by his son Bashar, the New York Times offered a highly sympathetic portrait of the “shy, young doctor.” The Times noted that expectations of the younger Assad were high, because, in the words of a member of the Syrian parliament, “he’s young and open and wants to give more liberty and democracy.”

Well, it may be churlish to begrudge people their optimism. But Assad has wielded absolute power in Syria for twelve years, and not a single reform has materialized. Quite the contrary. Even before the current bloodbath began, Syria was responsible for arming and protecting Hezbollah, assassinating Lebanese premier Rafik Al-Harriri, cooperating closely with Iran and North Korea, and sending terrorists into Iraq to kill Americans.

None of that prevented Hollywood’s glamour couple, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, from visiting with the Assads to discuss their “refugee work.” Just-released photos captured rock star and “human rights” campaigner Sting and his wife enjoying a good laugh with the Assads in 2008. Vogue magazine, apparently immune to shame, ran a fawning profile of the dictator’s wife, “a rose in the desert.” “Asma al-Assad,” Vogue told its readers, “is glamorous, young, and very chic — the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies.” Along with fetching views of Asma, Vogue featured shots of Bashar playing on the floor with his children.

When images of bleeding and dead children — shot by Assad’s troops — began to cascade out of Syria, Vogue quietly removed the piece from its website.

Then-speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited Assad in 2007 (against the wishes of the Bush administration) and came away satisfied with his cooperation. “We were very pleased with the assurances we received from the president that he was ready to resume the peace process.” In this, she was echoing a sentiment often expressed by former secretary of state James A. Baker, co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, who argued that the key to peace in the Middle East was to “flip Syria.”

But no visitor was more enthusiastic about Bashar Assad than President Obama’s informal envoy, Senator John Kerry, who made six visits to Damascus between 2009 and 2011. In 2010, he said “Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region.” Even after the tanks rolled into cities and began blasting away civilian demonstrators, Kerry stuck to his self-delusion: “My judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and economic opportunity that comes with it. . . . ”

The “shy doctor” became a cold killer. Those who, without a particle of evidence, persuaded themselves that he was ever anything else, were useful idiots.

— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist.

A little more information on what the Syrian regime is using on Homs.

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / February 23, 2012 

This Feb. 15 satellite image shows a pipeline fire in Homs, Syria. The pipeline, which runs through the rebel-held neighborhood of Baba Amr, in Homs, had been shelled by regime troops for the previous 12 days, according to two activist groups.

DigitalGlobe/AP

I wrote a few days ago about Bashar al-Assad’s use of 240mm mortar rounds on the city of Homs, particularly the Baba Amr neighborhood, where dozens have died in the past week of withering shelling, among them two foreign reporters. 

Monitor librarian Leigh Montgomery and the folks at SIPRI (they have forgotten more about the world’s arsenals than you will ever know) helped me track down a little more information about what the Syrian regime is using on Homs, and possibly other cities.

I’d thought the firing platform for these beast-sized mortars — with 75 pounds of explosives and a range of up to 12 miles — was the Russian-made Tulip, basically a tank designed to deal death from a distance. But while it’s possible that Tulips have been delivered by Russia to Syria in the past year, there’s no evidence of that, and past SIPRI research shows no signs they’ve ever been delivered to the country. (Russia is Syria’s major arms supplier, and the value of its shipments increased by 58 percent last year.)

But what SIPRI confirms is in Syria’s arsenal is the Russian M240 for firing these mortars. While not as sophisticated as the Tulip, the M240 – towed into position by a heavy truck – still delivers accurate fire. It has been frequently used by Syria, from the 1973 war with Israel to the punitive expedition Assad’s father, Hafez, launched on his own city of Hama in 1982, which left more than 10,000 residents dead.

In Iraq, I’ve been close to incoming mortar fire (far smaller) and it’s terrifying. Raining mortars down on a densely populated area is beyond criminal.

Below is a video of US troops in Afghanistan firing smaller mortars in the Korengal Valley. Imagine if that ridge was filled with apartment blocks and the shells  were at least twice the size, and you have a good picture of what’s been happening in Homs.

By LIAM STACK

Published: February 21, 2012

The presence of the vessels had been seen as adding to international tension over the nearly yearlong crackdown by the government of President Bashar al-Assad, and an Iranian official called it “a clear message against the United States’ possible adventurism.”

State media in Iran quoted the defense minister, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, would continue to “beef up” its presence in international waters.

It was not clear whether the vessels unloaded cargo or had docked in the port as a symbolic display of Iranian support for Syria, a critical regional ally whose government it has supported against the uprising that started in March, 2011.

So acute has the confrontation become that, as government forces continued to pound opposition strongholds in the central city of Homs and elsewhere on Tuesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it was trying to negotiate a brief pause in the violence to deliver aid to the most devastated areas.

I.C.R.C. officials at their headquarters did not respond to calls on Tuesday seeking to establish whether their the organization’s efforts toward a ceasefire had been successful. But news reports from Syria, speaking of continued barrages directed at the beleaguered Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs, suggested that the fighting was continuing unabated.

On Monday, activist groups said the government’s inability to eradicate the opposition in Baba Amr despite weeks of bombardment could be preventing the military from striking deeper and harder into other parts of the country where armed resistance and rebellion are believed to be growing, including Hama and Idlib Province to the north.

“The biggest challenge in Homs is Baba Amr,” said Wissam Tarif, of the activist group Avaaz. “They cannot move military power to Idlib or Hama without finishing Homs first. They cannot leave any pockets of resistance behind them.” He said 16 people were killed in Homs on Monday. Such reports are impossible to verify.

A video posted on YouTube showed an artillery strike on Baba Amr that sent a plume of dark smoke into the clear, sunny sky. “God is my only and best guardian,” muttered the panicked videographer. “The world remains silent. Today is Feb. 20, 2012.”

Armed rebels have provided a measure of security to some protesters in places like Hama, which was leveled 30 years ago as Mr. Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, put down an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood, killing at least 10,000 people. In a video posted on YouTube on Monday, several hundred people jumped and danced in Halfaya, a neighborhood of Hama, in what the video described as a regular “morning protest.”

Still, more than 50 checkpoints divide up the city, said the Local Coordination Committees, a grass-roots group that organizes and documents protests, and security forces have detained more than 500 people there in the past three weeks.

The living situation in Hama, Homs and other hard-hit areas, including two suburbs of Damascus, Zabadani and Madaya, has become increasingly grim. In Homs, supplies of food, baby formula, medicine and potable water are all running out, said a spokeswoman for the committees.

“About two weeks ago, we sent 200 cans of baby milk into Homs, and they said they could not even meet 10 percent of their needs,” said the spokeswoman, Jasmine, who asked to use only one name for security reasons. “Now, no one can get in or go out.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it had begun negotiations with Syrian authorities for a pause in the fighting of as little as a few hours.

“The I.C.R.C. is exploring several possibilities for delivering urgently needed humanitarian aid,” Reuters quoted a spokeswoman, Carla Haddad, as saying. “These include a cessation of fighting in the most affected areas to facilitate swift Syrian Arab Red Crescent and I.C.R.C. access to the people in need.”

The Iranian ships arrived in the Syrian port, Tartus, days after the sharpest international rebuke to Mr. Assad so far: the passage of a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly condemning the crackdown and calling for him to step aside.

The current escalation of attacks on Homs and other areas began early this month, after the same resolution was vetoed in the Security Council by Russia and China. Russia recently sent ships to the same Syrian port, activists said. Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency called the ships “a serious warning” to the United States, and quoted a senior Iranian lawmaker’s denunciations of comments by Senator John McCain a day earlier in support of arming the Syrian opposition.

“The presence of Iran and Russia’s flotillas along the Syrian coast has a clear message against the United States’ possible adventurism,” said Hossein Ebrahimi, a vice chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, Fars reported on Monday.

Iran’s Press TV satellite broadcaster said the two ships had docked in Tartus on Saturday “to provide maritime training to naval forces of Syria under an agreement signed between Tehran and Damascus a year ago.”

The two vessels were a destroyer and a supply ship which had been given permission by Egypt’s interim military rulers to sail through the Suez Canal, Press TV said.

Reuters reported on Tuesday that the two vessels entered the Suez Canal from the Mediterranean Sea early on Tuesday, heading south toward the Red Sea.

“In case of any U.S. strategic mistake in Syria, there is a possibility that Iran, Russia and a number of other countries will give a crushing response to the U.S.,” said Mr. Ebrahimi, according to Fars.

Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican who was in Afghanistan on Sunday, told reporters there that he was in favor of arming the Syrian opposition, while stressing that no direct American involvement was necessary. In Cairo on Monday, he repeated that position.

“I am not calling for direct supply of weapons to Syria,” Mr. McCain said. “We have seen in Libya that there are ways to get weapons to people so that they can defend themselves. It is time that we gave them the wherewithal to fight back and stop the slaughter.”

On Monday Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said the world body should help solve humanitarian issues in Syria, after Damascus allowed the Red Cross to bring humanitarian aid to some regions.

Russia and China have vetoed two Security Council resolutions backing Arab League plans aimed at ending the conflict and condemning President Bashar Assad’s crackdown on protests that killed 5,400 in 2011 alone, according to the U.N. Hundreds more have been killed since, activist groups say.

Syria is Russia’s last remaining ally in the Middle East. Moscow has maintained close ties with Damascus since the Cold War, when Syria was led by the current leader’s father, Hafez Assad.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said Tuesday that Moscow will not attend the planned “friends of Syria” meeting at the end of this week, because its organizers had failed to invite representatives of the Syrian government.

Lukashevich said the meeting in Tunisia wouldn’t help a dialogue, saying that the global community should act as friends of the entire Syrian people, and not just one part.

“It looks like an attempt to forge some kind of international coalition like it was with the setting-up of a ‘contact group’ for Libya,” Lukashevich said.

Russia has said it will block any U.N. resolution that could pave the way for a replay of what happened in Libya. In that case, Russia abstained from a vote, which cleared the way for months of NATO air force attacks that helped Libyans end Moammar Gadhafi’s regime.

As violence in Syria continues to escalate and grab worldwide attention, NICK LAVIGUEUR interviews a Syrian man who left his homeland to start a new life in Huddersfield

SYRIAN born Khalil Khalaf fled the violent regime of his homeland in 1978 amid fears for his safety – and he has never been back.

Now settled in Huddersfield, he fears there is only a bloody future for his country as the war escalates.

Born into a Kurdish family, he was involved in activity opposed to then president Hafez al-Assad and made the tough decision to abandon his family.

He paid the equivalent of roughly two weeks wages to be smuggled over the border to Lebanon and from there bought a passport on the black market and moved to West Germany.

Four years later Assad ordered the massacre of Hama, where more than 20,000 people were killed in what has been called the single deadliest act by an Arab government against its own people.

Khalil was unable to return to Syria and so his wife-to-be Rojin was also brought out of the country to Bulgaria where they were married.

Having lived in several European countries, Khalil and his family eventually moved to Huddersfield in 2003 and last year opened restaurant Med One at Westgate.

As the bombing of civilians in Syria turns to full civil war, Khalil and his daughter Jane, who attends Shelley College, have spoken out about the bloody assault by president Bashar al-Assad.

And they say there is no hope for the country – especially their Kurdish allies – unless western governments intervene.

Khalil said: “In our eyes Assad is much worse than his father.

“He came to power with the support of Britain and he’s lived here so his intuition should be a lot better than his father’s.

“It’s our last hope that Britain or the United Nations step in.

“There is not much chance that the people can overthrow the government.

“Syria is multi-ethnic with five big groups – Ba’athist Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Christians, Druze and Kurds.

“It’s not like Egypt or Tunisia or Libya where it’s one big group against the government.

“Even if there is a change there will be no change in our situation, but we will be happy if Assad goes.

“But there’s no hope unless there military intervention from outside.”

Khalil said many of his relatives remained in the country, but said a few had fled across the border to Turkey.

And he said his sister’s husband had been put into prison for two weeks for being opposed to Assad and had been beaten.

The father and daughter said they felt involved in the current uprising and were trying to do what they could to help from Huddersfield.

“We’re just as involved in the revolution as the Syrian people are,” said Khalil.

“Only the other day I got a phone call at 3am from someone in Homs asking for help.

“Our contact with them has been ongoing. We are not wanting to cut contact as we’re also involved no matter how far away we are.”

Jane added: “The people who ring, they can’t say anything. Everything is hinted because the government is checking all calls.

“Last year Assad granted us citizenship so we Kurds didn’t stand up against him, but it’s not working.”

Khalil said: “Not many Kurds have been killed as he knows we will all flee to Turkey and there will be a humanitarian crisis and then the United Nations will have to get involved.”

Khalil said, as an exiled Kurd, he tried to help by spreading information around the world so people knew the real situation in Syria.

He said he and many others would send money and mobile phones to help citizens post pictures and videos to the internet.

He explained: “It’s been 32 years since I left and it’s always been a huge problem that Syria has never been representative of the people.

“We’re trying to bring everyone together but it’s the government that is against this.

“Just like everyone else we want democracy and equality.

“I remember as a child in 1964 we were listening to a Kurdish radio station and the secret army heard it and came in and they smashed our radio.

“All the laws come from Hitler times – they are like Nazis.

“Extremists in Syria are very powerful.

“Kurds are the largest minority in Syria and yet even the official opposition to Assad are against us.”

He said the situation was so bad for Kurds that he was even afraid to go to the Syrian Embassy in London for fear of attack by opposition supporters.

Khalil – who says he is not an Arab and not a Syrian but is a Kurd from Syria – added: “We want our own country just like the Palestinians do, but for now we would just like to be recognised as a Kurdish minority and be given some support.

“It’s our dream that we are our own country but I can’t see that happening for 50 or 60 years, but for now I would just like to be living in freedom and recognised in a constitution.”

On Friday, Prime Minister David Cameron announced Britain is to supply £2m-worth of aid to Syrian civilians suffering as a result of the violent crackdown on protests against the Assad regime.

Mr Cameron said that the money will provide vitally needed medical supplies and food for more than 20,000 people affected by fighting in the city of Homs and elsewhere in Syria.

He said that the situation in Syria was “appalling” and that he did not believe the international community was doing everything it could to stop President Bashar Assad’s “butchery” of his people.

But he cautioned that the position was not the same as in Libya, where the world came together last year behind a United Nations resolution authorising military action to defend civilians.

Mr Cameron said the world had to act “as decisively as it can” against the Syrian regime without a UN resolution.

While the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly last week to condemn Assad’s violent repression of protests, China and Russia have used their vetoes in the Security Council to prevent the agreement of an Arab League-backed resolution calling for political transition.

Mr Cameron said: “We need to take all the action we can to put the maximum pressure on Assad to go and to stop the butchery that is taking place.

“I want us to go on working, to go on thinking, to go on combining with our allies and go on asking ourselves what more can we do to try and help transition take place in this country so we can get rid of this brutal dictator and give the Syrian people a chance of peace and stability in the future.

“I am not satisfied that we are taking all the action we need to, but it is difficult, it is complicated, and we need to work very hard with our friends, allies and neighbours in the region to make sure we can do everything we can.”