Three Assads: A fallen dictator, a cousin, and a former CIA officer
Ribal al-Assad, Bashar's first cousin, remembers their argument and warns about Syria's rebels. Former CIA officer Joseph Assad is trying to rescue Christians.
That’s it. Bashar al-Assad has fled to Moscow, just like other ousted leaders. His reign of abduction, torture, and chemical attacks has ended, and the U.S. has been striking ISIS targets to try to prevent the terrorists from regrouping.
From a national security perspective, it will be important to closely watch Russia and Iran, who protected Assad and got major perks. This time, when the brutal dictator came calling, they were too mired in the wars with Ukraine and Israel to offer much help in putting down rebels.
But you’ll find those stories easily. Instead, I want to give you the perspective of two Assads. One shares the same blood as the fallen president. The other shares just the name and is a former CIA officer.
First cousin showdown
Ribal al-Assad is first cousins with Bashar — he is the son of Rifaat al-Assad, the younger brother of the late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father. In August, Ribal and I talked about how his country had fallen from the headlines, Assad allowed back into the fold of the Arab League after years of isolation. “I do think Syria is totally forgotten,” he said with regret. “I want a democratic Syria, away from dictatorship and away from Islamist,” he told me.
Ribal left Syria in 1984 at age nine, and says he only saw his cousin Bashar two or three times in his life. Then he told me about one of those times, a dramatic visit back to Syria in 1994. “The regime tried to assassinate me at the Damascus International Airport after an altercation I had with Bashar and his brother, Maher, at the Sheraton Hotel.”
The argument had to do with a video of a cousin who had purportedly been tortured. Ribal, then about 19, questioned what he was looking at. “Aren’t you going to stop making problems?” he recalls Bashar asking him. Ribal says he swore at Bashar and asked if he was proud of having people torture his cousin, videotape and distribute it. “[Bashar] said that it looks like I would not understand until he does the same thing to me,” Ribal said. Then he slapped Bashar.
About two weeks later, Ribal was preparing to leave Syria to study in the U.S. His father learned that elite Republican Guard forces were heading to the airport, so he called his brother, the president. “He hung up the phone and he said, ‘Your uncle was very happy… but I feel there's something wrong.’”
Ribal’s father decided to go with him to the airport. At the Austrian Airlines terminal, Ribal says a presidential convoy arrived, with soldiers filing out of buses. “As soon as they came out, they started shooting in the air.” A man named Gen. Mufid al-Raawan led the convoy and “he was shocked when he saw my father.”
The general gave a salute and then said, “His Excellency, I have orders from the president that he wants Ribal.” Ribal’s father said he had spoken to the president the day before. “The general told him, logically, ‘Do you think I have the power to move such a big number of soldiers and officers to the airport without the president himself?’”
The standoff lasted two hours. Ribal went with the Republican Guards, and his father threatened to fight his brother “everywhere in Damascus.” Ribal says the soldiers took him to a building called the “Secretariat,” near the president’s house. His detainment lasted only 20 minutes, with two lieutenants apologizing. Then the general came in and said he had orders to take Ribal home. “The next day, I went to study in Boston.”
Being an Assad
Even before Ribal’s genocidal cousin fled to Russia, having the name Assad made his life complicated. “I live in London and I've suffered a lot from sharing the same last name because a lot of people sadly cannot differentiate.” He said there are about 60 Assads with foreign citizenship — British, French, Spanish, American, Brazilian, and German.
Like many other Syrians abroad, Ribal saw his HSBC bank account shut down. His brother and his children received death threats from Islamists, Ribal told me. “They told him that we're going to cut your head off, your children's head off.” But the school feared for the other students.“ And the next day the school called him and said, ‘You have to take your son out of school.’”
Denouncing Bashar and the rebels who toppled him
In a text message on Sunday, Ribal said Bashar’s departure “made all his supporters start calling him a coward and a traitor who could have done this 13 years ago and saved the country all the destruction and all the people killed, injured, and those who became refugees, internally displaced.”
But are the rebels any better? Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) is a syndicate of Islamist insurgent groups that evolved from al-Qaida’s Syria branch, called Jabhat al-Nusra. The U.S. designates HTS a terrorist group, despite its leader publicly denouncing international terrorism and promising inclusivity. “They have killed tens of thousands of people during the past 13 years,” Ribal tells me. “I don’t think that they can rebrand themselves now as democrats. Now they are just acting civilised by entering and collecting all arms from people’s houses, but I don’t trust Islamist extremists.”
Because of the Syrian military’s withdrawal from Aleppo, Hama and Homs, he believes a deal was made to get rid of Bashar. “Syria today needs an all-inclusive peaceful transition to a genuine representative democracy, draft a modern and progressive constitution with a federal system, guaranteeing the equality of all citizens under the rule of law regardless of religion, sect, ethnic group and gender.”
The former CIA officer and Syria’s Christians
Joseph Assad spent years serving as a CIA officer overseas. And sometimes his last name has led to odd encounters in the United States. When people ask him about it, he tells me, “I enjoy messing with them and act nervous, as if they just outed me.”
But no jokes since Saturday, when HTS militants approached Damascus. Joseph has been working to get a few Christian families out of Syria since then.
Some 300,000 Christians are estimated to still be in the country, especially in the village of Ma’lula. A severely persecuted community, Christians in Syria have been attacked, kidnapped, and killed, their property confiscated and their churches bombed.
Joseph says that HTS rebels are now “talking about Islamic rule, that [Christians] are going to live under jizya,” a tax for non-Muslims which ensures they are second class citizens.
“There are assurances that they’ll be treated fairly, that this is going to be a pluralistic society, everybody's going to have their place,” Joseph continued. “But [the Christians] know better. And some of them are just basically like, ‘You know what, we will come back when that happens. For now, we want to try to get out.’”
The route out
I reviewed an Arabic audio message from a Lebanese intelligence officer on Sunday. In it, the man says the border is closed to everyone except people with an iqama, a Lebanese residency permit. Previously, travelers were able to cross if they could prove they had onward travel, but the Lebanese have security concerns following the swift insurgency. The intelligence officer said the border may reopen in a few days.
Joseph has been tapping his contacts to build up a network of drivers. He is hoping to use al-Sham Road, the main border crossing between Damascus and Beirut, to pick up Christian families. Right now, the roads are filled with people heading into Damascus, people looking for relatives among the prisoners that rebels freed, people celebrating and wanting to set foot in the palaces to learn their secrets.
“My contacts know that if they are asked for something, they don't ask questions,” he says. “They think it's very sensitive. And honestly, it's not. It has nothing with the government. But they've been told, ‘Get reliable drivers, armed if possible, and who know how to coordinate at the border.’”
So far, Joseph knows of one Christian family that has made it out. “But those people that I've been specifically trying to help, they delayed. They were like, ‘We're trying to get our paperwork together, maybe we touch base in the morning.’ I was the one who told them [Sunday] morning that the border was closed. They didn't even know it.”
Joseph, who also coordinated the escape of 149 Iraqi Christians fleeing ISIS in 2015, fears for other minority communities in Syria: the Yezidis, who were genocided by ISIS just ten years ago, and the descendants of Armenians, who arrived in 1915 as a result of the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire.
And then there are the refugees in Turkey today, who fled Syria’s civil war which began in 2011. “Mark my words, Turkey is about to evict these people,” said Joseph. “Today they're saying ‘Now the conditions are good for these millions of people to go back to their own home country.’ How do we know? We don't even have a government yet. We don't know which direction they're going to go in. This is absolutely insane.”