Over decades, vivid images from Syria have cemented the al-Assad family’s legacy as the brutal and savage oppression of the country’s population.
As far back as 1982, photos showed devastation in places like the central city of Hama, where the al-Assad government bombed and bulldozed a Muslim Brotherhood uprising and left an estimated 20,000 people dead beneath the rubble.
Three decades later, images emerged in 2013 of rows of ghostly pale bodies, hundreds of victims of a government chemical weapons attack on a rebellious Damascus suburb. Many of the dead were children.
That same year, a former military photographer smuggled out of Syria thousands of photographs documenting how political prisoners had been starved, beaten and at times subjected to ghastly torture — their eyes gouged out or their genitals mangled.
“These people did not care; the leadership cared nothing about the Syrian people,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former U.S. government official on security issues. “They launched Scud missiles against their own people — who does that? — while the chemical weapons were a sign of just how far they would go to hold on to power.”
After World War II, Syria was known as the most unstable country in the Middle East, with at least eight coups carried out from the end of French colonial rule in 1946 until 1970. Hafez al-Assad, an air force officer, put an end to that after he seized power that year.
He set about turning the country into a power to be reckoned with in the Middle East, launching the 1973 war against Israel in conjunction with Egypt and exerting control over neighboring Lebanon and the Palestinian political leadership there to end its long-running civil war. In power for 30 years, he built fearsome, overlapping internal security agencies, with thousands of victims disappearing into his prisons.
When he died in 2000, the government changed the Constitution to lower the age needed to be president to 34 from 40 so that his son Bashar could take over. Bookish, shy, socially awkward and trained as an eye surgeon, Bashar became the designated heir only after his swashbuckling older brother, Bassel, died. Bashar, with his glamorous, Syrian-British wife, Asma, announced plans for political and social reform that never materialized.
In 2011, amid the uprisings across the Middle East, the young population revolted against Mr. al-Assad.
But the president refused any compromise, and his supporters managed to prevail. “Assad or we burn the country” became their slogan. The al-Assads ruled partly by creating sectarian divisions, with support concentrated in, but not limited to, the small, Shiite Muslim Alawite community rooted in the coastal mountains.
Less wily than his father, Bashar was unable to manipulate players like Iran or Hezbollah, instead becoming their captive as he relied on them, and eventually air power from Russia, to prop up his government.
Mr. al-Assad became even more tyrannical than his father, with an estimated 500,000 people dead or disappeared amid the civil war that started with the Arab Spring uprisings. The civil war devastated the country and sent millions of refugees pouring out of Syria.
“When the uprisings came in 2011, the full scale of the brutality of the Assad regime was on display,” said Firas Maksad, a senior fellow and Syria expert at the Middle East Institute based in Washington. “That will certainly be the legacy of Bashar al-Assad and how he is remembered in the region.”
The fighting lay dormant for years, and analysts believe Turkey was instrumental in resurrecting the rebels as a disciplined fighting force. The rebels themselves appear surprised by the speed and ease with which the seemingly entrenched al-Assad dynasty finally crumbled more than a decade after the first anti-government uprisings.
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