AsSAD reality for Syria

 

In the struggle (which began on March 15, 2011) between rebelling Syrian Sunnis against a repressive Shiite (Alawite sect) minority government in Damascus, Vladimir Putin provided massive support to his fellow brutal autocrat, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Al-Assad killed tens of thousands (some estimates carry that to over 100,000) of his own people with Russian-supplied poison gas, barrel bombs and weapons to implement genocidal assassinations – often delivered by experienced Russia pilots. As part of a confused strategy by the United States, battling extremist Sunni fundamentalist ISIS in Iraq and Syria, there were moments when the U.S., Russia, Syria and even Iran were nominally on the same side. 

It is clear that al-Assad’s murderous assault on his own defenseless civilians, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, killed three times as many Syrians as did ISIS. Without Russian support, there is little doubt that the Assad regime would have collapsed. Pro-Iran Assad and the United States have been natural antagonists for decades, and Putin was clearly delighted successfully to support a truly brutal dictator that the United States had wanted to take down.

While the Assad regime did not collapse, and as al-Assad continues to arrest, torture and execute those who had opposed him during the struggles, Syria is now economically ravaged. Entire cities were virtually destroyed. Infrastructure was ripped to shreds. Factories, schools and hospitals lay in ruins. As a pariah nation shunned by much of the mainstream commercial nations, impacted by continuing sanctions, Syria struggled to find the money to survive. Russian support was necessary but still woefully insufficient. 

Easy button? “Built on the ashes of 10 years of war in Syria, an illegal drug industry run by powerful associates and relatives of President Bashar al-Assad has grown into a multibillion-dollar operation, eclipsing Syria’s legal exports and turning the country into the world’s newest narcostate.

“Its flagship product is captagon, an illegal, addictive amphetamine popular in Saudi Arabia and other Arab states. Its operations stretch across Syria, including workshops that manufacture the pills, packing plants where they are concealed for export and smuggling networks to spirit them to markets abroad.

“An investigation by The New York Times found that much of the production and distribution is overseen by the Fourth Armored Division of the Syrian Army, an elite unit commanded by Maher al-Assad, the president’s younger brother and one of Syria’s most powerful men.” New York Times, December 5th. But even that revenue effort was not enough. Assad, used to ravaging his own people at the drop of a hat, decided that he would repeat his brutal pattern once again. This time, his minions, calling themselves “auditors,” began a massive shakedown of any Syrian with money.

A report from Greg Miller and Liz Sly writing for the December 4th Washington Post provides examples of al-Assad’s newfound “I’ll take if I want it” methodology: “The five Syrians pulled from their homes by secret police on the same night last year were not insurgents, spies or suspected of being disloyal to the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad… Instead, they were targets in a desperate new phase of Assad’s battle to survive: the hunt for cash.

“All five were executives at Syria’s second-largest cellphone company, MTN Syria, according to individuals familiar with the episode. Their arrests were part of a ruthless campaign by the president to seize MTN’s assets, along with almost every other meaningful source of revenue in Syria’s shattered economy.

“MTN was ultimately brought to its knees four months ago after protracted pressure in which those arrests were followed by demands for multimillion-dollar payments, threats to revoke the company’s operating license and a dubious court ruling that put an Assad loyalist in charge of the company.

“The South Africa-based corporation announced in August that it was abandoning the Syrian market under conditions that its chief executive called ‘intolerable.’ MTN’s cellphone towers are still working, its 6 million subscribers still paying their monthly bills… ‘But where that money is going, no one knows,’ said a Syrian executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. ‘Honestly, no one knows.’

“Similar events have played out repeatedly over the past two years, as Assad and his financially strapped regime have raided or outright seized dozens of businesses, including foreign corporations and family enterprises that rode out Syria’s decade-long war in government-held territory, according to U.S. and other Western officials, as well as Syrians with firsthand knowledge of the regime’s actions. Neither the Syrian government nor the Syrian presidency responded to requests for comment.” Simply put, Syria is a failed state that supports only Assad’s inner and most corrupt but loyal circle. In an awful anomaly, al-Assad is nevertheless firmly in charge.

“Even members of the Assad family have not been spared. Last year, Assad stripped his cousin Rami Makhlouf of companies and assets that had once been part of a massive portfolio estimated by Syria experts to be worth as much as $10 billion.

“The regime’s campaign to commandeer wealth has only intensified since then. U.S. officials and Syria experts said it has been driven by the intense financial pressure on a regime that has been bankrupted by war, daunting debts to Iran and Russia, a meltdown in neighboring Lebanon’s financial sector and continuing economic sanctions from the West.

“Assad needs the money, officials and experts said, to meet payroll for his military and security services, to buy fuel and food for the capital and other areas still under regime control, and to reward some Syrian elites who remained loyal to him through the war.

“Against this backdrop, an endgame has begun to unfold. U.S. officials and Syria experts said that Assad has so effectively consolidated his control over the country’s security apparatus and economy that he is poised to emerge from the war with a firmer grip on power than when it started. But after a decade of conflict, he is left in charge of a dismembered and decimated state where nearly half of Syria’s territory is beyond his government’s reach, entire towns lie in ruins and the currency has lost 85 percent of its value since the start of the war.” We live in a time when autocrats seem to prosper and where democracy suffers and contracts, all as climate change combined with an unending pandemic continue to erode at us all.

I’m Peter Dekom, and for those Americans pushing hard for a new white majority autocracy in our own country, the lesson needs to be rather clearly that very few ordinary citizens ever do well in the longer-term when they are subject to the whims of a single forceful leader or political party.