Toppled president came to power keen to show he was different to his father but proved to be as repressive
of 2002 presented a starkly different figure to the brutal autocrat he would become, presiding over a fragile state founded on torture, imprisonment and industrial murder.
Suggesting some uncertainty, he was curious about how Syria was seen in the world, floating possibilities for a change, including a reset in the relationship between Damascus and Israel. Rejecting the model of democracy as appropriate for Syria, Bashar’s initial offer of reform was to promise economic change ahead of political transformation, replacing unpopular state monopolies with a free market, but which ultimately benefited a crony elite.President Hafez al-Assad and his wife, Anisseh, in a family photo with his children Maher, Bashar, Bassel, who died in a car accident in 1994, Majd and Bushra.
And despite attempts to burnish the Assads that would continue until as late as 2011 – with a glossy profile of Asma in Vogue as the purported “Rose in the Desert”, Bashar’s rule would become even more horrific than his father’s. By 2011 and the onset of the Arab spring, the carefully curated image of Bashar and his family as a more wholesome version of the Hafez era – with its weekends spent watching screenings of western films with friends in their private cinema and meals in Damascus restaurants – had evaporated.
One factor would be the emergence of Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate, centred in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa in 2013, whose horrific abuses eclipsed that of even Bashar’s forces, diverting international attention from the Assad regime even as Damascus began using chemical weapons in attacks against rebel centres, most notoriously against Khan al-Assal and Ghouta in that year.
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