Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny

Con Coughlin is a well-known British journalist who has been covering the Middle East since around 1980 and has a wide network of connections with leading policymakers in the UK, US, and Saudi Arabia (see 254–55). This volume is based primarily on dozens of interviews with Syrians, including Bashar al-Assad himself in 2022. While it is not a social biography in the academic sense, it is not an exercise in hero-worshipping. It seeks to draw a line from the regime of Hafez al-Assad to that of his son, and then to explain how the 2011 uprising turned into a bloodbath. It is designed for a popular audience, but it is by no means a work for people who hate footnotes. It could also be seen as a grand rebuttal to relatively flattering works on Bashar al-Assad that appeared before 2011. It is a far cry from Patrick Seale’s biography of Hafez al-Assad, published in 1988, that virtually justifies the brutality of the Syrian regime.1Given the importance of the two most prominent leaders of Syria from 1970 to 2024, and their role as the central figures in the cult of personality,2 as well as their iron-clad grip on the state system and its vast security network, biographic work on the Assad dynasty goes beyond the scope of a traditional biography. One must explain the decisions made by Bashar al-Assad, as well as how his own character seems to have evolved in relation to the state itself. This is where Coughlin does a good job at convincing the reader—students of Syria should know that the awkward, lanky man with a lisp who just wanted to be an eye-doctor, emerged as a bloody tyrant of massive proportions. Bashar’s personal evolution was intertwined with the mobilization of the security forces against protesters in 2011 and every step of the descent into civil war.One of the many interesting nuggets Coughlin recalls is the notion that the young Bashar had encouraged his father to normalize relations with Israel in the 1990s. According to Bashar, his father once said toward the end of his life, “I never regretted a decision more in my life than not to take up Rabin’s offer to normalize relations” (56). However, Coughlin quotes from Madeline Albright’s memoirs the statement by Farouk al-Sharaa, uncle of the current head of Syria’s transitional government, Ahmed al-Sharaa saying: “The problem is not a matter of kilometers. It is one of dignity and honour” (56). In his first year in office, Bashar spoke with international leaders like Madeline Albright about the idea of turning the Golan Heights into a shared demilitarized commercial zone. Such international leaders were excited to hear ideas that were outside the box (58).Asma, Bashar’s wife, through a more-or-less arranged marriage, was obviously an advantage to Bashar, as a sophisticated, highly educated Sunni Muslim. She had been accepted to do a Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Harvard University when she got the offer to marry Bashar, and she whimsically noted, “who would choose Harvard over love?” (62). In any case, she roamed Damascus incognito for weeks after their marriage before people began to recognize her. She wanted to know about the real problems of the Syrian people.Within a year of coming to power, Bashar had managed to light and extinguish hope of a Syrian Spring. Diplomats who met him, like Ambassador Dennis Ross, thought that there certainly must be others behind the scenes who were managing him, but Coughlin notes that Syrians came to soon realize that Bashar was in full control and his ruthless side was emerging fast. He hated when people called him soft and wanted to be perceived as a man of power, capable of both modernizing Syria and ruling its many factions. On the other hand, there were deep rifts between those who wanted to maintain the state-led economy and those who were willing to toy with the idea of innovation and free-market economics. But without dissent, it was hard to imagine Syria turning into a liberal state, economically or politically.The interaction with the West in the early years of Bashar’s regime was complex. Syria shared valuable information about al-Qaʿida, but it received little in return, mainly because the US was unwilling to remove Syria from the state sponsors of terror list as long as it provided support to Hizballah in Lebanon (78–79). Coughlin notes that Bashar missed his first major chance at reconciling with the West when Tony Blair came to visit a month after the September 11, 2001, al-Qaʿida terrorist attacks on the US. In private, Bashar was amenable to change and tried to communicate this, but in his public speech he lambasted Israel and condemned the bombing of Afghanistan with no conciliation in his tone whatsoever, much to Blair’s chagrin. Bashar overestimated how important Syria was to the global stage, in Coughlin’s view (84).Coughlin takes his time building up to the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri in March 2005 and has a chapter dedicated to it titled, “First Blood.” Coughlin emphasizes the massive explosion and bloodshed that killed Hariri. By comparison, one might recall David Lesch’s 2005 biography of Bashar al-Assad, which glosses over the event as a minor footnote that occurred at the moment when the US was seeking help from Bashar to locate Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti (Saddam Hussein’s half-brother).3 Lesch uses highly ambiguous language, which granted, at the time may have reflected a genuine uncertainty about the assassination. He writes,Eyal Zisser, in his 2007 book Commanding Syria: Bashar al-Asad and the First Years in Power, also avoids blaming Assad for the assassination, but he contextualizes the event in a way that makes it clear that Syria saw Hariri as an obstacle.4 Zisser emphasizes the success Bashar achieved in transitioning from his father’s thirty years in power to a new Syrian era of stability. The loss of Syria’s position in Lebanon in April 2005 after the assassination was certainly a blow to Syria, and Bashar personally, and it led him to crack down on any popular protest movement that might have occurred otherwise.Coughlin certainly has the advantage of time when discussing things like the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, as well as many of the subsequent events that led to the escalation of tension between the government and protestors in 2011. For instance, the UN special tribunal on the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri only concluded in 2020, fifteen years after a suicide truck bomb blew a crater into the center of Beirut, killing Hariri and twenty-one others. Four Hizballah agents were charged with carrying out the assassination, led by Salim Ayyash, but the group as a whole was not blamed for the attack, and Syria was essentially exonerated.5 The tribunal’s decision was released days after the Beirut Port explosion of August 4, 2020, which killed 218 people, and injured thousands, and caused tens of millions of dollars of damage.Coughlin carefully pieces together a convincing narrative pointing to Assad’s direct role in the Hariri assassination (or at least greenlighting it). The details can be found on pages 95–118, and while most of it is in the public domain, some of the evidence was scrubbed from the UN report and only identified because of a technical error in the redaction that briefly appeared online.The narrative jumps forward from the aftermath of the Hariri assassination and Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon to the events of 2011, followed by a close reading of how the violence escalated. Coughlin discusses the events that cascaded into the Civil War, noting “Bashar’s schizophrenic [sic] approach to the protests—promising reform while at the same time personally supervising brutal reprisals—made it difficult for regime officials to ascertain the president’s main objectives, which only added to the sense of confusion at the heart of government” (165).While the pace of the last 100 pages of the book is quite fast, it paints a good picture of the dilemmas that Bashar faced and how he was personally involved in organizing the violence against the protests, which fanned the flames of rebellion. He would often speak about foreign conspiracy against him but at the same time turned to Iran and Russia to bail him out. Iranian-backed proxies like Hizballah and the Russian military assistance are credited with keeping the regime afloat and even turning the tide of the war in Bashar’s favor by 2016. Coughlin emphasizes the Russian relationship and somewhat skips over the role of the US-led coalition that helped defeat the Islamic State and doesn’t mention the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps very often. There are other works that delve specifically into these and other issues, such as the jihadi factions in Syria, which Charles Lister covers well, at least up until 2015 in his detail-oriented book.6Bashar’s regime did not survive, as is known now. Coughlin’s work helps the reader understand that this was related to military complications and setbacks suffered by Iranian proxies and Russian forces between the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the Israeli-Hizballah confrontation that escalated from October 8, 2023, until the ceasefire on October 1, 2024. The weakening of Bashar’s lifelines coincided with the stagnation of the Syrian economy, which increasingly relied on illicit drug production to pay the bills. At the same time, the rebels managed to survive and construct an Islamist-style regime in Idlib alongside Turkish-backed rebel factions who would eventually unite to recapture most of Syria, while Bashar and his family escaped to Moscow on December 7, 2024.Coughlin’s work is recommended for a newcomer to the Syrian story of the past thirty years. It has color pictures in two separate sections and reads like long-form journalism. But that is not to say that scholars and serious students will leave feeling empty-handed. Those who read Lesch or Zisser’s works will note that Zisser’s argument that Bashar was stronger than most people thought stands up to scrutiny given that the regime lasted a decade longer than many casual observers expected (even if external help was essential for that). Lesch has criticized his earlier book and noted that he was misled by Assad’s charming demeanor and words embracing a nuanced modernist message, but he refrains from harsh judgment of Bashar.7 Coughlin’s advantage is his constant ability to simply call a spade a spade—a quality unfortunately lacking in the small pool of biographies on Syrian leaders.