“Traitor Of The Family” — How Assad Sold Out His Loved Ones With His Secret Escape

-Analysis-

BEIRUT — Like the rest of the country and the world, former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s entourage and extended family are still stunned by the sudden fall of the regime. But they are also reeling from the way it ended, with a particular sense of humiliation because Assad renounced power and fled the country without informing them.

What kind of meanness is this? It is a variation on the meanness he practiced when he had Syrians killed while he was sitting pretty in the Muhajireen Presidential Palace. And a similar baseness that permeated his boring speeches in the People’s Assembly.

Baseness one of the characteristics of this incomplete man, who was raised by his father’s intelligence officers. The officers left him with serious faults in his character, emotional defects that were always noticeable in his speeches.

When Assad left Syria suddenly with his wife and three children, Mana Assad, his sister-in-law and wife of his criminal brother Maher, described him in a post on X as “the traitor of the family and the homeland.” The strongman has indeed shamefully sold out his entourage. His smallness has affected a wide circle of his Syrian and non-Syrian followers. Some of them no doubt face grave risks, including from those who may seek retribution for the decades of repression, torture and killings by the Assad regime.

A pampered man

With his downfall, this pampered man has tarnished the reputation of countries, regimes, parties and leaders, from Tunisian President Kais Saied and UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed to Lebanese politicians Gebran Bassil and Suleiman Franjieh. Assad betrayed all of them, leaving at dawn in silence before they woke up.

Assad left behind not only he blood of Syrians but also the blood of allies.

The humiliation that extends across the region is also due to the blood that was shed to protect Assad and his Ba’athist regime. Hezbollah lost the lives of its fighters in Syria to protect the regime. What about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of party members who were killed in Syria?

Indeed, Assad left behind not only the blood of Syrians but also the blood of allies who rushed to protect his regime for more than 10 years since the outbreak of the civil war.

How did Hezbollah’s Sheikh Naim Qassem feel when he received the news that Assad had fled? How did a Lebanese mother feel whose son was killed while fighting in Syria? It’s a parallel tragedy, without a doubt.

​Lowly dictator

Assad could not have done anything other than flee to Russia. He isn’t a fearless dictator. The differences between him and late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, for example, are vast. The protégé of intelligence officers, emotionally and mentally incomplete, and the one with the enormous capacity to kill, play and escape. He is so lowly that he might even deceive his children — leaving them to save himself.

Assad inherited this from his father, a killing machine, and a circle of killers, and added to them relatives and unsavory friends. He ruled Syria with the fist of his father and the gluttony of his cousin Rami and the impudence of his brother Maher.

Not a single person close to Assad hesitated to insult him the day after he fled.

He also inherited the “human slaughterhouse,” the Sednaya prison, and the “human compressor,” that infernal machine in Sednaya that the regime used to compact the bodies of those it executed so that they would be easier to put in mass graves.

These crimes are not a product of the moment, but were produced by a cumulative imagination of the Ba’ath officers who developed the expertise of the Nazi experts they hosted since the 1960s.

It is no coincidence that not a single person close to him hesitated to insult him the day after he fled. Not only artists but also his prime minister, foreign minister and parliament speaker, all began insulting him, moments after receiving the news of his escape. It was as if they were waiting for his cowardly escape to start insulting him.

Hamas, which was in the process of resuming its relations with the resistance regime in Damascus, was quick to welcome the fall of the regime. Tehran and Moscow, ultimately, did not show any real regret for him.

Betraying his father

Assad left behind an amazing scene of how the regime’s practices had intensified since his father seized power in Syria. In this sense, Assad stabbed his father in the back as well. What we are seeing today in Syria — images of prisons, security branches, poverty and violations — reveals more of what we knew about Hafez al-Assad. Bashar fled, leaving behind his father’s crimes as well.

But while the Syrians mock Assad’s escape to Russia, they do not realize that he is not impacted by their mockery, because he is made of something different than even the world’s worst dictators.

Assad was playing with the blood of his victims — but also the blood of his father, his family and his allies.