The head of a toppled statue of Hafez al-Assad lies in Hama/AP

By Lisa Van Dusen

December 8, 2024

As the world processes the end of the Assad regime and the departure of its brutal dynastic scion, Bashar al-Assad, for Moscow, Syrians in Syria and elsewhere, including Canada, are euphoric.

Syrian exile and Oxford research fellow Ammar Azzouz captured the theme of the day in the Financial Times piece, Now Syria can Dream of a Future Again.

“I dream of a future that is just and democratic. A future where we all live in dignity, and have the right to be whoever we are,” writes Ammar. “I dream of a future without ruins and without war.”

That future will depend on a host of variables, including which interests are covertly supporting the rebels who ousted Assad, led by the Sunni Islamist political and paramilitary group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Organization for the Liberation of the Levant) and where they fall in the current division of pro- and anti-democracy global agendas. The place of that question in Syria’s future will depend in no small measure on whether President Joe Biden’s assurances Sunday about US support for a democratic future for Syria will survive the looming transfer of power to his anti-democracy successor.

Speaking at the White House, Biden credited action by his administration and U.S. allies for weakening Syria’s backers — Russia, Iran and Hezbollah – and breaking Assad’s grip on power to create a “historic opportunity”.

“Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East,” he said, describing Assad’s ouster as a “fundamental act of justice” after decades of repression, but added it was “a moment of risk and uncertainty” for the Middle East.

To Syrians, who have become experts in the field of risk and uncertainty, today’s celebration represents a triumph of hope not only over the country’s recent hell on earth, but over a half-century of tyranny.

In the dramatis personae of Middle East strongmen who defined the region’s path in the second half of the 20th century, Hafez al-Assad was an archetypal dictator, his second son and successor an accidental, ultimately more dangerous one.

The soft-spoken, introverted Bashar, who exhibited no interest in the military or in Ba’ath Party politics – Syria’s two purviews and preoccupations of power – was not supposed to succeed his father as president and dictator. He earned his medical degree from Damascus University, evidently expecting to lead the quiet life of a doctor and private citizen, and later specialized in ophthalmology at London’s Western Eye Hospital, presumably to that end.

It was Hafez al-Assad’s first-born son, Bassel – charismatic, an engineer, equestrian, PhD in military sciences from Moscow, trained Special Forces-parachutist, nicknamed “The Golden Knight” – who was groomed his whole life as heir and widely viewed as a born leader. In 1994, at the age of 31, Bassel al-Assad was killed when his Mercedes crashed at high speed near Damascus airport.

At which point – like John F. Kennedy, like Rajiv Gandhi, like King George VI – Bashar al-Assad became heir apparent by accident of fate, a quirk of political primogeniture that has clearly produced mixed results. This Assad was not only required to assume a role on his father’s death in 2000 that he was widely seen – both by Syrians and by Syria’s international interlocutors – to be entirely unsuited for, he never truly rose to the occasion, to his brother’s memory, or to his father’s complex legacy.

In that sense, events unfolding in Syria are shocking for their alacrity but not surprising as the epilogue to the al-Assad dynasty.

Like John F. Kennedy, like Rajiv Gandhi, like King George VI, Bashar al-Assad became heir apparent by accident of fate, a quirk of political primogeniture that has clearly produced mixed results.

Among Middle Eastern dictators – the ones who filled and followed the pan-Arab chapter of Cold War alignments, whose human rights suppressions ultimately provoked the Arab Spring, Hafez al-Assad was as ruthless as Libya’s Muammar al-Gadaffi and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. But the senior Assad maintained a public persona that, like King Hussein of Jordan’s, was more westernized, reasonable and open to diplomacy – in Assad’s case; as long as his personal control over the levers of power in Syria and, up to a point, (most notably from 1976-2005), Lebanon, remained unchallenged.

Hafez al-Assad assiduously cultivated the loyalty of Ba’ath Party members from its upper echelons to its grassroots, of the military, and of the Damascus elite with a combination of coercive reward and punishment and gamesmanship worthy of a voter-dependent retail politician (notwithstanding a fateful blind spot about his own family members). As with all dictators, Hafez Assad’s relationship to power became twisted by time, and the Hama massacre of 1982 marked the barbaric low point of his life in office.

Bashar al-Assad possessed all of his father’s ruthlessness and none of his Machiavellian charm. As the complications and costs of his weakness and intractability in the face of the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring mounted over the past decade, he did what corruption-enabled tyrants suffering from Dictator Desperation Syndrome do and doubled down on nefariousness.

The Syria Bashar al-Assad has reportedly fled is now a narco-state, responsible for 80% of global Captagon production, a major source of income for the Assad family and regime. The priceless cultural heritage sites of Aleppo, Homs and Hama have been reduced to rubble. Damascus, long the capitol of a police state but still a vibrant, historic Levantine metropolis, is the new Medellin. This year, it was ranked once again the world’s least liveable city by The Economist‘s Global Liveability Index.

In 1927, Hafez al-Assad’s father, Ali Sulayman, an Alawite tribal leader, changed the family name from “Wahsh”, meaning “beast” to “Assad”, meaning lion. Hafez al-Assad, for all his surface civility and Greater Syria pretensions, would not recognize the country his son has left behind. In two generations, the dynasty has gone from beast to lion and back again. Bashar al-Assad’s toppling represents the end of two Assad eras; the 29-year rule of an intentional dictator and the 24-year rule of an inadvertent one.

To Syrians – the ones who got out and the ones who stayed, the ones who risked their lives to save their children, who came to Canada or went elsewhere – the unknowns are beside the point on this glorious Sunday. The post-Assad era has dawned, which means the impossible has become possible.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as a senior writer at Maclean’s, deputy editor at iPolitics, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.