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On Wednesday, the British daily The Guardian published private emails of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma. From a voyeuristic perspective, the correspondence is eloquent indeed in exposing the crassness of the Syrian ruling family. However, if we base ourselves only on what was made available to readers, it tells us relatively little about Assad’s role in Syria’s merciless repression.
The newspaper received a trove of 3,000 emails from a Syrian opposition source. It then conducted a methodical verification effort to confirm they were genuine. Only a handful have been highlighted by The Guardian to date, and what these exchanges show, primarily, is Bashar al-Assad and his interlocutors discussing ways to shape foreign coverage of the uprising in Syria, and Asma Assad buying expensive consumer goods online. One email, sent by the daughter of Qatar’s Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani to Asma, recommends that the Assads leave Syria, adding that they could move to Doha.
It does tell us something that in the midst of the Syrian crisis last year, both the president and his wife seemed devoted to shopping—he, for music applications, she for expensive household decorations. Such behavior creates the impression of a family strangely detached from the day-to-day suffering in Syria—the Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette moment of the Syrian revolution. It is rather more difficult to imagine the late Hafez al-Assad sending his wife Anissa a music app of their generation’s equivalent of Blake Shelton’s “God Gave Me You” while his army was crushing the uprising in Hama.
Not long ago, diplomats in Damascus believed that Bashar al-Assad regularly attended the meetings of senior intelligence chiefs to address the protests, before leaving soon thereafter when practical measures were agreed. One interpretation, the generous one, is that he is a hands-off leader who has little disposition to implicate himself in the details of power. Less kindly, one might assume the Syrian president is well aware of the mass murder being committed in his name, therefore prefers to keep up a layer of deniability.
In one respect, the cache of emails leaked to The Guardian may do a disservice. For some they suggest—and, again, we’re only talking about the limited number that have been made public until now—that Bashar is something of a nebbish, a weak-willed, adolescent leader. This portrayal plays up his relative innocence, in contrast to his brother Maher, for instance, who is regarded as someone who would never hesitate to climb down personally into the killing pit.
Yet while Bashar may not himself be preparing lists of those whom to kill and maim, he is the cornerstone of the system, the final arbiter between the officers when there are disagreements or decisive choices to be made. And his verdicts are not transmitted via the Internet. They are presented orally, even if they do sometimes filter down into written orders, of which several have surfaced in the past year.
In commenting on the emails, The Guardian noted that they showed Bashar al-Assad employing the tactics of his father, namely maintaining parallel lines of communication to his subordinates, in order to play them off against one another and avert a coup. In fact the emails don’t show that. Hafez al-Assad’s separate lines of authority and reporting were with his military and intelligence chiefs. Bashar al-Assad may well have a similar system in place, but it is not revealed in the emails.
Rather, what we know is that he communicated with several people who offered advice on media-related affairs, circumventing other more established figures who usually manage information in Damascus. Two pen pals were relatively inexperienced young women, another was his father-in-law, while a fourth was Hussein Mortada, a Lebanese businessman with connections to Hezbollah and Iran. This had nothing to do with preventing the overthrow of the regime, and none of these individuals are in the chain of command. In truth, the ideas voiced in the exchanges frequently sound amateurish.
There are exceptions. One of Assad’s correspondents is Khaled al-Ahmed, whom The Guardian describes as a “former senior regional official” who keeps Assad apprised of what is going on in Homs and Idlib. In one email he urges the president to “tighten the security grip to start an operation to restore state control in Idlib and Hama countryside.”* Interestingly, Ahmed tells Assad that he had agreed with another individual, whose identity The Guardian has concealed, to prepare an “action plan for dealing with the Alawite street.”
What is this action plan? And if Ahmed is discussing the launch of an offensive with Assad, then presumably the president was far more involved at the operational level than the other emails suggest. Given the savagery of the assaults on Homs and Idlib, what did Assad know and when did he know it?
Similarly, if Bashar al-Assad was aware that foreign journalists were in the Homs area, as Ahmed informs him in another email, then we can assume that this was an issue of considerable importance to the Syrian leadership. That brings us one step closer to assuming that the Western journalists killed in the Baba Amr district were specifically targeted, and that the president was no stranger to the development.
Ultimately, the emails will be truly valuable if they permit the preparation of an indictment for crimes against humanity. To learn that Assad and his wife have not a shred of compassion is, frankly, nothing new at this stage. Perhaps The Guardian will release more material in the coming days and weeks that better confirms just how complicit is the Syrian president in the destruction of his people.
*The original passage read:
There are exceptions. One of Assad’s correspondents is Khaled al-Ahmed, whom The Guardian describes as a “former senior regional official” who keeps Assad apprised of what is going on in Homs and Idlib. In one email he urges the president to “tighten the security grip to start [the] operation to restore state control in Idlib and Hama countryside.” Interestingly, Ahmed tells Assad that he had agreed with another individual, whose identity The Guardian has concealed, to prepare an “action plan for dealing with the Alawite street.”
What is this action plan? And if Ahmed is awaiting the launch of a specific offensive, then presumably Assad and he had discussed it, meaning the president was far more involved at the operational level than the other emails suggest. Given the savagery of the assaults on Homs and Idlib, what did Assad know and when did he know it?
The passage was changed because the translation from the Arabic in The Guardian was faulty. Ahmed did not mention “the” operation in Homs, but “an” operation.
The newspaper received a trove of 3,000 emails from a Syrian opposition source. It then conducted a methodical verification effort to confirm they were genuine. Only a handful have been highlighted by The Guardian to date, and what these exchanges show, primarily, is Bashar al-Assad and his interlocutors discussing ways to shape foreign coverage of the uprising in Syria, and Asma Assad buying expensive consumer goods online. One email, sent by the daughter of Qatar’s Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani to Asma, recommends that the Assads leave Syria, adding that they could move to Doha.
It does tell us something that in the midst of the Syrian crisis last year, both the president and his wife seemed devoted to shopping—he, for music applications, she for expensive household decorations. Such behavior creates the impression of a family strangely detached from the day-to-day suffering in Syria—the Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette moment of the Syrian revolution. It is rather more difficult to imagine the late Hafez al-Assad sending his wife Anissa a music app of their generation’s equivalent of Blake Shelton’s “God Gave Me You” while his army was crushing the uprising in Hama.
Not long ago, diplomats in Damascus believed that Bashar al-Assad regularly attended the meetings of senior intelligence chiefs to address the protests, before leaving soon thereafter when practical measures were agreed. One interpretation, the generous one, is that he is a hands-off leader who has little disposition to implicate himself in the details of power. Less kindly, one might assume the Syrian president is well aware of the mass murder being committed in his name, therefore prefers to keep up a layer of deniability.
In one respect, the cache of emails leaked to The Guardian may do a disservice. For some they suggest—and, again, we’re only talking about the limited number that have been made public until now—that Bashar is something of a nebbish, a weak-willed, adolescent leader. This portrayal plays up his relative innocence, in contrast to his brother Maher, for instance, who is regarded as someone who would never hesitate to climb down personally into the killing pit.
Yet while Bashar may not himself be preparing lists of those whom to kill and maim, he is the cornerstone of the system, the final arbiter between the officers when there are disagreements or decisive choices to be made. And his verdicts are not transmitted via the Internet. They are presented orally, even if they do sometimes filter down into written orders, of which several have surfaced in the past year.
In commenting on the emails, The Guardian noted that they showed Bashar al-Assad employing the tactics of his father, namely maintaining parallel lines of communication to his subordinates, in order to play them off against one another and avert a coup. In fact the emails don’t show that. Hafez al-Assad’s separate lines of authority and reporting were with his military and intelligence chiefs. Bashar al-Assad may well have a similar system in place, but it is not revealed in the emails.
Rather, what we know is that he communicated with several people who offered advice on media-related affairs, circumventing other more established figures who usually manage information in Damascus. Two pen pals were relatively inexperienced young women, another was his father-in-law, while a fourth was Hussein Mortada, a Lebanese businessman with connections to Hezbollah and Iran. This had nothing to do with preventing the overthrow of the regime, and none of these individuals are in the chain of command. In truth, the ideas voiced in the exchanges frequently sound amateurish.
There are exceptions. One of Assad’s correspondents is Khaled al-Ahmed, whom The Guardian describes as a “former senior regional official” who keeps Assad apprised of what is going on in Homs and Idlib. In one email he urges the president to “tighten the security grip to start an operation to restore state control in Idlib and Hama countryside.”* Interestingly, Ahmed tells Assad that he had agreed with another individual, whose identity The Guardian has concealed, to prepare an “action plan for dealing with the Alawite street.”
What is this action plan? And if Ahmed is discussing the launch of an offensive with Assad, then presumably the president was far more involved at the operational level than the other emails suggest. Given the savagery of the assaults on Homs and Idlib, what did Assad know and when did he know it?
Similarly, if Bashar al-Assad was aware that foreign journalists were in the Homs area, as Ahmed informs him in another email, then we can assume that this was an issue of considerable importance to the Syrian leadership. That brings us one step closer to assuming that the Western journalists killed in the Baba Amr district were specifically targeted, and that the president was no stranger to the development.
Ultimately, the emails will be truly valuable if they permit the preparation of an indictment for crimes against humanity. To learn that Assad and his wife have not a shred of compassion is, frankly, nothing new at this stage. Perhaps The Guardian will release more material in the coming days and weeks that better confirms just how complicit is the Syrian president in the destruction of his people.
*The original passage read:
There are exceptions. One of Assad’s correspondents is Khaled al-Ahmed, whom The Guardian describes as a “former senior regional official” who keeps Assad apprised of what is going on in Homs and Idlib. In one email he urges the president to “tighten the security grip to start [the] operation to restore state control in Idlib and Hama countryside.” Interestingly, Ahmed tells Assad that he had agreed with another individual, whose identity The Guardian has concealed, to prepare an “action plan for dealing with the Alawite street.”
What is this action plan? And if Ahmed is awaiting the launch of a specific offensive, then presumably Assad and he had discussed it, meaning the president was far more involved at the operational level than the other emails suggest. Given the savagery of the assaults on Homs and Idlib, what did Assad know and when did he know it?
The passage was changed because the translation from the Arabic in The Guardian was faulty. Ahmed did not mention “the” operation in Homs, but “an” operation.
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