Steven A. Cook
On January 21, 1994, Basil al-Assad was killed in what the Syrian government described as a car accident. According to official dispatches, he had been driving too fast on the way to the airport and lost control of his vehicle. It was both entirely believable and the kind of accident that did not happen to the sons of Middle Eastern dictators—especially those being groomed to take the reins of power.
Basil’s death required that the next oldest son of Hafez al-Assad take his brother’s place. That was Bashar, who had been living in London and training to be an ophthalmologist at the time of his brother’s death. Between 1994 and 2000, Hafez, who had come to power in 1971 and had brought a repressive and sterile order to Syria, put his unintended heir through a crash course in how to run Syria.
Now three decades after his rise to prominence and almost a quarter century of rule, Bashar is gone and so is the Assad dynasty. Almost incomprehensively swept away over a two-week period during which the Islamist rebel group Ha’yat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its partner, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), swept out of Idlib province to seize the country from Bashar who barely managed to put up a fight after his Russian and Iranian allies abandoned him. The flip side of this ignominious defeat for Moscow and Tehran is the liberation of Syrians who joined with HTS, in particular, to carry on the uprising they began in the spring of 2011.
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