What the case of Suleiman al-Assad tells us

 

 'Over the past few days, several news sources have reported the release of Suleiman al-Assad from Syrian prison. While the assertion that Suleiman, the distant cousin of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, served even a day of his so-called ‘20-year sentence’ is questionable, understanding the context surrounding this particular incident is important for those wishing to make sense of the often-intractable terrain of Syrian politics.

 In August 2015, Suleiman shot and killed a decorated Syrian Air Force colonel, Hassan al-Shaikh, in central Latakia in a bout of road rage. At a time in which up to one third of military-aged Alawite men – the sect to which the president belongs – had died fighting on the frontlines for the government, Suleiman, according to al-Shaikh’s brother, had obscenely denigrated the Syrian military before firing off a barrage of bullets that killed the officer, also an Alawite, at a traffic light. The debasing of the army – viewed by the community as the only buffer between them and an increasingly vengeful and sectarian armed opposition – by a member of the ruling class, elicited a sharp response.

 Protests calling for Suleiman's execution erupted the next day in the city’s predominantly working class Alawite neighbourhood of Al-Zira’a. Other demands made by the demonstrators included an end to the impunity of the shabiha – a patchwork of predominantly Alawite armed gangs and smugglers linked to the régime that have terrorised Syrian society for decades – and to a security apparatus that applies equally to its citizenry. Sensing growing anger and restlessness among his main constituency, the president issued an arrest warrant in an apparent attempt to mollify them. However, weeks after state news reported that Suleiman had been detained, he managed to gun down two of his critics, including the host of Sham Radio, the pro-régime station that broadcast the interview with al-Sheikh’s brother and the governor of Latakia. Ironically, the governor was quoted as saying “no one is above the law.”

 Yet this wasn’t the first time that Bashar had allegedly ordered his cousin’s arrest. In 2014, after Suleiman received news of the death of his father, Hilal – a commander of a local branch of the country’s chief pro-régime militia, the National Defense Forces, or NDF – he reportedly went on a killing spree. Seeking retaliation for his father’s death at the hands of Sunni rebels, Suleiman assembled a convoy of shabiha and stormed Sunni neighbourhoods in downtown Latakia, shooting indiscriminately into the air and hurling grenades at residential balconies. In spite of killing dozens and running the risk of igniting a sectarian powder keg in the city’s most volatile areas, he was released a few days later.

 Suleiman had apparently inherited a legacy of gangsterism from his father, the hallmarks of which are a combination of rape, ransom, and arbitrary repression.



 However, this tashbeeh, as it is referred to colloquially by Syrians, has been a feature of the Assad régime since its inception. Bashar’s father, Hafez, in an attempt to crystalise his rule, generated a broad support base built around co-opting a range of actors, including criminal syndicates. In exchange for their loyalty, the shabiha were given access to lucrative smuggling routes that allowed them to penetrate the illicit economy – and do so with near total impunity.

 This exploded in the 1980s, when the Syrian occupation of Lebanon consolidated the securement of these lines across their porous borders and fostered a booming market for smuggling. Hafez’s ancestral village, al-Qardaha, effectively transformed into a regional hub for black market activities. As clientelist networks flourished, this gave rise to a new class of shabiha directly commanded by the president’s relatives.

 During this period, Fawwaz al-Assad, Hafez’s nephew, became the first notorious shabih of his kind. His unrestricted access to the port of Latakia proved especially fruitful and he and his entourage quickly developed a reputation for treating the city as their own personal fiefdom, setting a precedent for recruitment among disenfranchised Alawite youth seeking to amass fortunes at any cost.

 Under their reign, the coastal public sphere, particularly within urban Latakia, devolved into a semi-anarchic state in which they could arbitrarily beat up restaurant owners, shoot at bus drivers, and kidnap, rape, and kill young women with ease. The two tiers of shabiha, those connected to high-ranking officers, and those affiliated directly with the Assad family, operated above the law.

 For Syrians residing on the coast, home to most of Syria’s Alawite community, the fear of the dreaded and omnipresent security apparatus, or mukhabarat, was compounded by the thought that these thugs could execute them in cold blood, as Suleiman did, without hesitation – and without so much as even a pretext. Their contempt for life is such that practically every Syrian on the coast, regardless of their confessional background, can recite a story that recounts their barbarism. Prior to the conflict, the Alawites, contrary to what is commonly believed, were the main recipients of their criminality.

 When the uprising began in 2011, the shabiha were covertly mobilised by the régime to repress protests, particularly in cities with mixed populations. The subcontracting of repression to these armed clusters, dressed in civilian clothing, enabled the government to exercise plausible deniability while executing a host of atrocities and attributing them to “gangs and terrorists.” Deployed first to the coast, these régime-aligned thugs targeted businesses, sprayed sectarian threats on churches, and chanted genocidal slogans against religious minorities while posing as protesters. In conjunction with the régime’s release from prison of radical Islamists, the objective was to fracture and derail the uprising by persuading Syrians that Assad is their only hope of survival amidst growing instability and intercommunal antagonism.



 It depicted itself as the guarantor of minority security while engineering the facts on the ground critical to validating the false binary at the heart of its propaganda: either accept us and our henchmen – i.e. “the state” – or test the dispositions of the ‘jihadist’ revolt.

 The shabiha quickly metastasised into death squads that specialised in targeting Sunni Muslims in rebellious areas where the régime’s narrative was often contradicted by the violence committed – in broad daylight – by its security forces. Their atrocities accelerated as many were organised into local security committees and ultimately absorbed into the NDF in 2012. Since then, they have grown exponentially due to the militiafication of the Syrian army, resulting in an emboldened class of warlords who operate with increasing autonomy. They have exploited the conflict to loot, pillage, and engage in sectarian score-settling in Sunni areas and, to a lesser extent, have capitalised on the tenuous authority of the régime to target impoverished Alawite districts in Latakia. This has led to an unprecedented sense of lawlessness in ‘loyalist’ territories.

 Though accounts surrounding Suleiman’s detention vary, one particularly striking story circulated in 2016. According to the article, Suleiman was incarcerated in a prison compound in Tartous, where he and his entourage were labelled “the torturers” because of their role in abusing political prisoners. Another version of the same story even alleges that he is thought to have angrily held prison guards hostage while in jail. Though these anecdotes may sound far fetched, nine years of conflict have taught us that no detail, however seemingly absurd, can be intuitively ruled out when it comes to the Syrian theater.

 This is especially true of the dysfunctional substructure of the régime, the dynamics of which are defined by exceptionally surreal levels of brutality, corruption, and inequality. A mere juxtaposition between the pictures depicting Suleiman’s massive weight gain during his ‘incarceration’, and the images of the emaciated and mutilated corpses of political detainees at the hands of the mukhabarat, is the unequivocal evidence of this.

 Above all, Suleiman’s case is a microcosm: a glaring reminder that Syria under the Assads is a police state run by an assortment of gangsters and warlords who operate outside of the law. Its people are held hostage by an authoritarian mafia underpinned by the criminality of one extended family and its various networks and surrogates. Underneath the layers of dichotomies that inform popular opinion surrounding the country and the conflict – Sunni vs Alawite, oppositionists vs loyalists, the army vs the rebels – there are in essence two main Syrias: one for the Assad clan and its proxies, and one for everyone else.'

Spirit of revolt lives on in Syria's exiles

 

 'They may be scarred, but nothing, not even torture, bombing or exile, could break them.
As the Arab Spring revolts swept through the Middle East and North Africa region like a wildfire, thousands of young Syrians joined protests in March 2011 demanding change in a nation ruled by the family of President Bashar al-Assad since 1970.

 The régime's revenge was swift and brutal, and many of the non-violent activists at the heart of the uprising paid with their freedom and their lives.

 Even now, with no end in sight to their exile, they do not regret their revolution.



 The first thing Omar Alshogre sees when he wakes up in his Stockholm flat are the photographs of two prison guards who tortured him in Branch 215, one of Syria's most notorious detention centres.

 It may seem surprising but Alshogre wanted the pictures, which he had to buy off the guards' families and keeps on his bedside table, as a reminder to himself that: "They could not break me, and I'm still alive."

 Alshogre, now 25, says he was just 15 when régime forces first arrested him "along with all the men" in his village near Baniyas city -- a protest hub in a largely pro-government province -- on the Mediterranean coast.

 He was released two days later -- but only after his interrogators had pulled out his fingernails and broken his leg.

 "I understood what freedom meant for the first time, and that's when I started protesting," Alshogre said.

 Over the next 18 months, he was detained six more times in different places, including at his cousin's home, in the classroom and at checkpoints.

 In May 2012, régime troops attacked his village, killing his father, a retired army officer, and his two brothers.

 Following his final arrest in November 2012, he was transferred to a total of 10 different prisons and detention centres.

 "I saw more of Syria's prisons than I ever saw of Syria itself," he says.



 Released in 2015, he was a shadow of his former self, weighing just 34 kilos (just under 75 pounds).

 To save her sons' lives, his mother smuggled Omar and his younger brother Ali, then 20 and 11 years old, into Turkey.

 At the height of Europe's migrant crisis, they boarded a smuggler's boat to Greece and crossed Europe to Sweden, where they were granted asylum.

 Alshogre has since learned Swedish and English and speaks both fluently.

 Now, he works for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a US-based advocacy organisation, and has testified before Washington's Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on torture in Syria's prisons.

 He has given TED talks on his experience, inspiring his audience with a universal message on overcoming pain by finding meaning even in one's darkest hour.

 And recently he won a place at Georgetown University in Washington DC to study business and entrepreneurship.

 "It is not easy to lose your home, your father, your brothers, your school, your town, your mountains and your memories," he says.

 "But if I had the possibility to go back in time, I wouldn't do it. Because the revolution is the first thing we did right in Syria."



 "When I was pregnant and I had pain in my belly, I would cry. Not for me, but for the Syrians living in displacement camps who can't see a doctor, and for the detainees who suffer constantly," says Nivin Al-Mousa, who has lived in Berlin since 2015.

 When she joined the protests in her town of Taybet al-Imam in the central province of Hama, she never imagined she would end up seeking refuge abroad.

 In 2013, her younger brother Hamza, also a non-violent activist, was detained at a checkpoint.

 "We later learned that he had been tortured to death," says Al-Mousa, who identified his body in one of the pictures of torture victims' corpses released by a former Syrian military police photographer, codenamed "Caesar", who fled the country taking thousands of photographs documenting abuse and torture.

 "The moment you see that picture, a wound opens inside you, and the pain never heals," she says.



 Al-Mousa, her mother and siblings fled to Turkey in an escape "worthy of a James Bond movie. There were warplanes above us, bombing all around us, and the driver was speeding at 200 kilometres (125 miles) an hour," she says.

 In Turkey, she met her husband Mohammad, who originates from the central Syrian city of Homs and had narrowly survived being randomly shot in the head by a sniper while coming home from university.

 In 2015, he was granted a visa to seek medical treatment in Berlin. There, the family received refugee status.

 Al-Mousa, now 36, has frequent nightmares. "We are all traumatised," she says.

 But for her two daughters' sake, she works hard to adapt to her new life.

 She now speaks fluent German as well as English and Arabic, as do her girls, who are six and four.

 She works for international aid group Humanity & Inclusion, formerly known as Handicap International, helping refugees with disabilities in Germany.

 She also participates in protests in Berlin, home to a large Syrian refugee community, to help shine a light on the suffering of Syria's detainees.

 "All we want is a government that respects our basic rights," Al-Mousa says. "One day, the régime will get the fate it deserves."



 Tohama Darwish survived an August 2013 chemical attack on the besieged Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta blamed on the régime, in which rights groups say 1,400 people were killed.

 Then in 2018, the area faced an onslaught when the army, backed by Russian warplanes, crushed the armed opposition.

 "The bombing was so intense, I wished my daughter had still been in my belly so I could run faster," says Darwish, whose daughter Sumu was two at the time.

 Darwish, then a volunteer nurse, and her family joined the tens of thousands who fled Eastern Ghouta to the rebel-held northern province of Idlib.

 There, Islamist fighters accused her of spreading "obscenities" through her work raising community awareness about violence against women.

 "We didn't want to leave Syria," the 30-year-old says. "Unfortunately, there was no difference between the régime and the Islamists ruling Idlib."



 The family went to Turkey, from where Darwish and her husband applied for asylum in France.

 They now live in state housing in the northeastern French town of Colmar, where they are learning the language as they wait for their residence permits to come through.

 "From a gender perspective, life is better here. It's hard to be a feminist in Syria," she says.

 "I feel guilty for leaving my relatives behind. But I am happy that Sumu is at school here," she says.

 "She will always be Syrian, but her life is here now. When she's older, I will tell her everything that happened."



 When Bashar Farahat was released from detention in early 2013, he was barred from resuming his postgraduate paediatrics training at a government hospital in Latakia in western Syria.

 He had been jailed for joining the protests, and beaten by his interrogators "even harder" because he was a doctor with a degree from a public university.

 In April 2013, he was detained again for another six months.

 "In prison, the torture during interrogations was bad. But the worst was the constant torture of living in a tiny cell of 30 square metres (320 square feet) with 90 to 100 other detainees," says Farahat, who is now 36 and a registered doctor working in London.

 "We would take turns to sleep while the others stood," he says.

 As a doctor, his cellmates would ask him to treat their wounds. "But I had nothing to treat them with," he says of his time in a military intelligence detention centre in Damascus.

 "Occasionally, the guards would give us two vitamins or two anti-inflammatory pills to share among 100 people. People would lose limbs because of simple injuries becoming severely infected," he adds.



 Following his release in November 2013, he fled to neighbouring Lebanon, where he applied for resettlement through the United Nations.

 He arrived in Britain in March 2015, and has since passed the conversion exams allowing him to practise medicine there.

 Now married to an interior designer, he works at a National Health Service (NHS) hospital in north London.

 "When the Covid-19 pandemic began, of course I worried for my loved ones, but I think my experiences in Syria prepared me to work well in a crisis," says Farahat, who feels proud to be able to give back to Britain in its time of need.

 He has also set up a telemedicine website offering vulnerable Syrians online consultations free of charge.

 "We have to be strong, work hard and build good lives, so that when the régime falls we can contribute to Syria's future," he says.

 Looking back, knowing now what he didn't know in 2011, what would Farahat tell his younger self?

 "I would say: go out. Protest. Even more than I did. Do I regret the revolution? Never, not for a second. The revolution made me who I am today." '

How did Mazen Hamada disappear?

 'Mazen Al-Hamada escaped from the Assads’ torture dungeons and did what no one dared to do: using his own name, he told the world what happened to him even before he sought refuge in the Netherlands. Today, Mazen is missing, and his family fears that he is in the grip of the régime.

 “In his last call before he disappeared, Mazen repeated the sentence: ‘Pray for me’. His voice was trembling with fear. It made me feel that someone was listening to the call,” his nephew confirms. Mazen assured his family members of the thing they didn't want to hear: “I am in Syria, I am at Damascus International Airport.”

 The last thing Mazen said to his nephew was: “My nephew, pray to me”. Then the line went dead.

 It happened on a Sunday, a few minutes after midnight. Ziad stayed on the other end of the line in the German city of Krefeld, blaspheming and cursing his uncle Mazen: "Damn everything, Mazen, why did you return to Syria?!"

 Mazen Al-Hamada, aged 42, had been living in the town of Hillegom in the heart of the tulip-growing region in the Netherlands, in an apparently safe situation. But he was not an ordinary Syrian refugee; instead he’s one of the brave Syrians in Europe whose number does not exceed the fingers of one hand, who dared to be identified and to speak out, giving public testimony about the forms of torture they were subjected to in Bashar al-Assad's prisons.

 Mazen presented the story of his torture to politicians and human rights organizations in Washington, Geneva and London. "It was prominent in Europe." Ugur Angor, a researcher at the Dutch Center for War Documentation, which researches the issue of torture in Syria, said this. Ugur asks, "What made Mazen, a symbol of the resistance against Assad, go to Syria, the country that brought him close to death by torture?"

 Mazen grew up in a village close to Mohassan in eastern Syria, which was known as ‘Little Moscow’, due to the large number of communists among its children who were hostile to the Assad régime. When he graduated, Mazen worked for a French company carrying out oil exploration in Syria. With the outbreak of the Arab Spring and its arrival in Syria, Mazen began working to coordinate popular protests against Assad.

 As with many protesters, Mazen was arrested twice, and each time he returned after a few days to resume his activities. The third time, he was arrested by Air Force Security in Damascus in March 2012, he was detained for a year-and-a-half, moving between several prisons, including the military hospital, known as ‘the slaughterhouse’.

 He was released without understanding the reason, but it was clear that he had to leave Syria. Mazen arrived in the Netherlands in 2014 as a refugee, broken in body and soul. A newspaper journalist who met Mazen in 2014 reported that he was amazed at the sheer number of bikes in the Netherlands. When we asked him at the time if he could live comfortably, he replied: “I don’t know.” He said he was just a ghost. "I'm not living any more."
Mazen's sister and husband live in the town of Hillegom, where Mazen got a small apartment on the first floor of a building intended for low-income people. Like all expatriates, he had to follow language and integration classes. He was unable to learn the Dutch language. “I cannot memorize anything - my brain is full,” he says to his cousin Amer Obeid.

What distinguishes Syria from other dictatorships in recent history is the killing of thousands of people since the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011 by torturing them to death. For those who have researched torture, this policy is exceptional. "Torturing a person to death is a terrifying way to carry out an execution," said Angorou, a researcher who’s been analyzing the Assad régime's violations of people's rights. "After 2011, the goal of torture became to terrorize the people, not to obtain information."

 Most of those who survived the torture in Assad's dungeons are too afraid or ashamed to talk about what happened to them there. Mazen presented the entire account of his harrowing experiences to a Syrian research group, the Violations Documentation Center, formed by Razan Zaitouneh, while he was in Syria. Subsequently, from his place of residence in the Netherlands, he worked with the International Commission for Justice and Accountability, and with many Western-backed human rights organizations in an effort to help ensure justice for the employees of the Syrian régime.

In the documentary Syria's Disappeared, Mazen narrated the methods of torture practiced on him by Air Force Intelligence agents. He admitted to them that he had filmed the demonstrations and his ‘weapon’ was a Toshiba camera. An Air Force Intelligence interrogator falsely accused him of killing soldiers and attacking régime checkpoints. When Mazen denied these charges, the interrogator withdrew, leaving four monstrous thugs to beat the poor young man. They broke his ribs and hung him from hooks on a window frame, with his legs dangling in the air half a meter off the ground, Mazen told the newspaper in a 2014 interview. They forced him to remove his clothes, and the executioners put a large pair of pincers on his genitals.

"They continued to pinch and tighten these pliers until they cut the penis," Mazen recalled in Syria's Disappeared. Then they raped him by inserting a sharp object into his anus. They continued with this action until he finally agreed to sign the ‘confession’ wanted by the interrogator, who was waiting in the next room.



 Sexual violence is a daily occurrence in Syrian prisons. It is exceptional for the victim to speak about this openly, using his name. What makes Mazen’s story even more unique, however, is that he escaped from Hospital 601 in Damascus, the infamous hellhole known as the ‘slaughterhouse.’

According to the human rights organization Human Rights Watch, Hospital 601 is one of two hospitals where more than 6,000 prisoners were killed between 2011 and 2013. A military photographer known as ‘Caesar’ smuggled harrowing photos of the victims out of the country when he managed to escape to the West in 2013.

The régime agents brought Mazen to Hospital 601 because he was urinating blood, due to the torture he had endured. In the toilet there, he saw three bodies, bound and dumped. Chained in his bed, Mazen watched as another one was beaten to death, realizing he could be the next victim. So he decided to claim that he had recovered in order to escape from this hell. Will they take him again to the torture prison? To hang him there again by his wrists? escape from this hell. Would they take him back again to the torture prison? To hang him up there again by his wrists? It seemed to him that the executioners were frustrated that he was still alive.

Mazen sustained permanent injuries due to torture. “Don’t talk to me about this,” he would say, weeping, every time Amer Obeid, his sister’s husband, mentioned the issue of marriage to him, saying – unaware what Mazen had endured - “You’re a young man. Time to get married.”
In Holland, Mazen visited the ‘Arc 45 Center,’ which specializes in treating the effects of war trauma, Amer says. Soon after starting there, however, he stopped the treatment. “They were putting him in a closed room, which he could not bear,” Amer explained. After that, he began to lose control of his life. According to Amer, who lives nearby, “Mazen's apartment became a pile of chaos, while Mazen spent his days eating and smoking at his laptop."

 The Dutch bureaucracy had no way to deal with Mazen. In the small community of anti-Assad activists there, he is considered a hero, despite being difficult to deal with. But the Dutch government viewed him primarily as an unemployed asylum seeker. This contradiction was further highlighted when a municipal social worker discovered that Mazen had again traveled abroad to tell his story internationally.

Amer, who was in charge of translating conversations between Mazen and the municipality employee, said that the latter expressed anger at Mazen, insisting that he was not entitled to travel without informing the municipality, which would need to deduct money from the unemployment benefit he received for the days he was absent. As for the fact that Mazen was a witness to historic crimes against humanity of international importance, this was of no concern to the municipality employee. “The way the municipality officials interrogated him was similar to that of the Assadist Intelligence,” Amer says. “They pressured him a lot.”

The municipality says it was unable to respond to Mazen’s case due to client privacy laws. “We know that the goal of social service is ‘to make the population as independent as possible in terms of work, income and care,” an official said, adding, “The right to receive unemployment benefits is safeguarded according to the rights and duties of the person entitled to it. Whoever does not abide by this rule and does not respond to repeated requests for compliance, the municipality has the right to stop paying him the unemployment benefits."

 Things got worse on November 12th, 2019. On returning home, Mazen discovered that his key no longer fit the front door lock. The Stek Housing Association seized his house and everything and evicted him. It was only then that Mazen's sister and husband knew that Mazen had not paid the rent for months.

Liesbeth Gort, a spokesperson for the Stek Housing Association, says eviction is the last resort if attempts to help the tenant get rid of rent arrears fail as claimed. He says that there is a team that specializes in helping tenants who have late-paid rents. “Of course we deal a lot with people with mental problems,” Gort says. We are trying to find solutions for them, in cooperation with the municipality's social team and the health care network. ”

 “We always take special circumstances into consideration and we have done that here. But if you don't provide real help, the housing company will stand helpless, ”says Gprt. "The eviction has been approved by the court and the tenant has been informed of this."

 

 After this, Mazen's laptop computer was seized, together with possible evidence against the Syrian government. Mazen's belongings are kept by the bailiff, O.J. Boeder in Haarlem. The owner of the company does not want to go into discussion of the matter with us and does not want to answer our questions. Generally, they say, when property is seized, things of economic or personal value are stored with an external storage company for a period of 13 weeks, after which they are destroyed.

 Mazen was living in a different reality. One of his acquaintances in Scotland, Idrees Ahmad, explained, "He said people from the Dutch intelligence services broke into his house and confiscated his documents." Ahmad adds that Mazen was suffering from schizophrenia.
Without a home and property, he lived with his sister Maha and her husband Amer in Hillegom. “He would sit there on the floor, wrapped in a blanket, smoking a lot and barely eating. He was chatting for long periods on the phone, Amer says, "I was curious to know who he was talking all this time without stopping. There was no one on the other end of the line - he was talking to himself."

 “I want to go back to Syria,” Mazen said repeatedly. Nobody took him seriously.
But Mazen left Helligom on 15th February. “I'm going to see friends of mine in Germany,” he said during his final farewell. Everyone - his sister, her husband, and also his nephew - believes that people in Berlin working for the régime had reached out to him. “We don't know how they pulled it off,” his family said. It is possible that his feelings were being played, that régime loyalists told him he could return to Syria, in exchange for the release of several family members who are still in prison there. There are rumors and allegations circulating on social media that Mazen called the Syrian Embassy in Berlin. 

 The Syrian embassies in Europe are a well-known base for Assad's spies. "The embassy mafia is trying to keep refugees in Germany under control," says Ziad, Mazen's nephew who lives in Krefeld. According to Angor, "It is 100% certain that the Syrian intelligence services are also active in the Netherlands."



 The first message about Mazen’s presence in Syria was posted on a pro-régime Facebook group on Saturday, February 22nd. When his nephew Ziyad heard this, he called him via WhatsApp, and this call remains the only evidence that Mazen is currently in Damascus. Ziyad recounts that his uncle told him that the Syrian authorities had given him a choice between undergoing a simple investigation in Damascus or leaving, on Sunday, February 23rd, for Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, to return from there to the Netherlands.

 Ziad says: “I think it sounded weird and irrational, but that’s what he told me. He was not in good shape and was speaking strangely, as if they were giving him hallucinogenic pills or drugs. Ziad urged Mazen to try to leave Syria for anywhere. Mazen’s appearance on WhatsApp was at 12 minutes past midnight on Sunday, February 23.

 Police in the Netherlands are investigating Mazen's disappearance. The County Department of Investigation requires witnesses to provide their testimony about the case. A foreign ministry spokesman said that the Netherlands “cannot provide consular assistance in Syria,” and that so far no inquiries have been made about Mazen's current residency. It is not clear how Mazen traveled to Syria at all. According to his family, he did not have a valid passport.
Mazen's sister and husband hope for any sign that Mazen is alive. Mazen was already weak in the Netherlands, not to mention what he suffered when he fell into the hands of Assad officials. “This régime is filthy, and its morals are disgusting,” says Amer, Mazen’s brother-in-law. His family fears that at some time, Mazen will be forced to appear on Syrian TV, making one of the régime’s typical forced confessions, denying all he said previously in a scripted statement, and saying, “Everything I mentioned before is untrue.” '

Escalating violence in strategic Syrian city

 

 'Violence has erupted in recent weeks in a strategic Syrian city with Assad régime forces and former rebels clashing amid a wave of assassinations, revealing the difficulty President Bashar al-Assad faces in maintaining control over areas he says he has pacified.

 The southwestern city of Daraa is considered the cradle of the Syrian revolution because it is where the first anti-government demonstration broke out in 2011. Seven years later, after peaceful protests had turned into a devastating civil war, Russian-backed Syrian forces recaptured Daraa, raised the national flag and introduced a program of “reconciliation” with rebel fighters.

 But dissent continued to simmer in Daraa, even as régime forces took their battle to other fronts. And the turmoil of recent weeks has become the latest challenge to Assad’s authority, which was already under pressure from a crippling economic crisis and growing dissension within the ranks of his traditional allies.



 Tensions in Daraa spiked last month after gunmen attacked the car of a prominent rebel leader who had continued to voice opposition to the régime even after Assad’s forces recaptured the area. The former commander, Adham al-Karad, and four of his companions were killed, sparking weeks of violence, according to opposition media reports corroborated by monitoring groups, analysts and social media posts.

 Under pressure, Assad agreed to release 62 people who had been arrested for “incidents in the province,” the pro-régime al-Watan newspaper reported two weeks ago.

 But days later, the army’s Fourth Division, which is headed by Assad’s brother Maher, rolled into southern Daraa in search of wanted men, provoking clashes with former rebel fighters who later shut down roads leading to the city to prevent the military’s advance, local pro-opposition media reported. Days later, an air force intelligence checkpoint in a nearby town was attacked, prompting the Fourth Division to try to storm Daraa and triggering a battle with former rebels.



 This month, at least nine former rebels who had agreed to join the Syrian army and seven others who had returned to civilian life were killed, according to Mohammed al-Sharaa, a member of the Daraa Martyrs Documentation Office. The assailants were unknown, with suspicion falling in turn on régime forces seeking to settle scores with former adversaries; opposition loyalists who feel betrayed by former comrades; and even Islamic State militants.

Reliable information about developments in Syria is often scarce because of the régime’s tight media controls and widespread fear of the police state. But the documentation office, a Belgium-based monitoring group, has sought to chronicle the rising toll, reporting that 193 former rebel fighters who had put down their weapons have been slain in Daraa since régime forces retook the city in July 2018, with the pace of killings accelerating each year. More than 200 other civilians have been killed, some under torture, the group reported.

 Assad's military has reclaimed much of the territory that had been lost at the height of the insurgency, and rebel fighters are now bottled up in one remaining enclave in northwestern Syria. Nor is there any other obvious contender for the presidency of the country, ruled by the Assad family for 50 years.

 But the unrest in Daraa comes at a time when Assad has been confronting the biggest challenges to his power since Syrians first rose up against him in 2011, including strains over the past year within his family and with his crucial Russian allies.



 The violence in Daraa is also eroding the image Assad has tried to portray as he urges Syrians who fled the country to return home to régime-controlled territory. He has promised that no harm will befall those who come back. But many Syrian refugees remain skeptical, aware of reports that many who’ve returned have disappeared or died in custody.

 During an international conference in Damascus this month, Syrian officials discussed steps they were taking to welcome returning refugees and blamed the regional Arab media for painting too negative a picture.

 The Syrian régime’s “proclaimed military victory and the physical return of its institutions does not mean the restoration of security and stability,” said Abdullah al-Jabassini, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute. “The situation in Daraa contradicts the ‘return of the state’ ideal narrative.”

 Not only does Assad’s régime continue to face violent opposition, Jabassini said, but it has yet to show that it can exercise meaningful control of the territory it has recaptured. The continuing turmoil in Daraa is fueled by a range of factors, he said, including unresolved grievances and score-settling, an unusually high number of former rebels, an abundance of available weapons, and local anger over the presence of fighters from Iranian militias and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which are aligned with Assad.



 Daraa’s significance goes beyond symbolism. Daraa city is just north of Syria’s border with Jordan, and the province of the same name hosts a strategic border crossing. Two months after the city was recaptured by Assad’s forces, the régime reopened the crossing to both people and commerce, seeking to swiftly restore a once highly profitable trade route after it was blocked for several years.

 The weeks-long battle over Daraa was exceptionally fierce. After the opposition was defeated, some rebels chose to pack up and pile into the now-infamous green buses dispatched by the régime to relocate fighters and their families to Idlib, a rebel-held enclave in the northwest of Syria.

 Other fighters chose to stay. Some accepted reconciliation deals, with many joining the Syrian army’s Russian-sponsored Fifth Corps, created ostensibly to fight the Islamic State. Soon after, the régime announced nearly 1,000 reconciliation deals struck in Daraa in a single day.

 The pro-régime media has trumpeted such reconciliation deals, saying they “preserve blood and return those who have lost their way to the homeland’s embrace.” But unlike in some other recaptured areas of Syria where former insurgents have been offered these agreements, the deals in Daraa did not put an end to resistance. Many former rebel commanders and fighters have remained openly defiant of the régime.

 Karad, the rebel leader assassinated last month, was one such commander. Even after the city fell, he continued to speak of revolution and criticized Iran and Russia, Assad’s biggest backers.

 “We are rebels from the city that is the cradle of the revolution. We succumbed to reconciliation under international pressure, and we have not abandoned our cause,” he said in a Facebook post after surviving an assassination attempt last year.

 In death, he leaves behind a 1-year-old son, named Saladin. On Facebook, Karad had written that he hoped God would allow his son to emulate the legendary Islamic commander who fought the Crusaders in the 12th century.'

Displaced Syria teen recreates lost family home

 

 'Among the olive trees in northwestern Syria, displaced teenager Wissam Diab plucks an oud outside his new home, a tent surrounded by luscious plants.

 Inside, there are more tumbling indoor plants and a collection of tiny cacti, as well as dozens of books lined up on a cloth-covered table from authors such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Haruki Murakami and Egypt's celebrated Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

 Assad régime bombing forced the Diab family to flee their village of Kafr Zita in central Hama province, but when 19-year-old Wissam moved into a tent in northwestern Syria he decided to recreate his childhood home.



 "It's been four years, and we haven't been able to find a house or go back home," said the young man with green eyes and shoulder-length brown hair.

 "What I've done with the tent is me trying to settle down."

 And settle down he did in his own tent in an olive grove in the area of Atme, in Idlib province near the Turkish border, while his parents and two sisters have a separate tent next door.

 A patterned stone path leads up to the front door and wooden sticks top the canvas roof.

 All around, plants and flowering shrubs thrive in large plastic pots, or in neat rows in the soil of his front garden.

 Indoors, he has hung a textile curtain along the tarpaulin wall, and made a small living room with a floor-level sofa.

 An ornate red carpet pads out his tent underfoot.

 "Our home was like this. We had a garden, we had a library, we had a lot of flowers," he said.

 It "was like this, but much, much better".



 In Idlib, a major rebel bastion, around half of the three million inhabitants live in tents or shelters, many after losing their homes in other parts of the country now back under government control.

 In October 2016, Diab and his family were forced to flee their home further south, as regime aircraft bombarded the surrounding area in a bloody campaign that killed his only brother.

 Scrolling through his smart phone, Diab shows images of their old home in Kafr Zita, which he says was blitzed.

 The family lived in a displacement camp until eight months ago.

 But as fears mounted over the spread there of the novel coronavirus, they decided to move away to somewhere more secluded.

 When they ran for their lives four years ago, the Diabs grabbed the bare necessities and Wissam managed to save a few of his precious books.

 His collection now contains 85 novels and other books, including translated works by Dostoyevsky or Murakami, he says.

 "Here I had to start again from scratch. I bought plants and books, and built the library up again," he said.

 To pass the time, he is also teaching himself to play the oud via tutorials on YouTube.

 Diab says many of his neighbours were surprised to see how much energy he had poured into transforming his tent.

 But the young Syrian says he fears it will be some time before anybody can go home.

 "I know we will be here for a while," he said.

 So in the meanwhile, he looks after his cacti collection and waters his creeping jasmine.'

The Liquidation of Rukban Camp

 

 ' “That’s the point, with Rukban. It’s a black hole. Nothing gets out of it. No info, no nothing.” - Simone Jeger, independent humanitarian adviser.

 By the middle of 2014, the Assad régime had displaced 6.5 million Syrians inside the country alone. 2.5 million more had registered as refugees in neighboring countries. A series of sweeping offensives and sieges in Homs suddenly threatened to displace hundreds of thousands more.

 And they did. Families ran in droves to the Jordanian border, fleeing an onslaught of warplanes, artillery shells, and marauding régime coalition forces.

 Today, the number of dead Syrians is nearly unfathomable and effectively uncountable: indeed, since 2014, even the United Nations (UN) has stopped trying. Those who have not succumbed to the horrors of war carry on, forced towards a life in the increasingly remote and inhospitable regions of the Syrian badiyat, or an existence marred by xenophobia and repression on the far shores of Europe.

 These stories serve as a testament, not to the horrors of war, but the Assad régime’s almost unimaginable brutality. International law has always been irrelevant to the equation of Syria, and indeed, all our commonly agreed upon norms have been set adrift by a tide of war intended to wrest control of the country by burning it to the ground.



 Faced with an overwhelming influx of Syrian refugees, Jordan’s already heavily subsidized economy abruptly reached a tipping point. For years, thousands of refugee children had been wandering the streets of Amman, peddling water bottles during school hours to support their families. Tens of thousands more were still trapped in Syria, making final decisions as to whether they should stay in Syria and face potential death or leave their homeland behind for Jordan’s uncertainty and the intensely inhospitable nature of the Jordanian mukhabarat, or intelligence services.

 During this period, most fled southward and eastward towards the Rukban border crossing — a sparsely manned outpost less than 10km from the Iraqi-Jordanian border. Then, in July of 2014, citing security concerns over recent SVBIED (Suicide Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device) attacks on the border checkpoint by ISIS militants, Jordan formally closed the Rukban border crossing – leaving thousands stranded.



 The Islamic State did indeed maintain some presence in the far eastern expanse of what they had declared to be “Wilayat Homs,” using their foothold in the area to facilitate cross-border transfers of goods and forces from Iraq to Syria and vice versa. And by late 2015, a clearly US-funded force comprised of Southern Front rebels and operating with the name جيش مغاوير الثورة (transliterated as Jaysh Mughaweir at-Thawra, or the “Army of Revolutionary Commandos”) emerged in the area as an opposing element to regional ISIS militants. It would take two more years for a physical US Armed Forces garrison (near Jabal at-Tanaf, roughly 10km to the northeast) to establish its presence in the region, officially operating as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, the Obama administration’s war on ISIS.

 Since Jordan shuttered the border, Rukban has swelled in size, eventually reaching a peak of around 75,000-100,000 residents* from roughly 2017 to 2018. But due to death, forcible displacement, and sporadic repatriation efforts spearheaded by the Assad régime’s mukhabarat, the camp population has dwindled slowly in the years since. Recent estimations from mainstream sources have placed the population of Rukban camp at around 10,000 people, but this appears to be an underestimation: at current, internal sources say, there are likely upwards of 20,000 people living in the camp, with around 3,500 families comprising between 5 and 10 members each.



 In the north, the threat of the Assad régime looms heavy over Rukban’s residents. The régime is logistically overstretched and prefers to invest money in various “reconstruction” projects appealing to foreign interest, so this territory sees few actual patrols by régime forces. Moreover, the US and US-backed forces’ physical presence at the Tanf base, less than 10km away from Rukban camp, serves as a further deterrent for régime patrols. The United States and Jaysh Mughaweir at-Thawra have positioned themselves as the de facto operating party within the 55km deconfliction zone established during the base’s inauguration in early 2016.

 While infrastructural support in the camp has been sporadic, the US Armed Forces garrison at Tanf base has been a crucial facilitating element in recent efforts to establish essential services in Rukban, including emergency provision cesarean sections to pregnant women in the camp. The goodwill of the US government is also still needed to move forward on critical projects, including efforts by the Chicago-based humanitarian NGO MedGlobal to staff a newly built health clinic that currently sits empty and unusable, without any doctors.

 In the center exists an effectively ungoverned territory, often referred to as a “no man’s land.” This area comprises the neigborhood for the bulk of Rukban’s inhabitants. Roughly as many Rukbanis live near the northern berm as the southern berm, and as the conflict has progressed, the UN and Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) have utilized various pathways to distribute goods into Rukban camp. However, most goods today come from the north, either via piecemeal UN / SARC structures hubbed out of Damascus or via informal networks.

 To the south lies Jordan, A barren desert country with sparse natural resources and an economy heavily reliant on foreign aid. Initial surges of displacement sent a shockwave through the Jordanian economy and drove millions of Syrian refugees into Amman’s streets and the tents of Zaatari. This logic led to the country’s ostensibly pragmatic and apparently malicious decision in 2014 to shutter the southern berm, leaving Rukbanis trapped between two impossible circumstances: an impassable border and a labyrinth of dungeons leading only to torture and death.'

Syrians scorn 'manipulative' Assad refugee conference

 

 'Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's régime alleged on Wednesday that Syrian refugees are being "pressured" to remain in their host countries during a Russia-backed conference that claimed to address Syrian refugees issue. 

 The Damascus conference, which took place on Wednesday, was rejected by most of the international community and was only attended by representatives from Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela and China, although a United Nations representative was expected to attend the conference as an observer.

 "Millions of Syrians want to return," Assad said.

 However, he claimed that Syrian refugees are being "pressured" and "intimidated" by their host countries to stay in order to obtain international aid.

 Mikhail Mezentsev, head of the Russian-Syrian Coordination Center for the Return of Refugees, pledged $1 billion for the reconstruction of electrical networks, industries and other civilian purposes at the conference.

 He said Russian ministries are pushing projects in a number of important fields, such as education and medicine, investment of natural resources and housing construction, trade, economy and scientific and technical cooperation.

 "The biggest detrimental factor to refugees' return is the rule of Assad régime that threatens all aspects of life," Syrian human rights activist Reem Assil said.

 "Syrian refugees around the world watch with horror how different crises in Syria are been dealt with by the régime, from the financial crisis and the currency collapse, to the health crisis and the response to Covid-19, to the environmental crisis and the Syrian forests burning, and the list goes on," she added. 

 Assil urged that as long as Syria remains in the state it currently is due to years of war, no refugee will feel safe enough to return.

 "No one will want to go back to a country with endless disasters caused by an inefficient régime that failed to offer any sound solutions to a growing list of pressing problems over the last decade."

 Syrian activists and lawyers deplored the conference and branded it hypocritical, manipulative and one that emboldens the racism of Europe's far-right anti-refugee sentiments.

 "Assad and Russia held today a conference in Damascus called 'The refugees' return', they still living in unbelievable denying they still not accepting that 10 million refugees left the country because of Assad. They still think someone will buy their lying and their propaganda," said Syrian human rights defender Asaad Hanna on Twitter. 

 Human rights lawyer Laila Alodaat slammed the refugee conference as an attempt to whitewash the systematic human rights abuses by the Assad régime and to manipulate vulnerable victims of war.

 "The arguments presented by the Syrian government in this conference are consistent with their ongoing standing and practices, including consistent human rights violations against civilians, the systematic use of detention and torture and the manipulation and the politicisation of international aid," she said.

 "This is one of many attempts to abuse and manipulate the ongoing suffering of the most vulnerable civilians to combat the few international measures put in place to hold the Syrian régime accountable for its abuses, for example, the sanctions."

 "It is also, once more, trying to reason with populist right wing anti-immigrant voices in Europe to suggest that refugees are making the death trips for financial gains rather than to flee eminent threat to their lives and livelihood", Alodaat added.

 Assad's remarks that it is safe for refugees to return to war-torn Syria are often echoed by far-right politicians in Europe – many of whom have links to Russia, including top officials in the UK's anti-migrant Brexit Party also.

 Of Syria's 17 million population, 5.5 million are living as refugees in neighbouring countries, mostly in Turkey. A further six million are internally displaced and uprooted within Syria.'

Russia has refused to stop bombing southern Idlib

 'A military source in Idlib governorate, northwest of Syria, said that Russia has refused a request by the Turkish side to stop the bombing of the southern countryside of Idlib. The source stated that Russia has refused a request from Turkey that included stopping the bombing of the towns of Jabal al-Zawiya in the southern countryside of Idlib. This coincided with Turkey’s evacuation of two military points in the areas controlled by the Assad régime forces, namely Sher Magha, west of Hama, and Maar Hatat in Southern Idlib.

 According to the source, Russia’s rejection of Turkey’s request indicates that Moscow is not satisfied with the Turkish army’s redeployment of its forces withdrawing from the Assad régime’s control areas, in Jabal al-Zawiya.

 During the past weeks, the Assad régime’s forces and their allies have bombed the cities and towns of Idlib Governorate, especially those south of the M4 highway. Most of the bombing operations focused on the city of Ariha and the villages of Jabal Al-Zawiya, including Kansafra, Kafr Awaid and al-Bara.

 A report by the Response Coordinators team in Syria stated that the Assad régime forces and Russia violated the ceasefire in Idlib 314 times from the first of October until the eighth of this month.

 It is noteworthy that the army sent huge military reinforcements to Jabal al-Zawiya, and established many new fortifications in the region, in conjunction with its withdrawal of a number of military bases from the areas controlled by the Assad régime forces, and their deployment again south of Idlib within the areas controlled by the revolutionary factions.'

 Note 24/8/25, link broken.

Assad's assault on Idlib's schools

 'Asked about her dreams for the future, nine-year-old Salam al-Munir responds solemnly: "For the war to end and to go back to the innocence of my childhood, like the rest of the world's children".

 Salam returned to her village of al-Nayrab in the eastern Idlib province last week for the first time in months, expecting to reunite with classmates from her old school.

 But nothing was left, just memories of smiles and laughter from the corridors and classrooms, now covered in rubble and debris.



 Russian warplanes destroyed her school earlier this year during a military operation with the Syrian régime in Idlib province. The bloody campaign in 2019 and early 2020 killed hundreds of people and displaced over a million, before a ceasefire deal was reached in March.

 At the beginning of 2020, Salam and nine family members were displaced from al-Nayrab to Salqin, next to the Turkish-Syrian border, during a campaign by Bashar al-Assad's forces to recapture Maarat al-Numan in January after two months of a punishing régime siege and daily bombings.

 Salam, like many Syrian children in Idlib, was forced to abandon her studies as the newly displaced struggled to find schools, which had either been destroyed or were at full capacity.



 The collapse of the Syrian pound and financial hardship meant that for many children, education was no longer an option. Salam's father Munir had lost his job during the military campaign after his supermarket in al-Nayrab was destroyed by artillery shells.

 Having returned to her village, life in al-Nayrab has been completely transformed. Most of her old friends were displaced by régime attacks, and her new classmates are unfamiliar faces. Her home now lies in ruins, with the family staying temporarily at her uncle's house, who is himself still displaced in al-Dana, near the Turkish border. Despite life's difficulties, Salam still dreams of becoming a dentist. "School is a mother," she says.



 Idlib has witnessed a tragic academic year in every sense of the word, said Mustafa Haj Ali, a media official in the province’s Education Directorate.

 Russian and régime forces deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure and schools during their military campaign earlier this year, he said, with tens of thousands displaced to refugee camps and border areas.

 The directorate has been working tirelessly to set up education facilities for students displaced to new areas, but dozens of schools were destroyed in fighting, including institutions in Khan Sheikhoun, Maarat al-Numan, Kafr Nabl and the directorate's headquarters in Saraqeb.



 The mass displacement of people to areas in northwestern Syria considered safer has made obtaining precise statistics about the number of students and teachers displaced, or killed, near impossible to quantify, Ali says.

 Two further crises followed for education in Idlib. A European grant to support schools, which used to support nearly 65 percent of teachers and schools with a salary stipend, was stopped. Most teachers now work voluntarily without pay. The second, and most devastating, was the Covid-19 pandemic.

 A meeting was held at the beginning of this academic year between education directorates and civil society institutions, along with health and civil defence organisations, to stress the urgent need to reopen schools to compensate for the previous year.



 Precautionary measures will be applied, including social distancing and masks and gloves for teachers and students. Families will only have to pay 10 Turkish liras ($1.20) for the academic year. A contingency plan for an outbreak of infection has also been created, whereby students will be tested, and school suspended until the results are confirmed.

 The number of students is estimated at 210,000 for the current academic year, half the number of 2019, prior to the régime's military campaign. There are around 600 schools in operation, less than half the number of 1,400 reported in 2011.



 UNICEF reports that after nearly ten years of war more than one in three schools are no longer operational. Many have been damaged, destroyed or are used to shelter displaced families. Some schools have also been turned into military headquarters by régime forces.

 New facilities, however, have been established by the Education Directorate in camps and areas hosting displaced persons, including in al-Dana, Sarmada, Maarat Misrin, Kelly and Hazano. Most of these areas have seen their population swell as new arrivals flee fighting in other areas. Al-Nayrab had five schools, of which three were destroyed and one is in need of restoration after being struck by a missile.

 A number of volunteer teachers are also now working to implement distance learning in agreement with the Education Directorate to provide up to 40 percent of the curriculum on social media for all students, in case schools are closed again.



 Muhammad Hallaj, Director of the Syria Response Coordinators Team, says that nearly 80 schools in Idlib have become shelters for displaced families since 2015, with around 35 now providing education again.

 In camps near the border sheltering displaced families there are around 45 schools with over 140,000 students, but children face multiple obstacles. Two out of every ten drop out for financial reasons, either to work or beg, while for many young girls marriages are arranged to provide support for their families.'

Daraa youth flee to opposition-held areas in northern Syria

 

 'Southern Daraa province is witnessing the daily departure of dozens of young people towards the rebel-held areas in northern Syria to escape arbitrary arrests, physical liquidations, and security prosecutions that have hit most of Southern towns, targeting their youth, regardless of their affiliations and loyalties.

 Local activists pointed out that the people of the southern province strongly want again to flee from Daraa areas towards the "unknown", after the régime established its pillars in the various regions, and began to take revenge on the young people whom the Syrian régime still considers yesterday's enemies, despite their joining his auxiliary forces with all its names and directions.

 Well-informed sources said that dozens of young men leave the regions of Daraa towards Lebanon and the liberated north of Syria, daily, after the régime and some of its pro-parties began to encourage clandestine immigration of the youth group, with the aim of achieving material benefit through them on the one hand, and emptying the southern region of its youth to facilitate control over it on the other hand.

 Residents, after they felt let down by the major powers that are manipulating the fate of their province, and the whole region, according to their calculations and interests, became completely sure that their economic and living conditions will not change for the better.

 To clarify the size of the security disaster that the people of Daraa are experiencing under the Assad régime, the Daraa Martyrs Documentation Office counted 17 people killed and 11 others injured in 31 operations and assassination attempts in Daraa last September.

 The report indicated that 14 former fighters died and they were among the opposition factions (Free Syrian Army), 8 of whom joined the régime forces after controlling Daraa and subject to a settlement agreement in August 2018.

 Yasser. S, 31, a former FSA fighter, said that he cannot exercise his normal life since he settled with the régime and had to work on his agricultural land, noting that he lives in a state of constant concern and fear that his fate may be the fate of his companions, three of whom have been assassinated so far. Despite their settlement with the régime and their conversion to free civil work.

 He added that he is trying to secure a sum of money to escape from the region and exit to Lebanon or Turkey, despite the dangers of the road and the lack of safety, pointing out that the cost of travel to the liberated north or Lebanon ranges between $2000 and $3000.

 On the escape routes that are being taken out of Daraa, Ahmed.S, 28, familiar with smuggling methods, said most people flee through the so-called military routes of the régime.

 Pointing out that those who facilitate the passage of people through these roads and help secure those wishing to immigrate are officers from the "4th Armoured Division" or from the régime's intelligence services, or some taxi drivers associated with the régime's security.

 Activist Gamal Malek saied that most of the migrants who leave Daraa are between 18 and 40-year-old, and sometimes they include families and children.

 Malek pointed out that the military and reserve service in the régime forces, and the security pursuit, are among the most prominent reasons for expelling the people of the province and the strongest motives for emigration, in addition to many reasons for living and psychological pressure.'

How the Arab world turned against Hezbollah

 

 'For many people across the Middle East, Hezbollah fighting on the side of the Assad régime—which stands credibly charged with war crimes, including chemical weapons attacks—has disrupted its cultivated image as a “resistance” defying Israel.

 Before the war, many Syrians had accepted this portrayal. Some, who weren’t politically interested, did so passively. Others more positively embraced Hezbollah as an anti-Israel force. Thirty-five-year-old Ghaith al-Hallak, who spoke to me from northern Italy where he fled after being conscripted into the Syrian army, said he remembers how pictures of Hezbollah’s leaders were ubiquitous in Syria during his childhood. At times, images of the Assad family—the dictatorship-dynasty that has ruled Syria since Hafez al-Assad took control of the country in 1970—were varied by photos of his son Bashar alongside Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader. “I think the peak was in the year 2000 when the Israeli forces withdrew from the south of Lebanon, which gave Hezbollah great popularity,” Ghaith told me.

 Plenty of Palestinians also admired Hezbollah’s battles against Israel. “I remember we were glued to their TV station Al Manar 24/7,” explained Marwa Fatafta, a Palestinian activist and researcher. With no state of their own, Palestinians “were so relieved and happy that finally there was that non-state actor able to stand up against Israel and protect its own land using armed resistance. There was actually action as opposed to empty rhetoric,” of the sort many Palestinians associated with their own leadership.



 But views about Hezbollah across the region soon began to change. In May 2008, its militants took over central Beirut by force, following a Lebanese government proposal to curb their private communications networks. At the time, Ghaith al-Hallak was watching events in the Lebanese capital from Aleppo in northern Syria, where he was studying IT at university. “They took control of streets, squares, and they prevented people from going out and protesting. It was bad behaviour,” he recalled. “For me, that was the turning point, where I started to see the other side of Hezbollah.”

 In Beirut a 14-year-old Shia girl, who I’ll call Lamia, from a Hezbollah-dominated southern suburb, met her older sister after school. “I remember my sister picking me up and she said, ‘They’re killing each other,’ and she was crying. I remember the whole way back home, masked people would stop us in the car to see if they wanted us to pass or not, and it was very scary,” she said. (Lamia, who is now 26, asked to remain anonymous because she is worried about criticising Hezbollah publicly.) “I think it’s then fully that they became an antagonist in Lebanon for me. They didn’t hurt me directly, but were a big threat to me.”

 Three years later, protests broke out across the Arab world, including in Syria. With the demonstrations came hopes of freedom, the rule of law and justice after years of rule by ageing dictators. But as Syria’s security forces quelled the popular uprisings across the country with violence, Hezbollah began to advise the Assad régime. It soon sent its own combatants in support—much fiercer fighters than the conscripted Syrian army—and in spring 2013 led operations to seize the rebel-held town of Al-Qusayr, on the Syria-Lebanon border. Despite its military prowess, some of its fighters, like Jawad’s brother, would be killed in battle. Hezbollah has not released any official casualty figures, but independent estimates put the number of men killed in action in Syria at over 1,100.



 Lamia began to see the results on home soil. Funerals for fighters killed across the border meant whole streets were cordoned off as processions weaved through the city. “Suddenly there were mass burials and no one knew publicly yet that they were fighting in Syria,” she explained. “I remember thinking, ‘Where are all these dead people coming from? I don’t understand.’” Those processions led to a Beirut graveyard designated for Hezbollah combatants known as the “Garden of Lady Zaynab,” after the sister of Imam Hussein, one of the most revered figures in Shia Islam. Protecting Zaynab’s grand shrine in Damascus from Sunni rebels opposed to Assad was one of the main reasons Hezbollah gave for its Syria intervention, which it has described as al-difa’ al-muqaddas—a “holy defence.” Other rationales are protecting the Middle East and Islam from Israel, the US and the Sunni and politically conservative Gulf kingdoms, all of whom have anti-Assad connections. Hezbollah’s media arms have blamed these states for forming an “American-Saudi-takfiri project.” Takfiri is a pejorative term applied to Sunni rebels including IS, which at its height controlled swaths of Syria and Iraq. The sectarian with-us-or-against-us rhetoric obscured how a US-led coalition, with Iraqi and Syrian allies, was bombing IS.

 “We do not fight them because of who they are, but we are fighting their Israeli-American project,” said Husayn, a Hezbollah unit commander, referring to Sunni rebels. “They say that we are the ones who came to their lands, but we are actually fighting their project, not fighting them.”

 But not all Lebanese Shia are convinced by the religious reasons given for the conflict. Some see Hezbollah using sectarian branding to silence criticism. “They utilise this [the religious pretext] so aggressively,” said Lamia, who added that Hezbollah’s interpretations of Shiism do not represent her faith. “Now if you don’t approve of the fight of Hezbollah, you’re not approving of Imam Hussein and immediately you’re not a good believer, you’re not a good Shia, you’re not a good Muslim.”



 Over the border, Syrians who once admired Hezbollah have turned on them. Among them is Ahmed (not his real name), now 32. He lived under a siege imposed by Hezbollah and Syrian régime troops in the mountain town of Madaya for nearly two years. “Before the war, I was completely with them,” Ahmed told me from Turkey, where he fled after the siege was lifted in April 2017. “I thought: they are fighting against oppression and injustice, but they are not.” Hezbollah’s role in the siege of Madaya—once popular with tourists from nearby Damascus for its clean air and hills planted with fruit trees—has been extensively documented by human rights organisations. “Syrian government and allied Hezbollah forces tightened the siege around the town, displacing residents to an ever-smaller geographic area,” said a 2016 report co-authored by the organisations Physicians for Human Rights and the Syrian American Medical Society.

 The disillusion does not stop in Lebanon and Syria. “Many Palestinians stopped supporting Hezbollah,” said Omar Shaban, the Gaza-based director of the Pal-Think for Strategic Studies think tank: “It’s not about Shia or Sunni—it’s that Hezbollah was helping a régime that many Palestinians don’t like.”

 Marwa Fatafta said that Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria made many people question who the group was really representing: “[The Syrian war] was a true test to understand whether that solidarity with the Palestinians—is it a genuine act, is it a genuine solidarity with a just social and political cause?” she asked rhetorically. “Or was it some sort of rhetoric that helps advance certain actors’ political agenda, and serves their own propaganda, and to legitimise them further in the eyes of their people and in the eyes of others, such as Palestinians?”



 Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria has not only muddied its reputation, but revealed the depth of its ties with the highest levels of IRGC leadership. Senior Hezbollah commanders would go back and forth to Damascus alongside the powerful Iranian commander Qasim Soleimani, who was assassinated by the US in January. They would share meals and relax with Soleimani, who ran the Quds Force, which is responsible for the IRGC’s external operations.

 Hezbollah members remember Soleimani fondly, and do not disguise the extent to which he was calling the shots. “He was flexible. He was able to simplify any problem for the young guys, so they could understand it and then solve it step by step,” said a senior Hezbollah official who met Soleimani in Syria, who spoke to me from a driveway at the end of a mud track in the Bekaa Valley. “He was evidently intellectually and analytically mature.” The official went on to deny that the general had harmed the Syrian people: “Syrians oppressed themselves with this war,” he insisted. His expression was unfeeling.

 By contrast with these warm words about the Iranian commander, Hezbollah fighters sometimes speak with disdain about the Assad régime’s army. “We respect their leaders,” Husayn, the Hezbollah unit commander, said of Assad and his associates, but about the Syrian rank and file he was much less kind: “They are not human and they seem to be from another world,” he said. “There are traitors among them. Some of them have killed many of us. They shot us from the back several times while we were attacking. A number of our fighters were martyred because of them.” Another Hezbollah fighter interviewed for this piece vented similar feelings about the Syrian army.

 The mistrust is mutual. Even Syrians who support the Assad régime aren’t too happy about Hezbollah sticking around, now that the bulk of the country has been retaken from the rebels. “There are a certain number of forces in Syria that are not doing anything—a lot of fighters from Hezbollah. These fighters are creating some problems in the areas they are present in, and aren’t welcomed,” said Nawar Shaban, an analyst based in Turkey. “Now pro-régime Syrians don’t see that Hezbollah is a must in their area—they see that Hezbollah doesn’t have to stay there in Syria because there is no actual role for them.” '

Syria’s security services flourish while people starve

 

 'It is no surprise that the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre has released documents revealing that Syrian Embassies around the world spy on their own citizens on behalf of the Assad régime. Every Syrian who has travelled abroad for any reason knows that the régime’s embassies and consulates are nothing but branches of the security services, and that intelligence gathering is their main task. Commercial, economic and consular services are mere accompaniments to the security mission. Syrian diplomats, meanwhile, know that the top official in their embassies is the “security attaché” not the ambassador.

 However, what is striking in these documents is that such surveillance has continued throughout the crisis affecting the régime and, indeed, the whole country. It is logical that the régime’s interest in exiled dissidents should take second place behind the major revolution in which hundreds of thousands of Syrians have played a direct role. The Syrian security services have never faced such a challenge before and do not have enough trained staff to deal with it. If they don’t have the tools to control events on the ground in Syria, how can they hope to monitor people overseas who are not that important in the great scheme of things when compared with revolutionaries on the doorstep of the presidential palace and the headquarters of the same government agencies?

 In less than three months after the start of the revolution, security officials issued lists of hundreds of thousands of wanted people who participated, one way or another, in the revolution. It is known that between 2011 and 2013 the Syrian security services arrested hundreds of thousands of people and put the names of more than a million people on the “wanted” list. This reveals the extent to which the agents penetrated Syrian society, with large networks across the country through which they were able to collect a huge amount of information about the régime’s opponents.



 In information leaked later, it became clear that Iran had provided Bashar al-Assad’s security services with modern cameras to photograph demonstrations to pinpoint key people. Many protesters who were arrested in the first few months mentioned that interrogators showed them their photos taken during the demonstrations. Nevertheless, the bulk of arrests were made apparently at random, sometimes without suspicion, when régime forces were combing villages, streets and areas in the cities. Some of the régime’s informants and militiamen were also arrested, and some of them were killed under torture by mistake.

 It is no secret that the Syrian intelligence services do not use modern methods in their work, such as analysis of data and real information. Instead, most of their work is based on written reports prepared by officials with very little education and inappropriate training. Confessions are always obtained through torture and are also forged, with detainees then forced to sign them. Signatures are not always obtained, because the detainees are most likely going to be killed in any case.

 From the beginning of 2013 until 2017, the Assad régime’s control declined to less than 20 per cent of Syria, and its security networks were dismantled across the country. Protecting the head of the régime and his cronies in Damascus became the main priority of the Syrian security services. Despite this, the security machine continued to operate with incomprehensible intensity and efficiency, following exiles, planting spies and informants, and openly moving its people around in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and even Turkey to boost demonstrations in support of the régime. Some even dared to threaten refugees that their families and friends in Syria would be punished if they didn’t collaborate. Organisations and clubs were set up for refugees so that the security services could monitor their movements and activities.



 It is worth noting that in France there are large numbers of Syrian doctors, university professors, merchants and currency exchange workers, most of whom studied in France before the revolution. French universities offered “scholarships” which were allocated to those close to and trusted by the régime in Damascus. We do not know whether these people returned to France by order of the régime to perform a specific task, or if they fled from the war, but it is certain that they support the régime enthusiastically.

 Assad and his régime are unable to provide any solution to the economic crisis affecting Syria, which has reached the point where famine is very likely, and yet they still have the time and resources — human and financial — to spy on ordinary citizens through a so-called “electronic army”. This demonstrates that the “Syrian republic” of Assad is nothing but a police state, with all government institutions subject to the diktats of the security services. At a time when all aspects of normal life in Syria are disrupted to the point of disintegration, the security services continue to flourish. What sort of “president” does that make Bashar Al-Assad?'