Robert Evans and Anna Hosnia dissect Bashar al-Assad's rise, detailing how his father Hafez groomed the ophthalmologist to replace charismatic heir Basil after a suspicious 1994 crash. They analyze Assad's brutal legacy, including the 1982 Hama massacre killing 20,000, the Mukhabarat torture network, and the regime's CIA collaboration that facilitated Maher Arar's abuse. The hosts condemn the 2011 Vogue article praising Asma al-Assad just before over 400 civilians died in Homs, arguing that anyone sustaining such power inevitably becomes a murderer to preserve their status. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:30
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks to real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, our goal is simple.
Make financial literacy accessible for everyone.
Because when you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Earn Your Leisure, and listen now.
Bashar's Early Confidence00:14:40
What's committing my war crimes?
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
My guest today is Anna Hosnia.
Anna, how are you doing?
Hello.
That's my impression of the bastard we're talking about today.
Oh, good.
Oh, that was a solid one.
Yeah, we're talking about Bashar al-Assad.
Did you like my themed introduction?
Yeah, I did, actually.
That was really wonderful.
Thank you.
Thank you.
A lot of war crime stands in the audience today.
Now, Anna, is there?
Yeah, oh, yeah, man.
A lot of big fans of war crimes.
Not really sure where this joke is supposed to go.
I guess I could see why you'd be a fan of a war crime.
All right.
Go on.
Weirdly enough, we're talking about a guy who has a lot of fans in spite of his war crimes.
So, how do you feel about Bashar al-Assad?
You know, if you ever listen to Ethnically Ambiguous, the podcast I host, I talk a lot about how I feel like this all, one, it all comes down to bad parenting and having a small penis that you are ashamed of, so you take it out on murdering everyone in your country.
Yeah, yeah, that seems like a credible explanation for his war crimes.
Small penis, bad dad.
We'll see if you change your mind at all as we go through the episode and talk about his background.
All right.
I think this is probably the hardest episode of the show for me to write because I get really angry whenever I read about or think about Bashar al-Assad.
And I got angry enough that I just got on Twitter and provoked a fight with a bunch of tankies, which are people on the left who defend any war criminal who's not American.
And they're very frustrating people.
That's a weird subsection of people on the left.
Why?
Why would you want to die on that hill?
They love Twitter, though.
A lot of them on Twitter.
So I guess I'll start reading from my little scripty duda here.
Oh, this isn't scripted.
I thought you just kind of like, he just freebased it off the dome, man.
I just write some lines down on my hand and then talk for.
I have very small handwriting, so you can fit about an hour per hand.
Very like memento, but on bastards.
It is because I wake up every morning forgetting everything about every bad person in history.
Like, I couldn't tell you a single thing about Hitler.
Just the names in my head for some reason.
It's a total mystery.
Yeah.
That's what we're doing.
It's not too familiar, but go ahead.
I'm also trying to figure out who killed my wife.
Might have been Hitler.
That's memento, right?
Dude, where's my wife?
You know?
Yeah.
Classic Hitler line.
In the summer of 2015, I found myself crossing the Serbian-Hungarian border on foot and walking along what was then known as the Refugee Trail.
That year, more than a million people, mostly Syrians, fled the blood and chaos of war in the hope of a better life.
Over the course of several long days, I helped hand out food and water and advice on where to find holes in the Hungarian border fence.
Through it all, I interviewed at least a couple of hundred Syrian citizens.
Men and women, young and old, anybody who spoke English.
They told me horrible stories of barrel bombs killing multiple members of their family in the same day, of torture in regime prisons, of chemical weapons attacks, and the horror of picking up pieces of their neighbors and hauling them away in bags after a bombing.
I did the thing it's my job to do, and I wrote about it, and then I went home and I wrote about other things, completely unaware that, inside of my own country, a sizable number of Americans on the left and the right were already hard at work rewriting the story of the Syrian civil war into a tale where the dictator, Bashar al-Assad, was somehow the hero, or at least not the very worst guy involved in the whole thing.
Some of my listeners may have and probably have heard variations of that story, especially if you're on the far left.
So if you're a fan of my show and you think Bashar al-Assad's an okay dude, which is a thing for some reason, I just ask that you listen through this till the end and maybe learn a couple of things about this fella.
I'm honestly very still stuck on the fact that anyone would think he's a good guy.
That's really crazy to me.
And I'm going to need more info on that.
Yeah, it's, and I think it's more common, to be a little bit fair, that instead of saying he's a good guy, they'll say that he's not nearly as bad as the Islamists or whoever.
And it's like, yeah, I mean, ISIS is pretty bad, but they didn't kill nearly as many people as Bashar al-Assad.
Yeah, I mean, just from what I remember talking about on our own show, it's like, which I'm sure you'll get into, but just like buildings full of body parts.
Yeah.
Just unexplained missing people.
There's a whole genre of pictures from the Syrian Civil War that's just bags that are very small.
That are just like, this is a person.
Like, this is what's left after.
Yeah, anyway.
Bashar al-Assad was born on September 11th, 1965.
So we're off to a great start with a great birth date.
He was the quintessential middle child, the third of five children.
His father, a dude named Hafez al-Assad, was a commander in the Syrian Air Force and a powerful man in the Baathist political party that had come to power in Syria in 1963.
Now, the Baathists are a pan-Arab quasi-socialist party, although trying to equate Baathism directly with any Western political ideology is a little bit of a fool's game, in my opinion.
Bashar's mother, Anissa, came from a prominent Syrian family.
So, Bashar grew up with power, wealth, and influence.
Never didn't know that.
But he also grew up as a member of a persecuted minority.
The Assads are an Alawite family, which is the Alawites are a sect of Shia Islam that a lot of other Muslims consider heretical for reasons that I don't fully understand.
Alawites make up about 10% of the Syrian population.
They were traditionally very poor and oppressed.
And Bashar's dad, Hafez, is one of those dictators who grew up very, very poor and had to claw for everything he got in life, kind of like Saddam Hussein.
Right.
Based on my understanding, his family got into power through a coup d'etat, right?
They over.
Yeah, I mean, sort of.
It was a little more gradual than that.
So by the time Bashar was born, Hafez was not in power, but Hafez was a prominent man, and the Baathists were in power.
Okay.
And because the Alawites, you know, it's the same thing in the United States.
Members of minority communities, blacks and Hispanics, but also like gay and trans people, serve in the military at a much higher rate than the general population because it's a route to not only better economic conditions, but also to like societal acceptance for traditionally persecuted groups.
And it was the same with the Alawites in pre-Baathist Syria.
So while the Alawites were only about 10% of the Syrian population, they were really overrepresented in the military.
And so that is part of how the Baathist coup was successful in 1963.
And Hafez wasn't in charge at that point, but during the coup, he wound up in a very high position.
Dude, that's how you do it.
That's how you do it.
So that's where we are right now.
While Bashar was still a muleing little infant, his father became the Syrian defense minister.
Now, Hafez was an incredibly smart, hard-fisted political operator.
Henry Kissinger considered him a cunning opponent at the negotiating table.
And whatever else you say about Henry Kissinger, that means something.
He's negotiated with pretty much everybody who has a Wikipedia page in the 20th century.
Hafez seized power gradually in the chaos that came after the disastrous 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and then after a failed attempt to encourage a coup in Jordan in 1970.
Hafez's coup at home is generally considered to have been bloodless.
It's euphemistically known as the corrective movement.
So that's how Hafez comes to power, as like, oh, we tried a bunch of stuff that didn't work.
I'm going to make shit work.
I'm going to fix this stuff.
Don't you worry.
Yeah.
So now Hafez is in power.
Bashar is like five years old at this point.
So pretty we.
Yeah.
A lot of confidence.
That's a man with such confidence.
I would never get it.
Well, with Hafez, I get the confidence a little bit more because he's this dude who really did grow up like dirt poor and had to like fight for political power and stuff.
So you get why a guy like that, a guy like that doesn't survive unless he's got that kind of just like gut-level confidence.
But he's the only one in this story who worked for anything.
Right.
It seems that way.
Yeah.
Now, prior to Hafez, Syria had suffered under a revolving door of unstable and ineffective regimes beset by constant military and domestic defeats and bungles.
Hafez promised to change all that.
But first, he promised himself that he would die as the supreme ruler of Syria.
To do this, he established an intricately interwoven net of 15 security agencies, all of them tasked one way or another with monitoring and crushing dissent, both within the government and within the populace.
We'll be referring to this tangled web of secret and not-so-secret police as the Mukhabarat, which I hope I'm pronouncing close to correct.
That's the Arabic word for intelligence.
It's used generally in a number of Arabic nations to refer to repressive police state agencies.
It's also the specific name of the Military Intelligence Directorate of Syria.
But for the purpose of this episode, we'll be using the Mukhabrat as a broader term for just like the secret police.
You know, that's that's uh the people in Iraq called Saddam's police by the same thing.
It's still one of those terms that, like, if you know any Iraqis, like sends chills up people's spines just like hearing that word.
Yeah, it's it's yeah, it's a it's a bad word.
I'd go so far as to say, never heard of mukhabrat.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm getting it more or less close to right, but you know, it's hard to say Arabic stuff.
The only thing, yeah.
Anyway, Hafez came to power when yeah, Bashar was about five years old.
Uh, so virtually his whole life has been as the son of a man who, for all intents and purposes, was king of Syria.
I found a good Financial Times article that discusses a book called The New Lion of Damascus, which was a vaguely pro-Assad book written before the civil war by an academic named David Lesh, who we'll be hearing from later.
In the book, quote, the Syrian leader describes his upbringing as normal, insisting he played soccer with neighborhood children, ping-pong with his father, and his friends' mothers came home to chat and cook meals with his mother and Nisa.
We had two very caring parents, and our happiness derived from having these two caring parents, Assad tells Lesh.
But to what extent was Bashar telling the truth, and what did normality mean to him?
There was nothing normal about their life, quips a family friend.
The children rarely saw their father, and they were always protected by bodyguards.
Abdel Halim Kadam, the former vice president who resigned and left Syria in 2005, says the Assad children grew up in an atmosphere where they were targets, but also felt as if they owned the country.
So, got a few conflicting views there about how the Assads grew up.
I know which one I find credible.
Which one?
The one where he and his brothers and sisters felt like they owned the country and never saw their dad.
Hmm.
Great parenting.
Let me tell you.
Yeah, shocking that a dictator, you know, you don't run into a lot of dictators who were super hands-on parents.
Yeah, a great way to get your dictator father's attention is to kill everyone.
Which is one of the weird things.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, Assad grew up to kill everyone.
They're not the kind of dictator kids, like, I'll say this for Hafez.
Like, they're not the worst.
Well, it's hard to say, because, like, you part of me wants to say that the worst case scenario for a dictator's kids is like Saddam's son, who was just like raping and murdering for years.
Yeah.
But, like, you know, he probably never killed more than maybe a couple of thousand people, like, because he just preferred to rape and murder people with his own hands.
Whereas Assad killed a lot more people.
So I guess.
So, like, who's chiller?
You know, like, yeah, who's chiller?
Who's the cooler dude?
Yeah.
Do we go with like Uday Hussein or Bashar al-Assad?
Like.
You know, it's really up in the air at this point.
Because, like, I doubt I doubt Bashar al-Assad ever raped anybody at gunpoint, which Uday Hussein did for like breakfast.
Yeah, honestly, I get Bashar was a little bit more like a little more uppity.
I can imagine him being very high maintenance.
He's like, oh no, I need to wash my hands.
Like, I imagine just being very, like, ooh, like, like, just crybabing about every little aspect of his life needing to be exactly how he needs it to be.
So does that, yeah, does that make him like a worse person than Uday who would like, at least if Uday's gonna murder some people, he's gonna pick up an AK-47 and like shoot them in the face, like, from three feet away, because he doesn't give a fuck.
Like, do we team Uday?
Are we team Uday or are we team Bashar?
Yeah.
Or, I mean, I think I'm on the other side of the camera.
Are we team Saddam's parenting or Team Hafez's parenting?
Battle of the Dictator Dads.
Yeah.
So, Assad was a Bashar al-Assad was a child of the Cold War.
He grew up knowing that he and his people were, you know, one fairly small player in a game board dominated by the U.S. and the USSR.
He also saw two Arab-Israeli wars as a child, both of which were disastrous for the Arab side of that equation.
All this had an impact on the growing Assad, but the most significant historical event of his childhood was probably his father's bombing of the city of Hama.
Now, this happened in 1982 at the end of a long and grinding Sunni rebellion.
As a way of ending the fighting with an exclamation point, Hafez pounded the city flat with artillery for days and then sent bulldozers in to flatten the rubble and anyone buried underneath it.
Roughly 20,000 human beings were murdered in just a couple of incredibly bloody days.
The Hama massacre was, until recently, the single deadliest assault by an Arab ruler on his own people in modern history, beating even the Halabja massacre of Saddam Hussein.
A Guardian writer who witnessed some of the massacre titled his coverage, Assad Goes Beyond the Point of No Return, which would not be the last time a reporter mistakenly believed that an Assad had gone beyond the point of no return.
The Damascus Massacre00:02:49
Yeah, bummer.
I feel like that headline could be used 600 more times.
Yeah, yeah.
There's been, what, 300 chemical weapons of strikes in the Assad regime?
You could really put that after each one.
This has got to be it.
Control C, control V. Okay.
Yeah, copy paste that.
He's done.
I do feel like as journalists, we have to retire point of no return.
Because it's the same thing with Trump.
He'd keep doing something.
He'd be like, oh, there's no coming back from this.
And it's like, stop saying that.
You don't know.
Nobody knows.
It's almost tempting them to go further.
Like, what?
No.
Yeah.
I feel like the only time that's ever been justified is when fucking Hitler shot himself.
Then that's it.
Yeah, he would pay.
That's the point of no return.
Yeah.
Okay.
Fair.
Yeah.
Fair use for that title.
God, what a way to go out to be like, oh, I'll just let you shoot myself.
It's like, oh my God.
Come out here and show your face.
At least Saddam went out like a G screaming at everybody before they hung him.
You know, I guess I'm definitely on Team Saddam as opposed to Team Hitler.
But I feel like nobody but Nazis is ever on Team Hitler.
So you know, that's a tough one.
I don't know if I'll touch that one.
It's really a bad one to weigh into.
You know, whose team am I on?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I would, you know, if I had a time machine, picking up these people right before their suicides or executions and then having them fight to the death in a steel cage, that would be pretty good TV.
It should be all of them and then just throw a dragon in there, too.
Yeah, yeah, just like a Komodo dragon, too.
One of those ones that just like bites you with its rotting teeth and so you slowly die over the course of days.
Yeah, that's a good way.
That's great.
Just Saddam bleeding out from a Komodo dragon bite for three days.
People take bets.
Tweet at us if you have a time machine.
Yeah, if you have a time, tweet at us or just come visit us in your time machine, assuming it also can travel through space as well as time.
Yeah, no judgment on what era you came from.
Your personal business.
I mean, probably some judgment.
Like, if you listening to this, like, built a time machine in 1859 instead of like doing something about slavery, a little bit of judgment.
Yeah, don't bring your plague up in here, though.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Don't bring your plague up in here.
Yeah.
Or bedbugs.
Neither of those.
God.
No cholera, please.
No thanks on the cholera.
Yeah, we already got plenty of measles.
I actually have cholera, and like I found that very offensive for you to ask me not to bring my cholera into the situation.
Cholera pride.
Yeah.
What color ribbon is that?
Exiling the Young Leader00:05:00
I mean, it's a brown one, right?
Yeah.
God.
That's great.
So the Hama massacre helped to ensure Hafez al-Assad nearly 20 more years of uninterrupted rule.
It would not be until 2011 that the Syrian state would next face serious resistance.
Bashar was 16 years old when his father flattened Hama.
The lesson would have been clear to him, but he was not, at this point, being groomed to rule.
That pleasure went to his younger brother, Rafat, who was the heir apparent.
Young Bashar's favorite parent was clearly his mother, Anissa.
One Western politician described him as a mama's boy more than a papa's boy.
Now, there's a lot of debate as to whether or not Asad's mom has been one of the secretly dominant forces in his regime, but it's pretty agreed upon that he was a mama's boy.
Up until her probable death in 2016, he was said to call her multiple times a week.
This was actually something of a running joke in Syrian society.
Syrian internet satirists call him Bisho or baby Bashar, or at least they did before he had them all murdered.
For real.
That was hilarious until they all died.
And now their body parts exist in small bags.
Yeah, yeah, and now they are filling small sacks.
Yeah.
When Bashar was 19, his dad had a heart attack and Rafat tried to seize power.
Unfortunately for Rafat, Hafez recovered and sent his eldest boy into permanent exile for his crimes.
Bashar's older brother, Basil, became their father's next successor.
Now, Basil al-Assad seems to have been an interesting dude.
I found one Psychology Today article which was written by a couple of PhDs and makes the case that Basil's bullying was a major influence on young Bashar.
I don't consider that article super credible because it's written like shit and it doesn't gel with what people who are close to the family report, but they're doctors, so I'll include their opinion on here.
Now, young Bashar does seem to have had issues with his brother.
Ayman Abdel-Nur, who knew Bashar when he was a young adult, told Financial Times, growing up, Bashar was overshadowed by Basil.
That seemed to be a complex.
He didn't have the charisma of Basil, who was sporty, was liked by girls, and was the head of the Syrian Computer Society.
Ayman claims young Bashar was shy.
He used to speak softly with a low voice.
He never asked about institutions or government affairs.
Yeah, yeah, Bashar was too much of a nerd to be president of the Computer Society.
Like, it's kind of unfair that his sexy athletic brothers also gets to be the computer guy.
Yeah.
Because that's one thing everyone agrees on is Basil was also like the smartest of the Assad boys.
He seems like he really got it all.
You know, it's so interesting, like, families like that, that in power, like, they're so easy.
Like, there's no empathy.
That's so easy for them to just drop people out of their family.
It's like, how dare you try and seize power?
You ain't ever coming back here again.
It's like, it's your son.
You know, I mean, Muamar Gaddafi would agree with you because Qaddafi had a kid who tried to overthrow him, who he exiled for a while and then invited back in.
So just ground him for a while.
Take away his family.
I don't know.
I feel like if my son tried to overthrow me and take over the house, take away the best terms.
Yeah, I would exile my son.
Yeah, I would exile him forever.
And exiling is so aggro.
It's pretty aggro, but I've always wanted to exile someone.
So, I mean, you and I are going to have an issue at some point because it's always been a dream of mine to exile somebody.
I'm not surprised by that whatsoever.
Really, I'm a big, big fan of exiling.
It's an art more than a science, but I love it.
I love the craft.
Pajar himself would later claim that his father didn't talk about work at all with his kids.
There was a complete separation between politics and family relations in our house.
My parents were very keen to make us live as normal lives as we can.
So.
I don't believe that at all.
Yeah, I mean, you were the son of the king of Syria.
And yeah, it does seem like most of the people who knew them at that time said, like, they, I mean, it's one of those things.
Maybe they think they were normal because they don't have any basis for comparison because they grew up the heirs to the throne of Syria.
But yeah.
I see you, Sophie.
Sophie's signaling that it's time for an ad break.
And I see her.
I was just trying to finish my sentence.
This is Sophie's in a way exiling me.
Yeah, you need to exile the ad break.
Well, I'm actually going to be exiling all of our listeners to an ad break.
So enjoy your exile into the green and bountiful land of capitalist products and services.
Products!
Ad Break Interruption00:03:31
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
Dictator or Doctor00:15:41
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back.
We're back.
We're talking about Bashar Al-Assad.
B to the A. Bishu.
Is that what it was?
Bisho.
Bishu.
Yeah, Baby Bashar.
If I was him, that would be my Twitter handle.
At baby Bash.
Baby Bashar.
It's kind of cute.
BB.
It would be amazing to get into Twitter fights about Bashar al-Assad with Bashar al-Assad.
At baby Bashar, you fucking loser.
He's like, leave me alone, block.
Oh, boy.
He would definitely be a blocker.
Yeah.
Now, Bashar did not grow up wanting to be a dictator, or at least he gave no impression of having that desire.
According to an article in The Atlantic based on interviews with people who knew him at the time, quote, Bashar did not seek out recognition or popularity.
He had no interest in being in the middle of politics, as his brother did.
In his school days, he was perceived by the Syrian society as a shy, reserved, weak, hesitant child who did not inherit any of his father or brother's intelligence and leadership.
So.
Whoa, that's like just reminding me of the godfather, like Al Pacino's character, how he's like, I'm not going to be involved in this like mafia business.
And then like next thing you know, he's like slapping Michelle Pfeiffer around.
It's like, yeah.
A lot of people have actually compared him to Michael Corleo, and some people compare him to Fredo.
But yeah, yeah, well, I mean, because he kind of was.
He was the like heir, like he wasn't really, like, he was the heir to a lot of money and stuff, but he was not the heir.
Like, he was never considered for power.
Like, he was literally his dad's like last choice, essentially.
And so he didn't really...
Yeah, we'll get into that a little bit more later, but that is a really apt comparison.
Now, Basil, meanwhile, was exactly the kind of kid you'd expect to be a dictator's son.
He was an avid parachutist.
He was an infamous ladies' man in a huge facet of nightlife in Damascus.
Did he have great?
I think so, yeah.
The pictures I've seen of him, he was a reasonably decent-looking dude.
He was a fit, athletic, and charismatic.
Pictures of Basil playing sports and looking fly as hell were slathered over many a wall in Syria.
Basil owned a stable of sweet sports cars and tore ass around town on a regular basis.
Totally.
He had a person.
Oh, yeah.
He loved driving real fast, which we'll talk about a little bit more in a second.
He had a personality cult that rivaled his father's.
Majid Rafizada Rafizada, the author of that Atlantic article and a guy who grew up in Syria around this time, recalled, When I was a student in high school, I would walk the busy streets of Damascus, Aleppo, or Latakia and find the walls and windows of shops and buildings papered with posters and photographs of Basil.
His images were even plastered across cars, but there was not a trace of Bashar's presence.
So it's all about Basil in these days.
All about Basil.
It's interesting that having a good set of like a good set of hair is like so key to being a dictator.
Because Bashar, not a good-looking dude.
Yeah.
Not a good-looking dude.
Like, if you have any latent bully instincts, you look at a picture of the kid and you kind of want to give him a swirly.
Especially when he had that little pencil-thin mustache.
Just such a nerd-looking kid.
Which is weird because Basil was apparently better at computers, too.
Yeah.
Now, for what it's worth, it seems like Basil al-Assad was one of the better case scenarios for a dictator's son.
He wasn't a mass rapist and murderer, or at least not based on what I've read.
I haven't read any allegations like that.
It's entirely possible that he was doing a bunch of terrible shit.
But it's not like he's certainly not like Uday Hussein, where you hear these stories about him machine gunning people at parties and stuff.
And he seemed to be more honest in interviews.
Like in 1988, Basil gave an interview that I think he was telling the truth.
Quote, we saw father at home, but he was so busy that three days could go by without us exchanging a word with him.
We never had breakfast or dinner together, and I don't remember ever having lunch together as a family.
Or maybe we did once or twice when state affairs were involved.
As a family, we used to spend a day or two in Latakia in the summer, but then, too, he used to work in the office and we didn't get to see much of him.
Like, that seems totally, totally likely.
Yeah, that seems like a credible representation of growing up as a kid whose dad was a workaholic, which, you know, Bashar will never admit to.
So, I don't know.
Basil seems like he was as decent a dude as it's possible to be and be the son of a brutal dictator who murders 20,000 people, to make a point.
I guess that's how I'll describe him.
But I never knew the guy.
Like any dictator kid, our sources.
No, no, no, no.
We never were pin pals.
Weirdly enough, I was pin pals with Jaif al-Islam, Qaddafi's son.
We used to play Sudoku over the mail, but, you know.
That is so you.
No.
I've never heard anything more Robert Evans than what you've just said.
I don't truck with Sudoku.
I'm not Keanu Reeves.
Okay.
Okay.
Like any dictator kid, our sources on how Bashar grew up are incomplete at best.
The official party line, at least, is that the Assad children had a modest upbringing.
It's emphasized that Bashar's mother thought this was the right way to raise children.
However, modest their upbringing, Bashar and his siblings lived in almost total privacy.
Pictures and reports of their lives were kept fairly mump, with the obvious exceptions of Rafat and then Basil.
All the Assad kids went to college in Syria, which is something of an oddity among an Arab dictator's children.
It's more common for them to go to school in Europe or whatever.
But Hafez was insistent that they do their college in-country.
So, Bashar went to medical school as a young man.
According to Ed Schulenberg, Bashar's former supervisor at the Western Eye Hospital in London, Bashar decided to become an ophthalmologist, an eye doctor, after reading a book.
Quote, he wrote a book about blindness and the treatment of blindness, and I think the psychology about being blind many years ago.
And it impressed him so much that he thought he wanted to become an eye surgeon.
Now, Bashar al-Assad himself claimed, quote, I like the idea of working in the humanitarian sector, so medicine was the best thing to take up.
The question that I asked my father was, I would like to be a doctor.
What do you think?
He told me it doesn't matter what you do.
The most important thing is if you succeed or not.
So whatever you do, just make sure that you succeed.
Holy shit.
What a way to turn your child into a fucking dictator.
Yeah, yeah.
It doesn't matter what you do, just succeed at it.
If you're going to be an eye doctor, you better be the fucking best eye doctor in Syria.
I don't even understand.
I don't want there to be any blind people in the world if you're an eye doctor.
Are you kidding me?
Get the fuck out of here.
Now, some experts on Syria and the Assad suspect that Bashar may have had a different motivation.
Dr. Ayal Zizer of Tel Aviv University believes that Bashar's medical ambitions were actually pushed on him by his father.
Quote, one can only assume that Assad, who himself wanted to be a doctor when he was young, pushed him in that direction.
So I don't know.
Like, there's three different totally credible, like, all of those sound very believable to me.
Well, I mean, growing up in a Middle Eastern family, you don't got to tell me that I was supposed to be a doctor because my father said it pretty quickly that I need to go to med school.
And I was like, I can't look at blood.
And he was like, you're going to need to get over that.
I mean, you should tell your dad what I tell my parents, which is that podcasting is the medicine of the 21st century.
You know, that's so true.
And it's funny because, like, I'm such a dictator of this office now.
You know, like, I'm like just a motherfucker.
You are.
You are.
Go on before I kill you.
You do say that a lot.
We're getting t-shirts printed up.
Go on before I kill you.
I'm a podcast dictator.
That's fun.
I like that.
Yeah, it's a fun theme for a podcast.
Now, whatever the truth about why he got into it, Bashar al-Assad seems to have had a real passion for being an eye doctor.
And from everything I've read, it seems like he was legitimately good at it.
This is not one of those stories where a dictator's kid becomes like the head of the port system, like Qaddafi's kid, and has like no idea how to do anything.
Bashar moved to London and practiced medicine.
Like he wasn't under daddy's arm when he was in London.
He was working at a real hospital and doing real medical work.
And he, from everything I've read, seems to have been really good at it and seems to have loved it.
So, yeah, he was a pretty solid eye doctor.
He adapted fully to life in the Western world.
You want to guess what his favorite musician is?
Leonard Skinner.
Phil Collins.
Oh, that is such.
That is a clear sign.
You know what?
Nothing annoys me more than him.
Was it like, what band was Phil Collins in again?
Shit.
Oh, boy, now we're going to.
The band that Peter Gabriel originally was in?
I think so.
I know he's one of the musicians that my mom listens to.
And your mom is a classic dictator type.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
She is the dictator of...
Yeah.
Genesis.
Genesis.
There we go.
Fucking Genesis.
A band so bad we forgot it.
A band so bad people who liked it became bad people.
Yeah.
I hate to say this, but his second favorite, or at least one of his other favorite bands, is a legitimately great band, the Electric Light Orchestra, which does break my heart a little bit.
Well, I mean, everyone likes ELO.
Everybody likes ELO.
But now I have this picture in my head of Bashar ordering the carpet bombing of Aleppo while listening to Mr. Blue Sky, and it kills me a little bit inside.
But I know it happened.
I'm going to disregard that thought.
Yeah.
Now, the young doctor fell in love with London, and he says that seeing the West helped him to open his horizons.
He has a lot of positive stuff to say about travel, which I guess is appropriate because he inadvertently caused millions of Syrians to travel and see Europe themselves.
A little bit of a not really a joke, just a horrible thing that happened.
Anyway, one day, on a foggy morning in January 1994, Basil Al-Assad was tearing ass through Damascus in his sports car.
I said he liked driving fast in his sports car on the way to the airport.
His car skidded off the road and he crashed at high speed, dying instantly.
Now, yeah, that's the end of Basil.
Now, whenever the heir apparent of a dictator, especially a dictator whose first heir apparent had tried to overthrow him, is killed mysteriously in a car crash, it's natural to be suspicious.
But all the credible sources I found seem to agree that this was really just one of those freak accidents that happens from time to time and changes the world forever.
Sounds like the son of a king in a regime thought he was invincible.
So he got himself killed because he, oh, what do you know?
Not invincible.
Nope.
Turns out that if you crash a sports car with a shitty safety rating at like 100 miles an hour, the same thing happens to everybody.
Mm-mm-mm-mm.
Mm-mm-mm-mm.
The only one of us that's invulnerable is Keith Richards.
And he should have known that.
He should have known that.
Now, that same January day in 1994, Bashar al-Assad got a phone call in his London flat.
He was told that his brother had died and that he was now the successor to Hafez al-Assad, and that he would have to return home to take up the family business.
There's a lot of debate as to why Hafez didn't pick Bashar's other brother, Maher, to rule instead, since Maher was a lot like Basil and Bashar had expressed zero interest in ever holding power.
But for whatever reason, Hafez picked Bashar.
Wait, wait, wait.
Maher, the daughter?
No, Maher is his other brother, and he's in charge of the Syrian Republican Guard.
So he's been one of the bloodiest military leaders of the Syrian Civil War.
But there's kind of a mystery among people who knew the family as to a lot of them had expected that Hafez was going to pick Maher to run the country.
But he went with Bashar for some reason.
We don't really have a clear idea why.
At this point, it seemed to many Syrians and to much of the outside world almost like this might be the plot of an unusually gritty Disney movie.
Like you can kind of see the upbeat version of this where a brutal dictator picks his shy, bashful eye doctor's son to rule in his stead, and the kid has to fly back from his life in London and learn how to rule.
You can make a really fun movie with that premise where he realizes that he only ever wanted to be a doctor and he gives his country back to its people and establishes a democracy and he and his dad fight at first, but then his dad comes to love freedom and probably rides a skateboard at the end.
I'm imagining this is a 90s movie.
It's like the goofy movie.
Yeah, it's like the goofy movie, but with like a brutal dictator.
Yeah.
It's like a cross between the goofy movie and that really bad Michael Caine movie about a dictator who hides out in like a 10-year-old girl's house.
What?
What is that?
Yeah, it's this, it's a fun premise.
This like girl becomes a pin pal with a brutal dictator of like a Caribbean nation played by Michael Caine and he gets overthrown and he like flees and winds up hiding in her like tool shed, I think.
Oh, Dear Dictator?
Dear Dictator.
It should have been a good movie, but it was just kind of bad.
Like you hear Michael Caine playing like a dictator who's best friends with a little girl.
It seems like it could be a really good movie, but it was just not.
It was not a good movie.
And I'm sorry.
Because now people are going to watch Dear Dictator, and they're not going to find it very good because it's not very good.
That's too bad.
Sad about that.
Yeah, it really is.
Now, according to Financial Times, in the real world, and not the fake world of the Disney movie that I invented about this, but the real one in which hundreds of thousands of human beings have been killed in the most brutal ways possible, Hafez al-Assad basically tried to remake his nerdy doctor's son into the spitting image of his dead brother, Basil.
Quote, Assad underwent a crash course in military and political affairs in a successful image-making exercise that would make him palatable to Syrian society.
He inherited Basil's friends, Basil's office in Mount Qasioun, overlooking Damascus, and even the Syrian Computer Society, a critical tool that would help him create an image as a man who could bring progress to a country that seemed stuck in the 1970s.
Bashar disappeared from view.
We only started seeing him again in 1996, and he had changed.
Even his voice had changed, recalls Abdel Noir.
Power Tripping Leader00:06:01
He was more confident, more muscular in his appearance.
So.
They made him go away and get a gym membership.
Yeah, it's the male version of that makeover scene where the curly-haired girl who becomes a princess gets her hair straightened and stuff.
They made him take his glasses off, and they're like, you're gorgeous now, Bashar.
You're really going to kill running this country.
Literally kill, kill.
You're going to have to kill everybody else.
Literally kill more than anyone in this century.
I wonder if they're like, dude, Bashar, I heard the country said you weren't cute.
And he was like, oh, kill them.
Yeah, maybe.
Because he's not cute.
Yeah, but I mean, of course, he has good hair.
Not really.
It's got that.
It's like, I mean, who knows how real it is.
Maybe he lost some of it and it's hair plugs now.
That statement alone is probably going to get me killed by Bashar al-Assad.
Oh, yeah, no, he's got a strike cruiser heading to your house right now.
Like, I heard she said I had hair plugs, and she's dead.
Yeah.
I mean, he has a full set of hair, I'm assuming, is real, so that's usually that's enough.
Yeah, I just don't notice his hair.
Like, it's one of those things we'll say on this podcast if a brutal dictator is hot.
Like Saddam Hussein, good-looking young man.
Fucking Joseph Stalin, good-looking young guy.
Hitler, always super weird-looking.
But Hitler, dude.
You have to be honest about the hotness of terrible people.
Otherwise, what are your standards?
And, you know, Bashar al-Assad is a not in the hot or not category.
I'm sorry.
It's just.
Yeah.
That's the hill I'll die on.
He's not.
Good set of hair, but a face that looks like an ass crack.
Yeah, face that looks like an ass crack.
Yeah.
Ass crack face being another one of his popular nicknames.
As the 1990s neared their end, Hafez al-Assad was increasingly sick and clearly nearing death.
He began filling Damascus and other cities with posters of Bashar al-Assad labeled Hope, which is not unlike an Obama campaign poster.
Is that where Shepard Fairey got the idea?
Yes, Shepard Fairey is a famed Hafez al-Assad stan, really a big fan of his marketing prowess.
While Hafez battled leukemia, diabetes, and a shitty heart, he trained his son and stocked the heads of his security and intelligence agencies with men he could trust.
Bajat Suleiman, one of his head spies, was a guy who was picked to sell Bashar as the hope of Syria.
He did this by making deals with businessmen who wanted more opportunities for financial gain than the nation's socialist structure would allow.
According to Rula Khalef of the Financial Times, Bashar al-Assad became a vociferous critic of bureaucratic corruption and those he recommended were placed in key positions in government.
It was during this period that I first met him in Damascus, a few months before his father died.
He was casual and inquisitive, particularly interested in whether living abroad had deluded my Arab roots.
He spoke about the scourge of corruption and Syria's economic stagnation and was sympathetic to the cause of an outspoken businessman who was being harassed by the regime for his political and anti-corruption views.
It was impossible to know whether he was sincere.
So I don't know.
Late 90s, Basa.
He's saying the right things, you know?
Which one of Gaddafi's kids was sort of doing the same thing where he got famous for like, I think it was Syph, actually, where he got famous for like criticizing the Qaddafi regime to the international press while he was the heir to the regime.
And some people thought he was a real reformer, but like it's become increasingly obvious through time that like, no, he was just...
He knew his dad was going to die eventually and wanted to be set up to be in charge.
He was playing the long game.
Playing the long game.
Yeah.
And it seems like...
I don't know if he, if Bashar started out being like, oh, I could be a good leader and then just went full psycho or if he was just full psycho.
Like I don't get it.
Like, because it sounds like he would have been a decent person, but then like, you know, just in the Michael Corleone way of like, what, what tipped him over the edge?
Like, was it just his father being like, this is how it needs to be?
You need to be strong and not weak.
Like, you need to stand up to your people and, I don't know, like, cut their heads off if they don't listen to you.
Like, I don't.
I mean, I guess that's why it's so secretive.
We don't know, but like, I need to know so bad.
Yeah, nobody, nobody really knows the answer to that question.
I mean, one of my theories is just that, like, there's a lot of people walking around who could be the, who could murder millions if you put them in the position where their continued comfort was dependent upon them maintaining in power of a regime like this.
Yeah, you know, I actually, now that I realize it, like, I've always said I should never be in power because I would take a, like, a bribe within seconds.
I'd be like, yeah, sure.
What do you do?
Nobody should be in power.
That's really the lesson of guys like Bashar all the time.
Because if he just stayed an ophthalmologist, probably would have just helped people have better eyes.
Yeah.
Probably would have done that for decades and it would have been fine.
Power.
Power is a hell of a drug, man.
It's the worst.
And I'm a big pro-drug guy, but not power.
That's the only drug that I think the DEA ought to go after.
Yeah, that's me.
I'm always like, if that's what the DEA was for, I would be pro-DEA.
If they were just like busting guys who were power tripping, like, sorry, sir.
No, you're clearly way too high on your own supply.
Like literally a group in the DEA that's like, you power tripping, dude, because we're coming for you.
The day after Trump gets elected, they arrest all of America.
Yeah.
Like, you guys are dealing power to a vulnerable man.
Like, he clearly can't handle this.
Yeah, our president's arrested for just power tripping way too hard.
No, no, no.
I mean, you'd have to bust us all for dealing, you know?
We sold him the power.
If you want to get high as fuck, consider getting high as fuck on the products and services that support this program and or show.
That was a good segue, right, Sophie?
Dealing with a Vulnerable Man00:03:27
Loved it.
Beautiful.
All right.
Products.
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
I love it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber deducts a shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He allegedly a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
The Short Damascus Spring00:15:53
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back skis.
I say skis now sometimes because I'm a cool, I'm a cool dude.
Because he loves to ski, man.
I've heard.
No, I actually don't think anyone should ski.
Dude, Robert, come on, man.
You don't have to hide it.
I've seen Sony fix on you.
Come on, guys.
No.
Everyone's sending Photoshop photos of Robert skiing.
You know, it's funny you say that because when I have a bad day, the only thing that calms me down is watching hours of ski fails.
You just type that out on YouTube, and it's people getting horribly injured.
Yeah.
But there's ski fails and base jumping fails are like I wonder if most of those people are dead.
We're all like maybe sucker and then we just don't find whatever made it.
No, because like I spent all week this week watching God knows how many videos of barrel bombs detonating in Syrian cities and like horrible things happening to people who did nothing.
If you're going out there to go base jumping, you know you might fuck up and kill yourself.
So like I feel like it's fine for me to watch videos of people hurting themselves if they're putting themselves in that situation.
I wouldn't watch videos of people getting hit by cars and laugh.
That's horrible.
Yeah.
But if you're going into that situation and that like that's something like you crashing and hurting yourself is an integral part of the sport, then it's fine for me to laugh at it.
Yeah, I mean, that's their risk.
I wouldn't laugh at somebody getting hurt playing golf because that's not part of the sport.
If you get hit in the face with a club playing golf, that's just a horrible accident.
That's kind of funny.
But it is a little bit funny, right?
My principles aren't ironclad.
We're all a little bit of a monster.
This is why I shouldn't be a dictator because I would make people ski just to watch them hurt themselves.
That would be funny.
You're like, all right, set up the skis.
Set up the skis.
Bury the bananas in snow.
Yes, yes.
Just put a tree in the middle of the path.
It's fine.
Yeah.
It was clear from the beginning that the young despot in waiting was insecure.
One of his friends, while Bashar was being groomed, later said, quote, in his early years, he was learning on the job and he wasn't confident.
He spoke about some of his father's aides as enemies and he didn't have his own advisors.
The security people would tell him it would be a threat to him because they wanted to control him.
So Bashar is kind of a paranoid, scared guy.
There's one story I heard from a guy who interviewed him who like took out his microphone and Bashar flinched away from him because he like the microphone looked just enough like a gun that he like freaked out because he was just so high strung and paranoid.
So you'll hear that a lot, that he was like incredibly high strung and paranoid and like scared all the time.
It does really seem like he didn't want the job at least at first, just because the risk of getting murdered was so high.
He'd rather be back in London listening to ELO and cutting open eyes.
Jesus Christ.
That's the feeling you get.
Hafez al-Assad died on June 10th, 2000.
His son assumed power shortly thereafter.
This was actually forbidden by the Syrian Constitution, which required presidents to be at least 40, but the Constitution was quickly amended to allow 34-year-olds to serve, which was Bashar's age.
That's handy.
Very nice.
Wow, it's as if your family runs everything.
Yeah, yeah.
Why even have a constitution?
Come on.
Hafez, don't play that bullshit.
Bashar gave an inaugural speech that was everything you'd want to hear from the new dictator who was replacing the old dictator.
He said it was time to modernize Syria, to open up the economy to new businesses and new ideas, and to institute a raft of political reforms that would allow political parties and previously unheard of levels of dissent, maybe even something that vaguely approached freedom of speech.
His inaugural speech promised democracy, transparency, and touted the desperate need for constructive criticism and creative thinking.
And to back that up, it even included criticisms of Hafez al-Assad's regime.
The international media obligingly ate this up.
I found an article published the day after his inauguration by Mideast Realities.
It was titled, Bashar al-Assad.
They say he's a gentleman.
Okay.
Okay.
Sounds like some prop, prop, propaganda.
Prop, prop, propaganda.
Quote, he's a 35-year-old media-shy ophthalmologist who loves Phil Collins, speaks fluent English and is in no rush to get married, and expresses a keen interest in Israeli high-tech.
Although he was never the favorite son, Bashar Assad next week will be declared heir to his father, Hafez.
Is this his Tinder professional?
Sounds a little bit like TM, like fucking Perez Hilton wrote this.
Yeah.
What occurred next has been dubbed by some as the Damascus Spring, which is accurate in that it did not last very long.
Political prisoners were freed.
European advisors were brought in to help reform the government.
Young technology-minded Syrians who happened to be friends with Bashar were brought into exciting new positions within the regime.
For the first time, Syria's new ruler allowed his people to access the internet, such as it existed at the turn of the millennium.
New political parties were allowed to form, and liberal intellectuals were allowed to form political discussion groups and even publish some literature.
The months immediately after Assad's inauguration were proved to be the absolute high point of Syrian civil liberties.
According to Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma's Middle East Studies Center, quote, of course, it didn't take more than a few weeks before people were demanding regime change because the regime was so corrupt.
It stunk.
The whole thing stunk.
So any kind of critique had to lead to regime change.
Basically, if you start picking at the problems in Syrian society, all of them come back to the fact that an incredibly corrupt criminal regime is in charge.
So like, you really can't allow criticism.
No, sorry.
This just back to the Tinder profile thing.
If Bashar was on Tinder, he would probably have every woman murdered who swiped no on him.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
Could you imagine?
I think that would be punishable by death.
Yeah, I could imagine.
I can imagine about half of the men on Tinder being dictators.
If you follow that She-Rates Dogs account on Twitter, where it's just like women getting threatened with murder by guys they turn down after a bad date, like fucking boy.
I believe that exists, but I feel like for my own sanity, I should not check it out.
You don't need to, but I think there's a lot of people out there, a lot of men, some women I'm sure, too, but a lot of men who, if they had an Air Force, would absolutely bomb a lot of people.
Which is why no one should have an Air Force, except for that Air Force pilot who drew the skydick above Washington.
That guy gets an Air Force.
He knows what to do with him.
He's chill.
Yeah.
About six months into the Damascus Spring, in January of 2001, Syria's information minister declared the idea of civil society to be an American term.
President Assad warned the reformist movement, quote, when the consequences of an action affect the stability of the homeland, there are two possibilities.
Either the perpetrator is a foreign agent acting on behalf of an outside power, or else he is a simple person acting unintentionally.
But in both cases, a service is being done to the country's enemies, and consequently, both are dealt with in a similar fashion, irrespective of their intentions or motives.
So, anyone who is attacking the regime in any way is either a foreigner trying to bring us down or a dumb person, but I have to deal with both foreign spies and dumb people the same way.
Kill them?
Pay attention to that reasoning.
Yeah, that reasoning will come back a little bit later in this tale.
Now, a couple of months later, Bashar imprisoned 10 members of Assyria's extremely milquetoast political opposition.
A lot of these were like the people he'd freed at the start of the Damascus Spring.
This started a trend of Syria's president re-imprisoning all the people he'd freed.
One year after assuming power, he approved a new press law, which gave the government total control over everything printed in Syria, from magazines to pamphlets.
Many experts now say the whole idea of the Damascus Spring was never more than a PR move to gain international support for the regime in its early days.
Others say it was undertaken earnestly, but resistance from old hardliners within the Syrian government forced Bashar to back off on his youthful dreams.
It's hard to say where the truth lies, but there was evidence from the earliest days of Bashar's presidency that he was going to be just as brutal as his dearly departed dad.
One of his first moves was to send his security forces into the city of Latakia, which was a stronghold for his exiled brother Rafat, who, for some reason, was allowed to remain the vice president despite being kicked out of the country forever.
Bashar had many of Rafat's supporters disappeared.
He also deposed the prime minister, Mahmoud al-Zwabi, and charged him with corruption, which was probably true, but no truer for Mahmoud than for any other high-ranking Syrian official.
Mahmoud committed suicide in his cell within weeks of Bashar's inauguration.
So, you know, starting things off with some murder.
Hmm.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's almost as if it's foreshadowing.
Almost as if it's foreshadowing, but I don't foreshadow.
Subtext is for cowards.
The Damascus Spring was short-lived, but the American September of 2001 would go on to have a much longer-lasting impact on Bashar's regime.
Like all Arab leaders in the wake of 9-11, he was forced to make some difficult decisions.
Bashar had to thread the needle of working with the U.S. just enough to not get regime changed himself, while also standing up to America enough to maintain support at home and, most importantly, doing his part to ensure that Iraq was enough of a debacle that Bush wouldn't have the political capital to fuck with the Syrian regime.
Bashar al-Assad was, by all accounts, very successful in this.
In 2004, the Bush administration started to slam him hard for allowing his country to basically act as a highway for foreign fighters to enter Iraq.
This was somewhat overblown because only 5-10% of Iraq's insurgents were foreign fighters, but those foreign fighters tended to be the ones who actually killed the most people.
They were the most of the suicide bombers and the really dedicated fighters.
So, some reason to be pissed at that.
He definitely let a lot of people through.
By the time W came down really hard on Syria, he had his hands so full with the disastrous occupation of Iraq that there was really fuck all he could do to Bashar al-Assad, which made Assad feel safe saying things like this: quote, Some see me as bad, some see me as good.
We don't actually care what terms they use.
It is not right to apply this term to Syria.
I mean, look at the relationship that Syria has with the rest of the world.
If you have good relations with most of the world, you are not a rogue state just because the United States says you are.
Which, you know, given the timing, not totally unfair, but anyway.
Bashar's regime did, of course, allow Salafist insurgents to pass through the country.
These Sunni extremists gradually built up a base of support in parts of Syria.
More than a decade later, they would wind up forming the foundation of the terrorist group ISIS.
At the time, letting them fester seemed like a smart way for Bashar to attack America while maintaining plausible deniability.
Assad was also willing to work with the United States, though, particularly when it came to exercising one of his regime's great strengths, its ability to torture the fuck out of people.
See, in the wake of World War II, an SS man, Alois Brunner, immigrated to Syria in an effort to escape being hung for his many, many, many war crimes.
Now, Brunner was the number one aide and the very best man of Adolf Eichmann, the single dude most responsible for executing the Holocaust.
Bruner himself was wanted for his direct complicity in the murder of 130,000 Jews.
Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad, welcomed Brunner into the Syrian intelligence establishment with open arms.
Now, they later fell out, and Brunner did fortunately die horribly in a Syrian prison, but for years he was an integral part in building up Syria's intelligence infrastructure.
And most importantly, he taught the Syrian government how to torture people.
So that's cool.
Literal Nazi helping build the bones of your torture department.
Now, where this gets even more fucked up is because the Syrian intelligence agencies learned Bruner's lessons about how to torture people well enough that the CIA eventually came to them for help.
A lot has been written about the CIA's own terrible torture programs, but most people don't know that we outsourced an awful lot, probably even the majority of the torturing we did, to other nations.
Syria was considered the very best of these.
Robert Baer, a former CIA agent who worked extensively in the Middle East, later told The Guardian, quote, if you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan.
If you want them tortured, you send them to Syria.
If you want someone to disappear, never to see them again, you send them to Egypt.
So Syria is the CIA's like, these guys.
Like, we can torture, like, not trying to be humble here.
We can torture some dudes.
But these guys, they're the Kareem, like, the CIA is the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of torture, but, like, Syria is the Michael Jordan.
That's so fucking crazy.
Why would you ever say that shit out loud?
Wait, Robert Baer?
Yeah.
Oh, he's been very critical of a lot of aspects of the intelligence.
Like, I think he's trying to be a decent person and tell people about things they need to know about.
Okay.
I thought he was like, it felt like he was like bragging, being like, let me tell you, well, we knew.
I think he's very sort of cogently and honestly talking to the Guardian about like, this is how the torture program works.
Okay.
You go to Syria if you want people to.
Like, I'm glad he said it.
Someone needs to.
Like, I'm not going to say everything Robert Baer has done in his career has been fine and above board, but I'm glad that information's out there.
That's terrifying.
Oh, it gets worse.
The U.S. would regularly send people at apprehended to Syria with lists of questions for the interrogators to work through while they brutally tortured our captives.
One of these people was Maher Arar, a Syrian and Canadian citizen.
On his way home to Canada after a vacation in Syria in 2002, Maher was detained by U.S. authorities at JFK airport under charges of being brown.
Maher was not a terrorist, but the U.S. intelligence agencies thought he might be, so they sent him over to Syria.
Here's how a U.S. judge later summarized what happened to him: quote, During his first 12 days in Syrian detention, Arar was interrogated for 18 hours per day and was physically and psychologically tortured.
He was beaten on his palms, hips, and lower back with a two-inch thick electric cable.
His captors also used their fists to beat him on his stomach, his face, and the back of his neck.
He was subjected to excruciating pain and pleaded with his captors to stop, but they would not.
He was placed in a room where he could hear the screams of other detainees being tortured and was told that he too would be placed in a spine-breaking chair, hung upside down in a tire for beatings, and subjected to electric shocks.
To lessen his exposure to the torture, Arar falsely confessed, among other things, to having trained with terrorists in Afghanistan, even though he had never been to Afghanistan and had never been involved in terrorist activity.
Cool.
Shadow Zones of Syria00:15:02
So.
Cool.
Fuck.
That's one of those things.
It's both like if you on the U.S., if you're like a patriotic American who gets like two up your own ass about how bad these Arab dictators are, like, our government was happy to use them to torture people.
But also, like, if you're a leftist getting too uppity about Bashar al-Assad being an anti-imperialist, he was fined to torture people for the CIA.
Fuck all of them.
Like, fuck all of them.
Well, I mean, just getting picked up for being brown is just, you know.
Yeah.
The fuck.
Yeah, it's all very frustrating.
Over the early aughts, Bashar gradually grew into his role as supreme ruler of Syria.
He allowed the U.S. to force his.
Yeah, there we go.
There's our boy.
He allowed the U.S. to force his soldiers out of their years-long occupation of Lebanon, something he felt he should have received more international gratitude for doing.
In 2006, Hezbollah, a group heavily supported by the Syrian government, went to war with Israel.
It did not go well, but Hezbollah survived, which was widely seen as a victory.
Bashar saw this as proof that his regime was now safe.
If America and Israel could not take out Hezbollah, they surely would not be able to remove him from power.
This wound up being a completely accurate guess.
David Lesch, a professor of Middle East history who met with Bashar dozens of times during this period, recalls his evolution.
Quote, in May 2007, amid Bashar's re-election and a referendum to another seven-year term, I noticed something in him that I had not detected before, self-satisfaction.
Maybe this is inevitable in a neopatrimonial authoritarian state, and maybe he was getting his due after such a tough ride.
But Bashar has been a very unpretentious leader, even self-deprecating.
Despite being surrounded by very dangerous circumstances, he never seemed to take himself too seriously.
Indeed, one time I asked him to talk about his greatest accomplishments to date, and he responded that perhaps we should spend more time on his biggest failures.
He is not a commanding figure at first glance, soft-spoken, gregarious, with a childlike laugh.
He does not fit the typical profile of a dictator.
This was even the case when he ran unopposed in a referendum.
Visiting a polling station, I observed that each voter had to check the yes or no box in public amid a band playing and people singing pro-Bashar tunes.
It would be an intrepid voter who would check no, especially with security personnel, no doubt, watching closely.
The Bashar posters draped over almost every standing structure and out of every window, and the I Love Bashar and English and Arabic pens, pendants, and billboards belied his eschewing of such cultish popular behavior to date.
Bashar understood that the 97% vote to re-elect him was not an accurate barometer of his real standing in the country.
He said it was more important to look at turnout rates for voters, as those who did not vote were more than likely to have voted no.
According to Syrian estimates, the voter turnout rate was 75%, still a very favorable response for Bashar.
I'm so stuck on how they just described him.
Self-deprecating?
You know, Lesh is an interesting figure because he wrote a very pro-Bashar book before the Civil War, and then after the Civil War, he wrote some really anti-Bashar stuff.
Like, came around to be like, okay, no, this guy's a monster.
And has been one of the more useful figures in trying to analyze the question you asked earlier.
Like, was he always a monster?
Like, how did this happen?
Like, what was the switch?
It sounds like the way that guy described him, he's like a real Jekyll and Hyde character.
Like, there's literally a study called Bashar al-Assad, Jekyll and Hyde, or something like that.
Yeah, like, no, like, it's, it's what you're saying is, like, really valid because a lot of people have had these same sort of realizations.
Um, there's enough childlike giggle.
It's like, get the fuck out of here.
But there's enough stories about him that paint him in that light for me to think, okay, well, they're probably not, they have no reason to lie because, like, Lesh has, you know, been pretty decent about, like, yeah, I got him wrong and stuff.
Like, either it was a facade he deliberately put up, or a guy like that is perfectly capable of killing half a million people.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, you kind of pick which one you want to believe, but one of the two seems to be the case.
Now, Bashar al-Assad was optimistic about his ability to keep Assading during the Obama administration.
U.S. foreign policy and public will had turned hard away from intervention.
The new president had promised to withdraw troops from Iraq.
Senator John Kerry was sent to Damascus to meet with Bashar and restart Syrian-Israeli peace negotiations.
Over the next few years, Kerry and Assad hung out a lot, speaking regularly on the telephone.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie also became friends with the Assads.
This was revealed.
Your face.
What?
The fuck?
Yeah, you didn't call that one, did you?
What the fuck?
Oh, you are about to get what the fuck here.
This next bit is quite, quite the ride.
Wait, what year is this?
This is 2011.
That is the fuck Brangelina, dude.
They deserve to know.
I hope Bashar broke them up.
I hope so, too.
I hope so, too.
And I hope that he provided no emotional support when they were going through that.
Jesus Christ.
Now, uh, Brangelina's friendship with the Assads was revealed in a February 2011 Vogue article titled A Rose in the Desert about Osma Al-Assad Bashar's wife.
Oh, the fucking prose you're about to hear.
Oh, it's bad.
Quote, when Angelina Jolie came with Brad Pitt for the United Nations in 2009, she was impressed by the First Lady's efforts to encourage empowerment among Iraqi and Palestinian refugees, but alarmed by the Assad's idea of safety.
My husband was driving us all to lunch, says Ozma Al-Assad, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see Brad Pitt was fidgeting.
I turned around and asked, is anything wrong?
Where's your security? asked Pitt.
So I started teasing him.
See that old woman on the street?
That's one of them.
And that old guy crossing the road.
That's the other one.
They both laugh.
The president joins in on the punchline.
Brad Pitt wanted to send his security guards here to come and get some training.
Isn't that funny?
I, you know, these people can all fuck themselves.
I hate everybody in that story.
That's the worst thing in the...
That old lady?
It's like, are you fucking kidding me?
You're going to murder all these people soon.
Yeah, all of these people will be dead from barrel bombs in like a year and a half.
Now, the whole article was filled with fawning praise for Syria's First Lady.
In case that excerpt doesn't give you a clear idea of the tone, here's the opening paragraph.
Fucking strap in, Anna.
Quote, Asma Al-Assad.
Asma Al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic, the freshest and most magnetic of First Ladies.
Her style is not the couchre and bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power, but a liberate lack of adornment.
She's a rare combination, a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement.
Paris Match calls her the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.
She is the First Lady of Syria.
How you doing there?
I know.
That is...
Is this article still online?
No.
No, it isn't.
At least Vogue has fucked up.
I think they should have left it up so they could be eternally shamed.
There are copies of it, and I will link you to the Wayback Machine archive, because people should read it and throw shame on Vogue for the rest of time.
That is such a dangerous description of a human being who is made into a... who is basically involved in some monstrosities.
That is the journalistic equivalent of getting blackout drunk and then driving a truck down the main thoroughfare of town.
Like, that's like morally equivalent to drunk driving.
I hope...
Honestly, if I saw Brad Pitt and he looked like shit and he was like, yeah, I'm just not going through a good time, I'd be like, yeah, you should never go through a good time ever again.
Yeah, how's Bashar al-Assad, you piece of money?
That fucking couple.
Yeah.
Yeah, gross.
And it gets grosser.
The Vogue article praised Syria for being the safest country in the Middle East.
In August 2011, the Hill Reports reported that lobbying firm Brown Lloyd James had been paid $5,000 a month by the Syrian regime to publish and manage that Vogue article.
That makes sense.
That makes sense.
The puff piece ended with a few paragraphs about the Assad celebrating Christmas in Damascus.
I think you'll find this very heartwarming, Anna.
Great quote.
200 children dressed variously as elves, reindeers, or candy canes share the stage with members of the national orchestra who are done up as elves.
The show becomes a full-on song fest with the elves and reindeer and candy canes giving all their hallelujah and joy to the world.
The carols slide into a more serpentine rhythm.
An Arabic rap group takes over, and then it's back to Broadway mode.
President whispers, all of these styles belong to our culture.
This is how you fight extremism through art.
Brass bells are handed out.
Now we're all singing.
Jingle bell rock.
1,300 audience members shaking their bells, singing, crying, and laughing.
This is the diversity you want to see in the Middle East, says the president, ringing his bell.
This is how you can have peace.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
Let's dissect.
First, he says all these styles are from Syria.
Well, I mean, Syria has, like, it's got Christians and it has, you know, Arabs and rapping and stuff.
Like, I think he was trying to say that, like, all of these religions are part of our culture.
I thought he was being like, rapping, we made that Broadway.
No.
From Syria.
If he had actually opened up Syria and not murdered hundreds of thousands of people, it would be a heartwarming story.
Yeah.
But, you know, on January 27th, 2012, less than one year and exactly one Christmas after the publication of that Vogue article, Syrian regime forces shot 102 people dead in protests across the country.
They shot 98 more people dead on January 28th.
On February 4th, 2012, almost exactly a year after that Vogue article, Bashar al-Assad ordered his artillery to fire indiscriminately at the city of Homs, killing more than 400 civilians in a single bloody day.
Now, we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves.
On part two, we'll talk about the Arab Spring and how Bashar's regime went from playing at openness to murdering hundreds of thousands of people.
For now, I want to note that Vogue eventually pulled their profile of Ozma al-Assad.
In an interview with The Atlantic, News Story's editor, a guy named Chris Knoxon, said, quote, we felt that a personal interview with Syria's first lady would hold strong interest for our readers.
We thought we could open up that very closed world a little bit.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Yeah, fuck off, man.
Yeah.
I have an idea.
Suck my dick.
Sorry, I don't, you know.
But fuck you.
Fuck you.
The closest thing that article gets to like acknowledging the horribly dark side of the Syrian regime is by saying that there are shadow zones in Syria, but it only mentions shadow zones to talk about how pretty Ozma al-Assad is.
So it doesn't really count.
Yeah, it's like, wow, she's so gorgeous around all these body parts.
Yeah, she's so pretty next to these Mukhabarat police torturing people.
God, look at her compared to like that like severed head.
Isn't she gorgeous?
Doesn't she look good next to this pile of limbs?
Oh my God.
Everyone involved in that article should take a strong hard look at themselves in the mirror.
Yeah, they really ought to.
Now, Anna, you feel like plugging your pluggables?
I feel like dying.
You know, you can find me Anna Hosnier on Twitter, A-N-N-A-H-O-S-S-N-I-E-H.
I will be tweeting nonstop at Angelina and Brad asking to explain themselves.
And you can also listen to my podcast with Shireen Yunez.
We host a podcast there called Ethnically Ambiguous.
Check it out.
It's all Middle Eastern news and politics.
And hey, you know, maybe we'll get in depth on how to get Angelina and Brad on the show and corner them.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
That could be our new podcast is just cornering Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and making them feel bad.
I do wonder if he ever got his bodyguards out there to train and if they're all psycho killers now.
Yeah, yeah, I hope so.
I hope for Brad's sake he did because we are going to be throwing some rotten food at him.
That is the plan.
So I'm Robert Evans.
You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.
You can find this podcast on Twinstagrams, both the Soch Meads at at BastardsPod.
Find us on the web at behindthebastards.com.
I have another podcast called it could happen here, which is about, uh what, what if a civil war, but in America, and it's uh also a real bummer, like this podcast.
So if you like being bummed out, maybe you like it, let me.
Let me guess.
Angelina is running like a Confederate ARMY now.
Yes yes yes, Angelina Julie, head of the Neo-confederate Forces.
Oh, my god, that is so her like, yeah, it's the obvious.
Play it's the obvious.
Yeah yeah, yeah.
Could you imagine a tabloid headline being like Angelina in charge of the Confederate ARMY?
We're like tabloid, such lies uh.
Also t-shirts, uh, tea public behind the bastards.
Design me a go-on or i'll kill you shirt.
Yeah yeah, we need to get podcast podcast dictator, podcast dictator shirt.
Uh Danel, play me off.
I'm not hearing anybody playing me off, I don't know.
Fill in your own music in your head uh, and go do something besides.
Listen to this podcast.
It's over.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not gonna get away with this.
He's gonna get what he deserves.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me babe, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Take Control of Your Money00:01:54
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot in life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajinista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks to real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, our goal is simple.
Make financial literacy accessible for everyone.
Because when you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Earn Your Leisure, and listen now.