Tracing the 50-year-long rule of Syria President Bashar al-Assad’s family

The statement came hours after a Syrian opposition war monitor declared that Assad had left the country for an unknown location, while country’s Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali informed that he did not know the whereabouts of Bashar Assad and his defence minister since last night. He also said the country should have free elections so Syrians can choose who they want, according to a Reuters report.

Who are the Assads?

President Bashar and his father Hafez Al-Assad ruled Syria for more than 50 years, relying heavily on country’s security forces. Their family ruled over Syria since 1971, when Hafez seized power in a military coup, crushing all forms of dissent through a large network of detention centres and strict governmental surveillance, The Guardian noted.

One of the remarkable events during Hafez’s rule remains the brutal defeat of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian city of Hama by the country’s military in 1982.

Fast forward to the present, in the capital’s central square, people Sunday climbed on top of tank and cheered as they trampled on a toppled statue of Hafez, The Guardian reported citing AFPTV images.

Bashar assumes power in 2000

Bashar, earlier an ophthalmologist who had trained in London for about 18 months, took over the reins in 2000, following his father’s death due to chronic heart attack that year.

After Bashar came to power, the West pinned high hopes on him to open Syria up to them, BBC News higlighted. However, the changes that were brought on by his government were minimal. Repressive attacks, a remnant of Hafez’s rule, continued to occur even under Bashar, culminating in the 2011 uprising, marking Syria’s entry into the wave of Arab Spring protests.

Moreover, under Bashar’s leadership, the state institutions weakened, challenging the family’s grip on Syria, and increasing tensions across the country. Family members such as his brother Maher, sister Bushra, brother-in-law Assef Shakwat then played key roles in maintaining the regime’s security apparatus, BBC News noted.

“Bashar felt that any reform, any questioning of his way of doing things was a sign he wasn’t respected,” said dissident Abdulhamid, suggesting he may have struggled with feelings of inadequacy or inferiority. “He refused to be treated any differently than his father,” BBC News quoted.

Syrians began to peacefully demonstrate against Bashra’s authoritarian rule in 2011, which soon turned into a civil war, which is estimated to have killed more than 300,000 people during the ten years of fighting, The Guardian noted. The war also created space for jihadist groups to plan attacks across the world.

As per a report in The Guardian, Assad then turned the full might of the state on his own people in order to maintain control, including “pummelling the civilian population with airstrikes and the use of chemical weapons including the deadly nerve agent sarin”.

Assad’s forces then lost control over parts of the largest city, Aleppo, while his opposition fighters closed in on the Capital city of Damascus. Back then, he was rescued by Russia, and his longtime ally Iran, which along with Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah military helped Assad’s forces retake Aleppo, turning the war firmly in his favor, news agency AP reported.

HTS, Syria’s strongest rebel group returns

Bashar’s rule over Syria was inevitable, before Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a former al-Qaida affiliate, the group that was once regarded as the rebellion’s most extremist factions, came back to haunt his government.

In 2016, HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani sought to rebuild the group’s image after cutting ties with the Al-Qaeda, ditching hard-line officials and vowing to embrace pluralism and religious tolerance, according to AP news.

The group has controlled much of northwest Syria, and also set up a “salvation government” in 2017 to run day-to-day affairs in the region. Its goal now is to establish fundamentalist Islamic rule in Syria rather than a wider caliphate, as the Islamic State (IS) had tried but failed to do, BBC stated.