Slender shoulders, a limp handshake and soft-spoken lisp. Those were the most vivid memories from my meeting with Bashar al-Assad.
It was 2007 and the insurgency against US troops was raging next door in Iraq. Toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, a fellow secular Baathist like Assad, had been executed just six months earlier.
But Syria’s then leader, who had succeeded his father Hafez seven years before, represented a stable contrast to the chaos engulfing neighboring Iraq.
Assad met us without a large entourage, folding his long body into a chair at the head of the room. At no stage were we physically searched.
His security team displayed absolute confidence, by staying mostly invisible.
The assumption was that the much-feared Syrian security services had eyes on us from the moment we landed in Damascus, while probably also searching our rooms and listening to us.
Little did I know then that this tall, thin man dressed in a suit would one day be the fiercest opponent of the Arab Spring, surviving where other regional strongmen fell by unleashing a ruthless crackdown that plunged his country into 13 years of civil war, only to then see his dynastic rule collapse in a matter of days.
I was with a group of more than a dozen correspondents and editors from National Public Radio. A fleet of black limousines escorted by motorcycles brought us from a luxury Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus to a mansion on a hill overlooking the city.
During an hour-long discussion conducted almost entirely in English in 2007, Assad flatly denied various allegations against his regime.
No, Syria had no role in a series of assassinations of critics in neighboring Lebanon. He denied the existence of a pipeline of jihadi fighters traversing Syria to fight in Iraq. In response to questions about Syria’s lack of press freedoms and system of one-party rule, he engaged in classic “whataboutism.” He exhibited absolutely no responsibility nor remorse about Syrian human rights violations, instead deflecting and highlighting examples of US abuses in Iraq.
Palaces and prisons
Assad wasn’t nearly as ostentatious as his fellow dictator Saddam, whose monstrous palaces in Iraq were slathered with tacky gold.
But the Syrians now exploring Assad’s abandoned properties have revealed that the former ophthalmologist-turned-president certainly had his own taste for luxury.
One video showed dozens of luxury cars parked in the president’s garage, including a red Ferrari F50, a Lamborghini, a Rolls Royce and a Bentley.
Meanwhile, his regime’s reputation for absolute brutality was cemented long ago, during the civil war that ground on for 14 bloody years.
Basat al reeh. Dulab. Falaqa. These were Arabic names for torture techniques repeated to me by Syrians who had been jailed during the regime crackdown on the anti-government uprising that erupted across the country in 2011. We soon became familiar with them.
“We suffered torture all the time,” said Tariq, an opposition activist from the port city of Latakia who recounted to me the 40 days he spent in solitary confinement.
Dulab, Tariq explained from exile in Turkey, involved forcing a victim’s head into a car tire and beating them. Basat al reeh was when a prisoner was tied to a board and beaten. Falaqa involved beating a victim’s feet.
In the opposition-held province of Idlib, I interviewed a dentist in 2012 who was arrested for secretly providing medical care to wounded demonstrators.
He said he endured beatings, near-drownings in buckets of toilet water and electric shocks to his genitals during a 45-day stint in a prison cell built for 60 people, but crammed full of 130 prisoners.
Eventually, Assad’s forces, backed by Iran, Russia and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, succeeded in regaining control of much of Syria.
The prisons stayed full of inmates and the torture continued.
Then, in late November, as the saying goes: “There are decades where nothing happens; and then there are weeks where decades happen.”
A rebel offensive disintegrated Assad’s regime in just under two weeks.
The crowds of Syrians desperate for signs of missing loved ones outside of Saydnaya Military Prison underscore the cruelty of the dynastic Assad dictatorship.
Syrian and Lebanese prisoners have emerged from Syrian dungeons as if resurrected, after having been thought lost for decades.
Cynicism and hypocrisy
During the Assad dynasty’s 53 years in power, Damascus played an incredibly cynical game of regional politics.
This fiercely secular government which bombed its own city of Hama in 1982 to crush a Muslim Brotherhood uprising later funneled Sunni jihadi fighters to Iraq to battle the US occupation. Some of these militants returned to eventually battle the Syrian government. Meanwhile Syria’s closest allies were also Iran - a theocracy - and Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Shiite “party of God.”
For decades, Damascus acted as a patron for Kurdish PKK separatists in a long-running insurgency against the government in neighboring Turkey, while also denying many Syrian-born Kurds the full rights of citizenship.
And Syrian officials constantly denounced the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, even as the Syrian military and secret police tormented ordinary people at checkpoints in Lebanon during a Syrian occupation that lasted nearly 30 years.
These ideological contradictions were astounding. They also served to project Syrian power and influence far beyond the country’s borders.
The hypocrisy and cynicism displayed by Assad was a family business.
In a 2009 interview with CNN, the president’s British-born wife Asma condemned allegations of Israeli military human rights abuses committed in Gaza and talked about the responsibilities of being a First Lady.
“What do you do in the position that you hold?” she said. “As a mother and as a human being, as I said, we need to make sure that these atrocities stop.”
But three years later, she proudly stood by her husband’s side, ignoring the horrors inflicted by Syrian government forces during the civil war, which included the repeated bombing of hospitals.
There is one memory of a reporting trip to Damascus that still haunts me.
In 2005, I went undercover, posing as a tourist visiting a nightclub on a hill overlooking the city.
There, amid strobe lights and booming dance music, I spoke with 14 and 15 year old girls from neighboring, war-torn Iraq who worked as prostitutes. Some of the boys and girls laboring in this brothel were even younger.
The nightclub stood just a few miles from Assad’s presidential palace.
In a country as ruthlessly controlled by the Syrian secret police - where any sign of dissent was swiftly crushed - it is impossible to imagine that the authorities were unaware of the club’s existence and the work the children were doing there.
It was hard to imagine the slender, lisping man I met ruling this kind of system, and yet Assad governed as president for 24 years.
A wiser person than me, Hannah Arendt, wrote about the banality of evil.
Based on what I saw long ago during my hour-long audience with a dictator, Bashar al-Assad personified this.