Express analysis | Bashar Assad and his idea of “free Syria”
By Trinidad Deiros. “Your turn, doctor.” That phrase, scrawled on the walls of a school in the city of Deraa in 2011, is considered the starting point of the revolution that, in 2011, rose up against the Syrian dictator Bachar el Assad, the ophthalmologist to whom that “ doctor”, and to whom the graffiti predicted following the path of overthrow that the Tunisian Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and the Egyptian Hosni had already taken. Mubarak, thanks to the “Arab Spring”. It wasn’t like that. To quell any hint of opposition, between that year and 2022 alone, the Syrian regime killed at least 100,000 people, who died in regime prisons, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The recently deposed Syrian president released a statement this Monday in which he assures that his flight to Russia, after the victory of the rebels led by Hayat Tahrir al Sham, “was not planned”, defining the new Syrian rulers as “terrorists” and formulates the wish for his country to be “free” again.
The data indicates that, under his rule, Syria has been anything but free. Politically, with a repression that is attested to by the numbers of opponents killed in prisons like Saidnaya. Also economically. In his text, Assad defines himself as the person who refused to exchange “the salvation of his country for his personal benefit.”
With that “personal benefit” perhaps he refers to the possibility of getting to safety, as he ultimately did in Russia, and not to a pecuniary issue. It’s hard to know. However, it is also important not to think about the exercise of cynicism that the former Syrian autocrat implies in expressing himself in these terms when his fortune is estimated between 1,000 and 2,000 million dollars (between 952 and 1,904 million euros), according to open sources cited. in a report from the United States Department of State. 90% of Syrians live in poverty.
“The difficulty in accurately estimating the net worth of Assad and his family members is because the family’s assets are believed to be spread out and hidden in numerous accounts, real estate portfolios, companies and tax havens,” often under a false name, says the cited report.
Bashar Assad, the man at the top of this repressive, plutocratic and corrupt network, now defines himself in his statement as “the person who remained with his family alongside the Syrian people” in the “darkest years of the war.”
