The Fall of the Assads: The End of Half a Century of Tyranny in Syria and How it will Change the World

In 1971, Hafez Al-Assad seized power in Syria and in 2000 his son Bashar Al-Assad succeeded him ruling the country until he was toppled in 2024. The half a century rule of the Assad family has reshaped the Mediterranean country, but grasping the essentials of their rule often gets lost in a polarised media environment. James Snell’s new book The Fall of the Assads: The End of Half a Century of Tyranny in Syria and How it will Change the World offers clear sighted essentials for understanding their rule. ‘Syria under Bashar Al-Assad was a kingdom of fear, a place where saying the wrong word to anyone might mean arrest, torture and death.’ The book is organised into chapters looking at different themes of the Assads’ rule that charts from father to son to revolution to civil war and to ouster. 

When thinking about what caused the final downfall of the regime, Snell reminds us of a very important point. While the image of the Assad regime winning the war in 2017 became a dominant idea outside Syria, with remaining opposition confined to Idlib, the so-called victorious Assad had overseen the destruction of his country with heavy lifting from Iran and Russia. Syria was deeply indebted and was institutionally weak after years of war. The regime’s response was to hollow out governmental institutions further and nothing encapsulates this better than captagon, an amphetamine drug. 

The use of drugs and stimulants became widespread during the civil war, but after the regime’s ‘victory’ in 2017, captagon was being exported from Syria at an alarmingly high rate. In 2020, police in the southern Italian port city of Salerno, entered a ship that had come from Latakia, Syria. They discovered 14 tons of amphetamines and 84 million tablets with an estimated value of $1 billion making it the largest seizure of amphetamines ever recorded. The drugs were traced back to warehouses in southern Syria run by the regime. A single shipment with this amount of drugs, suggested that Assad’s Syria was one of the largest drug suppliers in the world. ‘With Syria’s legitimate primary and secondary industries in states of disarray and collapse, captagon became a serious export.’ In order to run such a large operation, state resources needed to be redirected to their production and export, which eroded the state’s capacity to do other things. While this is not the whole reason for the collapse of the Syrian regime in 2024, it is connected to its fall. 

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A key notion that took off in some quarters is that Assad resisted the United States and western imperialism, however, as Snell reminds us this is not entirely true. After 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on America, Syria willingly offered the US assistance. His regime tried to play it both ways in terms of messaging, ‘To the Arab and Muslim world, Assad wanted to be a hero standing up for their interests against the Americans. But to the Americans, Assad wanted to be useful.’ Assad’s media machine tried to launder its image and projected itself as a modern, Westernised society, that Washington could do business with. It worked and shortly after the attacks, the US was sending people it suspected of involvement with terrorism to Syria for interrogation. Interrogation included torture and according to an investigation by The New Yorker, Syria was the most common destination for US rendition operations. Despite not producing useful intelligence, the irony was, torturing suspects on behalf of the United States, is that it rehabilitated his image in the United States as he was seen as a ‘moderate’.  

This brings out a central point of the book, which is to remind western policy makers of the different ways they enabled the Assad regime. Snell argues, ‘Western policy towards Syria has, almost universally, been a disaster.’ The fixation on fighting Daesh from 2014 onwards, while turning a blind eye to the atrocities of the regime, meant the country continued to deteriorate and made it a breeding ground for more extremist groups. Snell says that it is now up to the Syrian people to decide how they are governed after the fall of Assad. That said, the West need to get their policy on Syria right and should include things like sanction relief, securing chemical weapons storages and enabling the Syrians to rebuild. The Fall of the Assads offers urgent lessons and a wonderfully simple insight into how Syria was governed and what needs to be done in order to bring peace, stability and justice to the country. 

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