The Structure of Syria's Repression

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For years, Bashar al-Assad’s regime subjected Syrians to a routine of good cop, bad cop. Maher al-Assad, President Bashar al-Assad’s brother and the head of the brutal Republican Guard, has played the bad cop. Although Maher was not seen much in public, he established a reputation for brutal repression. The good cop, ironically, was Bashar al-Assad himself. Educated in the West and an ophthalmologist by trade, he projected an image of benevolence, wearing blue jeans in public and, in a Vogue profile of his wife this past February, boasted of driving through Damascus without any security.

That same Vogue article referenced the well-manicured fingernails of Assad’s wife, “lacquered a dark blue-green.” In mid-March, the focus shifted to the hands of 15 children in the southern Syrian city of Deraa whose nails were removed by torture. Their crime was scribbling the famous words of the Arab Spring -- “The people want to bring down the regime” -- on their school’s wall, an act that began the ongoing Syrian revolt against Assad.

Now that Assad’s regime has killed hundreds of protesters since the students drew their graffiti, few Syrians harbor any illusions about the true nature of their president. Yet in standing against Assad’s security forces, the demonstrators face a secretive, complex, and ruthless apparatus.

Syria has four security directorates: Military Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, State Security, and Political Security. The heads of Military Intelligence and Air Force Intelligence -- Abdulfatah Qudsiah and Jamil Hasan, respectively -- are both Alawites. Meanwhile, Ali Mamlouk, the head of State Security, and Deeb Zaitoun, head of Political Security, are both Sunni, likely appointed over Alawites to help the regime diffuse tensions with the general populace, who interact most often with the security chiefs. These four directorates operate under the umbrella of the National Security Council headed by General Hisham Ikhtiyar, who reports directly to Assad.

However structured they are in theory, the security agencies are dominated by the Assad family in practice. A lower-ranking officer with ties to the Assad family, for example, might possess greater authority and privileges than his superiors, simply due to family connections. According to a former assistant of Assad who now lives abroad and prefers to remain anonymous, the Assad family ignores the formal structures of the state and controls the country itself. In an example of this clan rule, the president’s first cousin, Hafez Makhlouf, works under Mamlouk, the head of State Security, yet enjoys far greater influence than Mamlouk himself. Makhlouf, along with Maher al-Assad; Assef Shawkat, Assad’s brother-in-law and the army’s deputy chief of staff; and Zu al Hima Chalich, another Assad cousin and the head of presidential security, comprise the inner circle of leadership. They are responsible for the current political turmoil in Syria.

Many Syrians have, unfortunately, experienced first-hand the nepotism, corruption, and ruthlessness of the fear factories run by this inner circle. There is no coordination or communication among these divisions; many Syrian activists are released from one of the security agencies just to be arrested by another for the same alleged crime.

Air Force Intelligence is known as one of the most brutal security directorates. In 2006, members of the unit arrested and tortured eight of my friends for forming a secular democratic group at Damascus University. They were later sentenced to serve time, some for five years and some for seven, at the military jail in Saydnaya. I myself spent 40 harrowing days in a Syrian prison, subjected to ill-treatment and torture, solely for posting comments on the Internet expressing support for my friends and criticizing Assad’s regime. Plainclothes Syrian security agents arrested me at an Internet café in Damascus, pushing me and a friend into a car trunk at gunpoint. I asked which security branch they belonged to, and they answered me by punching me in the face and accusing me of espionage. Once we were in prison, we could not call our families -- who, we learned later, were searching for us in city morgues. After ten days in solitary confinement in a windowless room, I was taken, blindfolded and handcuffed, to an interrogation. I refused to speak, demanding to know who my captors were. When they took the cover off my eyes, I glimpsed a large poster of Bashar al-Assad. I said, “I now know where I am.” The interrogator responded by brutally beating me and telling me, “You are Christian. Why are you opposing us? Go to your Vatican and do whatever you want!” I was released after signing a paper that promised I would not to be involved in antiregime activities.