Assyrian Democratic Organization ADO
Maher al-Assad, the Syrian president’s younger brother, has become a man of many epithets.
By Adrian Blomfield, Middle East Correspondent
09 Jun 2011
To the regime’s opponents, he is "the most feared man in the country"; "the Butcher of Deraa" or simply "the enforcer".
As Syria’s uprising has ground on, Mr Assad’s ability to inspire terror has only multiplied.
For the regime, it is invaluable to have in its service a man whose name alone can strike fear into the entire civilian population of a town.
By dissident accounts, the president’s brother revels in his unwholesome reputation.
He has, they say, the classic psychopath’s appetite for inflicting suffering and a total inability to empathise with the plight of his victims.
Stories abound of his fondness not just for ordering retribution but actively taking part in it.
Last month, a video emerged purporting to show Mr Assad, dressed in a leather jacket, firing a pistol at unarmed protesters in a district of Damascus.
The authenticity of the footage has not been verified, but the man bears a resemblance to the president’s brother and the manner in which officers protect him as he shoots points to the culprit being a figure of some note.
It is the second time Mr Assad has allegedly been caught on film revelling in violence.
In March, disturbing footage emerged on the internet showing a man with Maher al-Assad’s appearance photographing the dismembered bodies of regime opponents at a prison near Damascus with his mobile phone.
As the commander of the elite Fourth Division and Republican Guard, Mr Assad was brutally effective in put down protests in Deraa, the wellspring of the 11-week uprising against his brother, President Bashar al-Assad.
Hundreds of people are thought to have died in the operation, among them several children.
Maher’s role in the killing led to the United States and the European Union fingering him as one of their first targets for sanctions.
Seen as the leader of a hardline camp in the regime, Maher was blamed by some observers for preventing the president from steering a more moderate course.
But that view is increasingly challenged, with some saying that the regime has deliberately fostered the impression that Bashar al-Assad was a reformer hindered from making concessions by his blood-crazed younger brother in order to protect the president’s image.
Under this analysis, it is Maher who gets the blood on his hands, and publicly revels in it, while Bashar keeps a respectable distance from the violence.
The relationship is modelled, proponents of the argument say, on the modus operandi established by Hafez al-Assad, Syria’s former president and the two men’s father, and his brother Rifaat.
Facing an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982, Hafez tasked Rifaat with the job of putting it down. Rifaat did the job so effectively that three-quarters of the city was destroyed and an estimated 20,000 died – though he boasted that the death toll was actually 36,000.
Many Syrians see Maher as Rifaat reincarnated.
It is little wonder, then, that thousands are fleeing his advance through the northern province of Idlib on a mission to take vengeance against the rebels of the town of Jisr al-Shughur.
