{"id":1660,"date":"2011-06-09T16:10:25","date_gmt":"2011-06-09T16:10:25","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-06-09T16:10:25","modified_gmt":"2011-06-09T16:10:25","slug":"maher-assad-profile-of-the-syrian-presidents-feared-brother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/maher-assad-profile-of-the-syrian-presidents-feared-brother\/","title":{"rendered":"Maher Assad: Profile of the Syrian President’s Feared Brother"},"content":{"rendered":"
ADO-World.org<\/p>\n

Maher al-Assad, the Syrian president’s younger brother, has become a man of many epithets.<\/p>\n

By Adrian Blomfield, Middle East Correspondent
\n<\/span>The Telegraph<\/span><\/a>
\n09 Jun 2011<\/p>\n

To the regime’s opponents, he is "the most feared man in the country"; "the Butcher of Deraa" or simply "the enforcer".<\/p>\n

As Syria’s uprising has ground on, Mr Assad’s ability to inspire terror has only multiplied.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

By dissident accounts, the president’s brother revels in his unwholesome reputation.<\/p>\n

He has, they say, the classic psychopath’s appetite for inflicting suffering and a total inability to empathise with the plight of his victims. <\/p>\n

Stories abound of his fondness not just for ordering retribution but actively taking part in it.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It is the second time Mr Assad has allegedly been caught on film revelling in violence.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of people are thought to have died in the operation, among them several children.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Many Syrians see Maher as Rifaat reincarnated.<\/p>\n

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.
\n<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ADO-World.org Maher al-Assad, the Syrian president’s younger brother, has become a man of many epithets. By Adrian Blomfield, Middle East Correspondent The Telegraph 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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-syria"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2011\/06\/Maher.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1660\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ado-world.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}