How Syria was before islamic terrorists won, as Asma al-Assad interview reveals

On 27 November 2024, a coalition of Syrian opposition groups consisted of Turkish – paid and Turkish-backed islamic terrorists mercenaries called the Military Operations Command,  led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched a  quick offensive  against the Syrian Army in Aleppo, Idlib, Hama and Homs Governorates in Syria which was followed by other rebel offensives from the Southern Front, the SDF and the Syrian Free Army.

Taking advantage of deteriorated power of Iranian and Russian forces, due to the US-backed Israel bombing of Iranian and Syrian targets alonside the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza during the last 12 months, and the consequent deterioration of power of Syrian army,  those Syrian islamic terrorists eventually captured Damascus on the 8th of December 2024.

Syria, one of the most advanced in quality of life countries in the Middle East, that suffered from US backed and Turkish backed islamists terrorist bombings and orchestrated  coup attempts and civil war, eventually turned from secular society to a CIA-designed islamist terror dessert, following the path of other US_backed coup attempts, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

But Syria was not always like that. An interview of Vogue magazine with the first lady of Syria Asma al-Assad, describes how Syria was, and how life in Syria was before the civil war and before Islamic Terrorism made the country a living hell.

The interview

The interview taken on the 25th of February 2011  described that “Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her “the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.” She is the first lady of Syria.”

The interview continues by describing the country ….”Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.” It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. Asma’s husband, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president in 2000, after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, with a startling 97 percent of the vote. In Syria, power is hereditary. The country’s alliances are murky. How close are they to Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah? There are souvenir Hezbollah ashtrays in the souk, and you can spot the Hamas leadership racing through the bar of the Four Seasons. Its number-one enmity is clear: Israel. But that might not always be the case. The United States has just posted its first ambassador there since 2005, Robert Ford.”

Regarding neighboring countries, in 2011, the interview says that “Iraq is next door, Iran not far away. Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, is 90 minutes by car from Damascus. Jordan is south, and next to it the region that Syrian maps label Palestine. There are nearly one million refugees from Iraq in Syria, and another half-million displaced Palestinians.“It’s a tough neighborhood,” admits Asma al-Assad. It’s also a neighborhood intoxicatingly close to the dawn of civilization, where agriculture began some 10,000 years ago, where the wheel, writing, and musical notation were invented. Out in the desert are the magical remains of Palmyra, Apamea, and Ebla. In the National Museum you see small 4,000-year-old panels inlaid with mother-of-pearl that is echoed in the new mother-of-pearl furniture for sale in the souk. Christian Louboutin comes to buy the damask silk brocade they’ve been making here since the Middle Ages for his shoes and bags, and has incidentally purchased a small palace in Aleppo, which, like Damascus, has been inhabited for more than 5,000 years.”

The interview gets into some perosnal details of the first lady

“Asma Akhras was born in London in 1975, the eldest child and only daughter of a Syrian Harley Street cardiologist and his diplomat wife, both Sunni Muslims. They spoke Arabic at home. She grew up in Ealing, went to Queen’s College, and spent holidays with family in Syria. She studied computer science at university, then went into banking. “It wasn’t a typical path for women,” she says, “but I had it all mapped out.” By the spring of 2000, she was closing a big biotech deal at JP Morgan in London and about to take up an MBA at Harvard. She started dating a family friend: the second son of president Hafez al-Assad, Bashar, who’d cut short his ophthalmology studies in London in 1994 and returned to Syria after his older brother, Basil, heir apparent to power, died in a car crash. They had known each other forever, but a ten-year age difference meant that nothing registered—until it did. “I was always very serious at work, and suddenly I started to take weekends, or disappear, and people just couldn’t figure it out,” explains the first lady. “What do you say—‘I’m dating the son of a president’? You just don’t say that. Then he became president, so I tried to keep it low-key. Suddenly I was turning up in Syria every month, saying, ‘Granny, I miss you so much!’ I quit in October because by then we knew that we were going to get married at some stage. I couldn’t say why I was leaving. My boss thought I was having a nervous breakdown because nobody quits two months before bonus after closing a really big deal. He wouldn’t accept my resignation. I was, like, ‘Please, really, I just want to get out, I’ve had enough,’ and he was ‘Don’t worry, take time off, it happens to the best of us.’ ” She left without her bonus in November and married Bashar al-Assad in December.

“What I’ve been able to take away from banking was the transferable skills—the analytical thinking, understanding the business side of running a company—to run an NGO or to try and oversee a project.” She runs her office like a business, chairs meeting after meeting, starts work many days at six, never breaks for lunch, and runs home to her children at four. “It’s my time with them, and I get them fresh, unedited—I love that. I really do.” Her staff are used to eating when they can. “I have a rechargeable battery,” she says. The 35-year-old first lady’s central mission is to change the mind-set of six million Syrians under eighteen, encourage them to engage in what she calls “active citizenship.” “It’s about everyone taking shared responsibility in moving this country forward, about empowerment in a civil society. We all have a stake in this country; it will be what we make it.”
In 2005 she founded Massar, built around a series of discovery centers where children and young adults from five to 21 engage in creative, informal approaches to civic responsibility. Massar’s mobile Green Team has touched 200,000 kids across Syria since 2005. The organization is privately funded through donations. The Syria Trust for Development, formed in 2007, oversees Massar as well as her first NGO, the rural micro-credit association FIRDOS, and SHABAB, which exists to give young people business skills they need for the future.” …”The French ambassador to Syria, Eric Chevallier, was there: “She managed to get people to consider the possibilities of a country that’s modernizing itself, that stands for a tolerant secularism in a powder-keg region, with extremists and radicals pushing in from all sides—and the driving force for that rests largely on the shoulders of one couple. I hope they’ll make the right choices for their country and the region. ”

A description of Damascus follows

“Damascus evokes a dusty version of a Mediterranean hill town in an Eastern-bloc country. The courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque at night looks exactly like St. Mark’s square in Venice. When I first arrive, I’m met on the tarmac by a minder, who gives me a bouquet of white roses and lends me a Syrian cell phone; the head minder, a high-profile American PR, joins us the next day. The first lady’s office has provided drivers, so I shop and see sights in a bubble of comfort and hospitality. On the rare occasions I am out alone, a random series of men in leather jackets seems to be keeping close tabs on what I am doing and where I am headed.”

…..All the religions and cultures that have passed through these lands—the Armenians, Islam, Christianity, the Umayyads, the Ottomans—make up who I am. including the Jews. There is a very big Jewish quarter in old Damascus. The Jewish quarter of Damascus spans a few abandoned blocks in the old city that emptied out in 1992, when most of the Syrian Jews left. Their houses are sealed up and have not been touched, because, as people like to tell you, Syrians don’t touch the property of others. … Brass bells are handed out. Now we’re all singing “Jingle Bell Rock,” 1,331 audience members shaking their bells, singing, crying, and laughing.“This is the diversity you want to see in the Middle East,” says the president, ringing his bell. “This is how you can have peace!”

A brief history of Syria

The name “Syria” historically referred to a wider region, broadly synonymous with the Levant and known in Arabic as ash-Sham.  Damascus and Aleppo are cities of great cultural significance. Damascus was the seat of the Umayyad Caliphate and a provincial capital for the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt. The modern Syrian state was established in the mid-20th century after centuries of Ottoman rule, as a French Mandate. The state represented the largest Arab state to emerge from the formerly Ottoman-ruled Syrian provinces. It gained de jure independence as a parliamentary republic in 1945 when the First Syrian Republic became a founding member of the United Nations, an act which legally ended the French Mandate. French troops withdrew in April 1946, granting the nation de facto independence. The post-independence period was tumultuous, with multiple military coup attempts shaking the country between 1949 and 1971. In 1958, Syria entered a brief union with Egypt, which was terminated in the 1961 coup d’état and was renamed as the Syrian Arab Republic through constitutional referendum. The 1963 coup d’état carried out by the military committee of the Socialist Ba’ath Party established  and ran Syria from 1963 to 2011. Bashar al-Assad became President in 2000. Since the Arab Spring in 2011, Syria has been embroiled in a multi-sided civil war with involvement of different countries, leading to a refugee crisis because the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group, backed by western forces, captured many Syrian cities in 2014–15 leading eventually to  three political entities – the Syrian Interim Government, Syrian Salvation Government, and Rojava – to capture Syrian territory. In late 2024, a series of offensives from a coalition of opposition forces led to the capture of several major cities, including Damascus, and the fall of  Social Democratic regime. A country of fertile plains, high mountains, and deserts, Syria is home to diverse ethnic and religious groups. Arabs are the largest ethnic group, and Sunni Muslims are the largest religious group. Up until the capture of Damascus by rebel forces, it was the only country governed by social democratic neo-Ba’athists.

What is Baath party

Neo-Ba’athism advocates the creation of a “vanguard” of leftist revolutionaries committed to build a socialist state in Syria and other Arab countries before making steps to achieve pan-Arab unity. The vanguard organisation is the Ba’ath party; which advocates class-struggle against the traditional Syrian economic elite classes; the big agriculturalists, industrialists, bourgeoisie and feudal landlords. By the 1970s, 85% of agricultural lands were distributed to landless peasant populations and tenant farmers. Banks, oil companies, power production and 90% of large-scale industries were nationalised. The neo-Ba’athists led by Salah Jadid who came to power in 1966 concentrated on improving the Syrian economy and exporting the doctrines of class-conflict and militant socialist revolution to the neighbouring countries. This view was challenged by General Hafez al-Assad and his neo-Ba’ath faction; who were proponents of a military-centric approach and focused on a strategy of strengthening the Syrian military to defend the socialist government against imperialist forces and their alleged internal collaborators. Assad favoured reconciliation and pursued better relations with other Arab states. Although majority of the party members favoured Salah, Hafez was able to gain the upperhand following the events of the 1970 coup dubbed the “Corrective Movement” in official Syrian Ba’ath history. Assad’s victory also marked the supersedure of the military over the Ba’ath party structures; making the armed forces a central centre of political power.

The elections used to take place every four years and Baath is the largest, albeit not the only party. On 15 July 2024 elections the Baath party gained 169 out of 250 seats in the Parliament, but had only 5 out of 28 ministry appointments. Other Parties that gained seats are the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (3), Arab Socialist Union Party (2), Syrian Communist Party (Bakdash) (2), National Covenant Party (2) Socialist Unionist Party 2, Arab Democratic Union Party 2, Syrian Communist Party (Unified) 2 and Democratic Socialist Unionist Party 1. There were also 65 other MPs unaffiliated with any of the above mentioned parties.

Epilogue

The Syria of independence, the Syria of diversity is the warm memory of a country that Turkish-backed terrorists with the support of US and Israel forces seem to turn into ashes, like Libya, Afghanistan and so many other counties turn with the interference of the big superpower.

It is a country that its people will keep in their memory and new generations may never experience again…

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