Director of ODFS, Ribal Al-Assad today gave an interview to the New York Times calling for the Obama administration to reconsider sending arms to the Syrian rebels.
A Conversation With Assad (No, Not That One)
New York Times
JUNE 26, 2013
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has antagonized many people during the conflict in his country, including some members of his own extended family. One of them, a cousin who has long lived in Western exile, is now making the rounds in the United States, denouncing both President Assad and the increasingly diverse array of jihadists who have joined the insurgency against him.
The cousin, Ribal al-Assad, says he has no aspirations to power in Syria. But he says he is worried that the Obama administration’s recent decision to provide weapons to the insurgency will only further entrench President Assad, whose blanket portrayal of the insurgents as terrorists appears to be gaining credibility among the war-weary population.
In an interview on Wednesday at The New York Times, Ribal said he believed that many Syrians were sticking by President Assad despite the horrific violence of the civil war, which the United Nations says has killed more than 93,000 people over two years. “Not because they are with Bashar,” he said. “It’s just because they fear that they will be replacing the devil that they know with something that’s much worse.”
Ribal al-Assad, 38, is a fluent English speaker, schooled in the United States, who now lives in Britain and runs a group he founded, the Organization for Democracy and Freedom in Syria, which describes him as an “international campaigner for democracy, freedom and human rights.” He was forced to flee Syria with his immediate family as a child because of rivalries in the Assad clan, which has dominated Syrian politics since the 1970s. His father, Rifaat, was the loser in a Baath Party power struggle with Rifaat’s sibling Hafez, the predecessor and father of the current president.
Rifaat was a government security enforcer before his exile, and he has been widely blamed as the architect of the 1982 Hama massacre, in which at least 10,000 people were killed. He and Ribal have called his involvement a myth.
Ribal said he had not spoken to President Assad or sought to communicate directly with him. But he said he knew early in the current crisis, which began as a peaceful Arab Spring uprising seeking a multiparty democracy, that “the regime’s only chance to survive was to militarize the conflict.”
Now, he says, money and weapons provided to the insurgency — largely by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, hardly democratic models themselves — have made President Assad’s work easier by turning the conflict into a sectarian struggle waged by Sunni jihadists against Shiites and Alawites — members of the offshoot of Shiism that is the Assad family’s sect. President Assad, he said, “wanted it to become like that, but he didn’t do anything for it. They gave it to him, the Qataris and Saudi Arabia.”
With Sunni jihadists from more than 30 countries now believed to be among the insurgents fighting Mr. Assad’s forces, Ribal said, Internet videos calling for death to what the insurgents call Shiite and Alawite infidels have proliferated, as have swathes of rebel-held territory where the black flag of Al-Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate, denotes the enforcement of Shariah law. That, he said, is why Mr. Assad’s core of support has endured despite the misgivings of many loyalists.
“We speak to a lot of people in the military, we speak to a lot of people in the Baath Party, a lot of people speak to us,” he said. “Of course they are for democratic change. But at the same time, they tell us: ‘Please, go check those videos. Is that the kind of democracy we’re going to have?’ This is not what the Syrian people want.”
He added, “Those videos you are seeing that are worrying and scaring the West — those are the same videos that are worrying and scaring people inside Syria.”
