The Assad Regime Crushes Dissent in Homs

Bashar al Assad’s personal involvement in formulating the Syrian regime’s extraordinarily violent response to the civil protest movement should not come as a surprise. Faced with a public revolt, Bashar followed the script his father Hafez al Assad had written in destroying the Hama rebellion three decades before. After his regime had massacred 20,000 or more of Hama’s inhabitants in 1982, Hafez al Assad dispatched his brother Rifaat to carry messages to King Khaled of Saudi Arabia, who had demanded a formal explanation for the regime’s brutal actions. When Rifaat arrived, King Khaled was so furious that he denied the Syrian envoy an audience, and Rifaat met Saudi Crown Prince Fahd instead. Rifaat asked Fahd to deliver the king the message that his brother’s regime would “destroy Damascus over [the Syrian people’s] heads” rather than fall to a rebellion.¹

From the outset of the Syrian conflict in 2011, Assad and his regime viewed any sort of low-level protest, such as graffiti and localized demonstrations, as sedition inspired by the Arab Spring. They understood from the beginning that they were facing a civil protest movement rather than an armed insurrection, but nevertheless decided to respond with armed violence. A report disseminated by a Syrian Military Intelligence branch on March 12, 2011, accurately described uprisings in Arab countries as a call for “change, democracy, freedoms and reforms aimed at creating job opportunities for young men, improving living standards and fighting corruption.” The report noted that “there have been attempts made by the opposition in Syria, civil society committees, human rights organizations inside and outside Syria and other suspicious parties to create similar conditions [to the Arab Spring] in Syria through mobilizing and inciting the youth in Syria against the government.” The report warned that “such attempts were made using social networking sites, graffiti, distributions of bulletins and leaflets and other secret mechanisms to urge the youth to organize demonstrations and sit-ins in Syria under false pretexts which, if ignored, may lead the youth to take to the streets.”²

This intelligence report, which was a topic of discussion within Syria’s National Security Bureau, the coordinating body of the Syrian security-intelligence services, shows that the regime understood the nature of the civil protest movement and was determined to suppress every facet of it. This harsh response would require intense coordination that would be difficult for a regime whose institutions had long been fragmented and working at cross-purposes—not by happenstance, but by design, to make coup plotting more difficult. To ensure his policies were carried out effectively, Assad would need a new coordinating body.

Accordingly, in late March 2011 Assad established the Central Crisis Management Cell (CCMC) as a national decision-making body to formulate and coordinate the regime’s military and security response to the nationwide uprising. Meeting on a daily basis, it linked Assad and all of his regime’s key political, intelligence, and military bodies. The CCMC included the Minister of Defense, the Minister of Interior, and the chairman and members of the National Security Bureau (NSB).³ The NSB was a decision-making body that coordinated the four main intelligence and security agencies: Military Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, Political Security, and General Intelligence (formerly known as State Security). The NSB also served as the main council for intelligence sharing. Information and instructions issued by the CCMC were disseminated through the NSB to the four main intelligence-security agencies, each of which then disseminated these instructions down to their respective branches on governorate, district, and subdistrict levels. The four agencies in turn sent intelligence reports back up to the CCMC through the existing chains of command.⁴

In addition to the channels of coordination through government ministries, CCMC instructions were issued and passed directly to so-called security committees, which can be understood as counterparts to the CCMC at the governorate and local levels. Directed by Assad, the CCMC, together with the NSB, was thus able to issue detailed tactical and operational instructions along the command chain. The security committees brought together representatives from the political, security, and military organizations within the governorates—the secretary of the Baath party, heads of the security-intelligence branches, governor, chief of police, chief of military police, and the local military commander. The security committees decided on the best means of implementing CCMC decisions and produced reports that updated the CCMC on the security situation in their respective governorates.⁵

Minutes of the CCMC’s daily evening meetings were hand-delivered by courier to Assad, who in turn made annotations and often deleted suggestions by substituting his own orders. This system both ensured and documented Assad’s involvement with CCMC decisions: They were taken and implemented with the full knowledge and participation of Assad himself.⁶

On March 30, 2011, three days after the creation of the CCMC, Bashar al Assad gave a much-anticipated speech to the nation, his first since the Arab Spring’s spark had reached Syria. Many observers expected Assad to announce reforms to pacify the growing protest movement, but Assad took a hardline course that surprised even close associates such as Brigadier General Manaf Tlass, then a commander in the Republican Guard, who later defected in July 2012.⁷ Assad claimed Syria faced a “great conspiracy” with which there could be “no compromise or middle way.” He accused protest organizers of sedition, declaring that “all those involved intentionally or unintentionally in it contribute to destroying their country.”⁸

Assad’s speech signaled the first escalation of the regime’s security response, which would target protestors more forcefully just days later, beginning in Homs. According to a CCMC report dated April 14, 2011, the Homs Security Committee confirmed that “pre-emptive measures will be taken in order to prevent any negative demonstrations happening next Friday. It was recommended to track and arrest rioters in Baba Amr.”⁹

In a meeting on April 18, 2011, the CCMC pronounced that “the time of tolerance and meeting demands is over” and issued orders to riot police forces and security-intelligence agents to crack down on demonstrations.¹⁰ The CCMC also called for Baath party loyalists to stage daily pro-regime rallies and prepare to confront the protests, including with weapons.

One day later, regime security forces in Homs implemented the new guidance ruthlessly. In the early hours of April 19, 2011, thousands of protesters staged a sit-in at the New Clock Tower Square—broadly speaking Homs’s answer to Cairo’s Tahrir Square—after attending the funeral procession of several protesters who had been killed two days earlier. Regime authorities demanded an end of the sit-in and threatened to remove the crowd by force. A few hours later, regime forces arrested some and opened fire on the remaining 1,000 protestors.¹¹ According to one witness to this violence, when religious leaders attempted to treat the wounded, regime forces summarily executed the clerics.¹² The following morning, authorities removed approximately 30 dead bodies with wheel-loaders and dump trucks.¹³

In a follow-up meeting on April 20, the CCMC doubled down on its hardline approach. According to the meeting minutes, the CCMC determined that “a new phase should be started to counter conspirators by initiating the use of force against them as of this date” to demonstrate “the power and capacity of the state.”¹⁴ Two days later, a CCMC report detailed that the “new phase” had resulted in the death of 92 further civilians after security forces responded to countrywide protests with lethal force.¹⁵

The death toll prompted a nationwide outcry that the CCMC discussed in its meeting on April 23, 2011. The previous day had been “a difficult day in which several people died,” the meeting minutes reported. The killings had “created a new situation in the country.” The CCMC decided to respond by increasing the deployment of security personnel, mobilizing army units, and prioritizing the arrest of protest organizers based on wanted lists.¹⁶

Even while ordering these harsh measures, the CCMC appeared to understand that the bloodshed had backfired. The committee agreed that when shooting at protesters, regime forces should start with a “warning—firing in the air” or “if necessary, shooting at the legs below the knee.” To avoid further bloodshed, the CCMC considered it “critical to end the phenomenon of casualties this week.”¹⁷

The CCMC’s rationale behind these orders was strategic, designed to break the snowballing effect of the protests. Numerous internal communications within the CCMC and governorate intelligence branches stressed the need to “prevent the expansion and increase of demonstrations” by persuading local community leaders not to join the protest movement.¹⁸ To that end, the CCMC instructed regime officials to pacify local leaders by fulfilling any of their “reasonable demands” swiftly.¹⁹ What regime officials might consider “reasonable” would undoubtedly fall far short of protesters’ demands for true reform, but these episodes illustrate how the regime made its initial assessment of which communities and leaders could be incorporated into the loyalist camp, and at what price.

In keeping with CCMC instructions, security authorities in Homs also tried to deescalate the situation in strategic areas of the governorate through dialogue with local notables. After security forces shot 22 people in Ar-Rastan, a town in the northern countryside of Homs along the vital Damascus–Aleppo highway, authorities offered blood money “in order to defuse tension and avoid rendering Ar-Rastan a new demonstration hub,” as an internal report noted.²⁰

Regime authorities in Homs experimented with these calculated attempts to pacify at the same time that they also extended their violent military response. Regime forces followed up the massacre in Clock Tower Square by moving against the restive population of Baba Amr, a district of 55,000 residents that was one of the largest in the city.²¹ Within weeks, the Syrian military besieged the area and bombarded it for days. Regime military and security forces eventually entered Baba Amr in late April 2011, set up checkpoints, arrested scores of people, and killed civilians by sniper fire.²²

The CCMC’s efforts, both its attempts at pacification and its violent responses, were too little and too late to prevent the spread of protests across most of the country. During the summer of 2011, hundreds of thousands of protesters crowded into Syrian streets and demanded reform. The regime’s violent crackdown had triggered a spiral of escalation that it was unable to control. Defections from the army increased, local youth began to take up arms, and slowly but steadily, local armed resistance became more organized.²³ In Homs, the regime’s measures in April 2011 created a serious backlash, with army defectors and local residents forming armed factions to protect neighborhoods against any further assault by the regime. By summer, Baba Amr was the base of the Farouq Brigades, an armed opposition faction led by the recently defected Lieutenant Abdul Razaq Tlass, a nephew of former Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass.

On August 5, 2011, with the regime’s security situation deteriorating nationwide, the CCMC met to discuss ways to improve the security response throughout the country. Meeting participants highlighted poor coordination and information sharing between agencies. According to the CCMC, this lack of interagency cooperation was prolonging the crisis, increasing “human and material losses” and allowing “armed gangs to keep conducting acts of looting, plunder, killing and intimidating citizens.”²⁴ The CCMC judged that the regime’s early response to the uprising, including the April crackdown in Homs, had failed.

In keeping with the CCMC’s judgment on August 5 that interagency cooperation must improve immediately to reverse four months of failure, the NSB the following day instructed the security committees to conduct daily joint military-security campaigns to arrest wanted individuals.²⁵ At the same time, the CCMC also decided to increase its direct oversight of local security matters by dispatching the heads of the security-intelligence agencies to visit the “hottest zones” to lead their regional branches on the ground and ensure “accurate implementation of missions, and tracking goals which shall be reached as per the plan set up by comrade Head of the National Security Bureau (NSB).”²⁶

This period marked the start of a gradual shift in the regime’s handling of the situation in Homs. The CCMC began to centralize its control of regime activities in Homs at the expense of the Homs Security Committee, which from the beginning of the conflict until July to August 2011 appears to have played the predominant role in dealing with the crisis in the governorate. This is not to say the Homs Security Committee became detached from the senior leadership in Damascus: It reported regularly to the CCMC and NSB, requested authorization for security activities, and hosted visits from national leaders and agencies. However, from August 2011, the CCMC minutes note an apparent change both in the militarization of the regime response and the direct engagement of high-level members of the CCMC and NSB charged with taking command over security forces in Homs.

Despite the direct engagement of the CCMC and NSB and the increased deployment of Syrian army troops, the regime’s response in Homs failed to stem the growing rebellion in the weeks after the CCMC tightened control. This time, however, the failure had personnel consequences on the leadership level. On October 18, 2011, the CCMC decided to issue “a memorandum by order of the President clarifying the main downturns which led to the exacerbation of the crisis and delayed the finding of sound solutions. It will also comprise effective suggestions to swiftly end the crisis.”²⁷

What followed from this meeting was a change in leadership, with the more hawkish Major General Hasan Turkmani, a former Minister of Defense, replacing Muhammad Said Bekheitan, Assistant Regional-Secretary of the Baath party, as head of the CCMC. Turkmani proceeded to consolidate the CCMC’s central authority by establishing new work mechanisms to “impose control on all security agencies, military units, partisan comrades and organisations.”²⁸ This move demonstrated the regime’s view that new, stricter coordination was required to get a grip on the security situation in all the governorates.

After Turkmani’s appointment, the role of the Homs Security Committee receded further when the CCMC decided to create a new, consolidated security authority in Homs. Called the Homs Military and Security Chief, the new authority would bring together the area’s military units and intelligence agencies to coordinate and implement security operations. The new authority would be headed by a senior military officer who would, in turn, be overseen by the Syrian regime’s head of political security, Major General Muhammad Dib Zeitoun.²⁹ Zeitoun was tasked to “command security agencies and armed forces units present in the governorate of Homs” and to “take the necessary legal measures against any offender or anyone who acts with laxity.”³⁰ The reference to “laxity” indicated that regime leaders sought to crush the armed opposition in Homs once and for all and judged that regime officials on the ground had been too hesitant to use decisive force. Indeed, four months later, the Homs Military and Security Chief would play a leading role in the large-scale attack on Baba Amr of February 2012.

Throughout 2011, regime forces conducted a number of extensive military-security operations in Baba Amr, including shelling and the use of heavy weaponry such as tanks and armored fighting vehicles by the army’s Third Corps. Operating from many army positions in and around the district, snipers fired at armed opposition fighters and civilians alike. The CCMC explicitly called for a “focus on sniping” in orders from November 9, 2011.³¹ When the opposition Farouq Brigades established control over large parts of Baba Amr after months of fighting, the regime imposed a full siege in late November. On behalf of regime leaders, General Asif Shawkat, Deputy Minister of Defense, traveled to Homs to issue an ultimatum: either the armed opposition would give up, or the regime would destroy the armed resistance “over the heads of the residents.”³²

Regime attempts to storm Baba Amr in mid-November and late December failed. Consequently, the Syrian army, with the Eighteenth Tank Division taking the lead, positioned artillery batteries in areas surrounding Baba Amr and sporadically shelled the district.³³ However, the regime had not unleashed its full firepower yet, presumably due to the arrival in December 2011 of a monitoring mission that was part of the peace plan brought forward by the League of Arab States.³⁴ When the monitors left the area in late January 2012, the Syrian army reinforced the siege of Baba Amr and cut off the district’s water, electricity, food, medical supplies, and other basic necessities.³⁵

During February 2012, the regime significantly intensified its systematic shelling of Homs, including Baba Amr. During this period of bombardment, specifically on February 22, 2012, regime forces directed their artillery fire at the Baba Amr media office, injuring and killing many of its occupants, including U.S.-U.K. journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik.³⁶

Despite two ceasefires that were negotiated so that the Red Crescent could enter Baba Amr, the district remained under constant siege throughout February. Essential food and medical supplies had to be smuggled through tunnels. Fleeing civilians had no safe passage: According to multiple witnesses, regime troops opened fire on those trying to escape.³⁷

In late February, after 27 days of sustained shelling and fierce fighting along the frontline, opposition fighters ran out of ammunition and retreated from Baba Amr to adjacent areas. Regime forces immediately entered the district and began combing it building by building. But, as would happen countless times in the following years, the regime’s flag was raised over rubble. The shelling had destroyed 70 percent of Baba Amr, and 80 percent of the population had fled.³⁸ For many though, the worst was yet to come.

In the aftermath of the February 2012 military campaign in Baba Amr, regime forces, often assisted by pro-regime paramilitaries, conducted post-offensive sweeps in the Baba Amr district. In the course of these raids, the forces subjected remaining residents to widespread looting, arrests, killings, and sexual violence. Evidence suggests that they murdered about 1,200 individuals.³⁹ In one instance, pro-regime militiamen gathered about 60 men and boys from a neighborhood and detained them in the nearby Ugarit Soda Warehouse. According to eyewitness accounts, black-dressed regime militiamen shot the entire group, killing all but two men who survived by hiding under the dead bodies. After the shooting, Syrian army forces arrived and confronted the militiamen who had carried out the shootings. A heated exchange erupted, and a militiaman was heard telling an army counterpart, “you focus on your work, and stay out of mine.”⁴⁰ In the confusion, the two survivors escaped to a shed attached to the warehouse. After their argument with the soldiers, the militia returned to the storage area to finish off the wounded among those they had shot.⁴¹

Pro-regime paramilitary groups (often referred to as Shabbiha), operating outside the formal security-intelligence structures, were far from being an uncoordinated grassroots phenomenon. As indicated by the militia commander in the Ugarit Warehouse, these groups were indeed assigned work, again coordinated by regime authorities. Months before the massacres in Baba Amr, in May 2011, a high-level meeting had taken place in Homs with the aim of organizing loyalist groups into a cohesive body with the intention of using them to break up planned anti-regime demonstrations.⁴² Amid the militarization of the conflict throughout 2011, loyalist groups were soon used to guard facilities, enforce checkpoints, and operationally secure territory taken back from opposition control. The security-intelligence agencies played the main role in controlling these forces from early on. As early as March 2, 2011, a directive from Military Intelligence Branch 243 to its subordinate sections stated: “You are instructed to mobilize and streamline the work of all security agents, informers, sources, Baath party sub-divisions, popular organizations, leaders of National Progressive Front parties and all friends who should be put on a state of high alert to detect any graffiti, publications or gatherings within their areas of responsibility. They are required to report such incidents and give the matter their utmost attention.”⁴³

Later in March, the regime created a new framework to formalize loyalist units and better include them in the hierarchic command structures. Called popular committees, they were a precursor of what would later become the National Defense Forces and were formed under the aegis of the security-intelligence agencies utilizing the existing Baath party apparatus. Instructions from Military Intelligence Branch 243, issued on April 11, 2011, demonstrate the regime’s intention to recruit loyalists on a large scale. All sections were ordered to “mobilize members of the Baath party in every district and form the so-called Popular Committees in every district so as to protect towns and defend public departments, as well as confront anti-government elements and criminal gangs.” Furthermore, the orders continued, “their work shall be streamlined by the Security Committee in the districts and under your personal supervision in coordination with Baath party officials.”⁴⁴

As the armed opposition grew, the role of popular committees and other pro-regime formations became more militarized and violent. The most powerful of these groups stemmed from Alawite milieus, mainly criminal networks, businessmen, tribal sheikhs, and family elders that often had ties to the security and intelligence agencies.⁴⁵ In Homs, many of their recruits were young, unemployed men from Alawite neighborhoods. As the Dutch scholar Uğur Ümit Üngör notes, “these men not only feared and hated rebellious Sunni communities in Homs, even before the conflict, but also harbored resentment against their marginal position within the broader patrimonial structures during Bashar al Assad’s first decade of rule. This was their moment to ‘shine,’ and they seized the opportunity without hesitation.”⁴⁶ Relying on militias for face-to-face massacres was useful for the regime: It gained plausible deniability vis-a-vis the outside world and reduced the risk of further polarization within its own army, which was more diverse in ethnic composition and motivations.

In early March 2012, Syrian army forces gathered a number of residents—mainly men between 15 and 50 years of age, along with a few women and children—at the Shufan cement storage warehouse in Homs. According to a witness, the soldiers handed over the detainees to elements of the popular committees. A survivor recounted that he heard an order to shoot and saw the black-dressed militia members firing at the other detainees while he was hiding under the bodies of those already killed or wounded.⁴⁷ Many more massacres were committed in and around Baba Amr at that time. For instance, another witness was arrested in the district and taken, along with other detainees, by Air Force Intelligence soldiers to the nearby Qatina Road. Upon arrival, the troops opened fire and killed as many as 104 people. Subsequently, a car with Syrian Red Crescent insignia arrived and someone from the vehicle called out to see who remained alive. On hearing a response, armed men came out of the vehicle and killed three people who had called for help. The witness pretended to be dead, and in the evening fled towards nearby farmland.⁴⁸

Sexual violence was also widespread and confirmed by insiders who attributed responsibility to members of their former units. One witness, who was a part of the Arab League Monitoring Mission to Syria in December 2011, saw a 15-year-old girl in a highly distressed psychological state as a result of having been raped by pro-regime militants. These militia members allegedly tried to force her father to rape her and her brother to rape his mother. When they refused, the militia members killed everyone but the girl.⁴⁹ Another witness described two videos which showed security officials raping a young girl in front of her mother, with the father and son being forced to rape the women in their family.⁵⁰

Rape and sexual violence were likewise inflicted upon men detained during and in the aftermath of the offensive on Baba Amr. A witness, who had been arrested on March 2, 2012, together with some of his neighbors and taken to a stadium, was forced to strip naked, was handcuffed, and had gasoline poured over his body.⁵¹ One witness stated that he heard a fellow detainee screaming while being tortured and later saw him with blood dripping from his anus.⁵²

While the sieges and bombardments of neighborhoods, as well as the raids and massacres, were oftentimes highly visible manifestations of the regime’s response to the uprising, detention happened below the surface. Mass detention was omnipresent and invisible at the same time, shrouded in secrecy and used as a weapon to neutralize the opposition and to hold psychologically hostage those fearing for their loved ones’ fates. The next section of this paper will address this horrific system and its origins in orders from the highest levels of the Assad regime.