The Fate of the CCMC and Continuation of the Slaughter

By the spring of 2012, the CCMC had, on the guidance of Bashar al Assad, successfully created, launched, and fine-tuned a vast system of military, security-intelligence, political, and loyalist militia organizations which waged total war on the Syrian population. It had also created a vastly expanded system of detention and torture and swept hundreds of thousands of Syrians into it. But the CCMC would not live to see the full effects of its work. On July 18, 2012, an explosion rocked the headquarters of the NSB in Damascus, which the CCMC had been using as its meeting place since earlier that year. A bomb, reportedly hidden in a flower bouquet in the middle of the conference table, detonated and killed four of the 10 permanent CCMC members: Hasan Turkmani (Head of the CCMC), Asif Shawkat (Chief of Staff of the Army and Deputy Minister of Defense—and Bashar al Assad’s brother-in-law), Daoud Rajha (Minister of Defense), and Hisham Ikhtiar (Head of the NSB).

The exact circumstances of the attack remain unclear today. Theories range from an opposition operation with help from abroad to an “inside job” ordered by Assad himself to prevent a coup which Hisham Ikthiar or other CCMC leaders were allegedly concocting in coordination with foreign intelligence agencies. Whatever the truth, this bombing remains the highest-profile attack to date against regime leadership figures.

After the bombing, Assad did not reconstitute the CCMC. The available primary-source documentation in the possession of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) and other investigative bodies makes no reference to the CCMC’s continued existence from mid-2012, nor does the extant evidence suggest that the regime ever felt the need to form a replacement body with the same far-reaching coordination authority. The reasons for this apparent course of inaction are unknown. It may be that Assad assessed that the CCMC had centralized too much power in a system built upon the divide-and-rule principle. Nonetheless, Assad continued—and continues—to utilize the CCMC’s surviving members to direct the regime’s war and detention machinery, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and displacing more than half of Syria’s population to date.¹

Whatever Assad’s reasons for not reconstituting the CCMC, by summer 2012 the regime’s system of warfare and detention was in any case running efficiently enough to continue without the CCMC as a formal coordinating body. Within three weeks of the bombing of the CCMC, the regime machinery proved resilient enough to reprise what it had done to Baba Amr, this time in the region of Southern Syria that had been the cradle of the revolution.

On August 12, 2012, the Syrian army’s Fifty-Second Brigade received instructions from its divisional command to inform the people of the small southern Syrian town of Hrak “that if any shooting or assaulting of a soldier or military vehicle takes place, the neighborhood will be destroyed.”² The Syrian army had besieged Hrak in an attempt to quell the public protests and armed resistance that had spread throughout the country since the spring of 2011. Months of unrest had taken a toll on the brigade’s combat strength. According to an internal brigade assessment, a large number of defections in the first year of the uprising had left the brigade with only 58 percent of its established strength.³ Despite being severely understrength, the Fifty-Second Brigade carried out the divisional command’s instructions and duly destroyed the town, using artillery bombardment as the principal means. The commander of one of the brigade’s artillery units reported that the regime’s forces had consumed 2,091 explosive shells during the Hrak operation.⁴ In addition to the shelling, the regime troops attacked the approximately 20,000 residents of Hrak with missiles, barrel bombs, and sniper fire.⁵

After laying siege to Hrak for a month, military and security forces loyal to Bashar al Assad launched a ground attack against the town on the last day of Ramadan. In the early hours of August 18, 2012, thousands of soldiers from the Fifty-Second Brigade, Ninetieth Brigade, One Hundred and Twelfth Brigade, Fourth Division, Fifth Division, and the Republican Guard entered Hrak from the north.⁶ Near the town’s entrance, roughly 25 regime soldiers raided a shelter crowded with civilians, taking the men among them outside in blindfolds and handcuffs. A slaughter followed. One witness remembered soldiers sorting the men, saying, “You go to heaven, and you go to hell.”⁷

Multiple witnesses have confirmed the ensuing massacre, in which Assad’s troops killed at least 13 civilians with knives and blows to the head, in just one of many such mass killings in Hrak through the days that followed. The identities and exact number of victims are unknown. Though dozens of the dead were recognized, at least 63 other bodies were burned too badly to be identified.⁸

In total, the Assad regime’s ground assault lasted for eight days and left large parts of Hrak in ruins. Throughout and after the events in Hrak, Assad promoted several commanders involved in the murderous attack, making it clear that they were doing exactly what he expected them to do.

Assad also continued to utilize the CCMC’s surviving members to direct the regime’s war and detention machinery, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and displacing more than half of Syria’s population in the years after.⁹ For years, CCMC alumni have held the Assad regime’s most senior military, intelligence, and security positions, including Ali Mamluk (whom Assad appointed chief of the NSB shortly after the CCMC bombing), Jamil Hassan (chief of Air Force Intelligence), and Muhammad Dib Zeitoun (chief of the Political Security until 2014, when he was promoted to head up General Intelligence). Hassan and Zeitoun retired in 2019, while General Ali Mamluk maintains a top-level position to this day.