Latest news with #MaherAssad
Malay Mail
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Malay Mail
Syrians reclaim equestrian sport once dominated by Assad family
DAMASCUS, May 19 — For weeks, Ziad Abu al-Dahab has been training for gold at an equestrian tournament near Damascus—in a sport once dominated by Syria's Assad family and their inner circle. 'Results used to be decided in advance, always favouring those close to the government,' the 25-year-old rider said. 'My greatest ambition was to reach third place, but today, I can aim for first and do well with my new horse.' For decades, former president Bashar al-Assad, his relatives and allies enjoyed wide-ranging privileges before his overthrow in a lightning Islamist-led offensive in December. Equestrian sports surged in the 1990s under Assad's late brother Bassel, who was being groomed to succeed their father Hafez before dying in a car crash in 1994. Bashar took over and became president in 2000. Bassel used to take part in tournaments at home and abroad and styled himself as Syria's 'first rider'. His profile helped shine a spotlight on the sport, which came to symbolise elite status under the Assads. Abu al-Dahab said those close to the family had European horses, which far outperformed the local ones of other competitors. 'It was impossible to compete with the ruling family,' he said while walking his horse on the sand. Impossible competition Outside the Dimas equestrian club near Damascus, a statue of Bassel still stands, his face now hidden by the new Syrian flag. The family's grip on the sport passed to the next generation, including Sham, daughter of Bashar's brother Maher. Sham used to compete in Syria and at international tournaments, often placing high. The attention she received in the media stirred controversy, with critics seeing it as propaganda. That grip on the sport kept some away. Munana Shaker, 26, said her father banned her from competing until the Assads were gone. 'My father forbade me from practising due to fear (of the ruling family), and he always told me that competition with them was impossible,' she said as she stroked her white mare, Mariana. 'He didn't want us associating with the Assad family at all. He told me the story of the equestrian who was jailed after beating Bassel al-Assad, and did not want to put me in danger.' She was referring to Adnan Qassar, a prominent rider who outperformed Bassel before being imprisoned without trial in 1993, accused of plotting to kill him. Many believe his sporting success was the real reason for his arrest. Qassar was freed 21 years later under a presidential pardon. 'I have long stayed away from this sport, but it is now time to come back strong. I am from the Shaker family, not the Assad family,' she said. 'Dream come true' Shadi Abu al-Dahab, 48, oversees about 240 horses—including some of the Assads' former European ones. 'Around 40 horses were set aside for the Assad family. No one else was allowed to get near them,' he said. But today, he's seeing new faces and growing interest in the sport. 'We have new skills that we discover daily, and enthusiastic children... We now have a large number of riders aspiring to compete and get titles,' he said. Fellow trainer Salah al-Ahmad, 52, was beaming as his son took the mare Topsy for a spin—once ridden by Sham al-Assad. 'He used to dream of touching her or patting her head,' Ahmad said. 'Now in this new era, the mare is with him, and he has won two tournaments. 'It's a dream come true.' — AFP
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Socks and satire: Syrians mock ousted Assad dynasty
At Basel al-Sati's souvenir shop in a central Damascus market, socks bearing caricatures that ridicule ousted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and his once feared family now sell like hot cakes. "I want to bring joy to people who've been deprived of happiness for so many days and years," said Sati, 31, displaying pairs of white ankle-length socks. "Everyone who comes from abroad wants to buy the socks -- some to keep as a souvenir, others to wear mockingly and take pictures," he told AFP. "There are even some who buy them just to stomp on them," he said. Stamping on someone's image is considered deeply insulting in the Arab world, so the socks allow wearers to trample the Assads underfoot as they walk. Pictures of the Assad clan have gone from being ubiquitous symbols of repression to objects of derision and mockery since his December 8 ouster by Islamist-led forces after nearly 14 years of devastating civil war. Some socks showing Assad in sunglasses read "We will trample them", while others depict him with heavily exaggerated features. Others bear a caricature of Hafez al-Assad who ruled Syria before his son, depicted in his underwear and chest puffed out. They bear the phrase "This is what the Assads look like" -- a play on the family's last name, which means lion. Assad's once feared younger brother Maher labelled "the captagon king" also features. Western governments accused Maher and his entourage of turning Syria into a narco state, flooding the Middle East with the illegal stimulant. - 'No better' gift - Sati's shop, brimming with other gift items, is decorated with images from Syria's revolution. An image of Assad is on the ground at the entrance so people can walk on it. "It's another kind of celebration, for all the Syrians who couldn't celebrate in Ummayad Square after the fall of the regime," Sati said. The Damascus landmark filled with huge crowds from across the country and hosted days of celebrations after Assad's ouster, with people raising the now official three-starred flag symbolising the revolution. Afaf Sbano, 40, who returned after fleeing to Germany a decade ago, said she had come to buy "Assad socks", which sell for around a dollar a pair, for friends. There is "no better" gift for those "who can't come to Syria to celebrate the fall of the regime", she told AFP. "I bought more than 10 extra pairs for my friends after I shared a photo on Instagram," she said. "We had never dared to even imagine making fun of him" before, she added. - 'People hate him' - Manufacturer Zeyad Zaawit, 29, said the idea of socks to mock the Assads came to him after the former ruler was deposed and fled to Russia. Zaawit started with a small number and then ramped up production when he saw they were selling fast. "People hate him," Zaawit said of Assad. "I took revenge on him this way after he fled," he said, adding that the socks were so popular that some customers even paid in advance. Zaawit said he produced around 1,000 pairs in the first week and has since tripled production, making more than 200,000 pairs in three months. Images of the socks have been shared widely on social media and they have even been used in satirical television programmes. Assad's own words have also been turned against him -- including a refusal to meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a foe who is close to Syria's new authorities. Erdogan made repeated overtures to Assad in the period before his overthrow. In August 2023, Assad famously said: "Why should I meet Erdogan? To drink refreshments?" The pronouncement, now the subject of jokes on social media, appears on posters in food and juice stalls, sometimes accompanied by mocking images of Assad. mam/lg/srm
Arab News
03-03-2025
- Business
- Arab News
‘Where's the gold?': How the Assads sucked Syria dry
DAMASCUS:From a Bond villain lair in the rugged heights overlooking Damascus, the all-seeing eye of a notorious Syrian military unit gazed down on a city it bled dry. Many of the bases of the elite Fourth Division formerly run by toppled president Bashar Assad's feared younger brother Maher now lie looted. But papers left strewn behind reveal how the man they called 'The Master' and his cronies wallowed in immense wealth while some of their foot soldiers struggled to feed their families and even begged on the streets. Piles of documents seen by AFP expose a vast economic empire that Maher Assad and his network of profiteers built by pillaging a country already impoverished by nearly 14 years of civil war. Western governments long accused him and his entourage of turning Syria into a narco state, flooding the Middle East with captagon, an illegal stimulant used both as a party drug in the Gulf and to push migrant workers through punishingly long days in the gruelling heat. But far beyond that $10-billion trade — whose vast scale was exposed in a 2022 AFP investigation — papers found in its abandoned posts show the Fourth Division had its fingers in many pies in Syria, an all-consuming 'mafia' within the pariah state. + It expropriated homes and farms + Seized food, cars and electronics to sell on + Looted copper and metal from bombed-out buildings + Collected 'fees' at roadblocks and checkpoints + Ran protection rackets, making firms pay for escorts of oil tankers, some from areas controlled by jihadists + Controlled the tobacco and metal trades The center of this corrupt web was Maher Assad's private offices, hidden in an underground labyrinth of tunnels — some big enough to drive a truck through — cut into a mountain above Damascus. A masked guard took AFP through the tunnels with all the brisk efficiency of a tour guide — the sauna, the bedroom, what appeared to be cells and various 'emergency' exit routes. But at its heart, down a steep flight of 160 stairs, lay a series of vaults with iron-clad doors. The guard said he had counted nine vaults behind one sealed-off room. He said safes had been 'broken open' by looters who entered the office just hours after the Assad brothers fled Syria on December 8 when Damascus fell to an Islamist-led offensive, ending the family's five-decade rule. Maher, 57, did not know of his brother's plans to flee to Russia and escaped separately, taking a helicopter to the Iraqi border, according to a senior Iraqi security official and two other sources. He then made his way to Russia, they said, apparently via Iran. The chaos of their fall is apparent in the underground complex. Safes and empty Rolex and Cartier watch boxes still lie scattered about, though it is not known if the vaults were emptied before the looters arrived. 'This is Maher Assad's main office,' the guard said, 'which has two floors above the ground but also tunnels containing locked rooms that can't be opened.' In one corridor, a shrink wrap machine — probably used for bundling cash — was abandoned next to a huge safe. There was never any shortage of bills to wrap. One document retrieved from the papers that litter the Fourth Division's Security Bureau farther down the hill show they had ready cash of $80 million, eight million euros and 41 billion Syrian pounds at their fingertips in June. That was a perfectly normal cash float, according to papers going back to 2021. 'This is only a small sample of the wealth that Maher and his associates gathered from their shady business deals,' said Carnegie Middle East Center scholar Kheder Khaddour. Their real fortune is probably hidden 'abroad, likely in Arab and African countries,' he said. 'The Fourth Division was a money-making machine,' Khaddour added, preying on a land where the UN says more than 90 percent of the population was living on a little more than $2 a day. Western sanctions to squeeze the Assads and their cronies did little to impede Maher and his men. Theirs was an 'independent state' within the state, said Omar Shaaban, a former Fourth Division colonel who has signed a deal with the new Syrian authorities. 'It had all the means... It had everything,' he said. While the US dollar was officially banned under Assad — with Syrians not even allowed to utter the word — Shaaban said many Fourth Division officers grew 'wealthy and had safes full of money.' 'In dollars,' naturally, Shaaban added. Maher's cronies lived in sprawling villas, shipping luxury cars abroad while beyond their gates the country was mired in poverty and despair. Weeks after the Assads' fall, desperate people were still combing through Maher's mansion built into a hill in Damascus' Yaafour neighborhood next to the stables where his daughter rode her prize-winning horses. 'I want the gold. Where's the gold?' a man asked AFP as he went through its ransacked rooms. But all that was left were old photographs of Maher, his wife and their three children strewn on the floor. Maher was a shadowy, menacing figure in Assad's Syria, branded 'the butcher' by the opposition. His Fourth Division was the ousted regime's iron fist, linked to a long list of atrocities. But while his portrait was hung in all their bases, he was seldom seen in public. Despite rights groups accusing him of ordering the 2011 massacre of protesters in Daraa — which helped ignite the civil war — and the United Nations linking him to the 2005 assassination of ex-Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri, he was 'the invisible man,' one person close to the former ruling family told AFP. 'Few people would tell you that they know him,' the source said. Yet Maher could be generous and good company, according to his sister-in-law Majd Al-Jadaan, a longtime opponent of the regime. 'However, when he gets angry, he completely loses control... This is what makes his personality terrifying,' she told Al-Arabiya TV. 'He knows how to destroy — he knows how to kill and then lie to appear innocent,' Jadaan told French TV early in the civil war, saying he was as ruthless as his father, Hafez. One other name keeps cropping up alongside Maher's when people in Damascus curse the crimes of the Fourth Division. Ghassan Belal was the head of its powerful Security Bureau. Like his boss, he collected luxury cars and lived in a villa in the Yaafour district. Belal has also left Syria, according to security sources. Inside his spacious offices in the bureau's headquarters, you can piece together his lavish lifestyle bill by bill from the papers he left, including the cost of running his Cadillac. Over the summer, Belal shipped two cars, a Lexus and a Mercedes, to Dubai, the $29,000 customs and other expenses charged to a credit card under another name. A handwritten note showed that despite being sanctioned for human rights abuses, he paid his Netflix subscription using a 'friend's foreign credit card.' Another list showed that mostly domestic expenses for his properties, including his main villa — which has since also been looted — amounted to $55,000 for just 10 days in August. That same month, a Fourth Division soldier wrote to Belal begging for help because he was in 'a terrible financial situation.' Belal gave him 500,000 Syrian pounds — $33. Another soldier who abandoned his post was caught begging on the street. While thousands of the papers were burned as the regime fell, many of the classified documents survived the flames and have tales to tell. Among prominent names mentioned as paying into Fourth Division funds are sanctioned businessmen Khaled Qaddour, Raif Quwatli and the Katerji brothers, who have been accused of generating hundreds of millions of dollars for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard and the Yemeni Houthis through the sale of Iranian oil to Syria and China. Quwatli operated checkpoints and crossings where goods were often confiscated or 'taxed,' multiple sources said. Qaddour — who was sanctioned by the United States for bankrolling Maher through captagon, cigarette and mobile phone smuggling — denied having any dealings with him when he tried to have his EU sanctions lifted in 2018. But the Security Bureau's revenue list showed he paid $6.5 million into its coffers in 2020 alone. Khaddour said the Security Bureau handled most of the division's financial dealings and issued security cards for people it did business with to ease their movements. A drug lord told Lebanese investigators in 2021 that he held a Fourth Division security card and that the Security Bureau had agreed to protect another dealer's drug shipment for $2 million, according to a statement seen by AFP. The US Treasury and several Syrian and Lebanese security figures have also cited Belal and the bureau as key players in the captagon trade. AFP visited a captagon lab linked to the division in December in a villa in the Dimas area near Lebanon's border, its rooms full of boxes and barrels of the caffeine, ethanol and paracetamol needed to make the drug. Locals said they were not allowed to approach the villa, with shepherds banned from the surrounding hills. A former Fourth Division officer who worked for Belal, and who asked not to be named, said the bureau enjoyed 'so much immunity, no one could touch a member without Maher's approval.' 'It was a mafia, and I knew I was working for a mafia,' he added. The division's unbridled greed haunted families for decades as a letter written by Adnan Deeb, a graveyard caretaker from Homs, shows. His plea for the return of his family's seized property was found among hundreds of damp and dirty documents at an abandoned checkpoint near Damascus. When AFP tracked Deeb down, he told how the Fourth Division confiscated his family's villa, and those of several of their neighbors in the village of Kafraya 10 years ago. Despite not being allowed near them, Deeb said they still had to pay taxes on the properties, which were used as offices, warehouses and likely a jail. 'The Fourth Division Security Bureau here was a red line that no one dared to come close to,' the son of one of the owners told AFP. They found hundreds of cars, motorcycles and hundreds of gallons of cooking oil in the properties after the regime fell. 'They left people in hunger while everything was available for them,' he said. A woman with 25 family members — some living in a tent — repeatedly requested the Fourth Division give her back her home in a document found in another of the villas. The Fourth Division controlled no part of the Syrian economy more than the metals market, with former colonel Shaaban saying 'no one was permitted to move iron' without its approval. It also had 'exclusive' control of copper, he said. When Assad's forces took control of a Damascus suburb after a fierce battle with rebels, the Fourth Division swiftly sent its men to pull the copper and iron from destroyed homes, one of its officers recalled. Fares Shehabi, former head of Syria's Chamber of Industry said a metal plant managed by one of Maher Assad's partners monopolized the market, with factories forced to buy exclusively from it. Many 'could no longer operate' under such pressure, Shehabi said. Maher Assad and his 'friends' controlled a big share of Syria's economy, he said. But the ultimate beneficiary was always his brother Bashar, he argued. 'It was one company. The (presidential) palace was always the reference.' The former Fourth Division officer also insisted a share of profits and seized items always went to the president. While little seems to be left of Fourth Division today other than its ransacked depots and headquarters, Syria expert Lars Hauch, of Conflict Mediation Solutions (CMS), warned its legacy could yet be highly toxic. 'The Fourth Division was a military actor, a security apparatus, an intelligence entity, an economic force, a political power, and a transnational criminal enterprise,' he said. 'An institution with a decades-long history, enormous financial capacity and close relations with elites doesn't just vanish,' he added. 'While the top-level leadership fled the country, the committed and mostly Alawite core (from which the Assads come)... retreated to the coastal regions,' Hauch said. Syria's new leadership has repeatedly sought to reassure minorities they will not be harmed. But across the country, violence against Alawites has surged. Hauch said caches of weapons may have been hidden away. Add to that the division's war chest of 'billions of dollars,' and 'you have what you need for a sustained insurgency... if Syria's transition fails to achieve genuine inclusivity and transitional justice,' the analyst warned.
Al Bawaba
27-02-2025
- Politics
- Al Bawaba
'Maher Assad is gentleman': Sulaf Fawakherji sparks anger
Published February 27th, 2025 - 07:21 GMT ALBAWABA - Syrian star Sulaf Fawakherji appeared with fiery positions regarding the country and her relationship with the Assad family, especially Maher Assad, sparking fuss and criticism. This is Sulaf Fawakherji's first statement since the fall of the regime of former Syrian President Bashar Assad on Dec. 8, 2024. The actress talked about what happened inside Syria and claimed that "the revolution" lasted only 5 days and then the thing turned into an "armed opposition". Whether she will come back to Syria or not over her stance regarding the collapse of the Assad regime, Sulaf said "no one prevents" her from entering her country, the debate began after her interview with Lebanese media personality Muhammad Qais on Al Mashhad channel and platform. — محمد شازار (@mohammad_shazar) February 26, 2025 Sulaf Fawakherji sparks anger after praising Maher Assad: As for her relationship with Maher Assad, Fawakherji denied the existence of a relationship between them, indicating that it was just rumors because she was a supporter of the old regime. However, she confirmed: "I met him [Maher Assad] once in my life and he was respectful and a gentleman," explaining that she met him because of a problem but he wasn't able to help her solve it. She added: "Maybe he did not know how to do it." Nonetheless, Fawakhirji also justified the presence of Russian and Iranian soldiers in Syria by claiming that they are "allies of Syria," noting that the Lebanese Hezbollah liberated "Saydnaya and the nuns in Maaloula," describing its former leader Hassan Nasrallah as "more than a religious figure, he is the leader of a nation." © 2000 - 2025 Al Bawaba (
Al Bawaba
09-02-2025
- Politics
- Al Bawaba
Relative uncovers Maher Assad's place of residence
Published February 9th, 2025 - 06:45 GMT ALBAWABA - After months of uncertainty about the fate of Maher Assad, brother of the former president of Syria Bashar Assad, a relative uncovered the truth about the former Syrian commander. Also Read Was Maher Assad arrested upon his return to Syria? Maher Assad is a Syrian former military officer who served as commander of the Syrian Army's elite 4th Armoured Division and has disappeared since the ousting of the former Syrian regime as no news confirmed whether he left with his brother to Russia. Following the collapse of Bashar Assad and his government on Dec. 8, the fate of Maher Assad was unknown despite that unconfirmed sources revealed that he escaped to Russia via Iraq. حلقة جديدة من #قابل_للجدل انسحبت فيها شقيقة زوجة #ماهر_الأسد من البرنامج .. مجد جدعان كشفت عن زواج شقيقتها من ماهر الأسد ووالدها محكوم بالإعدام من حافظ الأسد ..وهل مات والدها بسبب زواجهم ؟ ولماذا أشهر بشار الأسد السكين في وجهها ؟ وهل أسماء الأسد تبيع أعضاء أطفال سوريا… — نايف الأحمري | Naif Alahmari (@Nayef_tv) February 8, 2025 Many further allegedly claimed Masher Assad could have died or was injured in an earlier explosion in Damascus and the ex-regime remained silent about it. Is Maher Assad alive, where is he? Majd Jadaan, sister-in-law of Maher Assad said that the former Syrian commander is likely to be living in Russia, the only place that would welcome Assad family members. Jadaan also claimed that Maher Assad was involved in planning the "Crisis Cell" explosion that targeted the Syrian National Security building in 2012 in the center of the capital, Damascus, and included only 5 people. © 2000 - 2025 Al Bawaba (
