Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's Middle East editor, previews his series on the House of Assad in next week's Radio Times. He draws out the contrast between the civilised veneer of the Syrian first family and the ruthless suppression of dissent in the country. He sketches all the key players except, it seems to me, the main driver of the brutality. The Independent obituary of February 2016 reports:
The daughter of a wealthy Alawite Shia family from Lakania province in Syria, Aniseh Makhlouf became the matriarch, behind the scenes, of the country's ruling Assad family. She was rarely seen in public after Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, became Syrian president in 1971, but even beyond his death in 2000 she was acknowledged still to be a powerful influence on Syria's government.
She is said to have urged her son, President Bashar al-Assad, to crack down on opponents in 2011 as Syria's civil war erupted. It is believed she called for a still more heavy-handed response than the strong measures he already favoured, and she was thought to have remained one of the few people whose advice he continued to seek when the war intensified.
Her hold over her son already included a fierce outburst of disapproval over Syria's withdrawal in 2005 from what had been 29 years of occupation of neighbouring Lebanon. She is said to have upbraided him at the time: “You violated your father's statement that Lebanon and Syria both belong to the Assad family.”
That apart, this looks to be a high-quality documentary series by Bowen, who, presumably because of Netanyahu's disapproval, we see and hear too little of on BBC News.
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