Family feud breaks apart Syria’s troika of power

A feud is raging at the heart of Bashar al-Assad’s regime just as the Syrian dictator looks close to victory in the nine-year civil war that has destroyed much of the country. The public dispute between President Assad and Rami Makhlouf, his maternal cousin, Syria’s richest man, has magnetised Syrian and Arab attention. During the two decades of his rule, the two men have formed a troika of power with Maher al-Assad, the president’s younger brother. Now, the traditional soap operas and melodramas of Ramadan have a real-life competitor: the tycoon versus the tyrant. The Assad dynastic dictatorship has ruled Syria for half a century. Aside from a blip in 1984, when Hafez al-Assad — the current president’s father — was taken ill and his brother Rifaat al-Assad attempted a coup d’état, they do not air their differences. Mr Makhlouf must be either daring or desperate to have gone public. Mr Makhlouf, who has amassed a vast fortune, has posted three videos on Facebook complaining that the Assad government is trying to expropriate his business empire which, he insists, has served the regime throughout the rebellion that so nearly brought it down. The ostensible cause of the rift is a demand that Mr Makhlouf’s lucrative mobile phone company, Syriatel, and its smaller rival MTN, hand over hundreds of millions of dollars to the cash-strapped government in back taxes and licensing fees. Syriatel executives are being arrested. Mr Makhlouf, whose aunt was married to Hafez al-Assad, founder of the dynasty, has prospered mightily from the crony capitalism the junior Assad nurtured under the guise of opening up a state-dominated economy. Aside from Syriatel, he has commanding positions in construction and engineering, tourism and real estate, banking and insurance, and oil and gas. Mr Makhlouf has been under US sanctions since 2008 and EU sanctions during the war, for allegedly using intelligence services to intimidate business rivals and acting as the moneybags of the regime. In an infamous interview with the late Anthony Shadid of the New York Times as the Assads turned their guns on what had been a civic uprising, he announced this would be a fight to the death. Now, in one of his videos, he says: “I want to direct my message towards the president. The intelligence services have begun to encroach on our people’s freedoms. These are your people. These are your supporters”. Mr Makhlouf plainly does not do irony. Quite how he came to this pass is hard to trace in a regime so utterly opaque. Aside from the stand-off between Hafez al-Assad and Rifaat, there have been plenty of bust-ups — but little clarity and plenty of conspiracy theories about what actually happened. In 2005, Ghazi Kanaan, interior minister and Syria’s viceroy in Lebanon during most of its 29-year occupation of the country, supposedly committed suicide. He seems to have been opposed to the assassination in February that year of Rafiq Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister, in which Damascus was implicated. His successor as Syria’s man in Lebanon, Rustom Ghazaleh, also died mysteriously in 2015, taking his secrets to the grave. Almost no one tied to the Hariri killing remains alive. Kanaan was seen as a rival to Mr Assad. So was the president’s brother-in-law, former military intelligence chief Assef Shawkat; he was allegedly canvassed as an alternative to Mr Assad by French and Turkish intelligence, when he was killed in a 2012 bombing of Syria’s security council that also killed the defence minister and a leading general. The attack was claimed by rebels, who had broken into central Damascus in a major offensive. Many Syria-watchers believe it was an inside job, although it seems excessive even by regime standards to blow up the national security bureau to get one man. In the light of such precedents, Mr Makhlouf’s videos may be intended as an insurance policy against a similar fate. Yet it is hard to see him as a viable rival to Mr Assad. His al-Bustan organisation, both a charity and a 30,000-strong militia, has put down roots in the north-western coastal region of Syria, the minority Alawite sect heartland of the regime. He might look threatening, with an Iran-trained private army, wealth and cash flow to rival the straitened budget of a wrecked country, and a welfare network that has outshone the state. But his militia is being absorbed by Maher al-Assad’s Fourth Armoured Division. His charity is being marginalised by the bigger charitable networks and ambitions of Asma al-Assad, the president’s wife. As fighting in Syria starts to wind down, Mr Makhlouf’s egregious wealth is the target. Last September, the regime told scores of leading businessmen they had to repatriate dollars and help bail out the country. A new cohort that has done well out of the war readily assented. Mr Makhlouf, a knowledgeable Arab politician says, refused. He also resisted plans for a third cell phone franchise to which he was told to contribute a third of Syriatel’s clients, the politician says. It now looks as if he will lose everything. The melodrama continues.