Simon Sebag Montefiore
The Free Press, Dec. 8, 2024
“It is impossible to watch the fall of the brutal tyranny of the House of Assad without feeling joy.”
In Qardaha, in the Alawite lands of Latakia on the Mediterranean, stands the sumptuous and pristine marble mausoleum worthy of an Arab monarch. It is here the founder of the brutal Assad dynasty, Hafez al-Assad, is buried in magnificence.
Assad was not the original family name. Hafez’s father was a powerful character known as Ali Sulayman al-Wahhish—the al-Wahhish meaning the wild beast—for his strength. He had eleven children; Hafez was his ninth child. His nickname was al-Assad—the Lion—and he adopted that as his family’s name.
Hafez’s chosen heir was his swaggering eldest son, Bassel. Always promoted as the “golden knight” and depicted on horseback, he died young in a car crash and was buried alongside his father, leaving the succession to his younger brother—a gawky, chinless eye surgeon named Bashar. He turned out to be just as murderous as his father.
I have seen no footage yet of the fate of the mausoleum and the bodies that lie there, just as I have seen no footage of Bashar al-Assad as he fled the lightning-fast overthrow of his country. But his father’s and brother’s bodies are unlikely to remain untouched—unless he has taken them with him. …SOURCE
Simon Sebag Montefiore is the best-selling, prize-winning author of Jerusalem: The Biography; The World: A Family History of Humanity; and The Romanovs: 1613–1918 (Knopf). Follow him on X @SimonMontefiore.