The Heart of Evil: Memories from the Regime’s Command Center

An army defector’s account of life inside the regime and his escape

“This was not an experience but a nightmare”

The story Syria’s revolution cannot be told without the stories of defectors. Tens of thousands of men, at minimum, escaped regime barracks and frontline positions between 2011 and 2014. Most of these men made their way to Turkey, many making it to Europe, simply seeking refuge from the violence and freedom from the regime’s endless war crimes. Thousands of others joined fledgling opposition factions, bringing with them technical expertise, legitimacy, weapons, and manpower. Other opposition supporters used their time inside the army to support the revolution; planning coups or passing information to rebel commanders and activists.

What many forget is that defections did not peak until late in 2012 and into 2013, well after the revolution had already turned into full-scale war. These men witnessed the changes inside the barracks – how the regime became even more paranoid and abusive, the way loyalist soldiers celebrated in the carnage, and how the entire security apparatus quickly became a tool of sadistic violence against anyone deemed “the enemy.”

Every defector’s story is unique, but all share the same themes of violence and oppression. As Syria turns the page on Assad’s rule, these memories must be recorded and preserved. They are one of the last first-hand accounts of how the regime’s violence was orchestrated at every level: a systematic policy of oppression and murder that has touched most Syrians.

Since December 8 I have visited several times a Sunni family in Latakia whose oldest son, Ali, was conscripted in June 2011. What follows is his story of serving as the lone Sunni non-commissioned officer in the 1^st Division’s headquarters, and his defection in late 2014. It’s worth noting that his brother, Muhammad, was able to delay his service for many years by remaining in college, but around 2019 he was ordered to report to the recruitment office. Muhammad spent the next six years of his life in hiding, confined to his family’s apartment. “For weeks after liberation I would still have moments when walking outside where the terror took over,” he tells me in May, “I would think ‘I can’t be out here, I have to go home.’” The psychological torment of the regime knew no bounds.

A pair of 1st Division artillerymen upon a visit by the division commander, Major General Zuhair al-Assad, after shelling opposition areas in Damascus, October 2016.

Life as a Conscript

“I served in the 1^st Armored Division in the Damascus countryside. The first 6 months after being conscripted were quiet as we were still in training, and by the beginning of 2012 we had only left the base once, so we knew nothing about what was happening across the country. In 2012 the division was not really involved, but as the revolution went on the regime had to use every soldier, so our units were deployed in Idlib, Damascus, Deir Ez Zor…it was a chaotic mess.”

Some units of the division had deployed to East Ghouta during the regime’s first major offensive there in January 2012, others went to Deir Ez Zor in February.

By the fall of 2012, the division was involved in multiple axes in Idlib, the Damascus countryside, and Deir Ez Zor. One of its brigades, the 76^th “Death” Brigade, quickly became infamous for the string of massacres it committed in Idlib. Ali avoided deployments thanks to his uniquely privileged position.

“I served in the headquarters in Kiswah, I had a very good reputation because I played it very smart and everyone thought I supported the regime. If you wanted to survive you had to do this.

“When the six-month training ends, everyone tries to use his connections to get the best assignment. So, I was asking around and heard the name ‘Mazloum’ – Muhammad Mazloum who was the chief of staff of the 1^st Division. I realized it is the family name of someone my father knew, a close friend from Latakia. I called him and it turned out he was Mazloum’s brother and knew Faisal, the commander of the division, as well. He said they checked the “wasta” excel sheet – literally they had a document named “wasta” – and my name was at the top. This is how I became the only Sunni working in the division command.

“Next to my office were the chief of staff and division commander. My office was in charge of dealing with encrypted messages. One of my tasks was when someone came with a mission card I had to check it was all valid and not faked and then stamp it. This stamp allowed someone to go anywhere in Syria. When a brigadier would come to me, a 1^st Sergeant, they know this is a very sensitive department and all of us must be very loyal, so they don’t come demanding things, they are respectful.

“The division did not enter the conflict in the early stage. Faisal had some kind of agreement maybe, it must have been under the table with the people in the FSA around our base that we wouldn’t attack each other. By that time the division was taking orders only from Bashar directly, even though it belonged to the Ministry of Defense on paper. In the beginning it did not get too involved but then as they needed every unit for the war it was mobilized. Maybe Bashar wasn’t using the division because he wanted to use it as a shield to protect Damascus.

“Faisal’s last day was December 31, 2012. Just a few hours later his office director called me and said ‘take your blanket and go to jail.’ He had hated me for a long time because even though he was an Alawite and the director of Faisal’s office, I held the card stamp, I had power. I think he was also angry because I had accidently reported him earlier. The army takes food goods from the same offices which are used for civilian stores. But the army does not pay, it uses permission forms to take what it wants. I had earlier called an official saying someone is using old permissions to steal extra food. When I reported this, I learned it was not a soldier doing this but an organized crime, and the office director must have been involved to get them these permissions. With Faisal gone he thought I was vulnerable.

“I immediately called my friend again, Muhammad Mazloum’s brother who knew Faisal. This friend’s brother-in-law was also the head of Military Intelligence in Tartous. So even though this friend had lost Faisal as a connection he was still able to intervene and later that night he told me ‘Don’t worry I handled it you won’t go to jail.’

“When Faisal left and was replaced at the end of 2012 the new division commander quickly ordered an operation. We lost 20 or 25 soldiers around Kisweh that day because he tried to enter some of the territory nearby. Whatever truce there was around Kisweh was over.”

Proud of Their Crimes

A defining feature of Ali’s time in the army was the pride with which many officers boasted of their crimes against civilians. As a “trusted Sunni” serving in the command’s headquarters, he was privy to many of the stories, constantly testing his ability to blend in with the loyalists.

“The son of the man responsible for the first massacre in Homs was serving with me. He was so proud, telling me how his father organized the massacre, killed the civilians and raped women. How could he have the nerves to tell someone this? He was so proud telling me these facts. After the regime fell, I tried to find this guy because we have unfinished business…but I could not find him.

“On the mountains around the base were T-72 tanks with thermal optic upgrades. People in those tanks told me whenever they bombed buildings that they knew just contained civilians. They would laugh about this and say things like, ‘I was waiting for the man to start intimate times with his wife, then I bombed the building.’ They were animals. The guy who said this particular thing was serving in the bordering base. The night when he told me this, he was coming to visit us and at night on his way back to his office he got attacked by a pack of dogs. It was great.

“Almost every day we would hear people talking about killing civilians. My commander once sent me to somewhere near Daraya because another commander told him that they had looted a car parts shop, asking him ‘Do you need anything?’ So my commander said ‘Yes, I need a new battery, I will send Ali and my driver.’ Most of the soldiers there were Alawites, but one guy was Sunni. The Alawites told us, ‘We have never met a guy like him, he killed more Sunnis than us.’

“There was one group that was part in the army and part in the presidential guard, they also worked with civilians. During this time if you wanted a car then you would tell them what model and year, etc, and they would send the details to their people on the checkpoints. When that type of car arrived at the checkpoint they would kill everyone inside it and sell you the car for a third of the market price.

“The whole world knew what was happening. When I escaped Syria, I stayed four months in Antakya. Because of my connections I met an American general who was there to assess the strength of the FSA. He asked me what I thought of the Syrian army. I told him all of this and asked him what the USA would do, you act like the world police so what now? He said ‘We are the best at letting those who count on us down.’ This was December 2014 and he told me ‘The Syrian regime will not fail for ten years.’”

A Sectarian Army

Sectarianism in the regime is a complex topic. Sunni Arabs make up the overwhelming majority of Syria’s population, so of course they are heavily present throughout the security forces. However, their roles and power are distinctly different from those of Alawites, particularly, and other minorities in general. For example, a Republican Guard defector from the 106^th Brigade told me that in his entire brigade there was not a single Sunni, the vast majority were Alawite with a small number of Shia and Ismailis (including him), and even fewer Christians.

A common claim emerged in 2012 that the regime had confined all Sunni conscripts to its barracks, deploying only all-Alawite units to the frontlines. I have asked several defected officers about this claim over the past two years. All denied that this was a general policy, citing the regime’s desperate need manpower. However, one artillery regiment officer said that this did occur in his unit, specifically because the regime feared the Sunni soldiers there would defect with the artillery guns. Ali remembers well the deepening distrust towards Sunnis from his Alawite superiors as the war escalated.

“The regime trusted no one, even the Alawite. To get to the army you have to be an Alawite AND show your loyalty. All others were picked randomly, just to show they existed, but never given sensitive position. In the tiny chance a non-Alawite was given a sensitive position everyone around him was Alawite. Most conscripts were Sunni because that is what most of Syria is.

“95% of the army officers and mukhabarat were Alawite. There were Sunnis like me of course and they used us on the frontline, but not in the sensitive positions. I was an exception because I had money and used it well and I was smart in how I used it. My name also helped, and being from Latakia. But others were not as lucky as me.

“Anyone in the Syrian army who gave any indication that they might be against Assad would be killed instantly. I knew personally one officer, Hossam, from the same village as my mother. At the end of my training, Hossam told me ‘Don’t come to me anymore,’ I knew he was planning something. He was planning with a group but one of them was an informant and told the secret services and they were all killed. One of his colleagues was a Kurdish officer, they were together all the time but this Kurdish officer was so scared and didn’t have the strength to do something against the regime. Hossam hadn’t told the Kurdish officer what they were planning, so the mukhabarat didn’t take him since they knew he had nothing to do with it. But he was so scared they would come for him later that he had a stroke.

“How the army used Sunni soldiers depended on what unit they were in and where they were going. If they knew what was needed or who was there, they would not send Sunnis. But if they had no spy inside and didn’t know enough information then the first line would be anyone from lower-tier units as cannon fodder. Then the special forces would follow if nothing happened. Then would come the people who loot everything and sell it.

“At the time I left I heard they were sending anyone because they just had no manpower left. 2012 and 2013 had the biggest waves of defectors and deserters, so by 2014 things were desperate. There was an unofficial statement that if a Sunni wants to leave let him leave. Of course, if they know you will escape and fight the regime they will kill you. But they weren’t stopping you from taking vacation, or paying bribes for extra leave. In the beginning there were Sunnis I knew who had not had leave for two years, but then this changed. By 2012 and 2013 they were able to start replacing these men with Hezbollah fighters, so the regime felt it was safer to get the Sunnis out.”

Defection

“I escaped at the end of 2014, between then I paid a lot of money to stay at home as much as possible. This worked for a while. But eventually the people protecting my back couldn’t protect us anymore so I had to make a plan to escape Syria.”

Since before 2011, soldiers would regularly pay bribes to their unit commanders for extra leave, a system known as tayfish. This was a crucial means for many men to avoid participating in the regime’s crimes while they tried to find ways to defect, and later for wealthier soldiers to remain home during quiet periods in the war.

“A soldier would only leave the army if he knew his family was safe. For me, we faked my death. I only contacted my family with my Austrian WhatsApp number which doesn’t even have my photo on it. But for others they would not leave if their family was still under regime territory. Or if their family was displaced to another city, because then there is no database showing where they currently live so the risk is low.

“Once they leave there are many choices. If they are an officer most likely Turkey would keep them in a camp and prevent them from fighting the regime. If they were a regular soldier they have more options. It’s very hard to know the number of defectors. As the war went on, they stopped doing the morning roll call because they didn’t want us to see how many had left, but they continued the weekly gatherings in the square with the military show for a while. Eventually the command center of the Defense Ministry ordered to end these as well because of the risk someone with a rifle might shoot the officers in the stands. I think this did happen once but I don’t know which division, but I heard someone did this. If it’s true he wouldn’t have done this unless he lost everyone he knew.

“Someone I knew well from Idlib was showing everyone else how much he loved the regime, but of course they did not believe him. He got his first vacation after 1.5 years and of course he did not return. They called him and he didn’t pick up. So his colleagues, the men who served and slept in the same room and everything, they took his box of things from under his bed to steal his things – this was very common. But he was an electrician and he had built a bomb using an old watch and gasoline and nails that would go off when they opened the lid. Unfortunately, it didn’t explode.”

As was the case with Ali, many soldiers who wanted to defect couldn’t out of fear of retribution against their families. The rapid growth in liberated areas starting in late 2012 meant that many Sunni soldiers’ families were now safe from the regime, giving them the freedom to finally defect. But for men like Ali, whose families were deep in Assad-held territory, the risks were too high. One such example of this can be seen in the biography of a Druze conscript whose fear for his family’s safety and pressure from loyalist family members ultimately cost him his life.

For Ali, the loss of his wasta network inside the army and ever-growing risk that his true feelings would be exposed ultimately pushed him to take the risk.

“I had to escape Syria using a fake ID, being passed between cars until I reached the Turkish border. It was a very complicated process going back and forth between villages. First, we drove south, then from Hama…it was night and very dark…the drive took 12 hours, but I can’t tell you the exact road because I couldn’t risk having a GPS with me. Mostly we took countryside roads passing through small villages. When the driver would go through regime checkpoints it was no problem for him, he would give them goods and money and there was no problem.

“After Hama we went to Qalaat al-Mudiq where we crossed the last regime checkpoint and entered the FSA checkpoint. Once we crossed the last army checkpoint most villages were completely destroyed. After my driver crossed the first FSA checkpoint, he started to lose his confidence. When he reached the first Nusra checkpoint he said to his wife, who was in the car with us to lower suspicion, he said ‘I won’t do it after what happened last time.’ He told me to get out and walk and he would meet me later. He said, ‘You have to give me your word you won’t tell them that you had to pay me.’

“From everything I saw in the army and while fleeing the country, I can say that the shittiest rebel factions were still better than the regime. I don’t know about ISIS, I only crossed a small section of their territory and it was just a 14-year-old boy leading a group of fighters. I asked my driver who the hell was this and he said, ‘He is a prince.’ It was such a joke. All the governments including the regime planted this virus.

“What I will tell you, I know you will not believe: The regime knew every single movement of ISIS. They knew every commander and soldier and what streets they were taking. You need to see it from the ground to connect the points. But the whole time the Syrian regime was saying ‘Please help us fight ISIS’ they knew them all. They knew them by their real names not their nicknames. They knew everything but never gave the order to attack them. For the FSA when the regime knew one bit of information, they would give the order to bomb everything around them. This was one reason I had to escape, because they knew that I knew too much.”

A Regime of Prisons

Many Syrians had known for years that the regime’s prison system was more extensive than officially documented. As the regime fell, this belief became fact, with hundreds of secret prisons discovered in military bases, mukhabarat offices, and militia-affiliated buildings. The risk of detention in any one of these facilities was a huge factor preventing soldiers from defecting – especially since any defector caught in those first years was executed or tortured to death.

“There was a Sednaya in every military base. Most of the people caught at military checkpoints I believe didn’t even reach the prison. The roads weren’t safe at times so then the military guys would keep these people in their checkpoint until a car came for them. And if you had proven your loyalty to the regime, you could do anything you wanted to anyone at those checkpoints.

“You are always followed by the fear of ‘what if they know’ so trusting someone is very, very hard. You know many are acting like they support the regime and are not, but also many acting like they oppose the regime to catch those people. But there is a line which separates being a human being and an animal in a human body. In a few special cases, I knew those people. The first thing to take into consideration: he must be Sunni. Anything else is a risk. Even if you know 100% he is against the regime there is still a risk he will be pressured into reporting you.

“To be open and transparent, the Christians were not supporting the regime and didn’t want it, but they did not do anything against it. What else could they do? They are a small minority and can’t do a lot, but on the other hand the regime would not dare bomb their villages. Look at Suwayda, where Assad did not dare to attack them for two years while they protested.

“I know a guy with an office near mine. He took a vacation somehow and at the same time the rebels took his town, so he couldn’t return to our base. After 8 months the regime recaptured his town, but instead of escaping he tried to return to the division! At the front door he gave them his original vacation permission and tried to explain what happened. They immediately sent him to the military prison. He stayed there for six or seven months. When they released him, he had lost his mind to the extent he was sleeping in the streets of Damascus naked in the winter. It’s just one of the stories that when you hear it you think you are watching a horror movie, but it is just what is happening in Syria. When the Syrian regime fell, it was the end of the Nazis.”