I assume most, if not all, of the people reading this have at least one cousin. Hell, technically we’re all cousins at some remove. My cousins are great, but I never see them, mostly because I am generally awful about seeing people I should see more often. Maybe your cousins are also great, or you feel kind of “meh” about them, or you can’t stand them. Maybe you have a cousin who causes you nothing but grief and irritation at every opportunity, intentionally or not. Maybe you are Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and you have a cousin who may have just hastened your imminent trip either out of Syria and into a reasonably comfortable exile or out of this crazy, mixed-up world altogether. Probably you wouldn’t like your cousin so much, in that case.
Everybody, meet Suleiman al-Assad:
He is a cool bro who enjoys doing cool bro things like shooting assault rifles one-handed and without looking:
Anyway, Suleiman was apparently out for a drive last Thursday in Syria’s coastal port city of Latakia, and some TOTAL ASSFACE “overtook him at a crossroads” (I’m not sure there’s any way to know what that means unless you go examine the scene). In response, Suleiman did the only sensible thing he could do: he followed the guy, ran him off the road, and shot him. Seven times. With an AK-47, maybe even the very one he’s holding in that picture above (that looks more like an AKS-74 in my very amateur opinion, please correct me if I’m wrong, but anyway that’s still an AK-47 derivative).
Yikes! We’ve all been there, am I right? But when you’re the cool bro cousin of your country’s authoritarian dictator totally freely “elected” president, it’s no problem, right? Your cousin Bashar will make it all go away; you’re family, after all.
There’s little reason to doubt that if Suleiman had just gunned down some random guy in that road rage incident, that’s exactly how it would have gone down. As it turns out, though, Suleiman didn’t murder some random guy, he murdered Colonel Hassan al-Sheikh, a high-ranking officer in the Syrian air force and prominent figure in Syria’s Alawite community. And, man, that’s not good for Cousin Bashar, because it manages to piss off both the only wing of his military that’s still keeping him in the fight against ISIS and the rebel armies that are all gunning for him, and the only Syrian ethno-religious group that might reasonably be expected to fight for Assad until the bitter end. And this is happening in a city, Latakia, that he pretty much can’t afford to lose.
Now, Bashar is watching crowds of Alawites in Latakia protesting his idiot cousin’s (alleged, I guess) crime and demanding justice, and he’s got to be wondering just a little bit what might happen if he loses Alawite support over this. He’s reportedly promised Al-Sheikh’s widow that he will “punish the perpetrator,” but his message also added “whoever he [the perpetrator] is,” which might mean “even if he’s my own out of control shitheel of a cousin,” but might instead mean “hey, let’s not rush to judgment; it might have been the Zodiac Killer.” I guess we’ll see if Suleiman winds up in prison over this, even though that LAMEASS COLONEL TOOL totally deserved what he got for, like, changing lanes without signaling or whatever.
I wouldn’t expect Bashar to lose his Alawite or air force support over this one incident. The Alawites still have far more to fear from ISIS and/or many of the rebel forces like Jabhat al-Nusra (ask the Druze how kind Nusra is to religious minorities, if you can find any under Nusra’s control who haven’t been killed or forcibly converted to Sunni Islam at this point) and Ahrar al-Sham (which might be expected to treat subjugated Alawites about as well as it treats subjugated Christians) than they do from Assad’s trigger happy cousins (how many of them could there be, really). The reality that a takeover of Syria by any of those groups would very likely be followed by mass forced conversions, pogroms, and executions, by the way, is one of the biggest reasons why the Obama administration is right to worry about who is going take over when Assad is gone, despite the fact that it’s allowed that concern to virtually paralyze its Syria policy. But if abuses like this weaken Assad’s support among the Alawites and/or the air force, even just a little bit, it could easily speed up his ultimate downfall.
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The Foreign Exchanges Companion 