Blue jeans and white t-shirts. Neither luxury cars nor extravagant yachts. During nearly twenty-five years of rule, Bashar al-Assad cultivated an image of modesty, almost austerity, in public. In his vacation photos, the setting always appears sober, like that of an ordinary family. The trained ophthalmologist, graduated from the best schools in London, did not want to resemble his alter egos Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, for whom demonstrations of excess were equivalent to absolute power. “We lead a simple life, in every way similar to that of the middle class in Damascus,” his wife Asma el-Assad repeated in numerous interviews in the Western press, before the civil war. On December 8, this veneer of simplicity crumbled as quickly as her husband’s regime.
Of designer clothes and luxury jewelry, all that remains are cardboard boxes, ripped open on the floor of their palace in Damascus. The red carpets remain in place to cover the marble of this immense building which overlooks the Syrian capital. Just a few hours after the flight of Bashar al-Assad, hundreds of Damascenes rushed into the building to empty the drawers of their beloved dictator.
A fortune estimated at between 1 billion and… 400 billion dollars?
On social networks, civilians display their Louis Vuitton, Hermès and Dior bags filled with trinkets, before shouting their amazement at the dozens of luxury cars parked in the garage of the deposed president. “The extent of their real wealth will be very difficult to assess,” says Matthew Zweig, who participated, within the Trump administration, in the implementation of American economic sanctions against the Syrian regime in 2019. The Assads followed the same pattern as the Kims in North Korea, with a formidable efficiency in blending into the background.” Now that this curtain has fallen, the treasure hunt is on.
In a 2022 report, the US State Department estimated Bashar al-Assad’s personal fortune “between one and two billion dollars”. A figure widely criticized by all those familiar with the regime who, without knowing the precise extent of its assets, judge their value to be very much higher. “Some estimate that the Assads’ fortune exceeds $400 billion, although personally I do not think that Syria is rich enough for them to have amassed such a sum,” says Nanar Hawach, analyst at the International Crisis Group. What is certain is that the Assads embezzled astronomical amounts and exercised a monopoly on the Syrian economy, in which all the money went to their relatives and supporters. This was particularly true since 2018-2019.” The American administration also recognizes the complexity of measuring the personal fortune of the fugitive dictator, “as it is distributed across a multitude of bank accounts, real estate portfolios, companies and offshore accounts in paradises tax.”
“Like a house of cards”
Since Bashar’s father’s coup in 1970, the Assad family has merged its own bank accounts with those of the Syrian state. A clan that ruled over the army, intelligence, education and religion, but above all over the economy. In the corruption index published each year by Transparency International, Syria ranks 178th… out of 180 countries.
“The regime nourished a very large network of favoritism and had set up a palace economy [NDLR : dans laquelle la richesse du pays passe d’abord dans les mains d’une administration avant d’être redistribuée]like what exists in North Korea or Venezuela, describes Matthew Zweig, now an analyst in Washington for the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies. These systems of favoritism are very complicated to target and sanction from the outside. But once you hit the mark, they collapse like houses of cards…”
The 2011 civil war did not curb Bashar al-Assad’s appetite for corruption. Quite the contrary. While the repression caused more than 500,000 deaths and threw 12 million Syrians on the roads, the clan strengthened its grip on a bloodless economy, in order to secure the support of its last faithful. Riddled with international sanctions and deprived of its main oil wells (which came under the control of Kurdish forces in the east of the country), the regime then turned to two new sources of income: humanitarian aid and drug trafficking. . The fortunes of the Assad clan continued to grow while Syria’s GDP collapsed, from $67 billion in 2011 to $9 billion in 2021. The poverty rate exploded beyond 90%, according to the UN.
In recent years, the Assads’ main source of income was called captagon. A synthetic drug based on amphetamines, cut and distributed in small pills, it costs almost nothing to manufacture but is sold by the millions in rich Gulf countries, notably Saudi Arabia. According to analyst Nanar Hawach, 80% of global captagon traffic came from Syria before the fall of the regime. An immense windfall which arrived, for the most part, in the bank accounts of the Assad clan.
Among the numerous captagon production factories discovered since the fall of the regime, at least one of them, located in Douma, was managed directly by Maher el-Assad, Bashar’s brother. Just the tip of the iceberg, according to Caroline Rose, author of numerous studies on captagon trafficking. “The Assad family was extremely involved in this trafficking, underlines the analyst at the New Lines Institute. The captagon constituted one of the main sources of income for the regime and the trafficking obviously did not finance public services… All this money was primarily used to strengthen the support of regime officers and went to members of the Assad family.” Internationally, this traffic brought in around $10 billion in 2022, according to estimates. At least 2.4 billion went into the pockets of the Syrian regime this year alone.
A Syrian rebel shows captagon pills discovered at a drug manufacturing factory in Douma, December 12, 2024 on the eastern outskirts of Damascus
© / afp.com/Bakr ALKASEM
Captagon also had diplomatic interest for Assad. The “butcher of Damascus” used it as a means of putting pressure on his neighbors, in particular Saudi Arabia, to be rehabilitated on the international scene. The deal was simple: drug shipments would decrease in exchange for diplomatic concessions, or even investments in the country. The Saudis have thus promised 4 billion dollars to Syria in exchange for stopping the traffic. Bashar el-Assad also made his return to the Arab League table in 2023… “This captagon trafficking was a way to circumvent international sanctions, to minimize their effects on the regime’s closest allies and on its key members , assures Caroline Rose, ultimately, it was an indicator of the weakness of the structure of the regime, one of the warning signs of its rapid collapse.
Before its fall, the Syrian regime also drew on another source of international revenue: humanitarian aid. Each year, Western countries provided nearly $2.5 billion in aid to the Syrian population, knowing that much of these donations would be misappropriated by the Assad family. In particular, it was Asma, Bashar al-Assad’s wife of British origin, who was responsible for coordinating the entire Syrian humanitarian network. Clearly, no aid could enter and then be distributed in the country without its approval.
Not only did the regime directly embezzle millions of dollars in this way, but this system also helped keep its economy afloat thanks to the arrival of foreign currencies in the country. By manipulating the exchange rate, half of the humanitarian aid went into the regime’s coffers as soon as it entered Syrian territory. “Those who violate human rights are the same ones who benefit from the destruction they have caused, while their victims have access neither to humanitarian aid nor to economic development,” concluded a very complete report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 2022.
Planes full of banknotes heading to Moscow
Bashar al-Assad’s flight to Moscow was sudden on December 8, but this golden exile had been planned for a long time. One of his sons had been studying in Russia for years, and his wife Asma was regularly treated there. Above all, the Assad clan had invested heavily in Russian real estate in recent years by acquiring around twenty residences in the capital, for a value of more than 30 million dollars. To find refuge during this long Russian winter, the Assad family has the choice between villas and luxurious apartments in “the city of Capitals”, a brand new business district in Moscow.
As revealed by Financial Times, the Assads transferred at least $250 million in cash to Russia using planes full of $100 and $500 bank notes. The British newspaper got its hands on documents proving the existence of at least 21 thefts of this type between March 2018 and September 2019. And that’s just the beginning. “The regime collapsed so quickly that it did not have time to delete, burn or take with it countless amounts of evidence of its actions,” reports analyst Nanar Hawach. All this data and this evidence is being collected as we speak, which should have a very positive role for the future of Syria. In addition, regime figures who are still on Syrian territory will happily exchange information and evidence in exchange. of a shape amnesty.”
Already, international financial crime agencies are receiving reports and documents linking the regime to offshore accounts. The work will be long and grueling. But a hope of uncovering the Assad financing networks and, possibly, seizing them, has just been born with the fall of the regime. “Paradoxically, this complexity of financial arrangements involves many jurisdictions [NDLR : étrangères] and it is therefore enough for one of them to give up for the entire chain to find itself exposed, adds Chanez Mensous, a lawyer specializing in the study of illicit financial flows for the Sherpa association. In recent years, during revelations of financial scandals, either through leaks [NDLR : fuites] or due to the cooperation of certain authorities, we were able to note that these links are ultimately quite fragile and that they only allow temporary opacity.”
The French NGO Sherpa has notably been at the forefront of the issue of Syrian ill-gotten gains, contributing to the trial in France of an uncle of Bashar al-Assad, who fell into family disgrace at the end of the 1990s. Sentenced definitively in 2022 for organized money laundering and embezzlement of public funds, Rifaat el-Assad fled Paris for Syria. Justice seized several of his properties in Europe, including apartments in Paris and Lyon, a castle in Bessancourt, as well as bank accounts. The investigation revealed part of his real estate empire on our continent, with luxurious properties also in Spain and the United Kingdom. A glimpse into the Assad fortunes.
During the trial of Rifaat el-Assad, Chanez Mensous remembers the empty chairs in the audience. “At the time, people were very, very afraid,” says Sherpa’s lawyer. “There was still a heavy weight around the Assads, even if the trial concerned a reviled and exiled member of the clan.” The fall of the regime gives hope that tongues will also be loosened among the Syrian people. “This is one of the many virtuous aspects of the fall of Bashar el-Assad, continues Chanez Mensous: it will allow Syrian civil society to form, to speak, to free itself.” And, perhaps, to find the money confiscated for so many years from the Syrian people.
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