Assad’s inner circle resisting compromise

The Syrian vice president’s criticism of leader Bashar Assad has highlighted the cracks in the regime’s highest ranks, pitting supporters of compromise against the president’s hard-line inner circle. Assad’s closest aides believe the regime should keep fighting and that they can still win a war against fighters which has left more than 44,000 dead in almost two years. “Power has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of just a few people in Assad’s clan, which has grown autistic and seems to have chosen to just keep going,” Paris-based expert Karim Bitar said. Assad’s circle includes his brother Maher, 44, who heads the army’s elite Fourth Division and his wife Asma, an analyst said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. The group also includes Assad’s notorious businessmen uncle Mohammed Makhluf, 80, cousin Rami Makhluf, 43, and Damascus security chief, Hazem Makhluf, 41. Like Assad, all are members of the minority Alawite community, except his wife, who is a Sunni Muslim. Presidential affairs minister since 2009, Mansur Azzam, 52, and former Al-Jazeera journalist Luna Al-Shibl are also close to Assad. Both are members of the Druze community. Alawite Hussam Sukkar, a security adviser to the president, is also key, as are two Sunni veterans: National Security director Ali Mamluk and Political Security chief Rostom Ghazali. “This is the group that takes the decisions,” the analyst said. “Bashar, who runs the show, only listens to people who owe him, for the most part, for their rise.” But several high-level officials, members of the state apparatus and part of the army command, understand -— like Vice President Farouq Shara — “that neither the fighters nor the army can secure an all-out victory,” said Bitar. “As such, they are hoping for a negotiated solution, which would prevent them all being swept away should Assad fall.” In an interview published in a pro-Damascus Lebanese daily, Shara, who for 22 years served as foreign minister, said he favors a negotiated solution to the conflict, rather than the president’s strategy of crushing the revolt militarily. Assad “does not hide his desire to press on militarily until the final victory (and he believes that) after this, political dialogue will actually still be possible,” Shara told Beirut-based Al-Akhbar. Experts say that out of those who share Shara’s views, two women stand out. The journalist who interviewed the vice president for Al-Akhbar said “Shara is not in the decision-making circle, and communicates infrequently with the president.”