Tribal loyalties drove Assad cousin but came at a cost

Dhu al-Himma Shalish always traded on his family connection to Syrian dictator Assad, but even trusted relatives have a use-by date in these brutal lands.

Dhu al-Himma Shalish was a cousin of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and, until 2019, head of presidential security.

Dhu al-Himma Shalish
Oligarch and war lord. Born Qardaha, Syria, 1951; died May 14, Damascus, aged 71.

There has been much discredited, even racist “scholarship” scrutinising the Arab mind. But one undeniable characteristic among Middle East and North African peoples is the concept of wasta.

It is not easily translated, but we can take it to suggest the clout and influence of connections. Our own Old Mates Act is wasta lite.

Wasta binds families and tribes to help their kin, and it can be good and bad. It may help the powerless deal with corrupt officials. It also may help to hide such corruption. It often subjects people to pressure to employ relatives with tribal connections. Networking by coercion.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, Indonesia’s population of 270 million is serviced by 4.2 million government officers, proportionally very few compared with Jordan, where wasta is endemic. It has 350,000 public servants in a workforce of 2.6 million.

Some Arab nations are dealing with the economic burden and inefficiencies of the practice, but not Syria, where it remains central to who governs and exploits the country’s wealth. It has created one of the most primitive, corrupt governments on earth, effectively defended and propped up by Vladimir Putin.

There are three interrelated families at the heart of Syria: the Assads, Makhloufs and the Shalishs, all members of the minority Alawite Islamic clan.

Dhu al-Himma Shalish led a life defined by tribal influence. He was a cousin of Bashar al-Assad, who became Syria’s unplanned president-in-waiting when his brother was killed, the playboy driver crashing at more than 200km/h.

Assad did not have the military connections of his dead brother and, living comfortably in London, had not planned on running Syria. Feeling exposed on his return, he relied on his ruthless younger brother – who heads the brutal Republican Guard – and other hitherto disdained cousins to shore up his position.

Then, when the civil war broke out in 2011, Assad sought repayment for this patronage. Both men were dispatched to subdue rebel-held areas and did so with vicious enthusiasm. Today the official death toll stands at 350,000 which the UN admits is “certainly an undercount”.

Thrust into the inner, malevolent sanctum of Syrian corruption, Shalish, nominally head of presidential security until 2019, saw the opportunity to make fabulous wealth by “privatising” state-owned companies, including the Military Housing Institution. He became the biggest, perhaps sole, official car importer.

Western governments believed Shalish and his family made vast sums laundering money and smuggling. Shalish was sanctioned by the US government for illegally providing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein with arms by using false, so-called end-user certificates for weapons systems.

He is reported to have organised and used his wealth to finance the state-sponsored Shabiha (Ghost) death squads that killed protesters during the early days of the uprising that sparked the civil war. These were jeans-clad mercenaries often recruited from gyms and whose steroid sculpted brawn terrorised the people of Aleppo, burning crops, raping girls and killing innocents.

One doctor who had reluctantly treated some of these mercenaries recalled: “I had to talk to them like children, because the Shabiha likes people with low intelligence. But that is what makes them so terrifying – the combination of brute strength and blind allegiance to the regime.”

Putin’s air force and missile attacks had swung the war in Assad’s favour by 2018 and the following year the president might have judged that his cousin’s value to him was diminished. Shalish had been connected to some regional terror events, and had been witness to war crimes Assad denied, including the bombing of hospitals and the gassing of women and children with the internationally banned nerve agent sarin. Saddam had used mustard gas and sarin on Kurds in 1988, killing up to 5000 in a few hours, a crime against humanity and perhaps drawing into question the insistence by many that he never possessed weapons of mass destruction. It has been reported that Shalish, assisted by Putin’s forces, moved Saddam’s stockpiles to Syrian tunnels.

Shalish had many enemies, and, by 2019, at least a few in the regime he’d worked within for decades. Perhaps some were relatives. Assad had him charged with embezzlement and Shalish was placed under house arrest in Damascus.

Wasta debts know no bounds. There are fevered reports among opposition groups that Shalish’s death was to order. It is also reported some of his relatives protested outside the building in which he died, suggesting they believe other than his death by natural causes.

Dead men tell no tales. But they still have bank accounts. The London-based Syrian Observer news service has reported that Shalish left a hoard of $800m at his Lebanon branch.