Jew World Order

Mr Fares spoke out as the violence in Syria continued unabated, with at least
28 people killed across the country yesterday. The town of Khirbet Ghazaleh
in southern Syria was attacked by hundreds of troops backed by tanks and
helicopter gunships, according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for
Human Rights.

Meanwhile, United Nations observers visited the village of Treimsa, in central
Hama province, in which up to 200 people are feared to have died on
Thursday.

It was precisely such atrocities as these that forced Mr Fares to gradually
question his own allegiance to the regime, ending 35 years of loyal service
in which he worked as a policeman, regional governor and political security
chief, becoming entrusted with some of its most sensitive tasks.

“At the beginning of the revolution, the state tried to convince people
that reforms would be enacted very soon,” he said. “We lived on
that hope for a while. We gave them the benefit of the doubt, but after many
months it became clear to me that the promises of reform were lies. That was
when I made my decision. I was seeing the massacres perpetrated – no man
would be able to live with himself, seeing what I saw and knowing what I
know, to stay in the position.”

Mr Fares’s most damaging allegation is that the Syrian government itself has a
hand in the nationwide wave of suicide bombings on government buildings,
which have killed hundreds of people and maimed thousands more. By way of
example, he cited the twin blasts outside a military intelligence building
in the al-Qazzaz suburb of Damascus in May, which killed 55 people and
injured another 370.

“I know for certain that not a single serving intelligence official was
harmed during that explosion, as the whole office had been evacuated 15
minutes beforehand,” he said. “All the victims were passers by
instead. All these major explosions have been have been perpetrated by
al-Qaeda through cooperation with the security forces.”

Such allegations have been aired in general terms by the Syrian opposition
before, and Mr Fares would not be drawn on what exact proof he had. He is,
however, better placed than many to make such claims. One of the reasons for
his rise in President Assad’s regime was that he is a senior member of the
Oqaydat tribe, a highly powerful clan whose population straddles the
Syrian-Iraq border. Following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, their
territory became part of the conduit used by Syria to smuggle jihadi
volunteers into Iraq, with Mr Fares playing an important role.

“After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the regime in Syria began to feel
danger, and began planning to disrupt the US forces inside Iraq, so it
formed an alliance with al-Qaeda,” he said. “All Arabs and other
foreigners were encouraged to go to Iraq via Syria, and their movements were
facilitated by the Syrian government. As a governor at the time, I was given
verbal commandments that any civil servant that wanted to go would have his
trip facilitated, and that his absence would not be noted. I believe the
Syrian regime has blood on its hands, it should bare responsibility for many
of the deaths in Iraq.”

He himself, he added, knew personally of several Syrian government “liaison
officers” who still dealt with al-Qaeda. “Al-Qaeda would not carry
out activities without knowledge of the regime,” he said. “The
Syrian government would like to use al-Qaeda as a bargaining chip with the
West – to say: ‘it is either them or us’.”

Mr Fares, who has six grown-up children, said he made his decision to quit
five months ago, after a particularly bloody Friday, which has become the
regular day for opposition protests. “The number of killings was
unusually high that day, especially in my area, and that was the final straw
– there was no hope any more,” he said.

Mindful that such a display of disloyalty could lead to reprisals against his
family, he slowly began getting his relatives out of the country. He himself
was then smuggled out of Baghdad last week by the Syrian opposition. He
declines to give details of the operation, but says he made a point of
continuing his normal duties up to the last minute so as not to alert the
authorities, who he suspected would have been monitoring his phone calls as
a diplomat anyway.

Since his defection, he regretted, many cousins within his extended family had
been questioned by Syrian intelligence, with some forced into hiding.
However, any doubts he had harboured prior to jumping ship had gone after a
final visit he made a month ago to his home city of Deir al-Zour, near the
Iraqi-Syrian border.

“There was tremendous destruction there and thousands of people had been
killed, many of them from my tribe,” he said. “Life in the city
was almost non-existent. What I saw there broke my heart, it was tragic and
unbelievable, and if people there have not joined the uprising already, they
will now. The majority of the tribe, I think, are already on the side of
revolution.”

Indeed, the last time he had spoken to President Assad, in a face-to-face
meeting six months ago, the Syrian leader had asked him to use his influence
in Deir al-Zour, promising him promotion if he did.

“He was saying that we should insist that this is a conspiracy from the
West aimed at Syria,” Mr Fares said. “I spoke with the local
sheikhs and leaders, but the people’s response was that you cannot trust
Assad.

“I think he does believe it is a conspiracy against him, but he is now
living in a world of his own.”

However, on the question of whether Mr Assad was directing the violence
personally, Mr Fares was equivocal. On the one hand, he claimed the Syrian
leader was being “led” by powerful members within his own family,
and also his Russian backers. On the other, he pointed out that President
Assad’s late father, Hafez, had been equally ruthless during his rule, which
included the massacre of more than 10,000 people during a Muslim Brotherhood
uprising in the city of Hama in 1982.

“Bashar doesn’t strike you as being extremely intelligent, he seems to be
someone who is led rather than who leads. But nobody has the ability to
carry out these decisions except him, and he definitely has the genes of his
father, who was a criminal by all accounts. This is what he grew up with,
this is the hallmark of the family.”

Like President Assad, Mr Fares now faces an uncertain future. To the regime,
which formally sacked him from his job last week, he is now a traitor and a
marked man. To the opposition, meanwhile, he is a boost to morale but not
necessarily someone who can be entirely trusted.

In his message announcing his defection last week, he urged other diplomats to
follow in his wake. Yet his own familiarity with the workings of Syria’s
police state means he knows that they will most likely keep their plans to
themselves. “These things are extremely sensitive so I don’t know of
others planning to defect. Sometimes you are frightened someone will hear if
you think it yourself.”