Assignment: What future for Assad’s army?

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The former rebels who now rule Syria dismantled the old regime’s security forces as soon as they came to power last December. Overnight, half a million soldiers, police and intelligence officers, and some civil defence workers lost their jobs and income. Many of those sacked were guilty of atrocities. But the majority probably were not. Tim Whewell reports on the reconciliation process which deprived servicemen of their jobs – but delayed justice. He talks to a variety of former junior members of the security forces – a civil defence worker, a policeman and an officer of the elite Republican Guard – to ask how and why they originally became servants of the regime – and find out how they are living now. War crimes investigator Kilman Abu Hawa says only 10-15% of former servicemen are guilty of crimes: the guilty should be prosecuted, and the innocent reinstated. Nanar Hawach of the International Crisis Group draws a parallel with Iraq, where the security forces were dismantled after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Many discontented former officers in Iraq eventually joined the jihadi group, ISIS. Do the mass dismissals in Syria risk provoking a similar insurgency?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the documentary podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Tim Hewell.
0:05.5	In this edition of assignment, I'm in Syria being offered a glass of tea on the outskirts of
0:10.7	Damascus. Thank you. Some sugar with any. Thanks. We've just sat down in this room of
0:19.0	air breeze blocks. So basically, you had to move very fast, because it's a kind of half-built house.
0:29.0	Yes, there is nothing we can do.
0:31.9	No one ever thought the regime could fall after nearly 15 years. So we had to move to this place that
0:41.6	isn't even a plastered, doesn't even have an electricity connection. It's the only place
0:47.5	we could find to live. Last December, Syria's streets filled with crowds,
0:54.7	celebrating the fall of dictator Bashar al-Assad.
0:57.8	A seemingly endless civil war was suddenly over in a flash
1:01.7	after a lightning rebel advance on the capital.
1:05.0	Most Syrians watched with ever-mounting excitement.
1:11.7	But the man I'm sipping tea with was terrified.
1:17.0	After the rebels took Aleppo and then Hama and then Homs, we were really nervous,
1:22.8	especially all of us living in government accommodation compounds,
1:27.3	because we were all in police or other security agencies.
1:32.1	So some of us fled before the liberation,
1:35.6	but I stayed in the compound because I had nowhere else to go.
1:40.9	Like everyone in that compound, Abousteif,
1:43.7	was part of the dictatorship's security forces.
1:49.7	On the night of the liberation, we were kicked out of our homes and they burnt all our furniture.
1:56.4	People with guns came in and attacked us. They didn't even give us half an hour, not even 15 minutes, to get out.
	...

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