She decided to marry Shawkat; many commentators expressed surprise given that Shawkat was a young officer of modest means. Her younger brother Basil al-Assad was strongly opposed, believing Shawkat to be too old; he was also a divorced father of five. Basil maintained that although an Alawite, Shawkat was of inferior standing and should never become an in-law; four times he had Shawkat jailed in an attempt to prevent the union.
In January , however, Basil died in a car crash, and a year later Bushra and Shawkat arrived in Italy and announced that they had married. The president brought them back to Damascus and gave them his blessing, promoting Shawkat to the rank of major-general. The couple lived quietly in a rented house in the opulent Mezzeh district of Damascus. Shawkat became friendly with Bushra's brother Bashar, an ophthalmologist who had returned from London to fill his late brother's position as heir apparent, and Bashar began to rely on him for companionship and security.
Having faith in Shawkat's abilities, Hafez instructed him to support Bashar, and by he was rumoured to have become one of the most powerful men in the country, even if relations with the rest of the family were not always smooth: Bashar's brother Maher allegedly shot him in the stomach in Hafez died in and was succeeded by Bashar, who the following year named Shawkat Deputy Director of Military Intelligence.
He was regarded as the main architect of Syria's policy in Lebanon and had a substantial influence on extremist Palestinian groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. A severe blow was dealt to his status and reputation in when the military commander of Hizbollah, Imad Mughniyeh, was assassinated in Damascus, and the following July was relieved of his post as head of Military Intelligence and made Deputy Chief of Staff.
In January this year he was reported to have been involved in negotiations which led to an unprecedented truce between security forces and the rebel free Syrian army in Zabadani, a mountain resort north-west of Damascus. Hilleary : Have we seen anything of him since the last report, which was last May? Lesch : Yeah of some sort of poisoning or something like that. I have not seen anything from him, but the fact that the state media is saying that he has died, apparently he has finally died.
Hilleary : How is this likely to impact the regime? Lesch : I think it is a more case of a severe psychological blow to the regime itself.
And now, people who have been identified as close to the regime are either defecting—like [General] Manaf Tlas—or being assassinated. And this is certainly, on the reverse side of the coin, raising the hopes of the opposition that they are truly making serious inroads into weakening the regime.
Lesch : Yes, Shakat had a number of loyalists within intelligence, within the security also, probably within the military, and the Assad family is not going to take this lying down. They could unleash themselves either in a series of assassinations against opposition figures or in a massive attack. Gloves are off, so to speak.
But they also have to be careful not to do something that elicits an international response. The thing is, the Minister of Defense under Bashar, certainly since Mustapha Tlas stepped down in , really has not been a very strong position. It has been the military and security chiefs that have had the power. Hilleary : What do you think is next? The United Nations Security Council is debating what to do. Is Syria likely to crack down all the harder or are they likely to hold back? When president Hafez al-Assad died in after almost 30 years in charge, Shawkat was believed to be one of a handful of people who helped to run the country before Bashar took power.
They say Shawkat appeared in public only twice after the revolt grew into an armed insurgency. He went to Zabadani, a mountain resort near the capital, when the rebels temporarily seized it. Later he went to the city of Homs, center of the uprising, when the army launched an assault on rebel-held areas. The lights and water went back on. And both times, the shelling started the next day. Or had he simply lost the authority to tell the army what to do?
But other than religion, he had little in common with the Assad children, born into the ruling class.
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