BEIRUT — They were close friends and shared a singular lineage: Both were blood royalty of the Syrian leadership caste, birthright beneficiaries of their fathers’ stranglehold on the nation.
But the conflict tearing Syrian apart also opened a rift between President Bashar Assad and Gen. Manaf Tlas, a brigade commander in the country’s ultra-loyal Republican Guard. On Friday, France’s foreign minister confirmed that Tlas had defected.
It was unclear whether Tlas had actually defected and joined the opposition, or had just seized an opportunity to follow his father and brother, Firas, a businessman, out of strife-ridden Syria. It was also not apparent whether Tlas, reportedly under close surveillance, fled from Syria clandestinely or had been permitted to leave.
The defection of a prominent member of Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority is a symbolic blow against the intricate cross-sect scaffolding that has helped prop up Assad, who is a member of the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
That alliance was evident in the shared backgrounds of Assad and Tlas.
Assad, an ophthalmologist by training, became president after the death in 2000 of his father, Hafez Assad, the former Air Force pilot whose rise to power in 1970 initiated the family’s dynastic rule.
Tlas, whose charm and easy-going demeanor belied his martial pedigree, followed in the military footsteps of his father, Mustafa Tlas, long-time defense minister and fixer for Assad the elder.
For years, Syria’s Alawite-dominated administration has counted on the support of military and business elites from the Sunni majority. Sunnis like the Tlas clan who backed Assad received ample benefits for their collaboration.
“(The) Tlas family has been at the heart of the regime from the beginning,” Joshua Landis, who heads the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, said via e-mail. “They are the keystone of the Sunni-Alawi alliance that has cemented the regime for 4 decades.”
But the rebellion has arisen largely from the Sunni masses disenchanted with the domination of Assad and fellow Alawites who mostly run the military and security services.
According to various accounts, the two men fell out last year after security hard-liners rejected Tlas’s mediation efforts in several rebellious towns. Tlas hasn’t commanded troops for months, and some have said he was lately living under a kind of house arrest, rumors swirling that he planned to join the growing ranks of defectors escaping to neighboring Turkey or elsewhere.
One Western diplomat who knew Tlas suggested that he might have been torn between his friendship with Bashar Assad and his opposition to the government’s heavy handed response to the uprising.
Tlas, a trained architect, was seen out on the Damascus club circuit, appeared comfortable in jeans and a T-shirt, and invited friends for concerts to his stunning, cliff-side vacation home, carved into the rock in the mountains outside Damascus. But Tlas is also said to have been a dedicated career military man who inspired trust among both his subordinates and the chief executive.
“He was a faithful friend of Bashar — but then again he was a Sunni from Rastan,” said the diplomat, alluding to the Tlas’ ancestral home town.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton calls Syrian defections “promising”
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Friday hailed an accelerating wave of defections in President Bashar Assad’s inner circle as the United States and its international allies pleaded once again for global sanctions against the Syrian regime.
Frustrated by the slow pace of diplomacy, Clinton lambasted Russia and China for standing in the way.
Speaking after a 100-nation conference in Paris, Clinton said Syria’s “regime insiders and the military establishment are starting to vote with their feet” by abandoning the four-decade Assad dynasty. She spoke after Western officials reported top Assad aide aide Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlas had left the country.
“We think that is a very promising development,” Clinton told reporters.
Tlas’ departure from Syria provided welcome news for the U.S. and its European and Arab partners after another gathering of the “Friends of Syria” group that demonstrated the international community’s continued inability to end 16 months of bloodshed that activists say has killed about 14,000 people. The Associated Press
