Inside Syria’s shabiha death squads

LATTAKIA, SYRIA AND BEIRUT, LEBANON — As Syria descends into civil war, Abu Jaafar said he is ready to kill women and children to defend his friends, family and president.

“Sunni women are giving birth to babies who will fight us in years to come, so we have the right to fight anyone who can hurt us in the future,” said the Allawite militiaman, a member of the ancient offshoot of Shiite Islam to which Syrian President Bashar Assad and the powerbase of his regime belong.

With his massive, tattooed muscles, shaved head, bushy black beard and trademark white trainers, Abu Jaafar, 38, looks every bit the figure of terror that is now imprinted on the international conscience. It is militiamen like Jaafar that are believed responsible for recent massacres in Houla and Qbeir, in which nearly 200 Sunni civilians were killed, many of them women and children who were stabbed to death.

Though he has a wife and children, after a day lifting weights and drinking some local Arak, Jaafar spends most evenings in the nightclubs of Lattakia, the port city on the Mediterranean coast where regime forces this week attacked a rebellious village.

As a member of the mafia militia who grew up smuggling commodities, appliances, drugs and guns between Syria and Lebanon at the behest of Assad’s extended family, Abu Jaafar has no problem getting past the nightclub bouncers.

Except when the “mualem,” his master, calls.

READ MORE:Arab Awakening

“If I get a call from my boss then my whole day is changed,” he said. “When I leave the house, I don’t know when I will be back.”

Packing up the Kalashnikovs, pistols, machine guns and grenades he said were given to him “by the government,” Jaafar joins his gang of 100 shabiha —named either for the Arabic word for ghosts or the old Mercedes Shahab popular for its smuggling-sized trunk — and sets off to crush Sunni Muslim protesters.

In an interview in Lattakia, Jaafar gave a frank and unique insight into the violent, disturbed world of the shabiha, a group that suffers from a dangerous cocktail of religious indoctrination, minority paranoia and smuggler roots.

The massacres in northern Syria, which UN officials, eyewitnesses and Human Rights Watch all concluded were perpetrated mainly by shabiha triggered a wave of international revulsion, with many analysts describing militia as a “Frankenstein” now beyond the control of the president. The regime blamed both massacres on foreign terrorists.

“The regime has been spawning militias, as deep down it is a militia pretending to be a state,” said a leading Syria analyst based in Damascus, who asked for anonymity to speak freely. “The Frankenstein is now completely out of control.”

READ MORE:Syria on UN’s ‘list of shame’ for torturing, killing and sexually attacking children

Like many of Syria’s estimated 2.5 million Allawites, a small mystic off-shoot of Shiite Islam which forms just 12 percent of the country’s population, Jaafar said he grew up in poverty.

“My story is similar to all shabiha: I was born in a small village and didn’t finish school. Instead I went to work with my father in our lemon farm,” he said.

It was during his military service that Jaafar was recruited into Syria’s security services, where uniformed officers worked with plain-clothed thugs in regime-sanctioned smuggling.

“I was bigger than the others so I got picked to be the bodyguard of a senior officer,” he said. “After military service, he asked me to be his man in dealing with some Allawite smugglers.”

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Jaafar lived the gangster high life, plying his trade in well-organized smuggling networks, anchored in Lattakia’s port.

Food, cigarettes and commodities subsidized by the government would be smuggled from Syria into Lebanon, then in the midst of a civil war, and sold for massive profit. Luxury cars, guns and drugs, meanwhile, would flow from Lebanon up the Bekaa Valley and into Syria’s tightly restricted, Soviet-style economy established under Hafez al-Assad, the country’s former dictator.

“They were noted for their brutality and cruelty and their blind devotion to their leaders,” writes Yassein Haj Saleh, a historian and dissident. “The shabiha were untouchable and operated with impunity. If there were ever a conflict between the shabiha and the local authorities, the authorities would not dare defend themselves.”

The impunity stemmed from a single, but all powerful source: The direct links between the shabiha and the Assad family.

Reportedly established by Namir al-Assad, President Hafez al-Assad’s cousin, and Rifaat al-Assad, the late president’s brother, each shabiha gang grew up owing allegiance to a particular member of the extended Assad family.

Syria experts say members of the shabiha would be carefully selected for their physical strength, lack of education and blind loyalty to the Allawite sect and the Assad family in particular.

By the mid 1990s, however, the shabiha were beginning to get out of control and Hafez al-Assad ordered his elder son and heir apparent Basel, famed for horsemanship and a furious temper, to bring the militias to heel. He did so, but soon after died in a car crash, catapulting his awkward younger brother Bashar into the presidency.

Following Basel’s crackdown, Jaafar said he left his gang and opened a liquor store. He continued to exercise his biceps, which bear a tattoo of the zulfiqar, the sword of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, who Shiites follow as the rightful heir of Islam — the root of the great divide with Sunnis.

“Last June, friends from the shabiha asked me to return to work with them,” Jaafar said. “They said we must defend President Assad and his family and keep the power for the Allawite sect.”

Soon, Jaafar’s pay of about $20 for a day’s thuggery had risen to a steady monthly salary of about six times the average state wage.

“We started by facing the protesters, but when the opposition became armed we attacked them in their villages,” Jaafar said. “In addition to our salaries, we take whatever we can get during the attacks: TVs, video players, electronics.”

Eyewitness accounts speak of dead children, some with hideously deformed faces, where the machetes split their skulls.

“Whole families were slaughtered,” Abu Ahmed, a resident of Houla who witnessed the immediate aftermath of the attack, said. “Women and children were shot from close range or slaughtered with knives. The shabiha did all of that.”

Jaafar defends the government’s crackdown by repeating the regime’s long-held claims — which are now increasingly becoming true — that the armed opposition is receiving support from religiously conservative Sunni Muslim states like Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

“We got money and arms from our government to fight those Wahhabi radicals who will force my wife and daughters to wear the veil and will close all wine shops,” Jaafar said.

Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, said President Assad, who took power in 2000, had presided over “a state that has become a kind of mafia extortion network” in which militias and the businessmen who pay them have grown beyond his control.

“Bashar is the president but he does not command. In Syria it is not about constitutional authority but about kill or be killed, and Bashar is not the top killer. He’s a prisoner of the presidential palace,” Salem said.

The way Jaafar tells it, however, money is not the prime motivator for the violence that follows the call from mualem.

“I know the Sunnis will take revenge for what we have done. I am fighting to guarantee a good future for my sons and grandsons. So this is the final battle: Win, or die. There’s no third choice.”

A GlobalPost reporter in Lattakia, Syria contirbuted to this report. Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand contributed from Beirut, Lebanon, with additional reporting by Rami Aysha.