Antakya, Turkey: Last Thursday afternoon in a Turkish hamlet not far from the town of Rehanliya on the Syrian border, two black four-wheel drive cars with tinted windows appeared amid the olive groves and red-soiled farmland of what has become a gathering point for Syrian defectors. They came to a temporary halt to allow a herd of sheep and goats to pass before proceeding gingerly down the tattered concrete lane through the olive trees.
They carried a coveted prize in the long covert war with the Syrian regime. Behind the smoked glass was Brigadier General Manaf Tlass, once a confidant of the Al Assad family, and the most significant defector to have fled Damascus by far.
The cars turned right up a steep hill towards a Turkish observation tower, where Tlass’s passage to safety had been co-ordinated with the Free Syrian command near the southern Turkish city of Antakya.
From Antakya, Tlass was soon on his way to Paris, where breaking news of his defection was greeted with jubilation by a gathering of western and Arab foreign ministers as a telling blow to Al Assad’s wounded but ferocious regime. But left behind among the olive groves on the border, other defectors, including senior army officers, took a more jaundiced view of his sudden flight as they gathered for dinner.
“There is something not right about this,” said Colonel Abu Hamza, a commander from Jebel Al Zawiya. “There were two eyes on him when he prayed and when he ate. How could he and his family escape without them knowing? We need to get to the bottom of it.”
Over the past few days, there has been neither sight nor sound from Manaf Tlass and his family, once a Sunni mainstay of the Al Assad regime. According to a diplomatic source, the former Republican Guard general was being debriefed in Paris by French intelligence officials, presumably anxious to discover how many other former top loyalists might be ready to bolt in Tlass’s wake, and how hollow is the structure keeping Bashar Al Assad in place. The Syrian opposition in Paris promise the former general, once a close friend of the Syrian president, will surface in the next few days and make his position clear.
While the exile opposition wait, a second top Sunni has followed Tlass’s example and bolted. Nawaf Al Fares, the Syrian ambassador to Baghdad and the head of an influential tribe on the Syrian-Iraqi border, fled to Doha, in a defection believed to have been organised and financed by Qatari intelligence, to raise a rebel banner in the Gulf, telling Syrian soldiers to “turn your guns on the criminals” in the Damascus regime.
But Colonel Hamza’s question over dinner last Thursday night remains unanswered.
The logistics of General Tlass’s escape are unclear but it clearly would not have been easy. He was indeed under close scrutiny from the security services at his Damascus home since a previous bid to defect was leaked in March and had to be aborted. In fact, according to one opposition figure, Tlass’s flight had been in the works for more than a year.
“Manaf had decided to defect very early on in the revolution and got in touch with the FSA to plan ahead. They advised him to stay in place as he would serve them better being on the inside rather than the outside.
“The same instructions had been given to a very large number of acting officers as they fed the Free Syrian Army with operational information and troop movements giving the FSA enough notice about impending attacks to avoid casualties and plan counter attacks,” the opposition figure said.
General Tlass’s usefulness inside Damascus, however, must have declined sharply over time, as the regime lost trust in his family’s loyalty, and that loss of faith was itself an important step in Al Assad’s slide towards isolation. The Tlass clan’s fidelity was once important to the Ba’athist system.
The patriarch, Mustafa, was at Hafez Al Assad’s side when he staged his coup in 1970, and rose to become defence minister. The role was mostly symbolic, a way of cementing a high-profile Sunni to the Alawite core of the system, said one Syrian businessman.
“Tlass in particular was never really taken seriously in his position as defence minister, neither internally where he was known to be more interested in chasing beautiful women, nor externally by the Israelis,” the businessman said. “He was a regular in the Damascene social scene always to be found by the swimming pool of the Sheraton hotel during high summer.”
An easy ascent was also offered to his sons. The elder, Firas, was given a business contract to supply uniforms and rations to the armed forces, and Manaf, a member of the tight circle of gilded youth around Bashar Al Assad when the latter inherited the regime in 2000, was made a Republican Guard general under the command of the president’s younger brother, Maher.
