The indecent luxury of the Assad family’s villas disgusts Syrians

The driveway winds between manicured lawns lined with lavender to the villa facing the sea and its blue ceramic swimming pool. The vacation spot of the deposed Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, in Latakia, in the west of the country, disgusts its visitors.

“To think that he spent all this money while we lived like miserable people,” spits Moudar Ghanem, 26 years old, with gray complexion and hollow eyes, who is coming out of 36 days in prison in Damascus for “terrorism”.

He came on Sunday to “see with his own eyes how they lived when people didn’t even have electricity,” he explains in front of the bay windows of the huge white marble living room.

“I don’t care if the future president lives here, as long as he takes care of the people. Let him not humiliate us.”

The province of Latakia is the cradle of the Assad clan, in power for half a century, whose heir Bashar, has just been ousted from power in two weeks by the lightning offensive of a rebel coalition.

Families began to wander around this summer resort of the fallen president on Sunday, guarded by a handful of fighters. One of President Assad’s three villas on the outskirts of Latakia, in the Mediterranean.

More than triumph, it is amazement and anger that dominate in the face of the ease of the places bathed by the sun above the clear waters.

The house was completely looted and stripped of every single doorknob, but the size of the rooms and the antique mosaic that adorns the entrance bear witness to its standing.

Noura, 37, lived with her family on this land: “They kicked us out. I never dared to come back,” she says. She plans to go to court to recover her property.

Like Noura, a week after the fall of the president, most of the people met on Sunday in Latakia expressed themselves willingly, but were hampered, when giving their names, by the fear that the clan still inspires.

“You never know if they came back,” explains Nemer, 45, who has just stopped his motorbike in front of a flashy villa in the residential district of Al Zeraaha: the residence of Munzer al-Assad , cousin of Bachar who led with his brother Fawaz, who died in 2015, a mafia militia known for its abuses and numerous trafficking.

“This is the first time I’ve stopped here, before the guards chased us away, we weren’t allowed to park.”

The house was visited on the first day and its two floors ransacked. Nothing resisted the rage of the population: family photos torn up, portraits trampled, chandeliers torn down, furniture taken away.

“We earn 20 dollars a month, I have two jobs to feed my family,” defends Nemer, who remembers the convoys rushing through the street.

In the “Syria Car” dealership of Munzer’s son, Hafez, only one car still sits in the crushed glass of the windows: failing to start it, the crowd attacked the bodywork, the windows, the seats. A young couple pretends to sit behind the wheel.

But Hassan Anouar has other designs. Since the morning, this 51-year-old lawyer has been inspecting the premises and collecting all the documents that could be used in justice: Hafez was known to confiscate or buy the cars he coveted well below their price, to the detriment of their owners, explains Mr. Anouar.

“Several complaints were filed,” he reports.

Above all, “Syria car” was a vast launderer of dirty money which masked the family’s trafficking, he assures.

On the sidewalk, two passers-by stop above a sewer grate, lift it and extract by the handful hundreds of small white pills: “Captagon”, according to them, this synthetic drug discovered in phenomenal quantities at across the country.

According to the lawyer, it was exported from Latakia in Made in China clothing labels.

Followed by two young fighters who have just arrived from Idlib, the rebel stronghold, he enters an adjacent building through a broken window from which a young police officer, Hilal, emerges, pistol in his belt.

In the basement, Hilal discovered brand new scales, still in their boxes, “for weighing drugs,” he said, and boxes of glass pipettes, test tubes and tubes which, according to him, were used to make pills. methamphetamines – he looked up the word on his phone.

“I am shocked by the level of crimes,” says Ali, 30, one of the young fighters from Idlib. “God will take revenge,” predicts the other, Moudar Ghanem.