THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The most senior Syrian official to defect from Bashar al-Assad's regime has told how the "tragic and unbelievable" destruction of his country moved him to join the growing opposition movement.
Nawaf Fares, a former regime hardliner and security chief who was Syria's ambassador to Iraq, spoke out in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Telegraph yesterday - his first since announcing his dramatic decision to quit last week. As the first senior diplomat to abandon the government, it is thought his departure may pave the way for others to follow, leaving President Assad's regime even more exposed.
Yesterday, in a wide-ranging interview conducted by telephone from Qatar, where he has now sought refuge, Mr Fares made a series of devastating claims against the Assad regime, which he said was determined to be "victorious" whatever the cost.
• Jihadi units that Mr Fares himself had helped Damascus send to fight US troops in neighbouring Iraq were involved in the string of deadly suicide bomb attacks in Syria
• The attacks were carried on the direct orders of the Assad regime, in the hope that it could blame them on the rebel movement
• President Assad, who had a "violent streak" inherited from his father, was now living "in a world of his own"
Mr Fares spoke out as the violence in Syria continued unabated, with at least 28 people killed across the country yesterday. The town of Khirbet Ghazaleh in southern Syria was attacked by hundreds of troops backed by tanks and helicopter gunships, according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Meanwhile, United Nations observers visited the village of Treimsa, in central Hama province, in which up to 200 people are feared to have died on Thursday.
It was precisely such atrocities as these that forced Mr Fares to gradually question his own allegiance to the regime, ending 35 years of loyal service in which he worked as a policeman, regional governor and political security chief, becoming entrusted with some of its most sensitive tasks.
"At the beginning of the revolution, the state tried to convince people that reforms would be enacted very soon," he said. "We lived on that hope for a while. We gave them the benefit of the doubt, but after many months it became clear to me that the promises of reform were lies. That was when I made my decision. I was seeing the massacres perpetrated – no man would be able to live with himself, seeing what I saw and knowing what I know, to stay in the position." » | Ruth Sherlock, Beirut | Saturday, July 14, 2012
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