Syria, what lies behind Rami Makhlouf’s strange accusations against his cousin Assad (and why it has to do with Moscow)

If penetrating the curtain of secrecy and mystery that has always been around the Damascus regime is not a simple task, The most obvious clues are the words of Rami Makhlouf, cousin of President Bashar al Assad and a key man for the former son of former President Hafez’s second son to remain in power.. For years indicated as the banker of the rais, but for months at the center of the rumors about his possible purge, in the management of the most important business, he preferred another tycoon, Samir Foz, last Sunday Rami published a video in the social networks. Addressing his cousin directly, he says: President (Assad), the security forces have begun to attack people’s liberties. These are his loyal followers. The dangerous situation and for God, if we continue, the situation in the country will be very difficult.

The unprecedented message, because Makhlouf uses a defiant tone and firm words while accusing the government security apparatus of carrying out an arrest campaign against employees of Syriatel, its cell phone company. You are adopting inhuman behavior, he says. All this after having defined in a previous video published on Saturday that the request to pay its debts to the tax authorities for more than 300 million euros is unfair. They ask me to distance myself from my companies and do exactly what they tell me to do, while I am blindfolded and cannot answer, he concludes.

To understand what’s on the table, you need to step back. Rami, a man always considered very close to the powerful Syrian mukhabarat, the intelligence of Damascus, was decisive in Bashar’s rise to power, after the death of his brother Basilio, considered the great puppeteer of the services, as well as the architect of the Bashar’s marriage to The Desert rose Asma, chosen to give the regime an appearance of respectability in European financial salons after the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the other hand, Makhlouf owes Bashar luck: he has financed the Syrian leader for the past 20 years and has supported much of the regime’s war efforts since 2012. Through his empire, he controls 60 percent of the Syrian economy, and despite being the target of US and EU sanctions, he has amassed a fortune of $ 18 billion. A fortune if we consider that the 2010 Syrian GDP amounted to 60 billion. Translated media: construction; car import, retail, tourism. And finally telecommunications, in which Syriatel’s mobile network was precisely the spearhead of its empire.

But why then did the pact between the two break? Rami pulled too hard? Or is it a “drama” for external use and consumption? If everything is silent from the presidential palace, apart from a meager statement by the Syrian telecommunications authority that reiterates the need to pay debts with the tax authorities, nothing has moved. The matter highlighted deep concern about the country’s precarious finances and led to speculation that Syrian First Lady Asma has taken a leading role in the big rebuilding business, cutting off her husband’s powerful cousin.

Leaving speculation aside, the family clash via social media comes after relations between Damascus and Moscow, the first ally, central to the regime’s military and political support and the maintenance of the status quo, appear to have passed. broken. The Kremlin, eager to reduce its military engagement, is in fact pressing Assad to give way to the opposition, but above all to involve Moscow in reconstruction matters. Two moves that Bashar evidently does not want to make, especially if the business is almost entirely in the hands of his cousin and therefore the family.

As a result, in mid-April, a group of Kremlin-related experts released a report signed by Aleksandr Aksenenok, a senior diplomat and former ambassador to Syria., who says: Damascus does not seem particularly interested in stabilizing the country and that it continues to seek a military solution with the support of its allies and unconditional financial and economic aid as in the old days of the Soviet-American clash in the Middle East, thundered Aksenenok . As if to say, in short, that the times when a steady stream of money could be expected from the Kremlin chests are over and the time has come for Assad to find a compromise if he wants to remain in power. In Moscow, Syria is feared to become a mini-Afghanistan just as the coronavirus crisis is hitting Russia in a particularly serious way. Therefore, the escalation of the media by Makhlouf comes in a period of particular weakness for Assad, who in addition to the tensions with Moscow at the center of the controversies over the deep economic crisis that the country is going through and the lack of efficiency in managing the coronavirus emergency, emphasizes Eugenio Dacrema, co-director of the Ispi Mena Center. And not only that. The specific criticisms come despite the fact that in Moscow they know very well that, from the Russian point of view, there is no valid alternative to Assad. They love Assad because they think they can control him, a Turkish diplomat said. Al Jazeera asking to remain anonymous. They don’t want Iran because they can’t. But both are causing great headaches for the Russians.