A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad, episode 3 review: How this mild mannered eye doctor ended up killing thousands

The third and final instalment explores how Bashar al-Assad, once employed at the Western Eye Hospital in London, and his smart wife Asma, ended up cowering in their presidential palace from Isis

Family portrait: Bashar al-Assad (second from left) followed in his father's cruel methods (Getty/Beshara)

At the conclusion of the third and final instalment of A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad we had a better idea than we did at the start about the fundamental question, as stated by one of the many experts interviewed for the documentary: “How does this mild mannered eye doctor end up killing hundreds of thousands of people?”

Why indeed. How did Bashar (once employed at the Western Eye Hospital in Marylebone), and his smart westernised wife Asma, end up this way, cowering in their presidential palace from so-called Islamic State (of Iraq and Syria)?

Another way of asking the question – and the one well posed as the Arab Spring blew into Syria – was why Bashar reacted the way he did to some of the small peaceful protests that started to erupt about petty corruption and abuse of power by local officials.

There was a moment, around the middle of 2011, according to one ex-cabinet minister in exile, when Bashar – a youngish leader by Arab standards – could have posed as the leader of youth, and pledged to side with the people against the predations of his police and bureaucracy apparatus. “They would have carried him shoulder high,” according to this witness.

Instead, Bashar made a speech in the Syrian parliament that amounted to a declaration of war: “Putting down rebellion is a national, moral and religious duty.” Bashar’s posters got the slipper treatment, shortly before entire towns were reduced to dust.

And so he went to war, sending mortars and sarin gas into civilian areas, and torturing, maiming and killing opponents. British and American former diplomats and security agents (including the former boss of MI6), and former friends and associates of the Assads were on hand to attest to what he did, and what he knew. There are documents to show that he personally approved any major decision – with his own signature. His spooks used the sat nav co-ordinates of the mobile phone of the brave Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin to murder her.

Why? Because he knew no other way. It was the family way, following his father’s methods (his father, Hafez, had been dictator for the previous three decades). His mother and then his wife shoved Bashar towards such cruelty – the ghoulish voices of his daddy. His brother joined in the fighting, even personally going into the field to fire at protesters. Bashar’s brother-in-law also helped him subdue whole cities, until he began to voice doubts and was murdered by Bashar’s secret police.

The Syrian civil war and the subsequent rise of so-called Islamic State had much to do with the counterproductive decision early on by a security cop in one Syrian town to torture a 13-year-old boy to death and then deliver the corpse to his parents – complete with cigarette burns and his penis chopped off. That was one of the atrocities that set the whole thing off. The cop was Bashar’s cousin once removed. Evil – and stupidity – was in his DNA too.