Oscar-Nominated Director Feras Fayyad On The Fall Of Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad, The Man Who Ordered His Imprisonment And Torture

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: Through a popular uprising and a long and hideous civil war, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime tottered at times, but held on, propped up by allies Russia and Iran.

But filmmaker Feras Fayyad, who endured torture in Assad’s prisons, never gave up the certainty that one day the dictator would be ousted. “I believed in that,” he tells Deadline. “The world has been through so many times of rising dictatorship and genocide, but in general there was an end to them, all of them.

There’s no way that they will go on like this [indefinitely].” The fateful day for Assad came in early December, when rebel forces entered Damascus, and the dictator hightailed it to Moscow and the embrace of his patrons at the Kremlin.

He left without so much as a goodbye to his supporters. “This was the most important [truth] for the people that was supporting him and standing behind him to understand — that this coward will leave them alone,” Fayyad observes. “And he left them alone, naked, without any power… He was lying and lying and lying to the last moment, the last second, lying to them [that he wouldn’t flee] and they deeply believed in his lies… Of course, for a lot of them it was like a shock, an earthquake under their feet and they have to process this faster than any normal human can do.” The collapse of the Assad regime abruptly threw open the doors to prisons where thousands of perceived enemies of his rule had been detained, tortured or disappeared.