There was pain in Safouh Atassi’s voice as he spoke about the barbarism, bloodshed and chaos that has devastated his native Syria.
“It’s a very sad situation,” the 85-year-old retired urologist was saying last week, when I visited his oceanfront Seagrove home to talk about the horrors endured by the people of Aleppo, the war-ravaged city where he was born and raised and, 50 years ago, helped establish a medical school.
“Besides the many people who have been killed – more than 300,000 civilians have died – there are another 10 or 15 million that have left the country,” he continued. “Many others are in jail, and we can only wonder what’s going to happen to them. Then there’s the calamity of the historical treasures in Aleppo, Palmyra and other places in Syria being destroyed.
“But what makes this especially tragic,” he added, “is that much of this could have been prevented.”
It was then that Atassi’s tone changed. Anguish turned to anger. Despair became disgust.
He called Syrian president Bashar al-Assad the “worst butcher ever” – worse than his father, Hafez, another tyrant who reigned as the country’s president from 1971 to 2000. He compared the atrocities committed during the past five years to Nazi atrocities in WWII. And he wonders why the good people of the world weren’t outraged enough to step in and save the Syrians.
He’s particularly puzzled by President Barack Obama’s refusal to follow through on his “red line” warning to Assad in August 2012, when the U.S. commander-in-chief threatened military intervention if Syrian forces used chemical weapons against anti-government rebels.
The United Nations has said it has proof that Syrian forces dumped chlorine gas on opposition fighters on at least three occasions, but the U.S. continued to provide only token support to the rebels.
“During the first two years of the uprising, if the moderate rebels had gotten just a little help – not just verbally but militarily, perhaps by neutralizing the Syrian Air Force – Assad would be gone,” said Atassi, who has lived in Vero Beach since turning over his Wisconsin medical practice to his son and retiring here in 1996.
“Everybody thought it was going to happen, too, especially after President Obama drew that red line in the sand,” he continued. “The revolution was taking hold. There were defections from the Syrian military. People were thinking: ‘If the United States does something, Assad is done.’ But it never materialized.
“Gradually, things deteriorated.”
After more than a year of Russian air strikes that pummeled the resistance and bolstered his defenses, Assad has successfully repelled the final wave of the rebellion.
The evacuation of civilians and resistance fighters from the last rebel-held part of Aleppo concluded last week, putting all of Syria’s industrial capital, much of it now in ruins, back under the control of government forces.
Atassi said he monitored the entire Syrian situation – what began as a peaceful protest quickly escalated to a violent uprising and, ultimately, to civil war – via television and newspapers. Before there were headlines, he said he followed the conflict through Facebook posts and tried to help by raising money, which he sent to people he knew there.
“These people were asking for freedom, to improve their lives, end a dictatorship,” he said. “I was so enthusiastic about it, and I thought I should do something.”
In fact, he said his family has past ties to the Syrian government. His brother-in-law was once prime minister and a distant cousin was a former president, but both were eventually jailed by Assad for more than a decade for opposing his policies and were released only because they were expected to die soon afterward.
“I still have a nephew who lives in Damascus, but I have not talked to him in quite a while,” he said. “I also have another nephew who lived in Aleppo until a year ago. The last I heard, he’s in Lebanon.”
The conflict in Syria began in March 2011 in the southern city of Daraa, where protests were ignited by the arrest and torture of teenagers who painted in Arabic on a school wall, “The people want to topple the regime!”
More protesters took to the streets after armed security forces fired on and killed several demonstrators. The unrest triggered nationwide demonstrations demanding Assad’s resignation.
By July 2011, the number of protesters in Syria had swelled to the hundreds of thousands, and the regime’s use of force only stiffened their resolve. Eventually, rebels began taking up arms to defend themselves and expel government forces from their communities.
“There was a lot of corruption,” Atassi said. “People close to the regime profited and made tons of money, but the unemployment rate was at 30 percent and a lot of people were suffering.”
So when the Arab Spring came to Syria from Tunesia and Egypt, people started demonstrating peacefully for change.
“Then there was the atrocity with the kids,” he added. “After that, it was no longer a peaceful revolution. It became a civil war with moderates, along with members of the military who had defected, fighting the government. And for a while, Assad was losing. Then the Russians came to help him.” That was in September 2015.
Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin had forged a strategic alliance, and the Russian airstrikes not only turned the tide of the war against the rebels, but they also pushed back against the efforts of ISIS to create an Islamic caliphate in Syria.
The airstrikes did something more: They put the U.S., which already was conflicted about intervening militarily in Syria, in a more difficult position.
The U.S. was training and equipping many of the anti-government rebels the Russians were bombing under the guise of helping Assad fight ISIS, an enemy to Syria, Russia and the U.S.
“Russia said it was bombing ISIS, but they were really protecting Assad so they could expand their influence in the region,” Atassi said.
Atassi said Assad now owes Putin and already is his puppet. Their marriage, though, helps both countries because Russia can use its veto power on the UN Security Council to protect Syria, and Assad offers Putin greater influence in the Middle East.
Atassi first came to the U.S. in 1958 for a medical internship in Cleveland, where he met his wife, Donna, who was a nurse. He returned to Syria in 1961 to begin a urology practice and, in 1964, was asked to help establish a medical school in Aleppo.
Two years later, however, he became so concerned about the worsening political climate in Syria that he decided to move permanently to the U.S., only to have the Assad regime refuse to let him leave.
So he sneaked across the border into Turkey and eventually made his way to Wisconsin, where he practiced in Neenah for 30 years.
In 1996, Atassi and his wife moved to The Moorings, then built a beachfront home at Seagrove in 2001. Fifteen years later, he remains active, even vibrant, so much so that on his 85th birthday this month, he swam 85 laps in his backyard pool.
He plays tennis three mornings each week, plays golf twice per week and volunteers one morning per week at the Indian River Medical Center’s Cancer Center.
“I’m so fortunate to be here and in good health,” Atassi said. “That’s why I try to give back.”
But he has no plans to return to Syria. He hasn’t visited there since the late 1990s.
“I feel very strongly that I’m an American, that this is my country, this is my home,” Atassi said. “But I do feel the misery in Syria and especially Aleppo. I sympathize with the people. I was raised there. It’s part of me.”