If not for his handsome older brother's appetite for risk, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad might still be a bookish ophthalmologist living in London.
Bashar was never meant to rule — that was Bassel al-Assad's destiny.
But on a foggy morning in 1994, the heir to his father's dictatorship made one choice that transformed the fate of his family, his country and himself.
Bassel didn't wear a seatbelt.
The 31-year-old army colonel jumped into his Mercedes and made for the airport so he could fly to the Alps for a skiing holiday with a friend.
Hurtling along at 240 kilometres per hour with his chauffeur relegated to the back seat, Bassel collided with a barrier and died instantly.
His father, Hafez al-Assad, had spent decades slowly tightening his grip on power in Syria, with the view of building a dynasty that would rule the country for generations.
Bassel's death left him scrambling for a new successor.
Eventually, he settled on his middle son, 29-year-old Bashar, who had none of Bassel's glamour or military experience, and was instead an aspiring eye doctor living in London.
Bashar was called home, and the regime's propagandists quickly attempted to build a cult of personality around the geeky, retiring ophthalmologist so his rise to power would seem inevitable to the Syrian people.
"It was kind of a race against time," David Lesch, an Assad biographer, told NBC in 2015.
"His father wanted to build up Bashar al-Assad's legitimacy inside the government, give him positions of authority inside the government, enough so that … he'd be able to take over."
And in 2000, at the age of 34, Bashar was hurtled onto the throne when his father died of a heart attack.
There was plenty of scepticism about Bashar's chances of holding onto power.
Many within the ranks of his government did not want Syria to become a dynastic dictatorship — and certainly not one ruled by a seemingly shy doctor with a British-born wife and Western sensibilities.
But despite appearances, Bashar and Asma al-Assad have always harboured the capacity for brutality and bloodthirsty ambition.
Over more than two decades, this couple has sunk to new depths of depravity to hold on.
Through civil war, oppression and support of the Kremlin, they have amassed what the US government estimates to be $US1 billion in "ill-gotten riches at the expense of the Syrian people through their control over an extensive, illicit network with links in Europe, the Gulf, and elsewhere".
Like so many dictators before them, the Assads somehow believed they would be immune to the forces of history.
And like so many dictators before them, their dreams for their dynasty have seemingly ended in ruin.
From a 'rose in the desert' to the 'first lady of hell'
Bashar and Asma knew their position was tenuous when he became Syria's leader at the turn of the century.
Dissenters within the ranks were jettisoned through purges or forced resignations so Bashar could fill his inner circle with loyalists.
And while the country initially enjoyed the so-called Damascus Spring — a brief period of reform and debate about the country's future — it quickly turned to winter when hundreds of intellectuals and dissidents disappeared off the streets.
Bashar found he could establish his dominance through fear, surveillance and murder, but it proved more difficult for his wife to overcome her status as an outsider.
The Assad family is part of the Alawite sect, a religious group that comprises about 10 per cent of Syria's population, but has slowly gained influence over the country's economy, military and security apparatus.
Asma, meanwhile, was born to Sunni parents in the UK and worked as a London investment banker before she moved to Syria to marry Bashar.
"At first, she wasn't treated as part of the family," Ayman Abdelnour, a former friend and adviser to Bashar al-Assad, told Sky UK in 2021.
"She is from Homs, and a Sunni, and her Arabic wasn't good, so she wasn't allowed to speak to the media in case she [made] mistakes. They didn't even let her have the title [of] first lady."
While she might have struggled to connect with the country's Alawite elite, Asma engaged the services of an international public relations firm to spruik her image abroad as a glamorous and modern first lady.
The result was a profile in American Vogue so controversial, that it has since been scrubbed from the internet.
In an article entitled "A Rose in the Desert", Asma was hailed as "glamorous, young, and very chic", a "thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement".
The piece was published in early 2011, just as the Arab Spring movement spread around the Middle East and North Africa.
While Vogue was hailing Syria as "a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings", the Assad regime began slaughtering and kidnapping tens of thousands of civilians to quash the growing rebellion.
The reporter who wrote it, Juliet Joan Buck, later said her time with the Assads was unnerving.
She said she was followed by intelligence officers, her phone was bugged, and the Assad family was odd and slightly menacing.
She described the Assads as "the devil and his wife", and nicknamed Asma "the first lady of hell", but insisted she was under strict instructions by Vogue to write an apolitical puff piece.
By 2012, the country was spiralling towards full-blown civil war.
The Assads once dreamed of a dictatorship that could be concealed behind a thin veneer of youthful glamour.
But faced with exile or surrender, they chose instead unimaginable violence.
The dictator's wife wears Louboutins
The rebellion may have started as an uprising against the Assad family's decades of unchecked power, but it quickly descended into horror.
This was not a war with two sides.
It morphed into a multi-faceted battle involving rebel armies, foreign powers that sent money and weapons to their chosen group, and extremist jihadist organisations who sought to exploit the chaos.
The notorious Islamic State terrorist group (IS) took control of about a third of Syrian territory in its bid to create a so-called caliphate, which collapsed in 2019.
The Assad regime, backed by Iran, their Hezbollah allies, and eventually Russia, would seemingly stop at nothing to retain power.
Barrel bombs — oil drums filled with explosives and metal fragments — were dropped on multiple cities, as were chemical weapons such as sarin gas and white phosphorous.
Civilians deemed enemies of the state, including the elderly and even children, were taken to a notorious military prison and tortured.
The United Nations estimates that 306,887 civilians died between March 2011 and March 2021, though the true figure is believed to be much higher.
But even as war raged around her, Asma refused to leave her husband's side.
"Yes, I was offered the opportunity to leave Syria, or rather, to run from Syria," she told a Russian TV network in 2016.
"These offers included guarantees of safety and protection for my children and even financial security. It doesn't take a genius to know what these people were really after. It was a deliberate attempt to shatter people's confidence in their president."
Leaked emails suggest that despite being the target of international sanctions, she continued to enjoy a lavish lifestyle, shopping for jewellery, antiques and designer shoes online through a network of emissaries.
She sent a friend photos of Christian Louboutin jewel-encrusted high heels, offering to include an extra pair in her shipment.
"Haha?I actually LOVE them!!!?" the friend responded.
"But I don't think they're not going 2 b useful any time soon unfortunately."
Experts say that while Asma may have been sidelined by the Assad family in the early years of her marriage, the war gave her an opportunity to grab a seat at the table.
"She backed her husband fully," said biographer Ayman Abdelnour.
"Her position matched whatever he was doing militarily: bombings, killings and torturing."
When her mother-in-law, Anisa Makhlouf, died in 2016, Asma embraced her status as the matriarch of the Assad family, and, according to experts, became a feared power player in her husband's regime.
From war lords to drug lords
Like so many dictatorships before it, the Assad regime was unravelled by a man at the helm who got sloppy, comfortable, and overly confident in the support of his powerful friends.
In recent years, Bashar and Asma appear to have hollowed out what remains of Syria's economy, acquiring stakes in business projects and private companies, often sidelining wealthy families and allies in the process.
"In his two decades in power, Bashar seems to have largely undone what his father had been patiently building," an analysis by The Syria Report concluded in 2022.
"Rather than enlarging his support base, he has tightened it by first pushing out the traditional elite and then pushing out the generation that helped him accede to power."
They also appear to have turned Syria into a narco-state, allowing the country to become the world's largest producer of Captagon, an addictive amphetamine drug that is popular on the Middle Eastern party scene.
Syria's income from the drug in 2021 was about $US5.7 billion, according to an investigation by Germany's Der Spiegel.
The drug helped enrich the Assads, but they also used its proliferation through the region as leverage to try to normalise relations with their neighbours.
While the Assads lined their own pockets, their country was collapsing.
In 2020, 1 US dollar was worth about 900 Syrian pounds. Last week, it was worth 17,500 Syrian pounds.
The currency's collapse has helped fuel hyperinflation and push 90 per cent of the population below the poverty line.
And so when a ragtag group of rebels led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched a surprise offensive late last month, Assad's poorly paid, untrained, and exhausted men were no match.
Assad's staunchest allies, Russia and Iran, who propped him up through a decade of civil war, pledged unconditional support to his government earlier this week.
But with Iran busy fighting Israel, and Russia stuck in its own quagmire in Ukraine, neither regime has offered much in the way of meaningful support.
Out of friends and options, Asma and the children reportedly fled to Moscow last week, while her brothers went to the United Arab Emirates.
By all accounts, Bashar was alone as his enemies reached the city gates.
"This inner circle with Bashar, they just disappeared … changed their mobile numbers," Bassam Barabandi, a former senior Syrian diplomat told The Wall Street Journal.
"They are not communicating with anyone anymore."
As rebels stormed Damascus, witnesses say they destroyed the posters of the Assad men that had adorned every building and street corner for decades.
Torn down was Hafez, who dreamed of a family dynasty to rule Syria forever.
Torn down was Bassel, the golden prince who died before his time.
And torn down was Bashar, who at that very moment, was on his way to the airport to flee to an undisclosed location.
