Assad’s childhood friend heads to Paris, for possible key role in Syrian opposition

Syrian defector Manaf Tlas, formerly one of President Bashar Assad’s closest friends and most trusted military colleagues, is en route to Paris after first fleeing Syria to Turkey, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Friday. A childhood friend of the president, Tlas seems set now to play a leading role in the opposition to Assad’s regime.

“Manaf Tlas, a senior official from the Syrian regime, a commander in the Republican Guard, has defected and is headed to Paris,” Fabius said at a Friends of Syria conference in Paris. Tlas’s wife, Thala Khair, is reportedly already in the French capital.

A member of Syria’s opposition National Council, Hassem Hashimi, described Tlass as a powerful figure in the Assad regime. “The defection of Tlass will encourage a lot of similar people to defect as well,” he told The Associated Press in Paris.

Tlas is also the son of the Assad regime’s former long-serving defense minister, Mustafa Tlas, who is also now in Paris. Manaf Tlas’s defection is the first from the president’s inner circle and was described by an Israeli analyst Thursday as the gravest blow yet to Assad’s regime.

The BBC on Friday quoted friends of Tlas as saying he told them in recent days that Assad’s regime is “taking the country to hell.”

Manaf Tlas and Bashar Assad have been friends since childhood, and the Tlas family, who are Sunni Muslims, have played a critical role in maintaining support for the Alawite Muslim Assads within the Syrian Sunni community. Brig.-Gen. Tlas was a battalion commander in Assad’s elite Republican Guard.

According to Israel’s Channel 2 news, Tlas’s father Mustafa, who was the Syrian army’s chief of staff from 1968-1972, and then served as minister of defense from 1972-2004, has also abandoned Bashar Assad, though more discreetly. “He has slipped quietly away to Paris,” said Channel 2’s Ehud Yaari, a respected Arab affairs analyst.

Many other members of the Tlas family hold senior positions up to and including the rank of general in the Syrian army, Yaari said, and it was hard to imagine that they would long continue in those positions now that Manaf Tlas had defected.

Manaf Tlas held failed talks with Syrian opposition leaders soon after anti-Assad unrest erupted in March of last year, the BBC reported at the time. Tlas was quoted then as saying that while Syria needed reform, Bashar Assad was the reformers’ best hope.

Manaf’s brother, Firas, is a billionaire businessman and part of the Sunni merchant class who have hitherto widely supported the Assad regime, Yaari noted. Now based in Dubai, although also reportedly often in Paris, Firas has lately been in contact with the Syrian opposition, Yaari said.

Yaari said Syrian state media briefly reported online on Manaf’s defection earlier Thursday, calling him a traitor, but then removed the item and had since issued no official comment.

The BBC said Friday that Manaf had told friends shortly before defecting that Bashar Assad should have resigned early in the uprising against him. The report said Tlas had been kept under partial houses arrest since May of last year, because he made clear his opposition to Assad’s handling of the uprising.

The report said Tlas had helped negotiate the release of prisoners held by the regime and sought to negotiate with the Syrian opposition, in vain. It said “the turning-point” for Tlas came in May 2011 at the city of Rastan. “In May 2011, power and mobile networks were cut off Rastan in preparation for an attack on the city by the official forces. Manaf Tlas ordered the services to be restored and promised the protesters they had the right to demonstrate peacefully. Celebrating this, protesters chanted his name, which was enough to anger Maher al-Assad, Bashar’s brother and head of the presidential guard, who ordered Manaf Tlas to stay at home. Gen Tlas continued going to his base but no longer with any power to issue orders.”

According to the BBC, many in the Syrian opposition “see Manaf Tlas as someone who has not been involved in bloodshed and believe he could play an important role in a transitional phase in rebuilding the military establishment.”

As the son of the longtime defense minister, Manaf Tlas was a member of the Syrian Baath Party aristocracy, part of a privileged class that flourished under the Assad dynasty.

His father and Assad’s father, Hafez, had been close friends since their days in the Syrian military academy in Homs and became even closer after being posted to Cairo in the late 1950s when Egypt and Syria merged into the United Arab Republic — a union that lasted three years. After Hafez Assad rose to power in the early 1970s, Mustafa Tlas became defense minister and the Syrian president’s most trusted lieutenant.

When Hafez died of a heart attack in 2000, Tlas helped engineer Bashar’s succession to the presidency and guided the inexperienced young doctor. Tlas was the leader of a coterie of old regime figures that critics blamed for reining in moves to liberalize the Syrian regime.

Associated Press contributed to this report.