Family business How Assad went from doctor to brutal dictator

In the face of it at least, the Bashar al-Assad of 2002 was a starkly different figure from the brutal autocrat he would become, ruling over a fragile state founded on torture, imprisonment and industrial murder.

- Peter Beaumont

He had been president then for just two years, succeeding his father, Hafez, whose own name was a byword for brutality.

For a while the gawky former ophthalmologist, who had studied medicine in London and married a British-Syrian wife, Asma, an investment banker at JP Morgan, was keen to show the world that Syria, under his leadership, could follow a different path.

Reaching out to the west, he pursued a public relations campaign to show the young Assad family as somehow ordinary despite the palaces and the ever-visible apparatus of repression.

Visiting Damascus in that year ahead of Bashar's state visit to the UK, arranged by then prime minister Tony Blair – the high point of that engagement – I was invited for a private coffee with Assad, who was sitting on a white sofa in an expensively tailored suit.

Suggesting some uncertainty, he was curious about how Syria was seen in the world, floating possibilities for a change, including a reset in the relationship between Damascus and Israel.

It was a constructed iteration of the Assads – highlighting Asma's much-vaunted "charitable" works and Bashar's brief embrace by the west – that nodded to an ambition to transform Hafez's Syria into something more like a version of Jordan's paternalistic royal family. More manicured. More PR savvy. A dictatorship all the same.

In the midst of the conversation, however, Bashar proffered a chilling and almost throwaway line as he reflected on the previous year's 9/11 attack on the US by al-Qaida and the subsequent American invasion of Afghanistan.

The world should know, Bashar insisted, that his father had been right all along in his brutal crushing of Islamist insurgents.

Twenty-two years later Bashar is gone, swept out of power by an offshoot of al-Qaida. And with the dramatic ending of the half-century of Assad rule, a key section of the map of the Middle East has been utterly redrawn.