Bashar al-Assad will find no peace in Moscow

Like many tyrants before him, the Syrian dictator will live his life on the run – and die in fear.

Moscow may have granted Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad asylum on “humanitarian grounds”. But he will never truly be safe again. When leaders like Assad have their backs against the wall, they have an impossible decision to make. Do they try to shoot their way out of the problem, or do they decide to flee? Usually, they choose the former. In large part, that’s because finding the right place to hide away is all but impossible.

Assad’s regime has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Many millions were forced to flee. As evidenced by the rapid advance of the rebels that toppled this bloodthirsty tyrant, much of the population hates him, and that hatred didn’t disappear the moment he slipped out the gates of the presidential palace. His first challenge would have been convincing someone, anyone, to take him in. Would you want your country to host someone best known for using chemical weapons against women and children? Probably not, and many voters in democracies feel the same way. Assad’s haven was always going to be a sympathetic autocracy.

But not just any autocracy. Assad has created so much suffering that his enemies will inevitably seek him wherever he hides. Now that he no longer controls the levers of power, neither his soldiers nor his intelligence officers will stand guard. That means he needed to find a country that’s not just willing to take him in, but which is also resilient and powerful enough to protect him. And several of Assad’s forerunners have quickly exhausted their host’s patience. Take Charles Taylor, the brutal Liberian war criminal who stepped down from power in the belief that he would enjoy exile in Nigeria. Despite their initial assurances, the Nigerian government stopped protecting him after it came under immense pressure from abroad. Instead of a hilltop villa, Taylor will likely die in a cell. Assad, now at the complete mercy of another ruthless dictator, must hope that his host won’t change his mind.

Given that he is only 59 years old, the former president of Syria could need around-the-clock protection for multiple decades. And in that time frame, it is very possible that Russia could see serious upheaval, or perhaps even turn against its own dictator. After all, while hardly overburdened by existing humanitarian critiques of his government, Putin is already 72. Any successor – or revolutionary – may find exiling Assad an easy way to appease the international community. That may sound unrealistic at this moment, but something like it has happened before. After Chad’s dictator Hissène Habré fled to Senegal, it transitioned towards a democracy and he was indicted for crimes against humanity.

But even if Russia is strong enough to resist external pressure to deliver him, and stable enough as a system not to experience drastic political change soon, the regime is not omnipotent. Even if it wants to protect Assad and his family, it simply might not be able to. In this sense, the fate of General Anastasio Somoza Debayle is instructive. After rebels toppled the Nicaraguan, Paraguay’s dictator, Alfredo Stroessner, agreed to host him – in luxury, at first. Somoza had a driver, an expensive car and even a swimming pool. But then, his illusions of tranquil retirement were shattered in an instant when his former life caught up with him. Met with a hail of bullets and a rocket launcher courtesy of the same Sandinistas who drove him out of power, he died in the very capital of the regime that was supposed to guarantee his safety.

And herein lies perhaps the greatest worry for Bashar al-Assad. Stroessner’s Paraguay isn’t Putin’s Russia, but there are few men on Earth with more enemies than him. Those he has wronged will never abandon the pursuit – pressuring Moscow to release him, or taking his punishment into their own hands. Just as Assad can leave Syria and travel a great distance to a foreign land, so can the men he imprisoned and tortured. Assad could be shot tomorrow or die an old man. But whatever happens next, he will have to live in constant fear until the very end.