Bashar al-Assad will find no peace in Moscow

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.