Shabiha: The death gangs of Syria's Assad

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's shadowy “Shabiha" gangs started as racketeers and smugglers. The civil war in the country has turned these death groups into forces ultra-loyal to Syria's brutal regime.

As the five-year-long devastating war continues to claim lives and force thousands to leave their lands, attention falls on Assad's shadowy paramilitary gangs, who are accused of some of the country's worst massacres.

The death gangs of President Bashar al-Assad, known as Shabiha, a paramilitary force made up of decommissioned security personnel, infiltrate the public in plain clothes along with uniformed elements of the security forces.

During the civil war in the Shabiha has become increasingly prominent as irregular paramilitary troops, regime enforcers and the “ghost forces."

The origin of this ghost killer group goes back to the late 1970s and early '80s, when Assad's father and uncles ruled the country.

Hafez al-Assad was President; his brother Rifaat had a pivotal role in the security forces and his other brother, Jamil, was setting up and consolidating shadowy business dealings which allegedly included drug trafficking and weapons smuggling, according to Radwan Ziadeh, a longtime member of the Syrian opposition.

The gangs, initially drawn from the Assads' extended family and their Alawite sect, were described as mafia enforcers.

They made their living from smuggling [electrical appliances, tobacco, drugs, alcohol, antiquities, etc.] and imposing 'taxes' [i.e., extortion].

They are familiar for their brutality and cruelty and their blind devotion to their leaders.

Following the beginning of the Syrian uprising-turned-civil war in 2011, the Shabiha group, formerly lurking in the shadows and looked down on as trash, rose to the top of the Assad regime's interest. They were connected to the security forces and received orders directly from Bashar al-Assad.

Time described one of the Shabiha massacres in the following words: “children shot point-blank, throats slit, skulls crushed, entire families gunned down in their homes, the stench of charred human flesh…"