Nawaf Fares: The Ambassador Who Walked Away

Nawaf Fares had spent his career in the service of the Assad system. He was a Ba'ath party veteran from Deir ez-Zor — the eastern Syrian city on the Euphrates, predominantly Sunni, that would later become a major theater of the civil war and ISIS territory. He rose through the party and government ranks to become governor of several provinces and eventually Syria's ambassador to Iraq.

When the uprising began in March 2011, Fares was in Baghdad. He watched from his diplomatic post as the Assad government responded to peaceful protests with arrests, torture, and eventually mass killing. He was a Sunni from a protest-heavy region watching a predominantly Alawite security apparatus crush a predominantly Sunni uprising.

For sixteen months he remained at his post. Then on July 11, 2012, he drove from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan — slipping away from his own security detail. From Amman he flew to Qatar. He issued a statement announcing his defection.

He was the highest-ranking diplomat to defect from Assad at that point. The Free Syrian Army welcomed his defection as a sign that the regime was cracking. Western governments received it as further evidence of Assad's isolation. Damascus accused him of being a traitor bribed by foreign powers.

In the weeks following his defection, Fares gave a series of interviews making explosive claims about the inner workings of the Assad government. He alleged that the Assad government had authorized the suicide bombing attacks in Damascus and Aleppo in 2012 — attacks the government blamed on terrorists — and that the regime had already used or was planning to use chemical weapons against opposition areas.