Assad was spending much of his time playing Candy Crush and other video games on his phone, according to the former Hezbollah operative I spoke with. He had sidelined the éminences grises of his father’s day and relied instead on a small circle of younger figures with dubious credentials. One of them, a former Al Jazeera journalist named Luna al-Shibl, doubled as Assad’s lover and also procured other women for him to have sex with, including the wives of high-ranking Syrian officers, according to former palace insiders and the former Israeli official.

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Ordinary soldiers were paid as little as $10 a month, far less than they needed to survive. The Syrian pound, which had once traded at 47 to the dollar, had reached a rate of 15,000 a dollar by 2023

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