From a Bond villain lair in the rugged heights overlooking Damascus, the all-seeing eye of a notorious Syrian military unit gazed down on a city it bled dry. Many of the bases of the elite Fourth Division formerly run by toppled president Bashar al-Assad's feared younger brother Maher now lie looted. But papers left strewn behind reveal how the man they called "The Master" and his cronies wallowed in immense wealth while some of their foot soldiers struggled to feed their families and even begged on the streets.
Piles of documents seen by AFP expose a vast economic empire that Maher al-Assad and his network of profiteers built by pillaging a country already impoverished by nearly 14 years of civil war.
Western governments long accused him and his entourage of turning Syria into a narco state, flooding the Middle East with captagon, an illegal stimulant used both as a party drug in the Gulf and to push migrant workers through punishingly long days in the gruelling heat. The centre of this corrupt web was Maher al-Assad's private offices, hidden in an underground labyrinth of tunnels -- some big enough to drive a truck through -- cut into a mountain above Damascus.
A masked guard took AFP through the tunnels with all the brisk efficiency of a tour guide -- the sauna, the bedroom, what appeared to be cells and various "emergency" exit routes.
But at its heart, down a steep flight of stairs, lay a series of vaults with iron-clad doors. The guard said he had counted nine vaults behind one sealed-off room. He said safes had been "broken open" by looters who entered the office just hours after the Assad brothers fled Syria on December 8 when Damascus fell to an Islamist-led offensive, ending the family's five-decade rule.
