Destroying a Nation

This chapter is intended to help explain how it was possible for Syria to end up in the bloody sectarian-tinted Syrian War that started in 2011 after almost half a century of Ba’thist dictatorship. As will be seen, there are many similarities between the Syrian War that started in 2011, and earlier periods in which the Ba’th regime heavily repressed any opposition, particularly the Sunni Muslim opposition movements, such as the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and the Islamist Mujahidin that split off from the Muslim Brotherhood. The scale of violence before and after the Syrian Revolution was very different, however. Whereas before the Syrian Revolution opposition movements and insurgencies were bloodily suppressed locally in cities like Hama, Homs, Aleppo and Damascus, after the revolution a greater part of the country was involved in the confrontation with the regime. Moreover, different from the pre-revolution period, after March 2011 the opposition movements started to receive political, financial and military aid from abroad, from countries that started to interfere in Syria’s internal affairs, giving the intra-Syrian war also the dimension of a violent war by proxy.

As far as the origins of the Syrian Revolution are concerned, much can be traced back to the power structure and composition of the regime, its dictatorship, its strong domination by people from the Alawi minority and their corruption, all combined with its incapability to introduce any substantial reforms. In order to better understand the Syrian Revolution, and the Syrian regime’s reaction to it, it is important to be aware of the history and background of the Syrian Ba’thist regime since its takeover of power in 1963.

On 8 March 1963, the Ba’thist military, under the leadership of the secret Military Committee, succeeded in taking over power by a military coup, along with the military of other groups, including Nasserists and Independent Unionists. Together they deposed the so-called ‘separatist regime’ that had ended the Syrian–Egyptian union on 28 September 1961, and had been dominated by a group of Sunni Damascene officers, who were now purged from the army.

It was an essential moment in Syrian Ba’thist history, decisive for the further power structure of the Ba’th regime for decades to come. After the coup, the number of minority officers greatly increased in strength at the expense of Sunnis.

A principal reason was that the Ba’thist military leaders involved in the coup had called up numerous officers and non-commissioned officers with whom they were related through family, tribal, extended family or regional ties, to swiftly consolidate their newly achieved power positions.¹

Most of the military called up in this way had a minoritarian background, which is not surprising since most members of the secret Military Committee, who supervised the activities of the Ba’thist military organisation themselves, had a minority background, as has been noted above. This form of recruitment was later explained in a confidential internal document of the Ba’th Party’s Syrian Regional Command as follows:

The initial circumstances following the Revolution and its attendant difficulties urged the calling-up of a large number of reserve military (officers and non-commissioned officers), party members and supporters, to fill the gaps resulting from purges of the opponents and to consolidate and defend the Party’s position. This urgency made it impossible at the time to apply objective standards in the calling-up operation. Rather, friendship, family relationship and sometimes mere personal acquaintance were the basis [of admission], which led to the infiltration of a certain number of elements who were alien to the Party’s logic and points of departure. Once the difficult phase had been overcome, this issue was exploited as a weapon for slandering the intentions of some comrades and for casting doubts on them.²

The latter part of this quotation obviously referred to the accusations that some members of the Ba’thist Military Committee had, on sectarian grounds, packed the army with members of their own communities. According to the Syrian author Mahmud Sadiq (pseudonym) the representation of Alawis among the newly appointed officers was as high as 90 per cent. How extremely important the purges of 1963 turned out to be in the longer term can be concluded from the fact that the origins of a significant number of officers holding senior positions in the Syrian armed forces in the 1990s could still be traced to this batch.³

It is hardly surprising that Alawi officers played such an important role thereafter, because the highest positions in the Ba’thist Military Committee were occupied by Alawis, notably Muhammad ‘Umran, Salah Jadid and Hafiz al-Asad. Salah Jadid first became head of personnel in the army. From this position, he could build up a network of loyalists within the army. Afterwards, he was chief-of-staff of the Syrian army between August 1963 and September 1965, also a central position in this respect. Hafiz al-Asad became commander of the Syrian airforce. Muhammad ‘Umran, the eldest of the three, commanded the 70th Armoured Brigade, stationed south of Damascus, which was to be the backbone of the Ba’thist military organisation for some years to come.

The three Alawi leaders of the Military Committee played a paramount role in the Ba’thist transformation of the Syrian armed forces. They swiftly consolidated their newly achieved positions of power, thanks to their efficient organisation and planning and to all the military supporters who had been mobilised. Within a few months they succeeded in purging their most important Nasserist and Independent Unionist military opponents, who, once again, happened to be mainly Sunnis, whether coincidentally or not.

The climax of the Ba’thist power monopolisation came on 18 July 1963, when a group of predominantly Sunni Nasserist officers, led by Colonel Jasim ‘Alwan, staged an abortive coup. Most of the officers who bloodily suppressed this coup were of minoritarian backgrounds, and among them Alawis played the most prominent role. This had nothing to do with sectarianism, but was later exploited as such by Sunni political opponents of the Ba’th regime, who resented that there were so many minority members among the new rulers and therefore tried to give the impression that the purges of Sunni officers were primarily based on sectarian motives. In this way, they also tried to discredit and undermine the position of the Ba’th regime in the eyes of the Sunni majority of the population.

This was a pattern that was to repeat itself every time Sunni or non-Alawi officers were deposed and purged from the army by Alawi officers. Time and again, non-Alawi officers resented the prominent position of Alawi officers in the Syrian armed forces. They suspected and accused them of sectarianism, which it was not really at first, but was nevertheless perceived as such. The Ba’thist Alawi military leaders were fervent secularists, and therefore should not be expected to be sectarian motivated. But in order to achieve power, they had allowed many loyalists to enter the army ‘who were alien to the Party’s logic and points of departure’. These ‘loyalist’ people may, from their side, have been sectarian motivated, but to get rid of them was easier said than done, because the regime depended on them. Purges of Alawi officers came only later.

And, if the Ba’thist Alawi leaders might have been sectarian motivated, it was not in the sense of religion, but rather in the sense of ‘belonging to the Alawi community’.

From the Nasserist coup in July 1963 onwards, anti-Ba’thist publications started to appear, stressing the so-called sectarian character of the regime. Muta’ Safadi’s book Hizb al-Ba’th: Ma’sat al-Mawlid Ma’sat al-Nihayah (‘The Ba’th Party: The Tragedy of its Beginning and the Tragedy of its End’), published in 1965, was one of the first examples in this respect.⁴ As it turned out, the title was premature, because more than half a century later, the Ba’th regime was still in power. Nevertheless, Safadi’s book includes many interesting observations from the point of view of Sunnis who felt discriminated against by Alawis and other minority people, who apparently had brought the centuries-old dominance of Sunni Arabs to an end. Safadi saw this as a kind of ‘plot and conspiracy’. In a polemic way Safadi argued that the Ba’th Party was actually a ‘sectarian movement which had designs on supplanting the traditional order in which Sunnis were dominant’. About the religious minorities, with the Alawis placed first, followed by Druzes, Isma’ilis and Christians, Safadi wrote that they ‘were most ambitious to overthrow the order of traditional society in which Sunni–urban Muslims dominated’.⁵ This was indeed what later took shape. The Ba’th was not a sectarian movement, however, as alleged by Safadi (who had earlier also been a Ba’thist), but rather the opposite with its secular ideology; and the takeover of the Ba’th in 1963 was not a ‘sectarian plot’. More important, however, is that some Sunni observers nevertheless perceived it as such, thereby making it an inseparable part of political dynamics, whether justified or not.

Safadi, who himself was imprisoned after the abortive Nasserist coup of July 1963, wrote about his experiences in the al-Mazzah prison in Damascus in a way that reminds us of the situation more than half a century later, as it exists today:

All those who have been interrogated and submitted to torture, will remember the names of their Zabaniyah (‘angels who thrust the damned into hell’). They will also remember that the most violent torturers among them belonged to specific religious communities, and more than that: they carried out their torture and their shouting matches with sectarian methods. The hundreds of prisoners who were brought to the al-Mazzah prison after the 18th of July 1963, and I was one of them, are not able to forget the director of the prison; neither can they forget the tortures and interrogations to which they were subjected … and the cursing against their [Sunni] articles of faith with the most degrading words.

The prisoners who were aware of it understood the complotting measures [of creating discord between Sunnis and members of minorities]. They tried to withhold themselves from hating all Alawis, just because the director of the prison, or the leader of the torture department, or all his assistants were Alawis, who showed their being Alawis by insulting the beliefs of the punished [Sunni] prisoners.

Likewise, the prisoners tried to prevent themselves from hating Christians, because the most ferocious ‘executor of the law’ who was known in the al-Mazzah prison belonged to the Christian community. Likewise, two or three supervisors who tortured day and night were from the Druze community.⁶

Safadi’s description reflects a phenomenon that might be interpreted as a kind of revanchism of sectarian minorities against Sunnis, some of whom in the past had so often had a denigrating attitude towards those minorities. In the past, many minority members had often been in a subservient position vis-a-vis Sunnis who generally had had a superior position, although some individual people from minorities, like Christians, or people of Kurdish origin, had had a prominent political role in Syria as well; but before the Ba’th came to power they were not that many.

Although Safadi’s description dates from more than half a century ago, it still appears to be very similar to that of Syria’s prisons of today, albeit that the situation has drastically deteriorated during the period of the Syrian Revolution that started in 2011. The number of Alawi torturers must now be even higher, whereas the importance of other sectarian minorities has declined.

Leaving polemics aside, many of Safadi’s observations have turned out to be correct.⁷

After the Ba’thist military had purged the army of their most important non-Ba’thist rivals, they were left among one another and started an intra-Ba’thist struggle for power. Most of the leading Ba’thist rulers had formed their own groups of loyalist supporters, who to a great extent originated from their own sectarian communities and home regions. The army and intelligence (Mukhabarat) officers gradually started to form a new kind of class, enjoying all kinds of privileges, some even controlling parts of provinces or cities, or governmental institutions, in which nothing could be undertaken, except with their approval. In the words of Munif al-Razzaz, former Secretary General of the National Command of the Ba’th Party, it appeared as if the new regime adopted characteristics similar to those of the Andalusian ‘petty kings’ (muluk al-tawa’if ), with each ‘king possessing a piece of the state apparatus which he arbitrarily handled as he liked’.⁸

As the military Ba’thist organisation was still full of members who had been recruited on an opportunist basis, as described above, their military leaders were obliged to rely on these same people to a large extent, in order to maintain a strong position vis-a-vis Ba’thist rivals. It turned out that selective criteria had been used when dismissing a great number of Sunni officers after the coup of 1963, and that Sunnis were being discriminated against when applying for the Military Academy and other military training centres. Members of sectarian minorities were advantaged at various levels.

Some military units started to be composed of mainly one sectarian group, like the 70th Armoured Brigade, that almost exclusively consisted of Alawi military and was led by Alawi General Muhammad ‘Umran.

This phenomenon exists until the present day, and has even become stronger than it was half a century ago, due to continuous practices of co-optation and favouritism, also in the military academies.

There were also Sunni commanders, but they could do very little independently when they had to rely on crews that were mainly Alawi. The authority of these Sunni commanders over their Alawi crews could easily be brought to naught if Alawi officers serving in other armed units instructed their co-religionists not to carry out the orders of their Sunni superiors. Some Alawi officers exercised active control in this way over a far larger part of the Syrian armed forces than they were formally entitled to under the official military command structure.

Already as early as 1955 the chief of Syria’s Intelligence Bureau, Colonel ‘Abd al-Hamid Sarraj, ‘discovered to his surprise that no fewer than 55 per cent or so of the non-commissioned officers belonged to the “Alawi sect”’.⁹

The leading officers of the Ba’thist Military Committee started a struggle for power in which one after the other was expelled or eliminated, until only one leader was left, notably Alawi General Hafiz al-Asad, who after his coup of 16 November 1970 was to become Syria’s leader for the next 30 years.¹⁰

The first member of the Military Committee to be expelled in 1965–6 was Alawi General Muhammad ‘Umran, who had been the eldest founding member. It had little to do with principles or ideology, but rather with power. ‘Umran was accused by the other members of the Military Committee of spreading the phenomenon of sectarianism in the armed forces. Not only Sunni officers accused him of this, but also his Alawi colleagues, Salah Jadid and Hafiz al-Asad. They, just like ‘Umran, depended largely on personal Alawi military supporters in order to be able to maintain their positions of power and they profited from sectarian, regional and tribal loyalties to strengthen their positions equally as well, but they were wise enough not to speak about this openly.

‘Umran, however, had openly declared that ‘the Fatimiyah should play their role’ (Inn al-Fatimiyah yajib an ta’kudh Dawraha), meaning that the Alawis, Druzes and Isma’ilis (being the so-called Fatimiyah) should play a key role against his most prominent rival at that time, the Sunni president and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, General Amin al-Hafiz and his Sunni supporters. ‘Umran’s open use of sectarianism as a weapon was to utterly fail, however, as a tactic.

Most Ba’thist officers did not want to tolerate the use of such overt sectarian-tinged declarations since, according to the secular Arab nationalist Ba’th ideology, Ba’thists should strive to banish sectarian, regional and tribal group feelings. In later periods of the power struggle among Ba’thist officers it was repeatedly proven that, in the final analysis, those who spoke openly in favour of strengthening the position of officers from their own religious community, as a result weakened their own positions rather than those of their opponents, who also reinforced their positions on a sectarian basis but did not openly speak about it. It was a clear case of ‘the pot calling the kettle black’.

It was taboo to speak about sectarianism, even though the Ba’thist military were fully aware that it was extensively exploited for practical reasons. Strong fiction was upheld side by side with a reality that was completely different, and officially denied.

Personal ambitions were among the most important reasons for the power struggle between ‘Umran and the other members of the Military Committee, headed now by Sunni President Amin al-Hafiz. ‘Umran’s overt exploitation of sectarian ties was not the main cause for his banishment by the other members, but was gratefully seized upon as an argument that could be used against him.

Having consolidated his bases within the army, [Alawi] Major-General Salah [Jadid] was wise enough not to bring up the weapon of sectarianism. He preferred to profit when his [Sunni] opponents brought it up, thus proving that from the point of view of the Party and of the nationalists, he was more sincere than those who raised the sectarian banner. Notwithstanding all this, I do not know which of the two is the more serious crime: causing sectarianism or exposing it.¹¹

At the same time, a power struggle was going on between Salah Jadid and President Amin al-Hafiz. During this struggle the manipulations with sectarian, regional and tribal loyalties caused the tension in the Syrian armed forces to increase to such an extent that a far-reaching polarisation between Sunnis and members of religious minorities was the result. Sectarian contradistinctions among the military consequently began to overshadow almost all other differences. This sectarian polarisation was based not so much on sectarian unanimity among military men from the same religious community, as on a common opposition and sectarian distrust.

At this stage, there was still such a delicate balance of power between the various army factions that the transfer of one single Alawi tank battalion commander in the 70th Armoured Brigade could have caused the balance of power to shift in favour of Sunni President Amin al-Hafiz. But al-Hafiz refused the transfer of this Alawi officer (‘Ali Mustafa), even though this would have been in his favour, because he had developed an anti-Alawi complex and had started to consider virtually all Alawis as personal enemies.

As a result, President Amin al-Hafiz, together with General ‘Umran and many others, could be deposed by a military coup on 23 February 1966, later called Harakat 23 Shubat (‘The 23 February Movement’). This coup led to the purge of some of the most prominent Sunni officers’ factions, which, in turn, once again, resulted in an increase in the representation in the armed forces of members of religious minorities, especially the heterodox Islamic, to the disadvantage of Sunnis. This was a trend that was to continue for several years.

The armed units stationed around Damascus, which were mostly dominated by Alawi and Druze officers in this period, had immediately rallied behind the coup. This was a result of the strategy of minoritarian members of the Syrian military command: officers who were ‘trusted’ on sectarian grounds, because they came from the same religious minority communities or were from the same region or extended families or tribes, were placed close to Damascus, whereas those who, for similar reasons, were ‘not trusted’ – because they were mainly Sunnis – were stationed near the Israeli front, or far away from the Syrian capital more to the north of the country. This was a pattern that was to repeat itself for the next half a century: Alawi-dominated elite military units were stationed close to Damascus to help protect the regime, whereas other units were stationed further away, to help protect the country.

Such a delicate equilibrium as existed just before the coup of 23 February 1966 did not occur again. The subsequent regimes had learned how to better defend their positions from opponents.

Shortly after the 23 February 1966 coup, the new Syrian rulers held an Extraordinary Congress of the Ba’th Party in Damascus to discuss the reasons that had led to the coup. It was decided that all those who had taken standpoints based on sectarian, regional or tribal loyalties should be severely punished, particularly if they were party members. This resolution did not have any implications for the leaders of the military coup, however, even though most of them had been guilty of such practices to some extent.

This became a phenomenon of Ba’th Party congresses: to adopt resolutions that were fully justified, but subsequently not implemented, because implementation could hurt the positions of those who had adopted them.

After the 23 February coup, the seats of government and power were redistributed, with General Hafiz al-Asad being appointed as Minister of Defence, even before the new cabinet was announced. The main Druze Ba’thist officers were disappointed that they were not rewarded with the positions they had hoped to obtain, because they had played such an important role during the coup. Moreover, they were not re-elected in their positions in the Ba’th Party leadership. As a result, Salim Hatum and Hamad ‘Ubayd, the two Druze members of the original Military Committee, started to plot against the new regime. ‘Ubayd had wanted to become Minister of Defence, but lacked the necessary qualifications, whereas Hatum – who had taken the lion’s share during the coup – wanted the command of an armoured brigade, combined with responsibility for the army’s security affairs. All this was refused; in the case of Hatum because he was not trusted.

Together with the deposed civilian party leadership, Hatum and other Druze officers secretly started to make plans to depose the new regime. For security reasons, Hatum refused to take in any Alawi officers into his secret military organisation for fear of prematurely being discovered. When part of the plot was nevertheless discovered by accident in August 1966, various Druze officers were arrested. Salim Hatum, whose involvement had not yet been discovered, subsequently started to create the impression that all this had caused an Alawi-Druze sectarian polarisation within the army, of which the Druzes became the victims. These allegations subsequently became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and led to a situation of alarm among the Druze military and the party organisation in the Jabal al-Duruz.

In order to help solve the situation among the involved Druzes, a high-level party delegation, including President Nur al-Din al-Atasi, Salah Jadid and Jamil Shayya (the only Druze member of the Ba’th Party Regional Command), was sent to the Jabal al-Duruz. By way of a trap, Hatum had invited them to a banquet (walimah), but instead of giving them hospitality he arrested them with the aim of putting the regime under pressure to such an extent that his demands would yet be met.

Those arrested could have known better, because Hatum already twice earlier had made a similar attempt, but had failed.¹² The party leaders who had stayed behind in Damascus refused to negotiate, however, and Hafiz al-Asad, Minister of Defence and Air Force commander threatened to bomb Hatum’s units in the Jabal al-Duruz. As a result of such heavy countermeasures, Salim Hatum’s coup failed and he fled with his men to Jordan, where he received political asylum.

During a press conference Hatum later declared that ‘the situation in Syria was being threatened by a civil war as a result of the growth of the sectarian and tribal spirit, on the basis of which Salah Jadid and Hafiz al-Asad, as well as the groups surrounding them, ruled’. Hatum added that the filling of

powerful places in the state and its institutions is limited to a specific class of the Syrian people [i.e. the Alawis]. Thus, the Alawis in the army have attained a ratio of five to one of all other religious communities.¹³

Hatum reproached the regime for having only non-Alawi officers arrested, but this was also as a result of the fact that he himself had specifically excluded Alawi officers from his secret organisation on grounds of security. Hatum continued his accusations against the regime by declaring, for instance, that

whenever a Syrian military man is questioned about his free officers, his answer will be that they have been dismissed and driven away, and that only Alawi officers have remained. The Alawi officers adhere to their tribe and not to their militarism. Their concern is the protection of Salah Jadid and Hafiz al-Asad.¹⁴

Hatum continued for some time with what could clearly be labelled as anti-Alawi propaganda. It would not be easy for the regime in Damascus to pacify the Druze community, after its trust in the central authorities had been severely shaken.

During the Syrian Revolution that started in 2011, the Druze community in general preferred to take a relatively neutral position, as it feared that its position could be threatened if the regime were to be overthrown by radical Islamist forces that generally hold heterodox Islamic communities, like the Druzes, in very low esteem or consider them as heretics.

After the start of the June 1967 War, Hatum returned to Damascus with the alleged intention of helping the regime, but he was accused of another plot to overthrow the regime, and executed.

By plotting against the Alawi-dominated Ba’th regime with his predominantly Druze supporters, Hatum in fact had indirectly contributed to a further strengthening of the position of Alawi officers. These, for various historical reasons, had already been the biggest officer group and their numerical presence was now even stronger.

Hatum’s statement that the situation in Syria ‘was being threatened by a civil war as a result of the growth of the sectarian and tribal spirit’ appeared to be an exaggeration, because the power struggle that took place was to a great extent confined to the Ba’th Party military organisation and parts of the civilian party apparatus. It did not include larger parts of the Syrian population and society, as happened after the Syrian Revolution in 2011, when the whole country became involved in a civil war, that later escalated into a full-scale war involving other countries as well.

It was not only Druze officers who had been purged following Hatum’s abortive coup, but also some Ba’thist officers and civilians from Hawran, the neighbouring province of the Jabal al-Duruz. They also had openly expressed their concern about the Alawi predominance in the army and party, and early in 1967 some leaders of party branches in Hawran refused to join further party meetings in expression of their concern about the inter-communal sectarian and regional tensions in the party apparatus and armed forces, and also to demonstrate their concern about the predominance of ‘specific’ (obviously meaning Alawi) sectarian, regional or tribal factions.¹⁵

Externally, these tensions could be noticed when all three ministers from the Hawran region threatened to resign. Shortly after the Arab–Israeli June 1967 War, some of the most prominent civilian Ba’thists from Hawran lost their positions in the party commands and the government. On 15 February 1968, the Hawrani chief-of-staff of the Syrian army, General Ahmad Suwaydani, who once had been a prominent supporter of Salah Jadid, was relieved of his army functions.

Musa al-Zu’bi and Mustafa al-Hajj ‘Ali, the two remaining Sunni Hawrani members of the original Ba’thist Military Committee, were dismissed from the army in 1967 and 1968 respectively. This implied that the most prominent civilian and military Ba’thists from Hawran had been neutralised or eliminated from the party apparatus and the army as separate power blocs.

It turned out to be, time and again, that those who openly criticised the powerful positions of the Alawi officers, already the biggest group in any case, in the end duped themselves, and indirectly contributed to making the Alawi share of the officers even bigger.

Of the 15 members of the original Military Committee, only seven members remained, of whom six were from minorities: four Alawis, two Isma’ilis and one Sunni from the (mainly Alawi) Latakia region. Of the seven Sunnis all but one had been expelled, and both Druze members had been removed as well.

This was not the end of the power struggle, however, because there still was more than one ‘petty king’.

The two main remaining rivals who competed for power were Salah Jadid and Hafiz al-Asad. Whereas al-Asad had maintained all his military functions and extended his powers, Jadid in August 1965 had – it can be concluded with some hindsight – made the fatal mistake of giving up his military function as chief-of-staff of the army, in exchange for the key civilian position of Assistant Secretary General of the Syrian Regional Command of the Ba’th Party. For some time, he still managed to keep his grip on the military party organisation, but gradually lost control, whereas al-Asad in turn could extend his control over it.

Jadid and al-Asad had serious differences of opinion concerning the military, foreign and socio-economic policies that were to be pursued. As the main contestors for power were now only Alawis, there was also more room for expressing ideological differences. Jadid was a fervent socialist who had the strong support of the civilian party apparatus. It was a heyday for Marxists and socialists, not only in Syria, but in Europe and elsewhere in the world as well. Jadid wanted to give priority to the ‘socialist transformation’ (tahwil ishtiraki) of Syrian society. His group rejected any cooperation with ‘reactionary, rightist or pro-Western’ regimes, such as Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, even if this would be at the expense of ‘the struggle against Israel’. They favoured cooperation with the Soviet Union and other communist countries.

Al-Asad, on the other hand, gave priority to what he saw as Arab national interests, and demanded top priority for ‘the armed struggle against Israel’, even if this would have a negative effect on Syria’s ‘socialist transformation’.

During a Ba’th Party conference in Damascus in 1968, these differences of opinion led to a confrontation. As Jadid had a great majority of supporters in the congress, his ideas were fully accepted. Al-Asad, however, rejected the results and refused to further attend the Regional Command’s meetings. On paper, Jadid’s faction was fully in power and issued various orders so as to bring the military organisation further under its control, but in practice al-Asad kept the upper hand, by simply ignoring the instructions of the civilian party leadership and strengthening his grip over the military. He forbade any contact between the military and civilian organisations that was not explicitly approved by him. There was a situation of ‘duality of power’ (izdiwajiyat al-sultah), with al-Asad having the de facto supremacy. Supporters of Jadid who, for instance in the Latakia Branch, wanted to purge al-Asad’s followers, were simply imprisoned or transferred and replaced by sympathisers of al-Asad. The Secretary General of the Latakia Branch, ‘Adil Na’isah (Alawi and supporter of Jadid), was imprisoned and only released 22 years later. This was a foreshadowing of things to come for al-Asad’s party opponents, but these kept thinking along the lines of the official party rules and regulations, which had little value when they were not backed up with military power.

Al-Asad kept on purging Jadid supporters from the army. Colonel ‘Abd al-Karim al-Jundi, head of National Security, committed suicide in March 1969, after his closest supportive security staff had been arrested by al-Asad’s forces. Al-Jundi’s arrest would have been next, and he probably feared that he would face the same fate as many of those who had been tortured or killed because of him.¹⁶

In 1967, Ahmad al-Mir was relieved of his military functions shortly after the June 1967 War, in which he – as a commander at the Israeli–Syrian Golan front – had played a dishonourable role, reportedly by fleeing the front by donkey.¹⁷

Herewith the two remaining Isma’ili officers (and original members of the Ba’thist Military Committee) were removed, making Hafiz al-Asad the only remaining military ‘king’ of the original ‘petty kings’ (muluk al-tawa’if ), with the difference that he was now all-powerful, and the opposite of ‘petty’.

The fate of Salah Jadid and his civilian supporters was sealed when they, during the Tenth Extraordinary National Congress of the Ba’th Party in November 1970, decided to pass an unrealistic resolution demanding that Minister of Defence Hafiz al-Asad and army chief-of-staff General Mustafa Talas were to be relieved of their military functions. The two were able to take countermeasures easily and swiftly. The most important opponents of al-Asad, including Salah Jadid and President Nur al-Din al-Atasi, were arrested and imprisoned for the rest of their lives. Jadid died 23 years later in prison, and al-Atasi died 22 years later, shortly after being released. Other Jadid supporters also served very long prison sentences.

Exiled opponents of the regime were hunted down and ruthlessly assassinated, like General Muhammad ‘Umran, who lived in Tripoli, Lebanon, from where he maintained contact with his followers in Syria. He was shot dead in his home in Tripoli in March 1972.

Salah al-Din al-Bitar, one of the founding members of the Ba’th Party and former Prime Minister of Syria, living in exile in Paris, where he had started an opposition journal called al-Ihya’ al-’Arabi (‘the Arab Revival’), the original name of the Ba’th Party before it was officially founded in 1947, was assassinated on 21 July 1980. In his last editorial, al-Bitar accused the regime of terrorism against the Syrian people, of the ugliest crimes of suppression with a sectarian spirit, of sectarian persecution against the Muslim Brotherhood, and of massacres (including of more than 600 prisoners in Palmyra prison ‘who [according to al-Bitar] had been arrested without any reason and had not had any legal proceedings and consisted of the elite of the educated youth’). He noted that the prisoners in Palmyra had been told that they were going to be released, but when they were supposedly on their way out to the exit gate, they were gunned down from above by helicopters of the regime. The situation he described was very similar to the situation that arose after the start of the Syrian Revolution more than 30 years later. In the analysis of al-Bitar, the regime had wanted to sow the seeds of sectarian fear, so as to force the Alawi community into loyalty towards it, although the majority of it did not really support the regime.¹⁸ Al-Bitar had tried to convince President Hafiz al-Asad, in a personal conversation in Damascus in May 1978, that Syria found itself in a deep internal crisis (Syria was, in al-Bitar’s words, ‘very very ill’). Al-Bitar told al-Asad that the only way to help solve the crisis was to achieve Syrian national unity by opening up the one-party dictatorial system and to allow for diversity of opinion, independent political organisations and a free press. But President al-Asad could not be convinced at all, and replied that ‘national unity had already been achieved’, and that ‘there was a democracy in Syria with the Ba’th Party having 550,000 members’.¹⁹ More than three decades later, after the start of the Syrian Revolution in 2011, President Bashar al-Asad could not be convinced of the necessity of similar reforms either, with the well-known disastrous consequences.

Other former Syrian Ba’thists were kidnapped, and never heard of again, like Shibli al-’Aysami, one of the founding members of the Ba’th Party and former vice-president of Syria, who had retired from political life in 1992, and was kidnapped in Lebanon in 2011.

Yet there were occasions when others, who were still part of the regime, but whose loyalty was doubted, were also assassinated, more often than not under dubious circumstances.

In general, the regime of Hafiz al-Asad, and later of Bashar al-Asad, did not tolerate any opposition that could be considered a threat to their position. Opposition was dealt with ruthlessly and possibilities for sharing real power between the regime and others appeared to be nil.

From November 1970 onwards, political power was completely monopolised by Hafiz al-Asad and his officers’ faction. The era of competing ‘power centres’ (marakiz qiwa) was over. The civilian section of the Ba’th Party never again regained the powerful position it had had for some time in the preceding period, particularly under Salah Jadid. The Ba’th as a party also declined in importance. Its numbers increased enormously, but its political significance declined, as it was Hafiz al-Asad who was to decide on all essential issues.²⁰

On 22 February 1971, Hafiz al-Asad became Syria’s first Alawi president. This ended Syria’s tradition of having Sunni Muslims as president. It also symbolically represented the political evolution of the Alawis from being a discriminated against, socially and economically backward religious community to a nationally emancipated group in a position of dominance. The Sunni population generally rejected the idea that they should be ruled by an Alawi president, particularly because many of them considered Alawis to be heretics and non-Muslims.

When, in 1973, a new constitution was drafted, it did not yet contain a paragraph on the religion of the president, and neither was Islam given a special place in it. After violent riots in predominantly Sunni cities like Hama and Homs, demanding a more prominent place to be given to Islamic law, the draft constitution was adapted, and finally stipulated that the religion of the President of the Republic had to be Islam, and that Islamic jurisprudence was to be a main source of legislation. This, to a certain extent, accommodated the wishes of the Sunni Muslims – albeit not fully, because they wanted a Sunni Muslim as president, not a president who called himself Muslim – but was not acknowledged as such by part of the Sunni population.

Since challenges to al-Asad’s regime came mainly from within the Alawi community itself, it was not surprising that he placed increasing reliance on persons with whom he had a close relationship, such as members of his own extended family, or village (al-Qardahah) and its surroundings, in order to secure his position even against people from his own religious community. His five brothers were all active party members and occupied prominent positions in the army, the party organisations or government institutions. Rif’at was foremost. After the November 1970 coup, Rif’at was in command of the Defence Companies (Saraya al-Difa’), elite army units of political and strategic importance, which were stationed around Damascus and with which he was able to protect his brother’s regime.

Corruption had for a long time been an issue that undermined the regime. Al-Asad, therefore, announced the formation of a Committee for the Investigation of Illegal Profits in 1977, ‘to investigate crimes of bribery, imposition of influence, embezzlement, exploitation of office and illegal profits’. The campaign was apparently intended to dispel popular discontent with the government’s handling of these issues, but was doomed to failure, since high-placed military officers in the direct entourage of President Hafiz al-Asad, who constituted an indispensable part of the hard core of his (Alawi-dominated) regime, could also have been found guilty of involvement in corrupt practices. To purge such officers from the army, or to take severe disciplinary action against them, could have directly undermined the power position of al-Asad, and consequently of the whole regime, as a result of which nothing was seriously undertaken against them.

The failure of the anti-corruption campaign was yet another example of the paradigmatic situation in which the Syrian Ba’th regime had repeatedly found itself since its seizure of power in 1963. This was due to the composition of the hard core of the political power elite. It was a political party, or a faction of that party, which, although pursuing an ideology that wanted to do away with sectarian, regional and tribal loyalties, found itself more or less forced to revert to those same traditional loyalties when it took over power in order not to lose the strength that was needed to realise that ideology.

This problem became a vicious circle: maintenance of that power entailed entire dependence on those loyalties, thus hindering their suppression.

In practice the Syrian Ba’th regime became the antithesis of its own ideals. The Ba’thists wanted to do away with primordial loyalties like sectarianism, regionalism and tribalism, which were considered to be despicable residues or illnesses of traditional society (rawasib/amrad taqlidiyah). But in fact, they achieved the opposite, because their behaviour strengthened in particular the factors that they claimed to abhor.

Their ideals in the sphere of socialism and social equality could not be fulfilled either, because of the fact that their regime was infested with corruption, clientelism and favouritism.

The fact that their ideals of Arab unity could not be fulfilled could not be blamed on them alone, because inter-Arab cooperation was impeded by the fact that there was not one Arab leader who would accept the relinquishing of his power, or sharing it with others.

During the last half a century, the Syrian regime has never been able to escape this vicious circle for fear of undermining its own position. Corruption even increased, and under President Bashar al-Asad the circle of those who profited from it became smaller, as a result of which his power base was also concentrated in the hands of a smaller number of people.

There must have been strong feelings of hate among Sunni Arab Muslims against the Alawi-dominated Ba’th regime. In the first place, this was caused by the dictatorial system itself, which applied to all population groups and regions of Syria. But dictatorship in itself had not been anything new; it had always been present in Syria, with the exception of a few years in the 1950s. What was new, however, was that the dictators who ruled after March 1963 happened to be mainly Alawis and people from religious minorities. They packed the army and security services, and government institutions with their people. Therefore, the Ba’thist dictatorship was perceived by religious conservative Sunni Muslims as a – mainly Alawi – sectarian dictatorship, or a dictatorship dominated by ‘heretics’ or ‘infidels’. Ba’thist secularism, intended as a neutral form of rule in which all people, irrespective of their religious backgrounds, were supposed to be equal, was seen by religious conservative Sunnis as a cover-up for Alawi anti-Sunni sectarian suppression, or as a system that was ‘anti-Islamic’ and ‘infidel’ Alawi. Secularism is not always seen as something neutral, and for many people in different population groups or countries, can have different connotations.

Various violent demonstrations and uprisings had taken place in 1964 and 1965 against the regime in mainly Sunni cities, like Homs and Hama, and they were all suppressed with military force.

In 1967, demonstrations took place because a Ba’thist officer, Ibrahim Khalas, had published an article in the army magazine Jaysh al-Sha’b (‘The People’s Army’), saying that religion was something of the past and was nothing more than ‘a mummified statue [that belonged] in the museum of history’.²¹

Secular Ba’thist rule was experienced by parts of the Sunni population as something provocative. Within the Muslim Brotherhood this led to extremism among some of its members. These formed a separate group, calling themselves the Mujahidin (‘Strugglers’) and later al-Tala’i’ al-Muqatilah (‘The Fighting Vanguards’). In February 1976, they started to carry out assassinations against Alawis, not necessarily Ba’thists, with the aim of provoking a sectarian polarisation that would destabilise the Alawi-dominated Ba’th regime. They spoke of the ‘infidel Nusayris who were their enemies and were outside Islam’.²² In their newsletter, al-Nadhir, they explained their motives:

Three years ago, to be exact on 8 February 1976, the first bullet was fired for the sake of Allah, thereby opening the gate for the organised Jihad [Holy War], which has now started to produce positive results. This first bullet, however, was the result of long and persistent suffering from oppression and terror. The prisons of Syria were packed with [Sunni] Muslims … The Zabaniyah [‘angels who thrust the damned into hell’] of suppression and tyranny attacked and wandered in people’s quarters, schools and universities; general liberties and civil rights were trampled underfoot …

The ordeal reached its climax, however, when oppression became concentrated against [Sunni] Muslims and against the religion of Islam in particular: mosques were destroyed; religious scholars were arrested; educational programmes were banned; Islamic law schools were closed; atheist and disintegrative information and instruction were published; sectarian party domination increased steadily; the psychological and military destruction of the armed forces were planned; … [Alawi] sectarian party militia were allowed to take the place of the regular armed forces; the riches of the nation were plundered by way of corruption, embezzlement, illegal trade, doubtful transactions, and the unlawful enrichment of a handful of people at the cost of the overwhelming majority.²³

In the words of a member of the Fighting Vanguards, who was brought before trial in Damascus in September 1979: ‘Assassination is the only language with which it is possible to communicate with the state.’²⁴

From assassinating Alawi personalites, the ‘Fighting Vanguards’ transformed into an overtly sectarian terrorist organisation willing to go as far as resorting to indiscriminate mass killings.²⁵ One of their most extreme acts occurred on 16 June 1979 at the Aleppo Artillery Academy in al-Ramusah. A Sunni officer called Captain Ibrahim al-Yusuf, who was affiliated with the ‘Fighting Vanguards’, had called the cadets of the Academy to attend a so-called urgent meeting in the mess hall. There he, together with his accomplices, separated the Sunni cadets from the others – who were mainly Alawi – and killed 35 of the latter with automatic weapons, hand grenades and his own pistol.²⁶ He had prepared a list beforehand, which he read out to the victims before they were killed.²⁷

The anti-Alawi Aleppo Artillery Academy massacre can be seen as an important landmark in Syrian history, as far as the issue of sectarianism is concerned.²⁸ Together with the earlier assassinations of Alawis, it left an ineffaceable mark on the relations between Alawis and Islamist Sunnis, the influence of which was still clearly present more than three decades later during the Syrian Revolution and civil war.

Immediately after the Aleppo Artillery Academy massacre of 1979, a country-wide campaign was started to uproot the Muslim Brotherhood organisation.

The regime’s subsequent propaganda and its campaign to root out the Muslim Brotherhood was seen as so crude and strident that it antagonised rather than won over a larger part of the devout Muslim population.

Notwithstanding the dangerous and bloody prospects, the Sunni Muslim extremists seemed ready to lead the country into a Lebanese-style civil war if this was the only way to bring down the al-Asad regime.²⁹

Following the Aleppo Artillery Academy massacre, state repression had become such that the Muslim Brotherhood leadership decided that it was time to respond to what they saw as Ba’thist provocations, by raising the banner of Jihad themselves. The subsequent alliance, which the Muslim Brotherhood made with the Jihadist forces of the Fighting Vanguards in late 1980, provided the regime with an additional argument to brutally crush the Islamic movement.³⁰

From the sidelines, Egypt’s President Anwar al-Sadat, who had been criticised by the Syrian regime for his peace initiatives with Israel, fuelled the conflict by referring to the regime as the ‘Alawi Ba’th’ and the ‘dirty Alawis’.

In 1980 there were again violent and bloody country-wide civil disturbances, mostly triggered by economic difficulties, repressive methods of the regime, and anti-Alawi feelings.

Regime military elite units, some of them led by President al-Asad’s brother Rif’at, on various occasions undertook revanchist actions against the inhabitants of Hama and Aleppo. Many were killed and wounded during these operations.

When, on 26 June 1980, President Hafiz al-Asad narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in Damascus, a wave of rage swept through the Alawi community, and al-Asad’s brother Rif’at took ‘revenge’ by killing all Muslim Brotherhood members and others in Palmyra’s infamous prison. However, according to then Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Faruq al-Shar’, who was a personal witness to the attempt, it was not clear who had carried it out. It appeared to have been rather amateurish, and the offenders were not caught.³¹

The repressive measures of the Syrian regime did not prevent the Muslim Brotherhood Mujahidin from continuing their opposition. On the contrary, by the end of 1980 various Sunni religious opposition groups formed an alliance under the name of ‘The Islamic Front in Syria’.

The climax came in February 1982 in Hama with the bloodiest showdown in twentieth-century modern Syrian history (to be surpassed during the Syrian War after 2011).

Earlier, the regime had already combed out cities like Aleppo, Homs and Hama, cordoning off whole areas, carrying out mass arrests and allegedly killing numerous people in the process. Hafiz al-Asad’s military right hand at the time, Alawi General Shafiq Fayyad, supervised such an extremely repressive operation in Aleppo, and is reported to have said to the local people: ‘If a thousand of you will be killed every day, I shall not care.’³² According to Muslim Brotherhood sources several bloody confrontations with the regime already took place prior to the battle for Hama in February 1982, including what they described as ‘the massacre of Jisr al-Shughur’ (10 March 1980), ‘the first massacre of Hama’ (5–12 April 1980), and ‘the second massacre of Hama’ (21 May 1980).³³

The battles in Hama raged for almost a whole month (2–28 February 1982). Estimates of the number of killed vary between 5,000 and 25,000, mainly victims from the population of Hama itself. The battle began when, on 2 February, a group of Muslim Brotherhood Mujahidin was completely surrounded by the regime’s Alawi-dominated elite forces, during their combing-out operations in the city, and decided to launch a full-scale counter-attack.

While the Muslim Brothers thereafter claimed that they had been provoked into the large-scale confrontation, and that they finally came out in self-defence, they had earlier announced that they would continue their armed struggle until the regime was deposed.

When starting their counter-offensive, the Muslim Brotherhood Mujahidin proclaimed a wide-scale Islamic revolt against the Ba’th regime, calling through loudspeakers of the mosques of Hama for a Jihad. They stormed into homes, killing some 70 officials and party leaders, they overran police posts and ransacked armouries in a bid to seize power in the city, which the next day they declared ‘liberated’. Although the Ba’th regime had been confronted with previous revolts in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and Hama itself, a full-scale urban insurrection of such dimensions had never been witnessed before.

As on earlier occasions, the Muslim Brotherhood Mujahidin had tried to provoke a sectarian polarisation between Alawis and Sunnis in the armed forces, hoping to win to their side the Sunnis who constituted a majority in the regular (conscript) army. The regime’s elite troops involved in the confrontation were, however, essentially Alawi in composition, and with some exceptions they held firm, and were generally able to maintain control and discipline in the regular armed forces. According to the Muslim Brotherhood, all military men originating from Hama were expelled from key units, however, just prior to the regime’s assault on the city.

The regime’s forces committed wide-scale atrocities during their recapture of the city, in which tanks, heavy artillery, rocket launchers and helicopters were used. And on various occasions soldiers refused to carry out orders.

After the eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood it never truly got back on its feet inside Syria in the period before 2011. Their weakening did not mean, however, that inter-communal relations in Syria had now become peaceful. Whereas the Islamic fundamentalist opposition had been severely hit, Alawi– Sunni sectarian tensions were as severe as ever, if not stronger. The massive repression in Hama and elsewhere had sown the seeds of future strife and revenge, and it took almost 30 years for this conflict to fully come out in the open again with the start of the Syrian Revolution in 2011.

if someone had been able to take an objective poll in Syria after the Hama massacre, Assad’s treatment of the rebellion probably would have won substantial approval, even among many Sunni Muslims. They might have said, ‘Better one month of Hama than fourteen years of civil war like Lebanon’.³⁴

Decades later, during the Syrian War that started in 2011, Friedman’s statement would have been strongly criticised, although there were probably many Syrians who thought that they would not have supported the insurrection against the regime, had they been aware in advance that the war would cost hundreds of thousands of lives, millions of refugees and immense destruction. The Syrian War that started in 2011 became much more bloody than the Hama massacre of 1982, and its number of deadly victims became multiple.

It might be asked whether it would have been possible to foresee in 2011 that the regime was going to act in the way it did. If the Hama massacre of 1982 can be used as a point of reference, it could have been expected. Nevertheless, for many observers what was going to happen went far beyond their imagination.

During the three decades that Hafiz al-Asad had the monopoly of power in Syria (1970–2000), very little changed in the power structure of the Syrian regime. Most of the prominent Alawi officers who commanded key positions in the armed forces and security and intelligence services in the early and mid-1970s were after 25 years still in the same, or similar, positions. This meant that they remained loyal, and that the regime during this period could be characterised by a great degree of continuity. Al-Asad’s reported obsession with loyalty paid off in both the short and long term, as, apparently, no substantial purges were considered to be necessary, the only exception being the purge of his younger brother Rif’at.

In November 1983 President Hafiz al-Asad fell seriously ill, as a result of which the succession question became acute. The power structure which President al-Asad had built wholly depended on himself and now appeared to break down without him. From his sickbed al-Asad appointed a six-man committee to which he entrusted the day-to-day running of affairs. His brother Rif’at was not among them, however, even though he had a formidable base in the armed forces with his 55,000-strong heavily armed Defence Companies (Saraya al-Difa’). In theory, these were subservient to the army chief-of-staff and the Minister of Defence, but in practice they were not and they behaved as independent formations. Hafiz al-Asad apparently did not trust his younger brother, and did not want Rif’at to succeed him, also because of his sometimes reckless, less sophisticated and notorious corrupt behaviour.

Rif’at seized the opportunity to try to take over power from his elder brother. At the end of February 1984, his heavily armed units made an effort to enter Damascus, but it came to a stand-off with loyalist military supporters of the president, and Damascus was on the verge of a bloodbath.

Rif’at al-Asad’s Defence Companies depended to such an extent on members of the Alawi sect of the Murshidiyin that they could be considered the military backbone of his power. The Murshidiyin were a sect separate from the Alawis in general. They had been discriminated against since the hanging of their leader Salman al-Murshid in 1946, in the era of President Shukri al-Quwwatli. Under the Ba’th regime, measures against the Murshidiyin were lifted. After the 8 March 1963 Revolution, various Ba’th leaders had asked the leader of the Murshidiyin, Saji al-Murshid (the elder son of Salman al-Murshid), to request his followers to join the Ba’th Party. Saji al-Murshid had answered that it was up to the Ba’th Party itself to recruit new members among the Murshidiyin. After all, if they would be instructed by the Murshidiyin leadership to join the party, their membership would not be based on conviction. Their leader Saji al-Murshid had added at the time: ‘If you believe that the Murshidiyin will join the Ba’th Party on my orders, don’t you believe that I can also order them to leave the party just like they entered it?’³⁵ Nevertheless, the Murshidiyin were encouraged by their leadership to join the Ba’th Party at the time, and many did so.

Rif’at’s heavy reliance on the Murshidiyin also turned out to be his weakness. When President Hafiz al-Asad requested the 3,000 Murshidiyin military in Rif’at’s Defence Companies to withdraw from their units, they responded positively, as a result of which Rif’at’s revolt was made toothless. Without these men, Rif’at’s tanks and armoured vehicles could not come into action, because the Murshidiyin occupied key positions in the Defence Companies.³⁶

The crisis was finally solved by appointing Rif’at al-Asad as second vice-president and relieving him of his command over the Defence Companies. Although officially it was a promotion, in practice it was a demotion.

After acting as a rather invisible vice-president for some time, Rif’at went into exile.

One of the lessons learned from this crisis was that the regime could maintain its power by relying heavily on various Alawi officers’ factions, but not on factions that consisted of only one element that could be considered as a separate Alawi group, like the Murshidiyin. A policy of ‘putting all eggs in one basket’ was risky and not to be practised again.

The crisis of 1984 with Rif’at had made Hafiz al-Asad more aware of the succession question. Apparently, he had his eldest son Basil in mind as his successor, though he was never officially mentioned as such. Within the Ba’th Party, Hafiz al-Asad had always been referred to as Abu Sulayman (‘the father of Sulayman’), which was his nom de guerre, but he never had a son by that name. It was only in 1990 that he was for the first time publicly referred to as Abu Basil (‘the father of Basil’). Basil had apparently become the president’s right-hand man, and appeared to be groomed for the presidency. As staff member of the Presidential Guard and chief of presidential security, Basil al-Asad was entrusted with the command of an elite armoured brigade. On 21 January 1994, then aged nearly 32, Basil died in a car accident.

From this time onwards, his younger brother Bashar came into the picture to be groomed as the new president, but again, never officially, because the Ba’th Party could not accept the idea of a hereditary presidency. It was another clear example of living in an ‘as if ’ culture³⁷ and keeping up a fiction while denying reality.

After the death of Basil, Bashar returned from London where he had been studying ophthalmology. Bashar followed in the footsteps of Basil, also went to the Military Academy in Homs, and graduated as a tank commander, together with his cousin, the son of Presidential Guard Commander ‘Adnan Makhluf.

It appeared as if a younger Alawi generation, consisting partly of sons and other younger relatives of the senior Alawi generals, was being prepared to eventually succeed the older one. Nevertheless, it should be noted that relatives of other prominent Alawi figures including, for instance, the sons of Rif’at al-Asad and ‘Ali Duba (Chief of Military Intelligence) preferred to go into business, commerce or construction, instead of pursuing military careers similar to those of their fathers. Many sons of the Alawi elite established cross-links with other communities through intermarriage or other social relationships, and thus contributed to some change in the originally closed character of the Alawi community.

Generally, the younger Alawi generation no longer had the socio-economic motives to join the army, as much as their forefathers had. Nevertheless, the relatively high percentage of Alawis in the officers’ corps kept increasing to extraordinary proportions.

Within a month of the death of Hafiz al-Asad on 10 June 2000, Bashar al-Asad was inaugurated as president, after being promoted by the Syrian Regional Command of the Ba’th Party to Lieutenant General (skipping a number of military ranks), and elected as Secretary General of the Ba’th Party Regional Command. The required age for the presidency of 40 years was decreased to 34, so as to exactly accommodate that of Bashar.

Hafiz al-Asad’s high-ranking military supporters (some of whom were twice as old as Bashar) and their respective dependants accepted President Hafiz al-Asad’s son Bashar as a unifying figure, symbolising their wish to continue the former president’s legacy and avoid premature dissension in Alawi ranks.

The fact that sectarianism, regionalism and tribalism were major factors in the struggle for power in Syria does not imply that other elements, such as socio-economic and ideological factors, were not important as well, or could be ignored. On the contrary: socio-economic factors were important, and in the case of the compact sectarian minorities such as the Alawis, Druzes and Isma’ilis, they coincided to a great extent with sectarian, regional and tribal factors. The overlap of sectarian, regional and socio-economic contrasts could have a mutually strengthening effect. Popular discontent and socio-economic tensions could sometimes be directed and even stimulated through sectarian channels.

Ideological differences were also important, even though during several crises sectarian, regional and tribal ties became the dominant means of self-preservation and the retention of power. Once a political group had monopolised power and had provided itself with a solid base, it could give more priority to political and ideological ideas than to pure power politics. Those who were excluded from power, for instance because they had, on idealistic grounds, refused to apply sectarian power tactics, were consequently not in a position to put their ideals into practice. Others who had used sectarianism, regionalism or tribalism as a means to seize or maintain power, or were more or less forced by opponents to make use of them in order to maintain themselves, could later concentrate on their respective political programmes and ideas.

Because of the fact that under Hafiz and Bashar al-Asad, Syria was dominated by only one all-powerful extended military faction with a highly reliable and effective security apparatus (also effective in the sense of severe repression), the country experienced more internal political stability and continuity than ever before since independence. The fact, however, that this continuity was linked to the absence of any political reform or substantial changes in the composition of the ruling political and military elite for a period of several decades also implied the serious future possibility of strong discontinuity and disruption of the regime, once its long-serving political and military leadership disappeared. As will be described in the following chapters, this so-called stability came to an abrupt end with the start of the Syrian Revolution in March 2011.

In the era of Hafiz al-Asad, Syria was able to develop into a major regional power in its own right,³⁸ no longer subservient to the traditional power rivalries between other Arab countries in the region such as Iraq and Egypt, as had been the case in the past.³⁹ Consequently, Syria was bound to play a key role in any overall Arab–Israeli peace settlement. In the period after the start of the Syrian Revolution in 2011, Syria again lost much of its position as a regional power, because of its full preoccupation with the Syrian War, and the interference of many foreign countries in its internal affairs.

However idealistic some Ba’thist leaders may originally have been (and many Syrians may not have shared their ideals), they could not evade the socio-political reality that without making use of primordial ties they could not monopolise power in Syria, let alone maintain themselves. Irrespective of the political line taken by the Syrian Ba’thist leadership after 1963, it should be noted that sectarian, regional and tribal ties have been so important that for about half a century they have constituted an inseparable and integral part of the power structure of the Syrian regime. Without their well-organised sectarian, regional, tribal and extended family-based networks within the Syrian armed forces, the security services and other power institutions, the Ba’thists who ruled Syria since 1963 would not have been able to survive for so long. Exploiting sectarian, regional and tribal ties was simply a matter of pure and elementary power politics.

Nevertheless, both Salah Jadid and Hafiz al-Asad could also be seen as a kind of Ba’thist idealist, who from their early youth, when they joined the Ba’th Party, had wanted to achieve their secular Arab nationalist and socio-economic ideals. In power, however, both developed opposing policies and ideas, al-Asad being more pragmatic than the radical Jadid. The outcome was that former party comrades and friends turned into serious rivals and lifelong enemies once it came to carrying the heavy burden of political responsibilities and of putting into practice under extremely difficult circumstances political ideas which earlier had just been theoretical ideals and ideology.

But even after fully monopolising power, Hafiz al-Asad turned out not to be able to implement some of his most important political ideas.

The takeover by lower-middle-class and poorer rural minoritarian Ba’thists in 1963 led to a social revolution: rural minorities which earlier had been discriminated against, and traditionally had belonged to the more if not most backward segments of Syrian society, went through an abrupt process of national emancipation. Traditional relationships were more or less completely turned upside down: people of rural origin and members of religious minorities started to dominate the predominantly Sunni people of the major cities, and relatively swiftly climbed the social and political ladders of society. Once in power, traditionally discriminated against Alawis, Druzes or other rural minoritarians started to favour members of their own communities and began to discriminate against those whom they perceived as their former oppressors. This led to a certain levelling of society between poorer and richer classes, between rural and urban populations, and for that matter between religious minorities and Sunnis. Urban Sunnis particularly resented being dominated by people of peasant origin from the countryside, irrespective of whether these rural rulers were from religious minorities or Sunnis like themselves. The combination of rural and minoritarian domination only strengthened urban Sunni resentment even further.

Raymond Hinnebusch (in 1991) commented on the issue of sectarianism and social change as follows:

in explaining political change, sectarianism per se gives little clue. Indeed, the importance of minority groups, notably the Alawis, has been their role as advance guard of an elite or as class coalitions rather than as sects per se. They played the role of class vanguard, then shield of state formation; they now appear as both spearheads of embourgeoisement and restratification, and as the target against which anti-regime class coalitions have coalesced. It is this class/state linked role of sect, rather than sectarian rivalries per se, which is by far of greater consequence for Syria’s political development.⁴⁰

Originally, the Alawi elite had constituted one of the strongest forces in the regime favouring radical change. After having enriched themselves, however, and having obtained all kinds of privileges to defend, the same elite turned into a major obstacle to the reform of abuses enveloping the state. As a privileged recruitment pool, parts of the Alawi community, in fact, have gone from the most downtrodden to the most well-situated social segment. In the al-Asad era, the enriched Alawi officers and their families built up a kind of coalition with the rich urban bourgeoisie, the Sunni Damascene in particular, but others as well, including Christians. The latter gradually obtained a direct interest in helping maintain the Alawi-dominated Ba’th regime, at least as long as their businesses continued to prosper.

President Hafiz al-Asad (like later Bashar) on numerous occasions made an effort to build up an orthodox religious image for the secular Ba’th regime, for instance by publicly performing prayers in, mostly Sunni, mosques (including the famous Umayyad Mosque in Damascus), or by appearing in public with high Sunni religious officials, or by quoting from the Qur’an in speeches. Hafiz al-Asad also had mosques built, including in his hometown, al-Qardahah. It remains doubtful, however, whether such actions generally had a convincing effect on the greater part of the Sunni population, however sincere the intentions of both Alawi Syrian presidents may have been.

The fact that sectarian favouritism and solidarity were in the first place socially, communally and politically motivated could not prevent many of the traditional Sunni population, as well as other non-Alawis, from experiencing Alawidominated Ba’thist rule as a kind of semi-religious repression – which it was not, as far as the dominant Ba’thists were concerned. For the traditional Sunni population, the element of religion was much more important than it was for the secular Alawi Ba’thists.

Prospects and possibilities for broadening the real power base of the Alawi-dominated Ba’th regime in Syria were limited, at least if the regime was not to bring itself into danger by sharing powers with others.

Feelings of revanchism among people who suffered from the severe repression of the Alawi-dominated Ba’th regime clearly remained under the surface for decades, and burst out into the open almost 30 years after the Hama massacre with the start of the Syrian Revolution in March 2011.