The Alawite Sect
Since the tenth century, the Alawites have inhabited Syria’s northern Mediterranean coast. They represent about 10% of the population of around 23 million. Around 80% of Syria’s population are Sunnis, followers of the moderate Hanafi school of jurisprudence. The rest are Christians, Druze, and Isma’ilis. Arabs make up around 85% of the population, with Kurds, Armenians, and others representing the rest. Arabic is the official language. Kurdish, Armenian, Aramaic, and Circassian are spoken in addition to English and French.
The original name of Alawites was Nusayris, an extreme Isma’ili sects. Around the end of the ninth century, Muhammad bin Nusayr, a Persian partisan of the Eleventh Shi’ite Imam, al-Hassan al-Askari (d. 874), formulated the Nusayris’ doctrine.[1] The name Alawite first appeared during the French mandate (1920-1946), possibly because Alawites consider Ali bin Abi Talib, the Prophet’s cousin, son-in-law, and the fourth caliph as the “incarnation of the deity.”[2]
Alawites believe that the Prophet was Ali’s visible veil and that the Prophet’s companion, Salman al-Farisi, was Ali’s proselytizer. The three men formed a divine triad, akin to Christianity’s holy trinity.[3] Transmigration of souls figured in their cosmology.[4] Unlike other Muslim sects, Alawites have a liturgy in their religious rituals.[5] Other similarities to Christianity include the consecration of the sacrament, the celebration of the mass, and the celebration of Christmas and Easter.[6]
The famous eleventh-century scholar Muhammad bin al-Hassan al-Tusi (d. 1067) accused the Alawites of heresy. While Twelver Shi’ite heresiographers regard the Alawites as exceeding all bounds in their deification of Ali, the Alawites hold Twelver Shi’ites to fall short of fathoming Ali’s divinity. Sunni heresiographers view the Alawites as disbelievers and idolaters.
The Alawites say their ancestors come from the Makhzum tribe in Arabia. There are four main Alawite tribal confederations—the Haddadin, the Matawira, the Khaiyatin, the Kalbiya (Asads’ confederation) and three smaller tribes, the Darawisa, the Mahaliba and the Amamira.[7]
Due to their centuries-old difficulties with Sunnis, Nusayris learned to practice their rituals in secrecy. The sect is hierarchical and esoteric.[8] They have a three-class hierarchy of initiates, consisting only of males, while the rest of the community remains uninitiated. They meet at night in secluded places.[9]
The Shi’ite Fatimid dynasties in Egypt and Syria between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries were helpful to the Nusayris. However, as the Fatimid reign was ended in 1171, the Alawites suffered persecution for the next eight centuries.[10]
The orthodox theologian ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328), the inspiration behind the Wahhabi ideology of Saudi Arabia, condemned the Nusayris as being more dangerous than the Christians. Ibn Taymiyya encouraged Muslims to conduct jihad against them.[11] In July 2005, an international Islamic conference in Amman convened by King Abdullah II, attended by 200 leading Islamic scholars from 50 countries unanimously recognized that:
Whosoever is an adherent to one of the four Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi‘i and Hanbali), the two Shi‘iite schools of Islamic jurisprudence (Ja‘fari and Zaydi), the Ibadi school of Islamic jurisprudence and the Thahiri school of Islamic jurisprudence, is a Muslim.[12]
How Was Alawism Anointed as a Part of Shi’i Islam?
Sensitive to his religious illegitimacy as president in the eyes of Syria’s Sunnis, when Hafiz removed from the constitution in 1973, the clause in the previous constitution that required the president of the republic to be a Muslim, demonstrations rocked Syria. To avert bloody confrontations, he instructed a rubber-stamp parliament to reinstate the old clause.
To confirm that an Alawite can legitimately be called a Muslim, Hafiz obtained in 1973 from Imam Musa al-Sadr, head of the Higher Shi’ite Council in Lebanon, an opinion (fatwa) that made the Alawites a community of Shi’ite Islam. The opinion was politically expedient for al-Sadr during the turbulent period in Lebanon that ultimately led to the civil war (April 1975 – October 1990). The fatwa, however, was not assented to by Shi’ites’ senior-most ayatollahs, Grand Ayatollah Abol Qasem Kho’i of the Najaf Seminary in Iraq, or Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari of the Qom Seminary in Iran.[13] Alawite senior clerics then refused to submit to the authority of the grand ayatollahs in Najaf or Qom.
The Poverty and Maltreatment of the Alawites
Until 1963, when a 33-year-old decommissioned former air-force captain, Hafiz Asad and five compatriots seized power in a military coup, the Alawites’ mountainous region was destitute. Poverty was so abject that many Alawite families were compelled to send their daughters, sometimes as young as ten years of age, to live and work for paltry wages as housemaids in the homes of affluent non-Alawite families in nearby cities. While other parts of rural Syria were also poor, the Alawite region was worse: Villages had no electricity, running water, or sanitation. Elementary schools were scarce, intermediate schools were rare, and high schools were only available in large urban centers. Hospitals were nonexistent. Most villages were accessible only by horse or donkey. The region’s main source of income was tobacco growing, but the high brokerage fees charged by wholesalers in the largest coastal city of Latakia left little profit for the growers.
The Change in Syria’s Power Structure in the Twentieth Century
For centuries, Syria’s wealthy urban families and notables enjoyed a privileged position under the highly stratified society of Ottoman rule (1517–1918). The French mandate (1920–1946) changed all that. Syria’s urban elite had hoped to govern an independent Syria should the Ottomans be defeated in the First World War (1914-1918). For this reason, they pledged on May 23, 1915 to join the Arab Revolt against Istanbul, declared by the Sharif of Macca, Hussein bin Ali, on June 10, 1916.
Three weeks before declaring his Revolt, unbeknown to the Sharif, Britain and France had secretly signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement on May 16, 2016. London and Paris had agreed that should they win the War, they would divide the Ottoman provinces outside the Arabian Peninsula between them. The document was kept secret until the Bolsheviks published its contents on November 22, 1917, in the government newspaper Izvestiya, following the Russian revolution.
Seven months before launching the Revolt, however, Sharif Hussein was informed in a letter dated October 24, 1915, he received from the British High Commissioner in Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon, that Iraq and the Levant would not get their independence after the War. Sharif Hussein acquiesced to Sir Henry’s terms in a reply letter to Sir Henry dated November 5, 1915, without informing his Damascus compatriots. (see: The 1916 Revolt of Sharif Hussein bin Ali Against the Ottoman Empire).
Syria’s embittered urban elite led the nationalist resistance against French rule. France turned to Syria’s ethnic and religious minorities. It filled infantry and cavalry units with Alawites, Christians, Circassians, Druze, Isma’ilis, and Kurds.[14] France divided Syria into five semi-autonomous regions—Aleppo, Alexandretta (France transferred it to Turkey on July 13, 1939), Damascus, Druze Mountain, and Latakia.
After the nationalists forced France out of Syria in 1946, Damascus’ early governments were composed mainly of urban notables. The new leaders resented an army composed of ethnic and religious minorities. Between 1946 and 1948, they reduced the size of the army from 7,500 men to 2,500 men.[15] Army commanders reciprocated the resentment. The army became politicized. A series of military coups followed (see: The Military below). During the next fifteen years, young Alawites, most of whom could not afford a university education, sought careers in the military. The military academies offered free education and board.
During the union between Egypt and Syria (February 1, 1958 – September 28, 1961), under the presidency of Gamal Abdul Nasser, serious alterations to Syria’s power pyramid started in earnest. The Nasser government pursued a socialist agenda that destroyed the base of the centuries-old power structure in Syria (and Egypt as well). In 1958, Nasser nationalized factories and promulgated the Land Reform Act, which redistributed/ expropriated feudalists’ land, ostensibly, to improve the living conditions of non-farm workers and the peasantry after centuries of control by the ruling elites of feudalists, capitalists, and urban notables of the Ottoman era.
The 1963 Military Coup
On March 8, 1963, Hafiz Asad, a 33-year-old decommissioned air-force Captain, joined two other Alawite decommissioned officers, Muhammad Umran and Salah Jdeid, and three active-duty pro Nasser Colonels, Rashid Quttaini, Muhammad al-Sufi, and Ziad al-Hariri, in a military putsch that deposed Syria’s democratically elected parliament, president, and cabinet.
On that day, legitimate representative governance in Syria died. President Nazim al-Qudsi was arrested and kept in the hospital of the infamous Mazzeh Prison in Damascus for seven months before he was released in late November 1963. In mid-December 1963, Dr. Qudsi was allowed to leave Syria. He left for Beirut, Lebanon, never to return to Syria again. He died in Amman, Jordan on February 6, 1998.
Quickly, all political parties were banned, except the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party. Also, most Sunni officers of all ranks were retired from service. Even the Sunni cadets in the military academies were dismissed and replaced by Alawite high schoolers.
The Asads Era
By 1970, Hafiz had neutralized the three Nasserites in the original 1963 coup and eliminated the threat of his two Alawites compatriots. Salah Jdeid, Syria’s strongman between 1966 and 1970, was jailed in the notorious Mazzeh Prison in Damascus without trial until a few weeks before his death in 1993.[16] Muhammad Umran was assassinated in 1972 in Lebanon under mysterious circumstances, rumored to have been perpetrated by Hafiz’ brother, Rif’at.[17]
Hafiz consolidated his authority in March 1971. He became president in an uncontested referendum with near 100% of the votes cast. Four more referendum theatrics of near 100% approvals made him president until his death in 2000. Realistically, the regime may count on around a third of the votes.[18]
To enable his 34-year-old son, Bashar, become president, a constitutional amendment to lower the minimum age eligibility from forty to 34 years was forced upon the rubber-stamp parliament by Asad’s army surrogates. The son, true to his father’s ways, organized an uncontested referendum that made him president with, again, near 100% approval. Another contrived referendum and elections were the son’s claim to legitimacy.
Asads’ Legitimating Ideology
Notwithstanding the fatwa from Musa al-Sadr that the Alawite sect was a part of Shi’ite Islam, the Sunni masses disagreed. The Arab Socialist Ba’th Party’s slogan of Arab unity and socialism became the regime’s mantra. These were enshrined in Hafiz’s constitutions of 1973 and his son’s constitution of 2012.
Until the regime’s collapse on December 8, 2024, neither Arab unity nor socialism was achieved. In the house of Asad, ideology was a façade. Sectarianism, dictatorship, and illicit money were real. Indeed, the two branches of the one and same Ba’th Party that ruled Iraq (under Saddam Hussein) and Syria (under the two Asads) had been the bitterest of enemies. And, Syria was the only Arab Sunni country to side with Persian Shi’ite Iran against Ba’thist Arab Iraq in the Iran/Iraq war (1980-1988). As for socialism, such a claim is a contradiction in terms in a lawless police state, where corruption was the glue that keep the edifice together.
Asads’ Governance
Having no legitimacy or support among most of the 80% Sunni majority, Asads’ ruling minority suffered from siege mentality. A sectarian coalition of mutual dependency between Hafiz and Alawite generals was the natural outcome. Allegiance to Hafiz and later, his son, was personal, based on fear and uncertainty.
Asad’s rule was non-representative, non-participatory, and non-transparent. Strategic decisions were made haphazardly by a poorly informed small circle of family members. There were no political parties other than the regime’s Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party to present alternative plans, no egalitarian non-governmental organizations to critique the regime’s ideas, nor free press to speak out against the Palace’s sanctioned discourse. Every breath of opposition was sniffed out.
The Asads’ power pyramid was composed of three layers: The Asad family, the military, and the Arab Ba’th Socialist Party.
1. The Asad Family
The Asad family is small. Hafiz had five brothers and five children. He was not well-educated. He had a high school degree (1951), followed in 1952 by three years at the Homs military academy and the air force academy in Aleppo. He spent less than a year of pilot training (1958/1959) in the former Soviet Union. Aside from technical and basic Russian, he spoke no foreign languages and rarely traveled out of Syria. He was reckless. He overshot the Nayrab Airbase runway near Aleppo and crash-landed his Mercer Airplane on its belly in late 1956. After admitting that before taking off, “he knew his brakes were defective, he was reprimanded, fined and given a suspended jail sentence”[19]
His eldest son, Basil, died in 1994 in a speeding car he was driving on the road to Damascus Airport. Another son, Majd, died in 2009 of chronic disease. Bushra, the first child and the only daughter, left Syria with her five children to Dubai[20] shortly after her husband, Asef Shawqat, deputy defense minister, was killed on July 18, 2012, in a bomb blast at the headquarters of the National Security Bureau during a meeting of cabinet ministers and senior security officials.[21] In defiance to her family, Bushra married Asef in 1995, after her brother Basil’s death (1994).[22] Basil imprisoned Asef in 1993 to keep him away from his sister.[23]
Bashar grew-up in a home of intrigues, conspiracies, and violence. He learned lessons in duplicity, deceit, and treachery throughout his childhood. In 1980 (when he was 15 years of age) and in 1982 (when he was 17 years old), he witnessed his father and uncle Rif’at commit unspeakable crimes in Palmyra and Hama and, in 1984, he watched his uncle Rif’at come close to overthrowing his father from office while sick in hospital (see below).
The youngest surviving son, Maher, has had a reputation for being emotionally unstable and violent.[24] Diplomats say Maher shot and wounded Asef, his brother-in-law, in 1999.[25] As commander of the Republican Guard and the army’s best-equipped division, his cruelty is unmatched. In 2005, Maher and Shawkat were both mentioned in a preliminary report by UN investigators as the people who might have planned the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri.[26]
Sectarian Security Forces
Hafiz ensured that only trusted Alawite officers filled the high ranks of the armed and security forces, especially those guarding the regime in Damascus. Sunnis may be made prime ministers and cabinet ministers but not colonels or generals in the tank battalions, or the intelligence services.
Hafiz was cruel.[27] He was a manipulator, deceitful, and vindictive. He played one commander against the other. His brutality was a reminder to whoever considered crossing him. His younger brother Rif’at, commander of the notorious Defense Companies learned the hard way. In 1984, when Hafiz was in hospital suffering from a heart issue, Rif’at attempted to replace him. He was spared a greater punishment, reportedly, by their mother, Na’isa. He was exiled to Europe. He never set foot in Syria again, until he fled France 37 years later to escape a four-year jail sentence for theft.
Absolute Dictatorship
The two Asads had absolute powers. In the 2012 constitution, which resembles 1973, the President appointed his deputies (Article 91.1), the prime minister, ministers and their deputies (Article 97), civilian and military employees, and ended their services (Article 106). He promulgated laws that the parliament passed, but had the right to veto any law. Parliament could overrule the veto by a two-thirds majority (Article 100), but the President had the power, then, to dissolve the assembly (Article 111). When parliament was not in session, or in cases of extreme need or when national interest so demands, the President could exercise legislative powers alone (113.1).
Although the constitution contained clauses of a democratic nature, the emergency Law, in force since 1963, nullified every protection, be it Article 33.1, which guaranteed personal freedoms, dignity, and security of citizens, or Article 42.2, which established the right of every citizen to freely and openly express their views in writing or orally or by all other means of expression, or Article 43, which guaranteed freedom of the press, printing and publishing, or Article 53.2, which stipulated that no one may be tortured or treated in a humiliating manner. The emergency Law tuned living in Syria into living hell.
Further, there was no separation of governmental powers since 1963. The parliament and the judiciary were rubber stamp entities. Fear of the security dungeons terrified the most hardened of parliamentarians and the most fearless of judges. Anyone under the slightest suspicion could die at the hands of the regime’s sadistic torturers.
Death of Democracy in Syria
In 1963, Syria had a robust political life conducted by ten political parties of different philosophies, ethnic and religious compositions, agendas and platforms.[28] The parties promoted their programs freely. They shared power democratically in a coalition government. Immediately following the 1963 coup, the political parties were dissolved, their leaders scattered outside the country, and democracy died.
The pre-1963 democratic institutions were replaced by the Ba’th Party. The Party was a huge mass of hangers-on. The president was the secretary-general of the Party. As if to convey the image of a multi-party system, five incarnations of the Ba’th Party were invented. Together, the six were cobbled together under an umbrella called the National Progressive Front. In the May 2012 parliament, the Front was composed of the Ba’th Party, the Socialist Unionists, Communist Party of Syria (2 factions), National Vow Movement, and Arab Socialist Union. The security services watched every move of every parliamentarian for the slightest deviation from the regime’s line. The regime decapitated Syria’s democratic institutions. Most political leaders were killed or became refugees in foreign countries.
Cult of Personality
The cult of personality was everywhere. Huge portraits and statutes were at major intersections and public buildings. The name Asad was given to major, and not so major, projects: Lake Asad, Asad City, Asad Library, Asad Stadium, Asad this, Asad that… Propagandists fed the airwaves and the press a steady diet of invented victories. Every Asad action became a great achievement for Syria, the Arab cause, even the world. The slightest criticism meant jail, torture, even death.
Land of Fear
Multiple security services, numbering about 120,000 soldiers,[29] operated independently of one another: General Intelligence, Political security, Military Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, National Security, State Security, External Security…. They reported directly to Asad, overlapped without coordination, operated outside the law, watched each other, and encouraged people to spy on one another, even their own families. Parents were fearful of their own small children who might inadvertently divulge in schools anti Asad conversations heard at home. Friends would not trust friends for fear that a cynical ear might be listening. Stories of torture put the fear of God in would be dissenters. Sixty years of torture dungeons bred a culture of fear and distrust, ruining Syria’s societal fabric. Even female relatives were tortured, often raped on camera, to break a husband, father, mother, or brother. Such practices in Syria’s conservative society were 100% terrifying.
Institutionalized Torture
Amnesty International documented 38 types of torture used against detainees; including, electrical shocks, pulling out fingernails, burning genitalia, forcing objects into the rectum, beatings while the victim is suspended from the ceiling and on the soles of the feet, alternately dousing victims with freezing water and beating them in extremely cold rooms, hyperextending the spine, bending the body into the frame of a wheel and whipping exposed body parts, using a backward-bending chair to asphyxiate the victim or fracture the spine.[30]
Massacre in Palmyra
On June 26, 1980, Hafiz Asad escaped an assassination attempt in Damascus. The next day, two units of Hafiz’s brother Rif’at’s Defense Companies committed a massacre in the Palmyra Prison. They massacred 500 helpless inmates with machine gun fire and hand grenades. Patrick Seale described the horror: “In Palmyra, deep in the desert, where Muslim Brothers were being held … about sixty men were driven to the desert prison, split up into six or seven squads and let loose on the prison dormitories with orders to kill anyone inside. Some five hundred inmates died in cells echoing to the fearful din of automatic weapons, exploding grenades, and dying shrieks of ‘God is great.’”[31]
Massacre in Hama
The brutality with which the regime dealt with an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama in western Syria in February 1982 was beastly. A three-week orgy of bombardment from the air and the ground demolished this city of around 200,000 residents. Patrick Seale wrote of the Hama carnage: “The battle for Hama raged for three grim weeks … Hama was besieged by some 12,000 men … Many civilians were slaughtered in the prolonged mopping up, whole districts razed … Scores of mosques, churches and other ancient monuments were damaged and looted … Just how many lives were lost in Hama must remain a matter of conjecture, with government sympathizers estimating a mere 3,000 and critics as many as 20,000 and more.”[32] Rif’at boasted that the death toll was 36,000.[33]
The Destruction of Syria
On Tuesday March 18, 2011, the pressure cooker exploded. The barrier of fear was broken. The revolution was not sparked by Israel, the CIA, global imperialism, global warming, the drought, or migration from rural communities to urban centers, as the regime propagated. It was the sixty years of police state cruelties.
Unarmed protestors were met with live ammunition, barrel bombs, and chemical weapons. In an act of blackmail legitimacy, Asad released more than 2,000 hardened jihadists from jail during the second half of 2011. He deliberately enabled Islamist warlords to spread throughout Syria to claim that his was a fight on the al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State terrorists in a cynical move to gain sympathy from Europe and America. [34]
With Russia’s air force carpet bombings, Lebanon’s Hezbollah brigades, and Shi’ite mercenaries, Asad demolished the homeland to smithereens with barrel bombs and chemical weapons. He killed and injured two million people, possibly more, pulverized two and a half million homes, possibly more, and displaced 60% of the country’s 23 million people, internally and in neighboring countries and Europe.
Corruption
The two Asads were corrupt to the core. A narrow ruling group chosen from religious minorities plus Sunni merchant families was cobbled together. The modest salaries of the military and security commanders were too low to justify the risk of protecting a minority regime seen by the Sunni majority as heretical. So, enriching the ruling group illegally was the answer. For a business to flourish, the owner had to partner with a high-ranking Alawite officer, preferably in the intelligence services. Ordinary citizens, too, had to bribe their way up and down the bureaucracy, be it to expedite the issuance of a passport, a birth certificate, or avoiding a traffic ticket.
The presidents, father and son, were the patrons in-chief. Patron-client associations cascaded down through all ranks. Among the chief offenders was Hafiz’s brother Rif’at. He moved from rags to enormous riches in just a few years. An investigation into Rif’at’s finances was triggered in France in 2013, accusing him of stealing his fortune from Syria.[35] On September 9, 2021, the Court of Appeal in France confirmed the judgment by the Judicial Tribunal of Paris on June 17, 2020, sentencing Rif’at to 4 years in prison and the confiscation of his assets in France for illegally benefiting “from Syrian public resources cleverly concealed through a network of shell companies located in Europe and tax havens.”[36] On October 9, 2021, his nephew Bashar allowed him to return to Syria “to avoid imprisonment in France”[37]
On April 4, 2017, police in Spain raided 15 properties belonging to Rif’at, and some of his children as part of a money laundering investigation. The judge blocked 16 bank accounts held by individuals suspected of being connected to Rif’at and deposit accounts belonging to 76 companies. The judge ordered the seizure of more than 500 properties worth £590 million owned by Rif’at and his relatives. [38]
Rami Makhlouf, a cousin of Bashar, was the supreme crooked wheeler-dealer. Foreign companies could not do business in Syria without his consent—in return for commissions and kickbacks. In 2008, the US Treasury Department banned US firms and individuals from doing business with Makhlouf and froze his US-based assets. The US accused him of, “corrupt behavior, disadvantaging innocent Syrian businessmen and entrenching a regime that pursues oppressive and destabilizing politics. Makhlouf has manipulated the Syrian judicial system and used Syrian intelligence officials to intimidate his business rivals. He employed these techniques when trying to acquire exclusive licenses to represent foreign companies in Syria and to obtain contract awards.”[39]
There were hundreds of Rif’ats and Makhloufs in Syria’s Asad. The World Bank’s 2010 study of Worldwide Governance Indicators showed that of the 213 countries in the study, Syria ranked 189.[40] Huge disparities in wealth, income, and political influence between the ruling group and the rest of the country created a stratified society akin to apartheid.
Corrupt Government Finances
Beyond individual sleaze, government budget figures and financial reporting to world organizations were unreliable. In 2010, a year before the revolution, the International Monetary Fund issued a scathing report:
“Government finance statistics (GFS) suffer from major deficiencies with respect to definitions, coverage, classification, methodology, accuracy, reliability, and timeliness that generate severe inconsistencies with monetary and balance of payments statistics.”[41]
For years, it has been an open secret that Syria’s oil revenues were under the personal control of the two Asads outside government budget and reporting. In the five years that preceded the 2011 revolution, Syria’s average daily oil production was around 400,000 barrels per day. A rough guesstimate would put Syria’s oil revenues during those years in the region of $5 billion per year. No one dared talk about the subject, let alone question where or how the oil money was spent.
2. The Military
Since independence from the French mandate in 1946, Syria’s armed forces have taken the country from disaster to catastrophe. Nonetheless, Asads’ military was exalted as the defender against Israel, even though it never won a battle against Israel. For decades, Israel could bomb Syria at will without a whimper from the regime, save for the empty rhetoric of a response at the right time and place.
The French mandate started in 1920, following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. Between independence in 1946 and 1954, Syria experienced four military coup D’etats, three of which were in 1949. In February 1958, Syria and Egypt were united. They formed the United Arab Republic under the presidency of Gamal Abdul Nasser. A Damascus military coup on September 28, 1961, separated the two countries. Another military coup in March 1963 brought the Arab Ba’th Socialist Party to power. By 1970, at the end of a vicious internal power struggle, Hafiz Asad eliminated his compatriots in the 1963 putsch. In all, between 1946 and 1970, the Syrian army carried out seven coup d’états, eight if the union with Egypt is included—it was the generals who forced the country’s civilian politicians into the union with Egypt. These eight successful coups were in addition to many failed coup attempts.
During the first seventeen years after independence (1946–1963), the Syrian army was an instrument of turmoil. During those years, the armed forces were composed of officers from disparate ethnic and religious backgrounds, and more than half a dozen rival political parties. Since 1970, all positions in the security establishment and the army around Damascus became entirely composed of Asads’ trusted Alawite officers.
The confrontations of father and son with Israel were disastrous and humiliating. Both men suffered one crushing defeat after another. Here are a few:
When Hafiz was defense minister, he lost the Golan Heights in the 1967 Six-Day-War. His Commander of the Golan Front, Colonel Ahmad al-Mir, fled the battle field on a horseback to the Hawran Region in Southern Syria.[42] Hafiz’ performance in the 1973 war over the Golan Heights was not much better than in 1967.
Subsequent armed confrontations with Israel were disastrous as well. On June 9, 1982, twenty-nine Syrian MIGs were shot down by Israel over Lebanon.[43] The next day, failing to learn from the previous day’s disaster, Asad, supposedly, an air force pilot, lost another thirty-five planes.[44] In addition to losing the pilots, the cost of this confrontation may be estimated at one billion dollars, a fortune for a country that had a GDP of $10 billion that year.
During the son’s reign, Israel attacked the suspected al-Kibar nuclear facility in the Eastern Deir Ezzor region on September 5-6, 2007, destroying the site completely.[45]
Syria’s military impoverished the country. For decades, a considerable proportion of Syria’s modest resources were wasted on a third-rate politicized army. Military finances are conducted secretly and independently from the government budget. Not even the central audit office, ministry of finance, or parliament’s committees may question, let alone examine, army appropriations or spending.
3. The Arab Ba’th Socialist Party
Meaning renaissance, the Party was founded in 1947 by French-educated Syrian intellectuals Michel Aflaq, a Greek Orthodox, and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, a Sunni Muslim. In 1953, the Ba’th Party merged with the Arab Socialist Party of Akram al-Hourani to become the Arab Ba’th Socialist Party.
Under the two Assads, the Ba’th Party became the eyes and ears of the regime, a supplemental tool to the security services. A Quasi-military hierarchical structure under the authority of the President replaced the old collective leadership of the party in 1971.
From a few hundred members in 1963, Ba’thification of the civil service and the military swelled the numbers to 375,000, by 1981, and to 1.2 million, by 2010. The later figure represented around 20% of the country’s population between the ages of 25 and 54. The growth is not surprising; new job applicants had to join the Party if they were to stand a chance of securing employment. In a job market with limited opportunities, a government job was a coveted prize.
The Ba’th Party penetrated all walks of life, from high school and university students to teachers, workers, peasants, lawyers, engineers, physicians, journalists, government employees, and military personnel. It included all religious and ethnic groups. It orchestrated Asads’ sanctioned national discourse and transformed the two dictators’ personalities into a cult. It controlled the unions, not to protect members’ rights, but to protect the Asads from the people.
Footnote
[1] Hitti, History of the Arabs, 10th ed. (MacMillan Press Ltd London), 1970P. 448.
[2] Ibid, P. 449.
[3] Martin Kramer; Editor, Shi’ism, Resistance, and Revolution, (Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1987), PP. 237-254.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Hitti, History of the Arabs, P. 449.
[6] Matti Moosa, The Nusairi mass, Extremist Shi’ites, (Syracuse University Press, 1987), P. 405.
[7] Patrick Seale, Assad, the Struggle for the Middle East (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1995), P. 9.
[8] Philip Hitti, Syria: A Short History, (MacMillan & Co. Ltd., London, 1959), P. 172.
[9] Ibid, P. 173.
[10] Momen, Moojan, An Introduction to Shi’i Islam (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1985), P. 58.
[11] Patrick Seale, Assad, the Struggle for the Middle East, P. 10.
[12] The Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, “The Amman Message,” P. 16. https://rissc.jo/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Amman_Message-EN.pdf
Over 500 leading Muslim scholars world-wide adopted the Amman Message.
[13] Martin Kramer; Editor, Shi’ism, Resistance, and Revolution, PP. 237-254.
[14] Philip Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate. P. 81.
[15] Ibid, P. 629.
[16] Patrick Seale, Assad, the Struggle for the Middle East, P. 164.
[17] Ibid, P. 184.
[18] 90% of the 10% Alawi population (9%) + 2/3 of the other 15% of minorities (10%) + 20% of the 80% Sunni population (16%) = 35%.
[19] Patrick Seale, Assad, the Struggle for the Middle East, PP. 52 & 53.
[20] “Assad’s Sister Defect Amid ‘Disputes’ Between Ruling Alawites,” Al-Arabiya, (September 18, 2012). https://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/09/18/238771.html
[21] John Hall, “Brother-in-law of Syrian President Killed in Bomb Blast as Rebels Close in on Assad Regime,” The Independent, (July 18, 2012). http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/brother-in-law-of-syrian-president-killed-in-bomb-blast-as-rebels-close-in-on-assad-regime-7956389.html
[22] “Assad Loses Assef Shawkat, Syria’s Shadowy Enforcer,” Al-Arabia, (July 18, 2012). https://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/07/18/227058.html
[23] Abdulrahman al-Rashed, “Visit of Assad’s sister to Dubai,” Arab News, (September 26, 2012). http://www.arabnews.com/columns/visit-assad’s-sister-dubai
[24] “Bashar al-Assad’s Inner Circle,” BBC, (June 30, 2012). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13216195
[25] Nour Ali and Esther Addley, “At Home with the Assads: Syria’s Ruthless Ruling Family,” The Guardian, (October 11, 2011). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/11/assads-syria-ruling-family
[26] “Bashar al-Assad’s inner circle”, BBC, July 30, 2012), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13216195
[27] Sean O’Grady, “A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad, review: ‘Confronts the viewer with their crimes, but tries to understand’,” The Independent, (October 10, 2018), https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/a-dangerous-dynasty-house-of-assad-bbc2-two-review-syria-hafez-alassad-bashar-president-a8574646.html
[28] Peoples Party, National Party, Arab Socialist Ba’th Party, Muslim Brotherhood, Arab Liberation Movement, Socialist Cooperation Party, Syrian Social Nationalist Party, Syrian Communist Party, Kurdistan Democratic Party, Assyrian Democratic Organization.
[29] “Syrian security branches and Persons in charge”, Syrian Network of Human Rights, https://snhr.org/public_html/wp-content/pdf/english/Syrian_security_branches_and_Persons_in_charge_en.pdf
[30] GlobalSecurity.org, “Syria Intelligence & Security Agencies.” https://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/syria/intro.htm
[31] Patrick Seale, Assad, the Struggle for the Middle East, P. 329.
[32] Ibid, PP. 333-334.
[33] Adrian Bloomfield, “Maher Assad: Profile of the Syrian President’s Feared Brother,” The Telegraph, (June 9, 2011). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/8565025/Maher-Assad-profile-of-the-Syrian-presidents-feared-brother.html
[34] Richard Spencer, “Four Jihadists, One Prison: All Released by Assad and All Now Dead,” The Telegraph, (May 11, 2016). http://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/projects/isis-jihad-syria-assad-islamic/
[35] Josie Ensor and David Chazan, “Syrian President’s Uncle Under Investigation for Corruption and Money Laundering in France,” The Telegraph, (June 28, 2016), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/28/syrian-presidents-uncle-charged-with-corruption-and-money-launde
[36] “Rifaat Al Assad sentenced in France for his Ill-Gotten Gains allegedly fled to Syria”, Sherpa.org., (October 12, 2021), https://www.asso-sherpa.org/rifaat-al-assad-sentenced-in-france-for-his-ill-gotten-gains-allegedly-fled-to-syria
[37] “Rifaat al-Assad ‘Avoids’ French Prison”, Asharq Al-Awsat, (October 9, 2021), https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3235636/rifaat-al-assad-avoids-french-prison
[38] James Badcock, “Spanish Police Seize Property Worth £590m from Assad Family,” The Telegraph, (April 4, 2017). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/04/spanish-police-seize-property-worth590m-assad-family
[39] “Bashar al-Assad’s Inner Circle,” BBC, (July 30, 2012), http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13216195
[40] The World Bank, “Worldwide Government Indicators,” (2016). http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.aspx#home
[41] The International Monetary Fund, Country Report on Syria, No. 10/86, (March 2010), P. 30.
[42] Patrick Seale, Assad, the Struggle for the Middle East, pp. 140-141.
[43] Ibid. P. 381
[44] Ibid. P. 382.
[45] Eleven years after the attack, on March 21, 2018, Israel admitted that eight of its jets destroyed the close-to-be-completed nuclear site. The admission came after Israeli military censors lifted an order banning officials from discussing the operation: “Israel admits striking suspected Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007,” BBC, (March 21, 2018), http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-43481803