Hafez al-Assad

President of Syria (1971-2000)

• Born: October 6, 1930
• Birthplace: Qardāha, Latakia Province, Syria
• Died: June 10, 2000
• Place of death: Damascus, Syria

Assad ruled Syria autocratically for nearly thirty years, bringing stability and modernization to a country plagued by political turmoil and economic underdevelopment. During his presidency, Syria became a powerful regional actor, a central player in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the dominant force in neighboring Lebanon.

Early Life

Hafez al-Assad (hah-FEHZ ahl-ah-SAHD) was born in the remote village of Qardāha in the Ansariya Mountains of Syria, near the Mediterranean coast. His father, Ali Suleiman, was noted for his physical strength and sense of fairness, bringing the family considerable respect in the tight-knit communities of the Ansariya. Ali Suleiman’s reputation resulted in a change in the family name just before the birth of Hafez, from Wahhish (meaning savage) to Assad (meaning lion).

Like others in the Ansariya region, the Assads were members of the Alawite sect, a small heterodox branch of Shia Islam. The blending of some Christian beliefs, nature worship, and reverence for Ali (cousin of the Prophet Muhammad and the fourth caliph), placed Alawites outside the mainstream of Islamic beliefs, explaining in part their long-standing social, economic, and geographic isolation from the Sunni Islam majority in Syria. Until at least the 1950’s, most Alawites lived either as subsistence farmers and herders in the mountains or worked as domestic servants for Sunni families in the cities.

Assad was the first member of his family to attend secondary school, finishing in 1951 in the coastal town of Latakia. He was a bright, hardworking, and highly ambitious student. It was in high school that Assad became politically active. He was elected to student government and became embroiled in the ideological debates between Arab nationalists, communists, and Islamists that permeated postindependence Syria (Syria gained independence from France in 1946). Assad joined the new Baՙth (meaning rebirth) Party in high school, attracted by its calls for pan-Arabism, anticolonialism, socialism, and secularism.

In 1952, Assad entered the Air Force College in Aleppo. The military was one of the few avenues for advancement for poor, marginalized Alawites, and Assad used this education to become a top-class pilot and to further his political ambitions. The years after his graduation in 1955 were tumultuous ones in Syria and the broader Middle East. The rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, including the 1956 Suez Canal crisis, dominated regional affairs. Domestically, Syria endured numerous military coups d’état and political instability, including an ill-fated union between Syria and Egypt from 1958 to 1961, which Assad opposed because of Syria’s subservience to Egypt in the newly merged country.

Life’s Work

After rising up the ranks of the military, Assad became defense minister in 1966, after fellow Baՙthist officers overthrew the government. From this post he oversaw the disastrous defeat of Syria and its Arab allies by Israel in the June, 1967, Arab-Israeli war. Among other humiliations, this war led to the Israeli occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights, a strategic region just 40 miles from Syria’s capital city of Damascus. Assad would spend the rest of his life unsuccessfully trying to win back the Golan.

In September, 1970, another military misadventure brought Assad to power in Syria. That month Jordan’s King Hussein launched an attack on guerrilla fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) who were establishing a virtual state within a state in Jordan and seeking the overthrow of Hussein. The Syrian government, led by Nureddin al-Atassi and Salah Jadid, sent ground troops into northern Jordan to intervene on behalf of the Palestinians. The Jordanian air force, backed by veiled threats from Israel, attacked the Syrian troops and forced their retreat. Assad refused to send air support to the Syrian troops and used the chaos to stage a bloodless coup. The party was purged in a so-called corrective revolution, Assad loyalists were placed in key positions, and Assad officially became president by a March, 1971, referendum.

Assad’s consolidation of power in 1970-1971 quickly cemented into a repressive authoritarian regime based on single-party rule, a cult of personality, and a wide-ranging internal security and intelligence system called Mukhabarat. Although Alawites constituted less than 12 percent of the population, they filled most of the top political and security positions. This, along with the socialist and secular ideology of the Baՙth Party, alienated the organization the Muslim Brotherhood (Sunni), which several times attempted to assassinate the president. The Islamist insurgency culminated in an uprising in Hama in February, 1982. In response, Assad unleashed Mukhabarat forces under the command of his brother, Rifaat al-Assad, against the city, killing at least ten thousand residents before finally quelling the uprising.

Although brutally intolerant of political opposition, Assad is credited with bringing stability and development to Syria. During his long presidency Syria made significant strides in public education, social reforms, industrialization, and modernization of the state’s infrastructure. With the exception of ensuring the internal security of his regime, however, Assad was far more engaged in foreign affairs than with domestic policy.

In October, 1973, Assad and Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat launched a surprise attack against Israel to regain territory lost in the 1967 war. After initial gains Egypt’s troops stopped and dug into their positions. Assad felt betrayed by Sadat, and Israel quickly turned the tide of the battle to its advantage. Israeli troops retook Golan and threatened to continue on to Damascus before the United States and the Soviet Union intervened to establish a cease-fire. Assad was further outraged when Sadat broke with his Arab allies to negotiate a separate peace treaty with Israel at Camp David in Maryland in 1978.

The 1970’s also witnessed Syria’s intervention in Lebanon. In 1976 the Lebanese government, dominated by a Christian minority, requested Syrian military assistance during the Lebanese civil war. With the agreement of the Arab League, President Assad sent in his army to bolster the government and to attempt to restore order. This may have been prompted in part by Assad’s sense that Lebanon was historically connected to Syria. It was also a way to assert control over the PLO, which had set up operations in Lebanon following its expulsion from Jordan. Whatever the initial motivations, tens of thousands of Syrian troops would remain in Lebanon for the next three decades.

Syria’s presence in Lebanon inevitably brought it into conflict with Israel, which invaded Lebanon in 1982 in an attempt to destroy the PLO. The fighting during this period also gave rise to a Shia resistance movement in Lebanon called Hezbollah, or Party of God. Inspired by the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, Hezbollah wanted to assert the demographic weight of Shia Muslims in Lebanon and was virulently opposed to Israel. The party became a powerful force in regional politics. Assad, along with Iran, supported Hezbollah as a way to indirectly combat Israel.

For the first twenty years of Assad’s presidency Syria was closely aligned with the Soviet Union. The collapse of communism was a devastating blow to Syria’s economy and military. The loss of Soviet support was thus the key factor in Assad’s decision to side with the United States-led coalition in the 1991 Persian Gulf War to oust Iraq from Kuwait. Syria sought better relations with the Arab oil kingdoms and a thawing of tensions with the United States, the sole remaining superpower. This policy shift led to numerous, ultimately unsuccessful, attempts throughout the 1990’s to negotiate a peace settlement between Syria and Israel.

Significance

During the 1990’s, Assad worked to secure a final legacy of his long rule: the succession of his son as president. Originally this was to be his eldest son Basil, but he died in a car crash in 1994. Bashar al-Assad, an ophthalmologist by training and the next son in line, was then groomed and successfully assumed power following his father’s death in June, 2000.

After a brief initial period of liberalization under Bashar, Syria began to function in much the same authoritarian manner as it did under Assad. Assad’s legacy also remains strong in regional politics, with most of the key issues of Lebanon, the Arab-Israeli conflict, sponsorship of terrorism, and the rise of Islamism dominating Syrian policy into the twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Hinnebusch, Raymond. Syria: Revolution from Above. New York: Routledge, 2002. Examines the development of the Syrian state under Assad, with a focus on the Baՙth Party’s consolidation of power, economic development, and state-society relations.

Lesch, David W. The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Chapters 2-4 offer analyses of the Assad family, Hafez al-Assad’s rule, and Syria’s role in the Middle East. Informed by personal interviews with Bashar al-Assad, Hafez’s son and successor to the presidency.

Ma’oz, Moshe. Asad: The Sphinx of Damascus. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988. A political biography written by a leading Israeli scholar of modern Syria.

Perthes, Volker. The Political Economy of Syria Under Asad. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. A detailed study of Syrian economic development and the interplay between the state, the economy, and society since 1970. Emphasizes the role of economic factors in explaining the policy decisions of President Assad.

Ryan, Curtis R. “Syrian Arab Republic.” In The Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa, edited by David E. Long and Bernard Reich. 4th ed. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002. An informative introduction to Syrian government and political history.

Seale, Patrick. Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. The classic biography of Hafez al-Assad, by a leading British writer on the Middle East. Research for the biography included interviews with Assad, his family, and many top Syrian officials.