Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria

by Raphael Lefevre

  After Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser shut down the Syrian multi-party system in 1959 within the framework of the newly formed United Arab Republic (1958–61), a core group of Syrian Alawi officers based in Cairo became involved in the establishment of the Ba’ath’s secret Military Committee—a confidential paramilitary platform which would later take a leading role in the Ba’athist coup of 8 March 1963. After the Ba’ath Party’s accession to power in Syria on that date, an internal struggle inside both the army and the Ba’ath was played out along overlapping sectarian, regional and socioeconomic lines, culminating in the coup of 23 February 1966, which saw the advent of a more radical, disproportionately rural and minority-dominated regime.26 As a result, during the period of this “neo-Ba’ath”, Alawi officer representation inside the Syrian Army increased from 30 per cent in 1963–66 to 42 per cent in 1966–70. Similarly, the proportion of Alawis in the Syrian Regional Commands of the Ba’ath Party, the most influential decisionmaking organ of the Party, had risen significantly from 14 per cent in 1963–66 to 23.4 per cent in 1966–70.27 Inside the army, bitter rivalry between regional factions did not end until the remaining non-Alawi blocs were neutralized in 1969, paving the way for an intra-Alawi confrontation between Salah Jadid and Hafiz al-Assad, of whom the latter ultimately prevailed through another coup on 12 November 1970. The symbol was powerful: Hafiz al-Assad became the first Syrian President of Alawi faith, thereby formally overturning the traditional pattern of oppression which his community had suffered for centuries.

  As the rise of the Alawis inside the army and the Ba’ath Party became more pronounced, so too did the favouritism from which the minority religious community could benefit. Not only did Alawis receive preferential access to public sector jobs, but health care and education efforts were also concentrated on the Latakia region so as to reduce inequality between members of the community and the rest of the country.28 Private and public investment also came to be concentrated in the north-western part of Syria, where in the early 1970s a university was established in Latakia, a cement works factory set up in Tartus and an oil refinery built in Banyas.29 While the regime strove to find rational grounds for most of these investments, certain examples of obvious regional and sectarian preference have sometimes been harder to justify. The French sociologist Michel Seurat reported, for instance, that among a group of 100 students from Tartus selected to undergo professional training in the USSR, one was Christian, two were Sunnis and 97 were Alawis in an area where 55 per cent of members belonged to the latter religious community.30 At the national level, especially in the army and the upper echelons of the bureaucracy, sectarian favouritism also seemed to spread. A Syrian Muslim Brother living in exile recounted that, when doing his military service at the Tartus Air Academy, he was surrounded by 1,200 fellow cadet officers amongst whom only 99 were Sunni, Christian or Druze; Alawis represented the remaining 98 per cent of the corps and controlled the most important positions.31 While such examples have only anecdotal value, they still convey the atmosphere of the time which, in certain sectors of Syrian society, led to the perception that the Alawi-dominated Ba’athist regime had, in fact, become an “Alawi regime” seeking to assert the domination of one community over others.

  By the end of the 1970s, the Alawis had managed to secure a grip on the political, economic and military levers of power in Syria. At first glance, this seems to confirm the old assertion of Jacques Weulersse, one of the earliest authors of scholarly work on the Alawis, that a minority can rule a majority so long as it wields an unquestionable political, military and economic superiority over it.32 But was the sectarian nature of the Assad regime always as clear-cut as this?

  The “Alawization” of the Syrian regime: myth or reality?

  While Hafiz al-Assad’s Sunni Islamic opponents have often portrayed his regime as being overtly sectarian from the outset, it is nonetheless worth noting that the Syrian President strove to moderate the sectarian antagonism he inherited from his radical “neo-Ba’ath” predecessors—at least in the early years of his rule. Until 1976, Hafiz al-Assad thus oversaw several substantial increases in Sunni representation in Syrian cabinets (+10.5 per cent between 1966–70 and 1970–76), the Syrian Regional Commands of the Ba’ath Party (+18 per cent between 1966–70 and 1970–76) and the military (+15 per cent between 1966–70 and 1970–76).33 Some Sunnis officials, such as Mustafa Tlass or Abdel Halim Khaddam, rose to prominent positions, Minister of Defence and Foreign Minister, later to become Vice President, respectively. It should be added that these increases in Sunni representation inside the country’s most significant decision-making bodies often came at the expense of non-Alawi minorities (Druze, Ismailis and Christians) and of other Sunnis originating from the cities of Aleppo and Hama.

  In fact, one of the earliest acts of Hafiz al-Assad’s presidency was to forge an informal alliance with the Sunni bourgeoisie of Damascus, offering this key constituency high-level positions in the bureaucracy and the Ba’ath Party in exchange for political support. A former senior Syrian diplomat whose family background is rooted in the traditional Sunni Damascene bourgeoisie thus recalled that when Assad took over as President, he immediately proposed key positions to his father, then a doctor, first as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Damascus, before making him Minister of Health.34 Yet, if Hafiz al-Assad first strove to downplay the sectarian dimension of his rule by co-opting Sunnis into visible positions, why did his Alawi background become an issue so salient that, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, it seemed to have brought Syria to the brink of civil war? Here, at least two factors seem to have been at play: the increasingly radical nature of the Islamic opposition and the growing perception that the Assad regime was behaving in a sectarian way both domestically and externally.

  Indeed, even though Hafiz al-Assad relied during his presidency on a power base composed, in order of importance, of his family (with his brothers Rif’at and Jamil in key positions in the army), his tribe (the Numailatiyyah section of al-Matawirah), his religious community (the Alawis) and senior Ba’athist officials from the countryside (the northwest and north-east of Syria) as well as from the capital, it was nonetheless the Alawi dimension of his rule that attracted most attention. This was mainly because, throughout the 1970s, the thorny issue of the supposedly non-Islamic nature of Alawism resurfaced. In January 1973, the enactment of a “secular” Constitution was perceived by many inside the Islamist opposition as symbolizing the fusion of the two worst sins: the secularism of the Ba’ath and the supposed anti-Sunnism of Hafiz al-Assad. As a result, the Syrian President had to introduce a clause making it mandatory for the head of state to be a Muslim, but he felt insecure enough to ask the Shi’ite Lebanese cleric Musa al-Sadr to produce, the same year, a fatwa asserting that Alawis belong to Shi’ism and are therefore Muslims.35 In parallel, he strove to obtain the official support of a few co-opted Sunni religious scholars such as the then Grand Mufti Ahmad Kuftaro and the Kurdish sheikh Said Ramadan al-Buti, who tied their own destinies to the regime by blindly praising it in return for privileged access to decision-making circles.36

  It was not long, however, before the sectarian powder-keg exploded again, with lasting consequences this time. In June 1976, Hafiz al-Assad dispatched 30,000 Syrian troops to Lebanon with the goal of restraining the leftist-Palestinian alliance which Kamal Jumblatt, the Druze leader of the left-wing Lebanese National Movement (LNM), had struck a little earlier with Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). While Hafiz al-Assad’s decision to order the military intervention in Lebanon was driven by a perception that this would enhance Syria’s security interests, it was nevertheless interpreted by the majority of Syrians as a deliberate act of anti-Sunnism. To them it seemed as if it was their President’s Alawi faith that had driven him to take sides in the early stages of the Lebanese civil war, defending and supporting the pro-Western Christian Maronite minority in their struggle against the Sunni Palestinians. If the Lebanese episode
severely tarnished the Arab nationalist credentials of the Ba’ath regime, it also drew a renewed attention to the Alawi background of its rulers.

  That perception, in turn, was partly the result of a campaign started by an increasingly radical section of the Islamic opposition against Hafiz al-Assad’s rule. Since the Hama riots of April 1964, the jihadist current, at the time led by Marwan Hadid, had grown more and more vocal in the Syrian Islamic movement (see Chapter 5). While the reasons behind the increased radicalization of the Islamic opposition go beyond the regime’s policies in Lebanon, that, it can be suggested, helped fuel Sunni resentment. At any rate, many inside the Islamist movement started to emphasize the distinctly “Nusayri”, or Alawi, nature of the Ba’ath regime. In a radical move, the Syrian Ikhwan’s chief ideologue at the time, Said Hawwa, started referring to Ibn Taymiyya’s fatwa against the minority community. Increasingly, Syrian Islamic publications such as Al-Nadhir referred to the Ba’athist regime as embodying the “Alawi enemy”, or these “infidel Nusayris who are outside Islam”.37 According to Nikolaos Van Dam, by framing its struggle in increasingly sectarian terms, the Islamic opposition hoped to polarize antagonisms in Syrian society around the confessional axis. This, in turn, was expected to gather the key support of Sunnis who were less religious, possibly even Ba’athist, to whom the regime appeared to be more and more tainted by a sectarian colouring, and who were increasingly attracted by the popular Islamic slogan of the time: “a minority cannot forever rule a majority”.38 The renewed anti-regime campaign launched from 1976 until 1982 by the Islamic movement was not, however, limited to harsh verbal attacks seeking to delegitimize the regime on sectarian grounds. It also had a violent component.

  At first, a campaign of assassinations directed at prominent Alawi members of the Ba’ath regime was launched by the leaders of the Fighting Vanguard, a well-structured jihadist network with loose connections to the Muslim Brotherhood (see Chapter 5 and 6). A prominent member of the Syrian mukhabarat, or security services, was killed at Hama in 1976, the rector of Damascus University and a professor at Aleppo University were both shot in 1977, and close security aides to Hafiz al-Assad perished in 1978, among many others. However, what was at first targeted violence soon transformed into indiscriminate sectarian killing. A former senior Syrian diplomat, whose father was a minister of Sunni faith in Hafiz al-Assad’s government, recalls: “all my Alawi friends, whether close to the regime or not, were afraid of seeing a plastic bag on their doorstep, possibly hiding a bomb.”39 The tipping point was reached on 16 June 1979, at the Aleppo Artillery School when a Sunni Ba’athist staff member, Captain Ibrahim Yusuf, assembled the cadet officers of Alawi faith in the dining-hall before letting in jihadist gunmen affiliated with the Fighting Vanguard who then slaughtered eighty-three of them, wounding many others.40

  Between 1979 and 1982, faced with a violent Islamic insurrection that based its opposition on sectarian grounds, Hafiz al-Assad took steps to reinforce his grip on Syrian institutions. In 1979–80, he proceeded to purge hundreds of Sunnis from the army and the Ba’ath. He also came to rely more heavily on the one group he could expect loyal support from: the Alawis.

  Atmosphere of sectarian civil war

  In August 1980, at a high-level meeting of Alawi leaders in Hafiz al-Assad’s home town of Qardaha, the Syrian President allegedly went as far as encouraging the members of his religious community to “enter the society and challenge the Sunni bourgeoisie in the economy”.41 Alawis were increasingly mobilized: they would either throw all their weight behind the regime or face an uncertain future. “Working for cohesion […] was the strong fear among Alawis of every rank that dire consequences for all Alawis could ensue from an overthrow or collapse of the existing regime,”42 explained Hanna Batatu. This dynamic was also confirmed by the former Syrian Vice President, Abdel Halim Khaddam, who sees “the regime’s fear of collapse”43 as a reason behind the increased mutual dependence of the Alawi community and the Assad system. By 1980, Syria was on the brink of a sectarian civil war. The Aleppo Artillery School massacre carried out by Sunni extremists had indeed managed to polarize Syrian society to an unprecedented extent and, by the same token, destabilized the regime of Hafiz al-Assad as never before.

  By the admission of one radical Islamic activist, the goal of the massacre of the eighty-three Alawi cadets at Aleppo had been to “sow sectarianism similar to that in Lebanon”.44 In that endeavour, the Sunni extremists were successful insofar as the attack triggered a wave of state repression mainly directed at the regime’s Sunni opponents who fought back, bringing Syria to the verge of a violent cycle with no end in sight. Just a few days after the June 1979 massacre, the mukhabarat were, according to one report, already detaining an estimated six thousand people in and around Aleppo.45 However, when the popular sheikh of the Rawda Mosque, Zeinedin Khairallah, was briefly detained by the Ba’athist authorities on the eve of Eid al-Adha, the streets of Aleppo quickly filled with several thousand angry protestors on violent demonstrations culminating in the killing of eighteen Alawis by the crowd.46

  Sectarian strife was not limited to the northern metropolis. It soon reached Latakia in a symbolic move signifying the spread of sectarian violence in a city that was predominantly Sunni but which also counted a sizeable Alawi minority, located at the heart of a predominantly Alawi region. In late August 1979, the Alawi sheikh Youssef Sarem was assassinated in the coastal city, inaugurating several weeks of violent clashes between Sunnis and Alawis. Clashes of a similar nature in Hama and Homs were reported. Most significantly, perhaps, it was in the armed forces that sectarianism quickly spread following the massacre at the Aleppo Artillery School, threatening to cause a split in the Army and bring the Ba’athist regime to a state of implosion. The day after the Aleppo massacre, clashes between Alawi and Sunni cadet officers erupted at the Homs Military Academy, which only calmed after a visit by the Sunni Defence Minister, Mustafa Tlass. Similar clashes erupted in several units of the Syrian army stationed in Lebanon. In Berze, near Damascus, a Sunni soldier from the Special Units slaughtered thirteen Alawi officers before killing himself on 15 July 1979. According to Michel Seurat, the seeds of sectarianism planted by the Aleppo massacre had spread so quickly within the armed forces that, by the end of the summer of 1979, it seemed as though there were “two Syrian armies” separated along confessional lines. While it is difficult to assess how far this represented the reality at the time, the Alawi-dominated regime felt sufficiently threatened for Hafiz al-Assad to order the dismissal of over 400 Sunni officers.47

  Very often, state repression itself assumed a sectarian nature as the units sent to crush the opposition and detain suspected terrorists were predominantly Alawi in their composition. While Hafiz’s own brother, Rif’at, was in charge of the Defence Brigades, famous for being disproportionately Alawi in composition and ruthless in action, other prominent members of the minority community were in charge of the security apparatus, such as Ali Haydar, leader of the Special Forces, and Ali Duba, head of Military Intelligence, among others. According to Walid Safour, director of the London-based Syrian Human Rights Committee (SHRC), “it became sufficient to be a religious Sunni Muslim to be arrested and tortured”.48 Now living in Britain, Walid Safour was a secondary school teacher in Homs where he was arrested in 1979 by Military Intelligence for his alleged links to the Muslim Brotherhood before being tortured, according to his own account, by Muhammed Ibrahim al-Shaar, a local Alawi security officer who would later rise to the post of Minister of the Interior. In many instances, the regime’s declared goal of “tracking down the Muslim Brotherhood”, an organization supposed to be behind the sectarian provocations of the radical Islamic militants, merged with a determination on the part of Alawi-dominated security forces to humiliate and crush its primarily Sunni opponents.

  Inside the regime, the President’s own brother, Rif’at, called at the 7th Congress of the Ba’ath Party, in December 1979, for a “national purge” which could be carried out by setting
up “labour and re-education camps in the desert” since no sacrifice would be too great to “defend the revolution”. This Ba’ath Party Congress marked the rise of Rif’at to a position of unprecedented influence. At the same time, however, Patrick Seale suggests that, if “the iron-fist methods he put into practice probably saved the regime, it also changed its character”.49 A few months after the Congress, an editorial in Tishrin, the mouthpiece of the Assad regime, warned that “armed revolutionary violence” would be used in order to defeat the “reactionary violence”.50 On the ground, the shift came about shortly afterwards when, on 10 March 1980, the government struck a severe blow to anti-regime protesters who had just set fire to a Ba’ath Party local headquarters at Jisr al-Shughur, a small town in the mountains between Aleppo and Latakia. Helicopter-borne troops of the Special Forces were flown in, and after two days of a search-and-destroy operation, two hundred people had been killed.51

  Aleppo, then a centre of gravity of the Islamist opposition, became the target of state repression again. By mid-March 1980, units of the Third Army Division entered the city, their commander, General Shafiq Fayadh, warning the townspeople that he was “prepared to kill a thousand men a day to rid the city of the vermin of the Muslim Brothers”.52 The city was occupied by additional troops from the Special Forces and the Defence Brigades. It is estimated that, during the year the city was occupied, the security forces killed between one and two thousand people, some at random, many in summary executions. At least eight thousand more were arrested.53

  In the public mind, however, it is the city of Hama that has received the most attention. As the particular dynamics leading to the February 1982 Hama massacre are complex and can only be fully understood by also considering the internal wrangling within the Syrian Islamic movement between its most moderate and radical members, it will be examined in greater detail in Chapters 6 and 7. It is nonetheless worth noting that the Hama massacre remains, to this day, one of the most traumatic experiences lived by those Syrians who poured out into the streets of the country’s cities in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Faced with an Islamic insurgency that was on the verge of taking Hama back for its pious Sunni Muslim inhabitants after a long occupation by government troops, Hafiz al-Assad decided to make an example of the city, showing how much it would cost for Syrians to rebel against his rule. As an illustration of the intensity of the fighting throughout February 1982 in Hama, it is difficult until today to assert precisely how many Syrians lost their lives. While initial reports suggested 10,000 civilians were killed,54 other reports put the number as high as 40,000.55