Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria

by Raphael Lefevre

  Ideologically, much was dividing the three factions. While both the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership and Issam al-Attar’s “Damascus wing” believed that an alliance with anti-regime secular parties would help sustain the momentum leading to the possible downfall of the Assad regime, this was an option which Adnan Uqlah’s organization ruled out completely. Committed to a literal interpretation of the “Qutbist ideology” whereby al-hakimiyya (God’s sovereignty on earth) would characterize a post-Assad Syria, the forces of the Fighting Vanguard expressed a particular scorn for democracy and political pluralism. “For us, men don’t have a right to govern by themselves, they must be governed through God,”38 a close associate of Adnan Uqlah proclaimed. Another member of the Fighting Vanguard made that approach clear when he asserted: “I do not know why and on what religious ground should reform be achieved through the democratic process.”39 Such statements were hardly compatible with the principles set out in the Charter of the Islamic Front, a statement of purpose signed by prominent ulama and Muslim Brothers (Said Hawwa, Adnan Saadeddine, Ali Sadreddine al-Bayanouni amongst others) spread throughout Syria in January 1981. It stressed that if the Islamic movement ever managed to topple the Ba’athist regime, the transition towards democracy would be based on principles such as respect for the rights of religious minorities, the independence of the judiciary, free elections and the separation of powers.40

  The wide ideological gap dividing the Fighting Vanguard from much of the Muslim Brotherhood was coupled with mutual mistrust and resentment. This had always been the case. Although many scholars and authors of Syrian politics have for long confused the Fighting Vanguard and the Syrian Brotherhood—suggesting for instance that the latter was behind the 1979 Aleppo massacre—the relationship between the two organizations was much more complex as, in fact, there was more rivalry than complementarity. As an example, Muhammed Hawari, the “Damascus wing’s” representative in Syria during the time of al-Attar’s exile, recalled receiving a visit in the Syrian capital from Abd-us-Sattar az-Za’im, Marwan Hadid’s successor at the helm of the Fighting Vanguard, in 1976 suggesting that they join forces in order to better counterbalance the Brotherhood’s leadership.41 This example is quite telling as it shows the extent to which the Fighting Vanguard and the Brotherhood were competitors: the jihadist organization was prepared to go as far as striking an alliance with the more moderate Damascene Brothers, who had by then left the main organization, in order to counterbalance the Ikhwani leadership.

  Tensions between the Ikhwani leadership and Adnan Uqlah’s Fighting Vanguard came to a head with the collapse of the “Joint Command” some time in late 1981. The “Caliph” seems to have been at the origin of the split. After almost a year of cooperating with the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership in Amman, Adnan Uqlah and his troops had grown frustrated with the Ikhwan’s “old-fashioned mentality”.42 While they had wished to act as the vanguard of the Ikhwan, and were therefore, at first, proud to associate themselves with the organization, the members of the Fighting Vanguard eventually became the organization’s fiercest critics. Adnan Uqlah himself grew so frustrated with the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership that a Syrian Islamic scholar who knew him well reported that the “Caliph” came to him to enquire whether he could issue a fatwa, or religious ruling, allowing the kidnapping and imprisonment of Ikhwani leaders.43 Abu Mus’ab al-Suri’s memoirs are also filled with negative references to the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership. Accordingly, the organization’s “no war no peace” mentality would allow its most prominent members to “live a peaceful civilian and secure life while claiming they are at war.”44 “They were not able to set a good example in daring, sacrifices and perseverance, and neither did their family members, those family members were placed farthest from the frontlines and encouraged to get on with their personal lives, continue their education and get married,” he asserted bitterly. “They were enjoying the easy life while their parents in the leadership were planning to send hundreds of other people’s kids to war.”45

  In addition, the members of the Fighting Vanguard were always very critical of the competing individuals whose political ambitions underpinned the sometimes chaotic work of the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership—in their eyes to the detriment of true ideological and military opposition to the Ba’ath. Such a perception of the Ikhwan’s state of affairs had already been a main rationale behind their creation of the Fighting Vanguard. “The people trying to initiate true reform realized that they cannot succeed in such an atmosphere and that their only hope is to choose a different path,”46 explained al-Suri. The following sentences describe the extent to which this former Fighting Vanguard member despised the Ikhwani culture, reflecting the profound divergences which ultimately set the Islamic movement’s “jihadist wing” apart from its “political leadership”:

  [In the Brotherhood’s leadership,] axis of power was formed not based on political philosophy or ideology but rather on the persona of leadership, power and responsibilities were concentrated in the hands of few traditional personalities. Loyalty and access to those few leaders played a big role in assigning mid-level positions. Tasks that required a dedicated system of many specialists were often assigned to a single individual not because of his qualifications but because of his loyalty or connections to the traditional leadership—[leading] to an excessive situation of cronyism and nepotism I’d rather not get into.47

  Abu Musab al Suri concluded: “[the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood] was side-tracked by marginal conflicts and spent a lot of time and effort jockeying for positions instead of concentrating all their resources and efforts on winning the battle.”48

  Frustrated by what they saw as a passive stance displayed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership, the members of the Fighting Vanguard, who inside Syria were coming under increasing pressure in their stronghold of Hama, started to express impatience. As the occupation of the city by governmental forces intensified throughout early 1982, a group of fighters belonging both to the Muslim Brotherhood and to the Fighting Vanguard started distributing weapons to the city’s inhabitants and called for the uprisings which, in February 1982, would lead to the fiercest governmental retaliation ever experienced in the history of the country.

  A last stand: the Hama uprising

  It has for long been a thorny issue to understand the complex dynamics which led the Muslim Brotherhood to enter into what all members of the organization admit today as having been “a tragic confrontation”. Until recently, the leaders of the Ikhwan were still reluctant to address the reasons which led the organization to call for an all-out uprising against the Ba’ath in Hama on 8 February 1982. Discussing with Syrian Brothers the exact flow of events remains contentious to this day—not least because the happenings underline the profound rift which then emerged among the organization’s ranks and has plagued the collective nature of its work ever since. Two overlapping factors seem, in particular, to have led the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership to endorse an immediate full-scale jihad against the Ba’ath in Hama. On the one hand, divisions within the organization led the more hard-line Hamawite members to take over its leadership. On the other hand, these Hama-born Ikhwanis entertained a particularly complex yet clearly close relationship with the Fighting Vanguard, which led them to embrace the jihadist organization’s call for immediate uprisings in their home town in early 1982.

  If the leadership of the “Joint Command” regulating the alliance between al-Tali’a, the Ikhwan and the “Damascus wing” formally lay in the hands of Hassan al-Houeidi, it is widely believed, as noted earlier, that the hard-line Adnan Saadeddine was the true power broker inside the coalition. In 1975, he had taken over the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership and had given rise to the so-called “Hama clan”, a group of more radical Ikhwani militants who mostly originated from that conservative city. “When Adnan Saadeddine became leader, he imposed his views on the movement and applied Hama’s tribal structure to the leadership of the Ikhwan,”49 Zouheir
Salem, a Brother from Aleppo, bluntly asserted. In Hama, it seemed as if personal friendships sometimes superseded political loyalty. The “Hama clan” is thus reported to have been bound by a particular form of solidarity and kinship which was the product of the city’s peculiar socioeconomic structure, very distinct from the more business-oriented and open way in which the Aleppines are said to have operated inside the organization. Much of the blame for the violent confrontation which ensued is placed on this “Hama clan”.

  Shortly after the debacle of February 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood’s consultative body asked that a “Truth-Seeking Committee” be set up in order to shed light on the way in which the organization was lured into a battle resulting in its immediate military and political demise. In it, Adnan Saadeddine and his right-hand man, Said Hawwa, were heavily criticized for the significant role they were reported to have played in the events leading to the Hama massacre.50 The former Syrian jihadist Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, originally from Aleppo, also pointed out the special responsibility of the “Hama clan” in the unfolding of events. “Adnan Saadeddine took control, made all the decisions and was directly responsible for what ensued […] including the tragedy of Hama,”51 he claimed in his memoirs. The ambiguous relationship Saadeddine and Hawwa seem to have entertained with members of the Fighting Vanguard in the city came under particular scrutiny.

  A local leader of the Ikhwan in Aleppo explained the different ways in which the militants of the Fighting Vanguard were treated by the Ikhwan in Hama and in the rest of the country in the years preceding the advent of the “Joint Command”. “Between the 1960s and the end of the 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood’s official policy was to withdraw the membership of any Brothers known to also belong to the Fighting Vanguard. In Aleppo for instance, when we learnt that Husni Abu, Zouheir Zaqruta and Adnan Uqlah, at first all members of the Brotherhood, followed regularly the circles of Marwan Hadid, we immediately fired them from the Ikhwan.” “However, in Hama, things were blurred as the local leadership there was much more open to dual memberships”.52 This is confirmed by a prominent Syrian Brother, at the time a local leader of the organization in Hama, who said there might indeed have existed “members who belonged to both organizations between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s.”53 For example, it is widely maintained that Umar Jawad, the commander of the Fighting Vanguard for the region of Hama, also belonged to the local section of the Muslim Brotherhood.54

  In another instance reflecting the divergent perceptions of Ikhwani members from Hama and those from the rest of the country, it is difficult to know exactly how long the Hama-based Marwan Hadid, the hero of the jihadists, remained an actual member of the Muslim Brotherhood. While the Hamawite Brothers generally assert that he remained a Syrian Brother all through his life, Damascene and Aleppine Brothers instead insist that Hadid’s membership was withdrawn after his involvement in the violent April 1964 Hama riots.55 It is quite obvious that the Hamawite members of the Ikhwan entertained close relations with the jihadists of the Fighting Vanguard originating from Hama. “Abd-us-Sattar az-Za’im, then leader of the Fighting Vanguard, was my friend”, Muhammed Riyadh al-Shuqfah, thus recalled. “The local Brotherhood was active in providing money and funds to the Fighting Vanguard which, in turn, benefited the families of those in Hama who had died fighting the Ba’ath regime,” he explained, while nonetheless insisting that “not one penny was at that time spent to help the Fighting Vanguard in its military fight” and that “personal friendships”56 did not mean an actual merger of the two groups.

  Whether this was truly accurate or not, it appears that the persona of the Hama-born Adnan Saadeddine, then leader of the organization, was deeply involved in trying to set up informal cooperation between the Fighting Vanguard and the Brotherhood between 1977 and 1980. Ali Sadreddine al-Bayanouni, at that time a prominent Aleppine member of the Ikhwan acknowledged that “Adnan Saadeddine met with Abd-us-Sattar az-Za’im in Beirut during January 1977.” But he also insisted on adding that the meeting of the then Ikhwani leader with the head of the Fighting Vanguard “was an individual act which did not result from a collective decision made by the leadership,” emphasizing that “it is worth noticing that both az-Za’im and Saadeddine were from Hama.”57 The alleged secret co-operation between al-Tali’a and the then leader of the Ikhwan was reported to have been put on hold for a few months when the person who acted as intermediary between the two men, Riyath Jamour, was caught by the regime in early 1979, ushering in several months of dysfunctional coordination between the two groups. This seems to suggest that Adnan Saadeddine did not have prior knowledge of the Aleppo Artillery School massacre before it happened, in June 1979, although at least one source has disputed this.58 But what was the degree of involvement on the part of the Hamawite leaders of the Ikhwan in the debacle of February 1982?

  The year 1981, during which the repression of the Islamic movement in Hama sharply increased, saw the convergence of two trends which, when they intersected, put the Ikhwani leadership onto a self-destructive path. On the one hand, the already existing rift between the Hamawite and Aleppine members of the Ikhwan, which until then was mainly of a clan-based nature, took on a quasi-ideological dimension. “Hamawite members of the Muslim Brotherhood perceived the situation differently than [Aleppine Ikhwanis] did, they had a different thinking,”59 Ali Saddreddine al-Bayanouni explains today. While those originating from Hama expressed an eagerness to do whatever it took to defend their home town from Ba’athist tanks, those from Aleppo seemed more cautious not to provoke the regime into a last-ditch battle before the Ikhwan were certain they had chances of winning it. Ultimately, however, the former prevailed over the latter. Said Hawwa, an influential young radical ideologue who also acted as Adnan Saadeddine’s right hand man, was reported to have successfully threatened Ali Saddredine al-Bayanouni that, if he did not pass on his job as “military commander” of the Brotherhood, he would resign from the organization. While still open to debate, the role played by Said Hawwa in the subsequent unfolding of events seems to have been crucial. Having taken over as head of the “military branch” of the Ikhwan in January 1982, a few weeks before the violent Hama uprising, he appears to have pushed the Brotherhood into a doomed confrontation with the regime.

  In parallel, Adnan Uqlah was recalled to Hama by the commander of the Fighting Vanguard, Umar Jawad, who wished to brief the “Caliph” on the tough security situation experienced by the Hamawites on the ground. Without consulting the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership, Adnan Uqlah left Amman for Hama where he remained throughout December 1981. There, he apparently became convinced of the necessity to go beyond the sporadic attacks undertaken by the Fighting Vanguard and the Brotherhood in order to open in that bastion of Islamic militancy an all-out frontal attack against the Ba’ath which, if successful, would then spread throughout Syria to eventually topple the regime. During his stay in Hama, he was reported to have told the city’s inhabitants that the time would soon come for the city to rise as a single man against the Syrian Ba’ath and that, with the expected help of the Muslim Brotherhood, and despite wranglings between some factions, the planned uprisings would have the effect of a bomb and destroy the remnants of the regime. For the Hamawites to know exactly when would be the best time to rise up, he told his local companions that he would send a code word which would be broadcast from a radio station based in Iraq.

  When the collective leadership of the Ikhwan was told that Adnan Uqlah had visited Hama and planned an all-out uprising against the Ba’ath there “with the blessing of the Muslim Brotherhood,” it immediately summoned the “Caliph” of al-Tali’a back to Amman for consultations. Members of the Brotherhood’s Executive Committee did not object to Adnan Uqlah’s broad intentions. They in fact agreed with him that the best way to topple the Assad regime would be to foment a full-scale revolt in the city of Hama, the bastion of Islamic activism in Syria, which, it was hoped, would trigger a series of similar uprisings in Aleppo, Damascus and other major cities
alongside general strikes to paralyze the country and ultimately bring the regime to the verge of collapse.60 But some within the Brotherhood’s decision-making body, and in particular most of its Aleppine members, disagreed with Adnan Uqlah on his plea for the unleashing of an immediate all-out rebellion in Hama. Organizing uprisings against the regime would take time as well as careful preparation and any attempt to rush the process could potentially be catastrophic for the Islamic movement. According to al-Shuqfah, who was present in Amman when the events occurred, the Ikhwan’s Executive Committee, then headed by Hassan al-Houeidi, asked Said Hawwa to send a letter to the Fighting Vanguard’s leader in Hama, Umar Jawad, instructing him to not follow Adnan Uqlah’s orders. The message, however, never reached Umar Jawad, who called upon the whole city to rise when he received Adnan Uqlah’s orders soon after an abortive government raid on the group’s weapons cache on 2 February 1982.61 The outcome is known: having distributed weapons to the inhabitants of Hama, the local Ikhwani and Fighting Vanguard militants slaughtered dozens of Ba’athist officials and led violent street riots which, in turn, would draw the government troops into bloody acts of revenge against the city’s inhabitants (see appendices for Abu Mus’ab al-Suri’s detailed account of the battle of Hama). When the uprising spread throughout the city, the Brotherhood’s whole leadership based in Amman was left with no other choice than supporting the rebellion—whatever its fate.

  There is still considerable controversy inside the movement as to how the message for Umar Jawad became “lost” between Amman and Hama, underlining the still-existing mistrust and, to a certain extent, tension pitting Ikhwanis from Hama against those from Aleppo. Muhammed Riyadh al-Shuqfah, a long-time member of the “Hama clan”, asserts that his colleague Said Hawwa did send the message to Umar Jawad and that the messenger, a trusted driver, should therefore be blamed for having “lost” it.62 Others belonging to the “Aleppo faction” suggest that given Said Hawwa’s particularly hard-line stance against the Ba’ath, he might not have wished to follow the Executive Committee’s orders and instead went his own way, tacitly supporting Adnan Uqlah’s jihadist effort.63 In addition, when asked why Said Hawwa subsequently resigned from the Brotherhood’s Executive Committee in 1983, Ali Saddredine al-Bayanouni, a member of the Aleppo faction, explained that the radical Ikhwani ideologue might have felt a “special responsibility”64 for the tragic way the Hama uprisings ended—tragic not only for the Islamic movement but also for the Hamawite population irrespective of its political affiliation.