Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria

by Raphael Lefevre

  At first, though, it seemed as if Adnan Uqlah’s call to arms had a chance to succeed in toppling the Ba’ath’s authority over Hama. The estimated 400 rebel Islamic fighters were joined by two thousand citizens who came to take control of the old city for a few days. According to a cable from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which at the time closely monitored the unfolding of the rebellion in Hama, loudspeakers on top of mosque minarets started calling on the people to begin their jihad against the government and to pick up weapons, which were available at specific mosques. Soon, fighting teams affiliated with the Fighting Vanguard and the Muslim Brotherhood, some even wearing army uniforms, moved to attack preselected government targets in the city. “One of the teams attacked the Office of Civil Registry and destroyed residency records for the city of Hama and the surrounding province. These records were a primary tool of Syrian intelligence in maintaining population control,” the DIA cable noted. “At the same time, other elements attacked police stations, security offices, Ba’ath Party headquarters and army units, forcing them to withdraw from the city after several days of intense fighting.”65 Government troops, however, soon regained the initiative as the regime’s most ruthless and reliable combat units were called in. Shafiq Fayad’s 3rd Armoured Division (responsible for the repression of demonstrations in Aleppo throughout March 1980) and the feared Defence Brigades (which participated, among other deeds, in the Palmyra Prison events of July 1980) joined forces to oust the rebels, house by house and district by district. Street battles lasted for several days before the security forces spent weeks shelling whole quarters of the city. The following sentences describe the humanitarian situation endured by Hamawites during Syria’s bloodiest three weeks, which would durably put an end to any political contestation to the regime for more than three decades.

  “Hama endured a collective punishment” was the conclusion of a team of human rights activists who undertook a study of the Ba’ath regime’s violations of humanitarian law throughout the years:

  For three days, security forces killed hundreds of people in a series of mass executions near the municipal stadium and at other sites. Troops pillaged stores and homes and fired weapons indiscriminately, treating all citizens as responsible for the insurrection. Army sappers blew up many of the buildings that still stood, sometimes with tens of people inside. Some reports say that security forces used cyanide gas to kill people inside structures […]. Commandos seasoned by the battlefields of Lebanon blasted the city with helicopter-launched bombs and rockets, artillery and tank fire.

  For three consecutive weeks, the shelling of the city was so intense that entire neighbourhoods were flattened and became unrecognizable. “North of the Orontes River, the dense, ancient neighbourhoods had been reduced to rubble. Old quarters south of the river lay in ruins. Army bulldozers arrived to flatten the smoking shells of buildings […]. Tens of thousands fled the city, homeless and traumatized. Thousands of others, attempting to flee, were caught in the security ring and arrested.”66 Estimates of the number of dead range between 10,000 and 40,000, but it has never been possible to come up with a precise number of people killed at Hama in February 1982.

  A “Camp David conspiracy”?

  Surprised by the strength and resilience of the movement encountered at Hama, the regime launched a massive investigation which led to the discovery of over 15,000 machine guns allegedly belonging to armed members of the Islamist opposition.67 Their provenance left the regime in no doubt about their origins, as their serial numbers referred to weapons having transited through Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, all of whom had differing interests in further polarization of the Syrian political scene.

  Of these countries, Iraq was the most prominent provider of training, money and weaponry to the Syrian Islamists. At first glance, this can be seen as surprising, given the shared ideological features of the Syrian and Iraqi Ba’ath regimes. However, by 1966 the Ba’ath Party had separated into two competing branches, a left-wing Syrian “neo-Ba’ath” and a more centrist Iraqi Ba’ath which welcomed Syrian dissidents belonging to the “old guard” such as Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar.68 According to one author, Syria and Iraq were thus ruled by “two mutually antagonistic elites, each claiming to be the sole representative of the true Ba’ath Party.”69 Perhaps most important, the two countries shared a history of rivalry in the struggle for regional primacy. Relations between Baghdad and Damascus reached a historic low when Hafiz al-Assad supported the Ayatollahs in Tehran upon Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in September 1980. According to the former Ba’athist Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam, this was the proof that interests have always trumped ideology in Syrian-Iraqi relations. According to him, “despite our common ‘Ba’athist’ nomination, the Iraqi security services became actively involved in supporting the Islamist movement in Syria while [the Syrian government was] financing rebel Iraqi Islamists.”70 The estrangement between the two governments was such that, in 1981, Saddam Hussein went as far as publicly welcoming a delegation of prominent leaders of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in Baghdad, promising them “full support and money”.71 Although the Syrian Ikhwan have historically been reluctant to recognize the Iraqi Ba’athist provenance of the bulk of their external help, many inside the Brotherhood retrospectively recognize that Baghdad might have, at the very least, “logistically facilitated”72 their struggle against the Syrian regime.

  The Iraqi capital thus quickly became a safe haven for Syrian Islamist activists who could undergo military training in any of the numerous camps set up at their disposal by the Iraqi Ba’ath’s security apparatus. Adnan Saadeddine in particular and his Hamawite followers in general seem to have enjoyed a special relationship with Saddam Hussein, this becoming obvious throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s (see Chapter 8). For quite some time, Iraq remained a strong and steady provider of arms, funds and security to Islamic militants from Syria. “For once in our lives, we were prized by the Ba’athists!” Muhammed Riyadh al-Shuqfah—who himself found refuge in Baghdad after fleeing Hama in the late 1970s—claimed with irony. He remembered the extent of the Iraqi regime’s help to the Islamic movement at such a crucial moment of Syrian history:

  The Iraqis were of a highly significant help […] Saddam Hussein appointed his Vice President, Taha Yassine al-Ramadan, to be in direct liaison, he was tasked with being constantly in touch with us in Baghdad. […] But beyond money and weapons, we were also provided with security help. Safe houses were at our disposal in the Iraqi capital and the local mukhabarat [intelligence services] strove to foil any assassination attempts aimed at us. On a personal level, out of four assassination attempts I suffered at the hands of the Syrian security services, three were foiled by the Iraqi mukhabarat.73

  On the security front, Adnan Saadeddine was in constant contact with Colonel Mohammed Salmani who was then heading the “Syria Desk” of the Iraqi secret services.74 Iraqi help to the Syrian Islamists was such that it came close to provoking an all-out war between the two neighbours. While the Syrian government expelled the Iraqi Ambassador from Damascus alongside his staff in August 1980, events accelerated after the Hama uprising which the regime was quick to blame on Baghdad. Shortly thereafter, Syria closed its border with Iraq, and following its shutdown of the Kirkuk-Banyas pipeline transporting Iraqi oil to the Mediterranean, it broke off all diplomatic relations in April 1982. It remains until today a delicate subject to discuss the Iraqi provenance of much of the external help which the Muslim Brotherhood received at such a crucial stage of its history. One can understand the embarrassment of Muslim Brotherhood leaders, who found in the Iraqi Ba’ath a pragmatic ally willing to back-up their struggle while the one country from which they could have theoretically expected help given its ideological proximity, the Iran of the Islamic Revolution, had joined Hafiz al-Assad in accusing the Ikhwan of being “a gang carrying out the Camp David conspiracy against Syria.”75

  The reference to the Camp David Accords which formalized peace
between Egypt and Israel in 1979 was far from neutral. Beyond the bitterness in Syrian-Iraqi relations lay a more regional, strategic game for influence in the Arab world. Pressure was mounting on the shoulders of the Syrian regime which felt increasingly isolated by Egypt’s geopolitical realignment. Although Nasserism and Ba’athism shared a common ideological background embedded in a declared commitment to secularism and socialism, bitter rivalry between Damascus and Cairo had emerged after Nasser tried to use the short-lived union between the two countries to advance Egypt’s influence in the Near East. By 1979, the struggle for regional primacy between the two countries had transformed into a strategic challenge for both in a reshaped Middle East. The peace accords signed that year by Egypt with Israel had decisively put Cairo behind an axis supported by the United States which seemed to threaten Syria’s interests in the region—focusing by then on the situation in Lebanon. For Cairo and Damascus, much was at stake. While it became in Egypt’s interest to pursue an agenda favouring peace in the region so as to decrease the isolation it had suffered since its signing of the agreement with Israel, Syria was for its part opposed to any compromise with the Jewish state, as the struggle against Israel had become a main source of legitimacy at a time of domestic unrest. Tensions rose between the two countries as, by then, the Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat was reported to be organizing clandestine security training programmes destined to increase the Syrian Islamic movement’s military capabilities. According to Brynjar Lia, who wrote a biography of the former Fighting Vanguard member Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, a team of Egyptian officers had been tasked with assisting the paramilitary instruction of Syria’s jihadist fighters. The six-week training course followed by Syrian activists was reported to be so good that al-Suri would even praise its efficiency in teaching how to carry out “guerrilla warfare techniques, security affairs and external terrorist operations.”76 However, as the Egyptian President himself quickly became the target of Islamic militants in his own country, he drastically reduced the assistance brought to Syrian activists loosely linked with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.77

  By the late 1970s, Damascus was closely watching the strategic realignments taking place in the Middle East. Chief among Assad’s worries was that countries other than Egypt might follow through and sign peace agreements with Israel, transforming Syria’s frontal opposition to Tel Aviv from a majority opinion into a minority position in the region. Jordan, a longtime strategic rival to its Syrian neighbour, was widely suspected by the Ba’ath regime in Damascus of being on the verge of signing an agreement with Israel. In parallel, King Hussein of Jordan had become by the late 1970s a major host for exiled leaders of the Syrian Ikhwan whom he welcomed throughout their stay in Amman. Training camps were set up in the Jordanian desert and the Syrian Ikhwan regularly held their Shura Council meetings in Amman where most of the leadership resided until the late 1990s. Therefore, while the Jordanian security services did not seem to have been as widely involved in the active training of the Syrian jihadist fighters as their Iraqi and Egyptian counterparts, they nonetheless displayed a benign neglect judged as suspicious by Damascus. According to Brynjar Lia, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood thus operated in Amman “relatively secretly albeit with the knowledge and tolerance of the Jordanian government.”78 In turn, in February 1981 Hafiz al-Assad allegedly sent an assassination squad to eliminate Mudar Badran, the Jordanian Prime Minister, who, when the attempt on his life failed, had to resign in a tacit acknowledgement by the Jordanian regime that it had gone too far in supporting the Syrian Islamist movement.79 Damascus would nonetheless have to wait until King Hussein’s death and King Abdullah’s accession to witness the departure of prominent Syrian Brothers, such as Ali Sadreddine al-Bayanouni, from Amman.

  In order to compensate for the regional realignment taking place in the Middle East, Hafiz al-Assad strengthened Syria’s ties with the USSR, a move initiated by the Syrian President’s approval of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and finalized by the signing of a Pact of Friendship in October 1980. In the framework of the Cold War, this could only have infuriated the American government. Given the Syrian Ikhwan’s strong anti-communist outlook, visible not only in their programme but, through their sporadic attacks on USSR missions inside Syria, a tacit alliance between them and the US was conceivable. However, allegations that the leader of the Syrian Brotherhood, Adnan Saadeddine, met a senior American diplomat in Amman in 1982 cannot be confirmed, despite the numerous interviews carried out in research for this work. Nevertheless, it is clear that a significant amount of the external help received by the Brotherhood was coming from Saudi Arabia, a pillar of United States strategy in the region, although the Saudi aid is said to have been provided on a more “cautious basis”80 than its Iraqi counterpart. The Saudi government welcomed exiled leaders of the Brotherhood, such as Abdel Fattah Abu Ghuddah, and allowed Ikhwani fundraising activities in the Kingdom to gather financial support for the organization. This was coupled with the significant backing of Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti who, conveying his dislike of Alawi rule in Damascus, granted his “full support to the Syrian Mujahidin’s struggle against the heretical and secular Ba’ath regime.”81 Whether these were in fact individual acts not sanctioned by the Saudi government remains unclear, but the very fact that such moral and financial support could be gathered in a Kingdom characterized by its authoritarian rule sent an unmistakable signal to Damascus.

  In retrospect, many members of the Syrian Islamic movement who once benefitted from Arab states’ help provided in their struggle against the Ba’ath later voiced strong criticisms of the way they felt instrumentalized in the regional game for strategic primacy. For them, it seemed as if the cause they defended—the toppling of the Syrian Ba’ath and its replacement by an Islamic state—had too often been claimed by states ultimately interested in advancing their own interests, abroad but also at home. In this respect, Abu Mus’ab al-Suri’s memoirs provide a fascinating insight into the way in which Fighting Vanguard militants were provided with help and training by states for purposes other than what they thought at the time. The former al-Qaeda ideologue suspected Jordan, Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia of having all helped Syria’s jihadist fighters solely with the goal of improving their knowledge of Islamic networks so as to better fight them at home. “By studying our organization, they were able to wage effective campaigns against similar Islamic groups in [their countries],”82 he claimed. The extent to which host regimes controlled the networks developed by Syrian activists remains unknown but, for that former Fighting Vanguard member, it is quite clear that they came to possess intimate knowledge of the functioning and methods employed by Islamic activists. “The host regimes infiltrated our organizations, monitored all our activities, restricted and checked us, and in some cases arrested or killed our members and representatives.”83 Drawing a lesson from this, al-Suri concluded: “A neighbouring regime or a regime antagonistic to the one we are fighting may step in and offer arms and financing unconditionally. We should never be dependent on such sources because their own hidden agenda will be aimed at controlling the revolution and using it to serve their own interest.”84

  PART IV

  ASHES OF HAMA

  THE SYRIAN ISLAMIST MOVEMENT SINCE 1982

  7

  MILITANT ISLAM AFTER HAMA

  The massacre of thousands of Syrian citizens in February 1982 was Hafiz al-Assad’s own way to send an unmistakable message to the Islamic opposition which had been challenging Ba’athist rule ever since 1963. Any attempt to resist the Syrian President’s grip on power would be met with a disproportionately harsh response: these were his “Hama rules”.1 The Syrian Brotherhood was seriously weakened—left for decades with neither a base inside the country nor a coherent organization abroad (see Chapter 8). The Brotherhood’s long exile, however, did not mean that all forms of political Islam were suppressed, for two powerful dynamics emerged out of the ashes of Hama.

  On the one hand, the Islam
ic rebellion had shown to the Syrian rulers that they had to take into account the growing popularity of political Islam, something the Ba’athists were keen to do by striving to co-opt religious scholars and to accommodate Syria’s increasingly vocal conservative constituencies. It is in this light that one should see their efforts to adopt foreign and domestic policies more in line with popular sentiment than ever before. The fierce anti-American stance taken by the regime at the dawn of the 2003 war in Iraq also enabled the Syrian Ba’ath to encourage the departure for Baghdad of radical Islamists who wished to raise the banner of jihad there. By doing so, however, the security services were playing with fire as the secular and minority-dominated Ba’ath regime was bound to be the ultimate target of those Syrians who, after waging jihad in Iraq, would be prepared to come back and fight for an Islamic state at home. As the Syrian uprisings continue to unfold, that trend is likely to merge with another dynamic linked to the history of radical Islam in Syria: the fate of the 1970s Syrian jihadists.