Hafez (center) and his son Bashar al-Assad (right) at their home in Damascus in the early 1970s.
On September 27th, 2019, a marathon was held in Aleppo, Syria. The event marks an uneasy return to normalcy for the city’s residents, as Aleppo saw fierce fighting between the Syrian Army and rebel forces throughout the Syrian Civil War. For many in the international community, the 2016 Syrian Army offensive on the city was the epitome of the Syrian regime’s brutality, with claims of war crimes and an incredibly high civilian death toll. However, there are parallels between Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s actions today and what his father, Hafez al-Assad, did in Hama in 1982, suggesting President al-Assad will stay in power as a result of brutally crushing the uprising.
Hafez, Destroyer of Hama
When Hafez al-Assad came to power in a bloodless coup on November 13, 1970, it was the country’s tenth coup in seventeen years. Al-Assad was constantly focused on holding onto power. Loyalty was paramount, and he was perpetually paranoid about being overthrown. When an anti-regime uprising in the city of Hama started targeting government buildings and “Alawite military officers,” al-Assad, an Alawite Shia himself, saw a threat to his rule. Hama had been a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist movement, since the early 1960s when the first clashes were reported to have occurred between al-Assad’s Baathists and Muslim Brotherhood insurgents. Due to its nominally secular, and nationalist, ideology, the Baath party opposed the Muslim Brotherhood.
Seeing the Muslim Brotherhood insurgents as a major threat, al-Assad ordered Syrian Army troops to quell the uprising in Hama. Over the course of a month, the Syrian Army destroyed or subdued “every neighborhood in the city.” Amnesty International estimated that “10,000 to 25,000″ people were killed, and it reported gruesome accounts of torture by regime forces. However, al-Assad’s plan worked; the city was subdued and the threat to his rule was removed.
The Student Becomes the Master
Given that his older brother was still alive at the time, Bashar al-Assad was not expected to become president, but he undoubtedly learned a few lessons that would prove useful later. In 2011, political and economic frustration directed at the Syrian regime exploded as part of the Arab Spring. What initially was a civil uprising became an armed insurgency, as the government cracked down with extreme force. From his father, al-Assad learned that paranoia pays off. In fact, Bashar al-Assad is reportedly so paranoid about being overthrown that he jumped when a journalist pointed a microphone at him because he thought it was a gun.
Second, from his father’s actions, al-Assad observed that using overwhelming force against civilians would draw little international condemnation and could effectively subdue a population. As a result, the Syrian military devastated entire cities and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians using airstrikes, which sometimes used cluster bombs. Third, he understood that torture is an effective way to spread fear among the populace. Thus, during the Civil War, military prisons, such as Sednaya, became torture centers. All the hallmarks of his father’s crackdown in Hama in 1982 can be seen in Bashar al-Assad’s actions today.
Bashar al-Assad is using his father’s 1982 playbook today. He learned how to quell an uprising from his father and is now employing the same tactics. The Syrian Civil War is the second deadliest war of the twenty-first century, and the Syrian government is responsible for a significant portion of the civilian casualties. Al-Assad will most likely stay in power after the end of the Civil War, thanks to his Iranian and Russian allies, and will continue to rule as a brutal dictator. Even if al-Assad manages to create a sense of stability in Syria after the Civil War ends, there is no guarantee that this stability will be permanent. Thus, understanding why and how al-Assad crushes dissent today is crucial to understanding his actions in the future. In the meantime, history will keep rhyming.
Image Credit: Flickr/FreedomHouse