Hafez al-Assad

Hafez al-Assad (6 October 1930 – 10 June 2000) was a Syrian politician and military officer who served as the president of Syria from 1971 until his death in 2000. He was previously the prime minister from 1970 to 1971 as well as the regional secretary of the regional command of the Syrian regional branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party and secretary general of the National Command of the Ba'ath Party from 1970 to 2000. Assad was a key participant in the 1963 Syrian coup d'état, which brought the Syrian regional branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party to power in the country, a power that lasted until the fall of the regime in 2024, then led by his son Bashar.

After the 1963 coup, the new leadership appointed Assad as the commander of the Syrian Arab Air Force. In February 1966 Assad participated in a second coup, which toppled the traditional leaders of the Ba'ath Party. Assad was appointed defense minister by the new government. Four years later Assad initiated a third coup, which ousted the Marxist regime of Salah Jadid, and appointed himself as leader of Syria. Assad imposed various changes to the Ba'athist foreign policy after seizing power, such as abandoning Salah Jadid's policy of exporting "socialist revolution" and strengthening Syria's foreign relations with countries that his predecessor had deemed "reactionary". Assad made an alliance with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War in return for support against Israel, while keeping ties with many Western European & Gulf Arabian countries. While he officially kept the pan-Arab concept of unifying the Arab world into one “Arab nation” as he termed it, such as being part of the Federation of Arab Republics, he sought to paint Syria as the defender of the Palestinians against Israel.

Assad quickly consolidated his power. Right after Gamal Abdel Nasser's death, he sought to reconciliate Syria with the other Arab countries, which had been harmed under Jadid’s rule. He also tried to form new ties with countries from both camps in the Cold War. As a result, he got economic support from OPEC members during the 1973 oil embargo, as a show of support to his war against Israel in 1973, the October War. While Syria remained a one-party system, Ba'athist decision-making authority that had previously been collegial was reduced in favour of empowering the president’s absolute control over the country. To maintain his personalistic rule, a cult of personality centred on Assad and his family was created by the president and the Ba'ath party. Assad ordered an Arabization campaign on Kurdish areas of Syria and started intervention in Lebanon in 1976, which resulted in the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. During his rule, his regime crushed an Islamist uprising led by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood rebels through a series of crackdowns culminating in the Hama massacre, which led to two thirds of the city of Hama being destroyed. His regime was accused of numerous human rights violations, including opening prison death camps.

Assad's initial preferred successor as president was his brother Rifaat, but Rifaat attempted to seize power in 1983–1984 when Hafez had a health scare and he was subsequently exiled. Assad's next choice of successor was his eldest son, Bassel. However, Bassel died in a high-speed car crash in 1994, and Assad turned to his third choice—his younger son Bashar, who at that time was a medical student in the UK, with no political experience. The move to appoint a member of his own family as his successor was met with criticism in some quarters of the Syrian ruling class, but Assad persisted with his plan and demoted officials who opposed this succession. Assad died in June 2000 and Bashar succeeded him as president, serving until his overthrow in December 2024.

Early life, education and early career

Early life

Hafez al-Assad was born on 6 October 1930, in Qardaha, a town in the north-west of Syria. He was born into a poor Alawite peasant family belonging to the Kalbiyya tribe of Alawites. Later, Assad recalled at the congresses of the Peasants' General Union: "I had a passion for threshing the harvest... But I took part in all the phases of farming..., lived your emotions and understand what your life signifies. I still have mental pictures of the injustices of the time. No matter how far the past sinks away, it is necessary to keep these images alive in our minds, not to nurse hatred against anyone but to see into them, for what we endured forms an essential part of the way we view things and of the foundation on which we build the present and the future."

His paternal grandfather, Sulayman al-Wahhish, gained the nickname al-Wahhish (wild beast) for his strength. Hafez al-Assad's parents were Na'isa Shalish and Ali al-Assad. His father married twice and had eleven children. Hafez was his ninth son and the fourth from his second marriage.

By the 1920s, Ali was respected locally and was initially opposed to the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, a French-ruled League of Nations mandate officially established in 1923. Nevertheless, Ali Sulayman later cooperated with the French administration and was appointed to an official post. Local residents called him "al-Assad" (the lion) for his accomplishments and, in 1927, he made the nickname his surname.

Education and early political career

Alawites initially opposed a united Syrian state (since they thought their status as a religious minority would endanger them). After the French left Syria in 1946, many Syrians mistrusted the Alawites because of their alignment with France. Assad left his Alawite village, beginning his education at the age of nine in Sunni-dominated Latakia. He became the first in his family to attend high school, but in Latakia, Assad faced anti-Alawite bias from Sunnis. He was an excellent student, winning several prizes at around the age of 14. Assad lived in a poor, predominantly Alawite part of Latakia; he even had to interrupt his studies for a while, since his father did not have enough money to pay for it (but later he was able to return). to fit in, he approached political parties that welcomed Alawites. These parties (which also espoused secularism) were the Syrian Communist Party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) and the Arab Ba'ath Party; Assad joined the Ba'ath in 1946, whereas some of his friends belonged to the SSNP. The Ba'ath (Renaissance) Party espoused a pan-Arabist, socialist ideology.

Assad proved an asset to the party, organizing Ba'ath student cells and carrying the party's message to the poor sections of Latakia and to Alawite villages. He was opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood, which allied itself with wealthy and conservative Sunni Muslim families. Assad's high school accommodated students from rich and poor families, and Assad was joined by poor, anti-establishment Sunni Muslim youth from the Ba'ath Party in confrontations with students from wealthy Brotherhood families. He made many Sunni friends, some of whom later became his political allies.

While still a teenager, Assad became increasingly prominent in the party as an organizer and recruiter, head of his school's student-affairs committee from 1949 to 1951 and president of the Union of Syrian Students. During his political activism in school, he met many men who would later serve him when he became president. Thanks to Assad and his comrades, the regional Ba'ath Party branch, through demonstrations and boycotts, succeeded in nationalizing the formerly French-controlled tobacco company "La Compagnie Libano-Syrienne des Tabacs," also known as Rôgie, in 1951. The company had already earned the hatred of the residents of Latakia for its total control over the most profitable and fertile lands, control over prices for its products, and its monopoly.

Air Force career: 1950–1958

After graduating from high school, Assad aspired to be a medical doctor, but his father could not pay for his study at the Jesuit Saint Joseph University in Beirut. Instead, in 1950, he decided to join the Syrian Armed Forces. Assad entered the Homs Military Academy, which offered free food, lodging and a stipend. He wanted to fly, and entered the flying school in Aleppo in 1950.

Assad graduated in 1955, after which he was commissioned a lieutenant in the Syrian Air Force. Upon graduation from flying school, he won a best-aviator trophy, and shortly afterwards was assigned to the Mezzeh air base near Damascus. He married Anisa Makhlouf in 1957, a distant relative of the powerful Makhlouf family.

In 1955, the military split in a revolt against President Adib Shishakli. Hashim al-Atassi, head of the National Bloc and briefly president after Sami al-Hinnawi's coup, returned as president and Syria was again under civilian rule. After 1955, Atassi's hold on the country was increasingly shaky. As a result of the 1955 election, Atassi was replaced by Shukri al-Quwatli, who was president before Syria's independence from France. The Ba'ath Party grew closer to the Communist Party not because of shared ideology, but a shared opposition to the West. At the academy, Assad met Mustafa Tlass, his future minister of Defence.