The Assad regime was established by a coup d’etat on November 13, 1970 and suddenly collapsed on December 8, 2024 when a surprise offensive conducted by a coalition of rebel groups across the country shattered a totalitarian state hollowed out by corruption and neglect.
This dynastic kleptocracy centered around a family from Qardaha, a town in the mountains of Northwest Syria overlooking the Mediterranean coastline, who rose to absolute power from the bottom rung of society due to one man’s ambition, drive, and ruthless nature–all of which was inherited and subsequently squandered by his lesser son.
Capturing the State
Hafez al-Assad was born on October 6, 1930 to a locally respected family in an Alawi village, the son of an educated man in an almost entirely illiterate area at the time who served as the de facto representative of his Kalbiyya tribe in negotiations with French colonial authorities. Assad and his siblings were sent to the nearby city of Latakia for an education that would earn them entry into middle class occupations. His secondary school years exposed him to the political and class divisions of the newly-independent Syrian Republic, which inspired him to join the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party at sixteen years old.
The Ba’athists, a left-wing Arab nationalist party, competed with the Syrian Communist Party and Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) for leftist, secular-minded voters who opposed the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist party backed by wealthy elites. Assad found himself targeted for violence by Brotherhood supporters both due to his Alawi background and his reputation as a talented organizer–reportedly being stabbed in the back, on one occasion.
Assad enrolled at the Homs Military Academy in 1952, where he studied to earn an officer’s commission while establishing a long-lasting network of political allies among students he befriended. One such friend was the future general Mustafa Tlass, a Sunni Muslim whose rural, lower middle class background and Ba’athist outlook meant he had more in common with Assad than the wealthy conservatives who supported the Muslim Brotherhood. This network of ideological and personal compatriots played a key role in the long series of military coups d’etat that shaped Syrian politics from the 1950s until 1970.
Joining his country’s air force, becoming a fighter pilot, and getting married somehow did not distract Hafez al-Assad from playing an increasingly large role in one coup attempt after another. He rose through the ranks as multiple short-lived governments began and ended as the Ba’ath Party gradually assumed full control of Syria, only for internal rivalries to spark Ba’athist on Ba’athist plotting. Assad’s involvement in the 1963 coup that brought the Ba’ath Party to power was critical to its success, according to an account he gave to Patrick Seale while the journalist was writing his 1988 biography Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East.
The Dumayr air base, where a majority of the Syrian Air Force was stationed, received orders to conduct airstrikes against the coup plotters while it was being surrounded by tanks and infantry operating on Assad’s orders. He described to Seale arriving at the base wearing civilian clothes and issuing a stark ultimatum–surrender and be spared or resist and be destroyed by artillery shelling. This could have potentially crippled the Syrian air force and opened the country up to attack by the multiple hostile countries on their border, from Israel to the south and Turkey to the north and eventually Iraq to the east.
The Ba’athists believed such a price was worth paying in order to overcome their rivals and usurp power over Syria.
Those defending Duamyr air base chose to surrender and Assad kept his word that they would be spared–he later claimed to Seale that he bluffed his way through that standoff, he had lacked the men and firepower necessary to overtake or destroy the base.
The participants of each successful coup received promotions and key positions throughout the military and intelligence services, with Assad elevated to commander of the Syrian Air Force. This put him in a position to reorganize the Air Force Intelligence Directorate and convert it into his personal intelligence-gathering apparatus, expanding its role far beyond normal military intelligence duties to domestic espionage against his political rivals.
Assad’s increasing authority within the Syrian military and expanding powers within the Ba’athist regime played a key role in the 1966 coup that expelled the party’s old guard and installed his ally Salah Jadid as the country’s new head of state. This particularly bloody putsch killed an estimated 400 people and resulted in a decades-long enmity between Syria and Iraq, another Ba’athist-led country that granted asylum to those ousted by Jadid.
The next four years saw continued internal intrigue and game-changing international developments, with Assad serving as Minister of Defense when Syria suffered one of its worst defeats by Israel in 1967 during the Six Day War. He had enough clout and control over the state to survive the resulting recriminations and keep his job, but a permanent schism between the civilian leadership and military officers within the Ba’ath Party erupted in the aftermath.
This internal tension was exacerbated by ideological disagreements between Assad and Jadid as well as the incoherent Syrian response to Black September, a conflict in Jordan between forces loyal to King Hussein and Palestinian militant groups.
The Jordanian military attacked Palestinian refugee camps after the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked five passenger planes and diverted three to an airfield near Zarqa, where 310 hostages were unloaded before the empty planes were blown up. International pressure and the militants’ increasing disregard of the Jordanian government’s authority prompted the king to order a crackdown in September 1970, while Jadid and others in the Syrian government felt obligated to support the Palestinians. Their reasons ranged from Arab nationalist solidarity to protecting a proxy force they intended to use against Israel.
Syrian soldiers and tanks crossed the border into Jordan wearing Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) uniforms, alongside some real PLA fighters, but they were rendered combat ineffective by Jordanian airstrikes. It is still not clear why there were no Syrian planes deployed to provide air support to the infantry and armored units, leading some to speculate that Assad and Jadid’s worsening relationship motivated the former to sabotage the campaign. Assad also likely did not want to sacrifice the Air Force he had struggled to rebuild after it was destroyed by Israel during the Six Day War in what he saw as a pointless invasion of another Arab country.
Jordan’s resulting victory and an Egyptian-brokered peace agreement resulted in Palestinian militants and their families being expelled to Lebanon while Assad and Jadid each took gradual steps toward throwing the other out of power.
Patrick Seale recounts in Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East that, “[Assad] had the backing of the army but Jadid still dominated the [Ba’ath Party] apparatus and, in a last-ditch attempt to regain control, called an emergency National Congress on 30 October: its first act was to order the Defense Minister to desist from any further army transfers long as the congress remained in session–an instruction [Assad] peremptorily rejected. For a dozen days the policy debate raged on in true Ba’ath fashion. [Assad] derided his radical critics,” condemning what he called “their empty gestures of defiance at Israel.”
Jadid and his supporters accused Assad of, “accepting defeatist settlements and bowing to imperialists,” Seale writes. “Inside the congress Jadid still commanded a majority among top party cadres, which he used to push through resolutions stripping [Assad] and his faithful aide, Mustafa Tlass, of their [military] commands and government jobs… But [Assad] had taken the precaution of deploying troops around the conference hall, so the resolutions were no more than rhetoric, the vain gestures of men who already knew they were defeated.”
“When the party congress broke up in acrimonious confusion on 12 November 1970, [Assad] wasted no time: the arrests of his opponents followed the next day. Some were offered posts in Syrian embassies abroad, the traditional haven for losers, but Salah Jadid is said to have angrily refused.”
“‘If I ever take power,’ he is believed to have told [Assad] defiantly, ‘you will be dragged through the streets until you die.’”
Assad responded by having Jadid imprisoned for life without trial–he spared his rival from execution to dissuade the man’s relatives from seeking revenge. The figurehead president Nureddin al-Atassi was similarly arrested and sent to prison without a trial, replaced first by Ahmad al-Khatib until Assad installed himself as the new president in March 1971.
“Our leader forever, Hafez al-Assad!”
The new Syrian autocrat claimed his coup was no coup at all but a “Corrective Movement,” or “Corrective Revolution,” instead. He promised to stabilize a long unstable government, but it became clear over the years that Assad’s top priority was securing his power and stamping out all political opposition rather than simply putting an end to incessant coups d’etat.
Yassin al-Haj Saleh describes this evolution from authoritarian to totalitarian governance in his book The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy, writing, “Hafez [al-Assad] established a brutal and feared security apparatus, which was led by family members and confidants. Top priority was given to his own clan, followed by his wife’s, according to Hanna Batatu’s book Syrian Peasantry. Throughout the years, Hafez followed the principle of clientelism as a rule of thumb. The regime’s security and its ‘pillars of stability’ were handed over to his inner circle of relatives and confidants. Naturally, this practice led to favoritism in military colleges and volunteer service in the army, and to the holding of high posts or key positions in state forces.”
Assad consolidated power by appointing Sunni Muslims such as Mustafa Tlass and Abdul Halim Khaddam to high ranking government positions while also delegating most of their powers to their Alawi subordinates, who were usually Assad’s family and friends. This convoluted system was far more difficult to unseat in a coup than previous regimes because authority was divided on sectarian lines, with Muslims and minority communities pitted against one another–as seen later when Assad’s brother and second-in-command Rifaat attempted to usurp him in 1984.
The securitization of Syrian politics extended to private speech among ordinary citizens, as the country’s numerous intelligence agencies or mukhabarat recruited an extraordinary number of informants to spy on the population and report all dissent. Complaining about the government to colleagues, friends, and even family came with the risk of arrest and merciless torture, giving rise to the phrase “the walls have ears.”
Sam Dagher explains these totalitarian developments in this book Assad or We Burn the Country, writing, “Inspired by what he saw on a trip to North Korea… [Assad] ordered the creation of the Ba’ath Vanguards Organization to indoctrinate children from grades one through six in schools and summer camps. Schoolchildren wore khaki uniforms, learned military discipline and skills, and perfected a ‘Heil Hitler’-like salute performed each morning before class. Later the Syrian Scouts were suspended so as not to compete with the Vanguards.”
“The mukhabarat, the cornerstone of the police state, was modeled after East Germany’s State Security apparatus, or Stasi, which implemented a wide-reaching and intricate system of citizen surveillance. [Assad] likewise put in place a web of mukhabarat departments, sections, and branches to ensure that everyone was watching everyone else and that no attempt to oust him had any chance of succeeding. Syrians would have [Assad]’s eyes and ears in their home.”
“And like any dictator longing for immortality, [Assad] needed colossal, Soviet-like projects that his subjects could celebrate,” willingly or not. “Flush with financial assistance from oil-rich Arab states, the Soviet Union, and later, even, the United States, [Assad] launched major infrastructure works, with nearly $1.5 billion earmarked for public investment in the 1971 five-year plan. For decades, schoolchildren memorized that it was the nation’s father, Hafez [al-Assad], who ‘subdued and tamed’ the Euphrates River with the dams he built… In arts class, children went from drawing bucolic nature scenes to depicting the leader and his supposedly miraculous achievements. One student [reportedly] received high marks for cutting out [Assad’s] portrait in a magazine and pasting it over the sun in his drawing of spring. Just like in the parades staged by the fascists, schoolchildren took part in torchlight processions to commemorate key moments of the history and narrative created by Hafez [al-Assad]. The veneration of [Assad] became a core army [military] doctrine.
“‘Our leader forever, Hafez al-Assad!’ would become the army’s battle cry.”
“A cult of personality was constructed around [Assad], no different from that of his friends Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania and Kim Il-Sung.”
Assad straddled the line between the pro-Soviet and pro-US camps during the latter half of the Cold War, maintaining his country’s historic ties with the Soviet Union–even convincing them to double the among of military aid sent to Syria–while also making unprecedented overtures to the United States under the Nixon Administration. Any Syrians who objected too openly to their government’s relationship with either superpower were quickly labelled enemies of the state and forcibly disappeared into the mukhabarat’s growing network of prisons and torture chambers. Richard Nixon would become the first US president to visit Damascus after Assad proved his government’s regional significance by conspiring with Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat to initiate a new war against Israel, intending to avenge their losses during the Six Day War.
The events of October 6 to October 25, 1973–known by some as the October War and others as the Yom Kippur War or the Ramadan War–saw fierce fighting that debuted a new generation of military technology and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Egypt and Syria caught Israel by surprise, similarly to what the Israelis did in 1967, by launching simultaneous invasions of the occupied Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights during the holiest holiday in Judaism. The initially successful attack inspired about a half-dozen other Arab-majority countries–in addition to communist-run countries such as North Korea, East Germany, and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union–to send reinforcements to join what they believed was the liberation of Palestine.
But the Israelis managed to stall the advance after a few days and, enabled by an unprecedented airlift of American weapons and military supplies called Operation Nickel Grass, launched a successful counteroffensive. The Soviet Union responded with their own large-scale weapons shipments to Egypt and Syria while threatening to directly intervene with a large-scale ground offensive. The Mediterranean Sea witnessed the largest naval standoff of the Cold War as tensions increased from the superpowers simultaneously transporting large quantities of military equipment to their respective Middle Eastern allies. American diplomats worked around the clock to mediate a ceasefire before either the Soviets or Israel, both nuclear-armed nations, graduated to using weapons of mass destruction.
The war was a battlefield defeat for Syria but it made the United States take the country and their interests seriously for the first time in decades because the new regime was far more stable than its predecessors and strong enough to start wars that put the region–even the entire world–in grave danger.
Henry Kissinger, the controversial US Secretary of State at the time, said of the situation, “You can’t make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria.”
War in Lebanon and a Domestic Insurgency
Assad’s growing prominence internationally coincided with festering domestic problems that only got worse over time, including controversy over his role as president of Syria despite the country’s constitution stating that the president must be Muslim. He tried to get around this in 1974 by convincing Musa al-Sadr, a prominent Lebanese-Iranian cleric and founder of the Amal movement, to recognize the Alawi faith as a branch of Shia Islam. But this did not satisfy the Muslim Brotherhood and other conservative Sunnis, who found themselves increasingly aligned with secular liberals who opposed Assad’s despotism. This anger was exacerbated by the Syrian government’s military intervention in Lebanon during the latter country’s extremely brutal and incredibly destructive civil war.
Lebanon was wracked by political instability and galling socioeconomic inequality for decades prior to the outbreak of hostilities in 1975 between far-right Christian militias–who were led and bankrolled by the overwhelmingly Maronite wealthy elites–versus a shaky, amorphous coalition of Muslims, Druze, leftist Christians, and other marginalized communities rebelling against the status quo. Constantly shifting allegiances among the dozen or so opposing parties and wholesale slaughter of civilians in sectarian massacres transformed the war into an identitarian conflict between religious communities.
Syrian troops entered Lebanon originally at the behest of the far-right Christian militias fighting armed groups associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the same ones expelled from Jordan years earlier. Assad, despite the Ba’ath Party’s espoused support for Pan-Arab nationalism, increasingly viewed the PLO as an uncontrollable entity who needed to be brought to heel in Lebanon before they could once again be used as a Syrian proxy. He also predicted that Israel would invade Lebanon to crush the PLO and probably seize the opportunity to encircle Syria.
Intervention to support the Christian far-right against the Muslim, leftist, and Palestinian factions in Lebanon significantly damaged Hafez al-Assad’s reputation among Arab nationalists and devout Muslims. Public anger reached a boiling point after indiscriminate Syrian shelling enabled far-right militias to successfully overrun Tel al-Zataar, the last Palestinian refugee camp left in East Beirut, and massacre between 2,000 and 3,000 people. This prompted Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Gulf monarchies to cut off generous sums of development aid, which halted the Assad regime’s short-lived economic boom.
The Syrian army ended up fighting the very same far-right Christian militias they once supported due to Assad’s policy of preventing any one faction in Lebanon from achieving total victory, preferring to keep the country weak and divided to further Syrian interests. Assad made overtures toward and betrayed almost every belligerent in the multi-sided civil war, showing only a modicum of loyalty to the Amal movement and PLO splinter groups on the Syrian payroll.
The unpopular military intervention in Lebanon and worsening economic conditions, in addition to increasing political repression and state favoritism toward the Alawi community, combined to stoke opposition to the Assad regime across the Syrian political spectrum. Motivatations among the opposition were as diverse as their beliefs and methods, with some choosing to organize illegal protests and others deciding that violence was the only option.
A wave of mysterious assassinations beginning in 1976 targeted Ba’ath Party leaders, high-ranking military officers, and associates of Assad including his personal physician–as well as diplomats and military advisors from Eastern Bloc countries. The killings were initially suspected to be the work of Iraq, a hostile country governed by a rival branch of the Ba’ath Party that held a grudge against Assad and the “neo-Ba’athists” for the 1966 coup. But evidence gradually emerged that incriminated an Islamist militant group called the Fighting Vanguard, which the Assad regime claimed was a deniable armed wing of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.
It remains unclear at the time of this writing what exact connection, if any, existed between the Fighting Vanguard, the broader Muslim Brotherhood movement, and the Iraqi government.
Violence escalated in 1979 after 83 officer cadets at the Aleppo Artillery School–mostly Alawis, but also reportedly including Christians and Sunni Muslims–were massacred by Fighting Vanguard militants and sympathizers within the Syrian military. This was followed by multiple insurgent attacks targeting police and other security forces while supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and secular opposition groups organized labor strikes and other protests. The Assad regime responded by putting Aleppo effectively under siege for months and committing a series of retaliatory massacres, often targeting civilians chosen at random. Terrorism by a non-state actor–which killed 300 people across Aleppo, a majority of whom were Alawi–was met by state terrorism that killed thousands, mostly Sunni Muslims, between 1979 and 1981.
Street-to-street gunfights between Islamist militants and pro-regime forces in Aleppo eventually abated but the insurgency spread across the country, famously including Jisr ash-Shugur in 1980 and Hama in 1981. The regime continually responded to protests, riots, and the occasional terrorist attack with even deadlier acts of state terrorism, from indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire to field executions of people detained during raids.
Bloodshed intensified after Hafez al-Assad survived an assassination attempt on June 26, 1980, the details of which were almost certainly exaggerated or if not entirely made up by regime propagandists. Accounts from the time describe Assad kicking one of two grenades thrown at him while a bodyguard sacrificed his life by jumping on the other grenade and smothering the explosion with his body. The exact order of events are ambiguous but the aftermath is crystal clear–death squads commanded by Assad’s brother Rifaat entered the Tadmur prison on June 27 and went cell-by-cell summarily executing every alleged Muslim Brotherhood supporter, approximately 1,100 inmates, via gunfire and grenades.
Simply being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood was made a capital offense after Assad’s assassination attempt while the organization was hunted down both in Syria and abroad. Multiple Syrians associated with the Brotherhood were killed not only in neighboring Lebanon but even as far away as Germany and France in the summer of 1980, murders that remain unsolved to this day but are widely suspected to have been the work of the Assad regime.
The cycle of terrorist attacks followed by even bloodier acts of state terrorism continued throughout 1981. This was exemplified by the regime’s massacre of between 150 to 300 people in Hama following a failed attack on either a security checkpoint or a spring festival, according to conflicting reports. Victims were reportedly chosen at random for execution among the male population over the age of 14 in what The Washington Post called, “the bloodiest retribution thus far in President Hafez Assad’s two-year crackdown on opponents to his rule.” Family members of alleged Muslim Brotherhood members were also reportedly tortured by the mukhabarat and Rifaat al-Assad’s increasingly lawless militias.
The insurgency appeared to be abating by the end of that year, despite a car bombing in Damascus targeting an intelligence agency headquarters that killed 64 people and wounded 135–casualties were a mix of military personnel and civilians, including many children.
The November 29 al-Azbakiah bombing was initially blamed on the Fighting Vanguard and the broader Muslim Brotherhood movement–however, an anonymous caller claiming to speak for the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners (FLLF) told journalists in Beirut that the FLLF was responsible. The latter organization was a mysterious terrorist group that operated in war-torn Lebanon from 1979 to 1983, killing dozens of Palestinian and Lebanese Muslim civilians as well as Syrian soldiers and other militants in a series of car bombings. The FLLF was revealed in 2018 to have been an Israeli proxy composed of Lebanese Christians, Druze, and Shia Muslims recruited by the Mossad, according to the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman.
It remains unclear to this day whether the al-Azbakiah bombing was the work of the FLLF or the Fighting Vanguard, both of whom had sufficient motive to target a mukhabarat office in Damascus.
Destroying Hama
The Islamist uprising in Syria and the Assad regime’s brutal response reached an unprecedented, record-setting denouement when an attempted insurrection in Hama was met by genocidal destruction.
Militants associated with the Fighting Vanguard launched simultaneous attacks across the city– and, to a lesser extent, other locations across northern Syria–on February 2, 1982 targeting government buildings, state-owned businesses, police stations, and army checkpoints. The government lost control of possibly two thirds of Hama in just one day, giving the insurgents a chance to raid armories while civilians held demonstrations supporting their uprising.
Hafez al-Assad tasked his brother, Major General Rifaat al-Assad, not only with retaking Hama but also exterminating all opponents of the regime within the city and erasing any trace of their existence.
Hama was completely encircled and cut off from the outside world by the Syrian military and pro-regime militias, travel in and out of the city was restricted to the point of non-existence, not even ambulances were allowed in or pregnant women in labor were allowed to leave. A week was spent mobilizing armored vehicles, infantry, paratroopers, and special forces units trained by the Soviet Union while the city was ringed by artillery pieces in classic Soviet fashion.
Isolated silence was shattered by the deafening noise of shelling, rocket barrages, gunship strafing, and aerial bombardment destroying neighborhoods packed with civilians to clear the way for tanks and troops moving on foot. The offensive was spearheaded by soldiers with combat experience in Lebanon and Alawi militiamen who had been indoctrinated for years by the Ba’ath Party to view their country’s Sunni Muslim majority as subhuman. Sporadic fighting between pro-regime forces and surviving insurgents from the Fighting Vanguard and any other Islamist armed groups in Hama was over within a week–this decisive victory was followed by two weeks of looting, rape, and mass-murder.
Every man, woman, and child living in certain neighborhoods was considered a “terrorist” and they were spared no quarter by men who kicked in their doors while going house to house and building to building, even sifting through the rubble, looking for survivors to shoot. The victims included doctors and nurses–depriving residents of access to healthcare–as well as the old, the young, and the disabled. Those whose lives were spared were left homeless, and humiliated by sacreligious graffiti stating, “there is no God but the nation… and no Prophet but the Ba’ath Party.”
This systematic, meticulously premeditated slaughter soon got out of hand and even resulted in regime supporters being killed when soldiers and militiamen got lost in the city and massacred the wrong neighborhoods. Some areas that were spared from bombing and massacre saw most if not all of the young male population being rounded by and sent to prisons across the country or makeshift torture chambers set up across Hama in warehouses and a polytechnic university.
The number of Islamist militants throughout the city never numbered anymore than 1,000 to 2,000 fighters, but the combined death toll of insurgents plus civilians in Hama throughout February 1982 ranges from a conservative 10,000 to a high end of 40,000. The most commonly accepted estimate today is a minimum of 25,000 people killed, the vast majority of whom were civilians. Rifaat al-Assad reportedly boasted about his men killing 38,000 people while another 17,000 to 20,000 Hama residents remain missing, either buried in one of the mass-graves or taken away to spend months, years, even decades being tortured.
Two-thirds of the city had been destroyed by the end of February 1982 while bulldozers were used to clear away debris and bury victims trapped in the rubble, including some who were still alive. The ancient Old City of Hama, whose Sunni Muslim cultural heritage dated back to the earliest days of Islam in Syria, was completely destroyed while any non-Sunni neighborhoods that just happened to be “in the way” were also annihilated–that is why churches were destroyed in addition to mosques. Luxury hotels and other gentrified properties were built in the destroyed neighborhoods in the following years, on land where many survivors believe the corpses of their loved ones are buried.
The events of February 1982 in Syria are most often called “the Hama Massacre,” but this name is clearly an understatement. The large-scale mass killing of a significant proportion of the city’s Sunni Muslim population was far deadlier than any of the previous massacres conducted by the Assad regime. Hama suffered more damage in three weeks than Beirut did in seven years of civil war, a systematic campaign of bombing and mass-murder that an increasing number of genocide scholars describe as a “genocidal massacre.” It remains to this day as one of the single worst acts of state violence inflicted by a Middle Eastern government against its own citizens.
A crackdown against all opposition to the Assad regime swept across the country in the months and years following the Hama Massacre–even Christians and atheists found themselves arrested and tortured on suspicion of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. A generation of Syrians were psychologically scarred and terrorized into silent compliance, just holding their heads down and trying to avoid being noticed by the mukhabarat for any possible reason. Even people who hated the regime pretended to be supportive or at least apolitical, too frightened to utter even the mildest of criticisms.
The new order imposed on Syria following the Hama Massacre is perfectly encapsulated in what later became a common pro-regime slogan: Assad or we burn the country!
Part 2 will examine the latter half of Hafez al-Assad’s dictatorship, the transition of power to Bashar al-Assad, and the roots of the Syrian Revolution.
Image credit: Public domain, United States Library of Congress website
