After 54 years, the brutal Assad regime has fallen to almost unanimous rejoicing. But any attempt to rebuild Syria’s shattered society will first have to heal divides entrenched by two generations of the former ruling family from the moment they seized power.
How did the Assads come to power?
Hafez al-Assad was one of a generation of Arab strongmen – among them Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt – who came to power from the late 1960s onwards. Like them, he imposed order following a period of great instability.
Between 1946, when Syria gained independence, and 1970, when Assad took power, the country went through 20 cabinets, four constitutions, and multiple coups d’état; it even briefly merged with Egypt and then split from it.
Assad, the son of an Alawite farmer from Syria’s mountainous coastal region, was one of a group of military officers in the Ba’ath Party, an Arab nationalist secular socialist movement. He took part in the coup that established Ba’ath rule in 1963. After several years commanding the air force, he staged his own coup, and took power for himself.
Why had Syria been so unstable?
Syria was what was left of Ottoman Syria after Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan had been detached; it was a French mandate from 1923 to 1946. From the start, the Syrian state was unstable, divided by both ethnicity and religion. Of its 2011 population of about 22 million, about 80% were Arab and 10% were Kurdish, with the latter mostly concentrated on the Turkish and Iraqi borders.
About 75% of Syrians are Sunni Muslim. However, the northwestern coastal region is mainly populated by Alawites (Arabs from a broadly Shia sect), the Druze (another Abrahamic sect) dominate in parts of the south, and the big cities have long-established Christian populations.
Socially, Syria was unstable, too, when Assad took power – with large, near-feudal rural estates but a thriving modern urban middle class. As in many post-colonial states, democracy gave way to military control; in Syria, heavy defeats at the hands of the new Israeli state only added to the turmoil.
How did Assad and the Ba’ath Party bring order?
From the first Ba’athist coup, in 1963, Syria became a totalitarian one-party state. Hafez al-Assad’s government “deployed unrestrained violence”, said Middle East politics expert Sefa Secen in Time. He consolidated his power by exploiting “sectarian and ethnic divisions”, and cultivating “international alliances to avoid outside scrutiny or pressure”.
Opponents were tortured and executed from the first days of his rule. The Mukhabarat, the secret police modelled on East Germany’s Stasi, exerted control over every aspect of life. Syria aligned itself with the Soviet Union (as it then was), although it was mostly pragmatic in its dealings with the US and Israel.
A personality cult was built around Assad. He ruled through a clan system, based on a dozen cronies and their families, many, if not all of them, Alawites. The secular opposition was largely destroyed, leaving only the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood (a Sunni group). Assad portrayed himself to Christians and other minorities as a bulwark against Sunni extremists.
How did Assad control the Islamists?
The city of Hama was a centre of conservative anti-Ba’athist interests, and of Muslim Brotherhood guerillas. In 1982, a conflict with security forces led to a general Islamist uprising there. State forces, led by Assad’s brother Rifaat, besieged the city and shelled it, before razing many of its neighbourhoods, killing not only any Islamists they found but also large numbers of civilians.
Syrian rights activists recently put the number of dead at more than 40,000. Until the civil war that was to follow 30 years later, it was the single bloodiest assault by an Arab ruler against his own people in modern times.
How did Bashar al-Assad come to power?
Bashar was Hafez’s second son. Gawky and cerebral, he trained in London as an ophthalmologist in the 1990s, and married a British Syrian woman, Asma. His older brother, and Hafez’s eldest son, Bassel, was a charismatic soldier and athlete, and had been groomed to succeed his father, but he died in a car crash in 1994. So, when Hafez died in 2000, Bashar inherited the presidency.
Initially, there were hopes that the new ruler would be a reformer: during the “Damascus spring” of 2000, political prisoners were released. But he soon reverted to a version of his father’s ways. In fact, he narrowed the ruling inner circle. He introduced changes to Syria’s socialist economy, but allowed the Makhloufs, his mother’s family, to dominate much of it. His brother Maher and his brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat – two hardliners – were his main security advisers.
What was Assad’s role in the civil war?
In March 2011, protests about unemployment, corruption and lack of freedom broke out, inspired by the Arab Spring in North Africa. Peaceful protests in Syria were met by arrests and shootings, first in the southern city of Daraa, then countrywide. Armed conflict between opposition and government soon erupted.
What followed was a multi-faceted and destructive civil war, prosecuted with great ruthlessness by Assad. Some 618,000 people were killed and half of Syria’s people displaced.
Kurds took control of Kurdish regions; Islamist and Turkish-backed rebels held the north, and Islamic State founded its caliphate in the east. The Assad regime, though backed by Hezbollah and Iran, nearly fell, twice, before Russia intervened decisively on its side in 2015. Until recently, it seemed Assad had won, restricting the rebels to small enclaves; other Middle Eastern states had begun normalising relations.
Why did the Assad regime fall?
The simplest explanation is that Assad’s major backers, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, were weakened by their conflicts with Ukraine and Israel.
But perhaps more importantly, the state had been hollowed out by years of US sanctions, endemic regime corruption and economic collapse. Assad had defeated his enemies, but he had nothing positive to give the Syrian people. If anything, his regime became more violent and predatory.
In the end, too many Syrians were disgusted by his dictatorship, and the conscripts in Assad’s army weren’t prepared to die for it. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the leading rebel group, had also professionalised and co-ordinated its efforts effectively with rebel groups in the north and south. After 54 years, the Assad regime was toppled in just 12 days.