Hafez al-Assad (6 October 193010 June 2000) was a Syrian politician, military officer, and dictator 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 until his death. 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. The party ruled for over six decades until it was overthrown in 2024, under the leadership of his son Bashar al-Assad.
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 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 quasi-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 Jadid's policy of exporting "socialist revolution" and strengthening Syria's foreign relations with countries that his predecessor had deemed reactionary. Assad made alliances with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War in return for among other things, opposing Israel, while maintaining ties with some Western European and Gulf states. 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, though his support for the Palestinians, particularly the PLO in Lebanon, was weak.
Assad quickly consolidated his power. Following the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of Egypt, Assad sought to reconcile Syrian relations with other Arab countries, that were weakened by Jadid. He also tried to form new ties with countries from both sides in the Cold War. Syria received economic support from OPEC members during the 1973 oil embargo, in part for his hostility toward Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. While Syria remained a one-party system, Ba'athist decision-making authority that had attempted to be collegial was eliminated in favor of absolute Presidential control of the country. To maintain his rule, a cult of personality centered on Assad and his family was created by the president and the Ba'ath party. Assad ordered an Arabization campaign of the Kurdish areas of Syria. Syria then invaded Lebanon with 30,000 troops in 1976, which resulted in the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. The Lebanon Invasion and occupation was an attempt to back the weakened Maronite Christians against the Palestine Liberation Organization (whom he previously claimed to back), and other far left militias. During his rule, his regime crushed an Islamist uprising led by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood through a series of crackdowns that culminated in the Hama massacre, which led to two thirds of the city of Hama being destroyed. His regime committed numerous human rights violations, including the massacres of 30,000 men, women and children in Hama alone.
Assad's initial preferred successor as president was his brother Rifaat, but he was exiled after attempting to seize power in 1984 in response to Hafez suffering a health scare. 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 office on 11 June 2000 and Bashar succeeded him as president.
Early life, education and early career
Early life
Hafez al-Assad was born on 6 October 1930, in Qardaha, a town in northwest 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 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, believing that 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). Interested in political action, 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. He actead as 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 he was graduated 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 was 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 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 Defense.
In 1955, Assad was sent to Egypt for a further six months of training. When Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, Syria feared retaliation from the United Kingdom, and Assad flew in an air-defense mission. He was among the Syrian pilots who flew to Cairo to show Syria's commitment to Egypt. After finishing a course in Egypt the following year, Assad returned to a small airbase near Damascus. During the Suez Crisis, he also flew a reconnaissance mission over northern and eastern Syria. In 1957, as squadron commander, Assad was sent to the Soviet Union for training in the MiG-17. He spent ten months in the Soviet Union, during which he fathered a daughter (who died as an infant while he was abroad) with his wife.
In 1958, Syria and Egypt formed the United Arab Republic (UAR), separating themselves from Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey (who were aligned with the United Kingdom). This pact led to the rejection of Communist influence in favour of Egyptian control over Syria. All Syrian political parties (including the Ba'ath Party) were dissolved, and senior officers—especially those who supported the Communists—were dismissed from the Syrian armed forces. Assad, however, remained in the military and rose quickly through the ranks. After reaching the rank of captain, he was transferred to Egypt, continuing his military education with the future president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak.
Runup to 1963 coup: 1958–1963
Assad was not content with a professional military career, regarding it rather as a gateway to politics. After the creation of the UAR, Ba'ath Party leader Michel Aflaq was forced by Nasser to dissolve the party. During the UAR's existence, the Ba'ath Party experienced a crisis for which several of its members—mostly young—blamed Aflaq. To resurrect the Syrian Regional Branch of the party, Muhammad Umran, Salah Jadid, Assad and others established the Military Committee. In 1957–58 Assad rose to a dominant position in the Military Committee, which mitigated his transfer to Egypt. After Syria left the UAR in September 1961, Assad and other Ba'athist officers were removed from the military by the new government in Damascus, and he was given a minor clerical position at the Ministry of Transport.