Hafez al-Assad served as the President of Syria from 12 March 1971 until his death on 10 June 2000. He had been Prime Minister of Syria, leading a government for two years. He was succeeded by his son, Bashar al-Assad.

Assad consolidated his power by imposition of mass surveillance on the society and ran a military dictatorship characterised by human rights violations, arbitrary detentions, extrajudicial killings and elimination of leftist and conservative opposition. Various journalists and political scientists have described his regime as totalitarian. Major events during his tenure include the 1976 Syrian intervention in the Lebanese Civil War launched against the Palestinian and leftist militias, resulting in the Syrian occupation of Lebanon until 2005. Domestically, his early years in power witnessed Sunni uprisings against his rule, which were violently put down during the 1982 Hama massacre, an incident estimated to have killed between 20,000-40,000 civilians.

Domestic policies Corrective Revolution

In 1971, while prime minister, Assad embarked upon a "corrective revolution" at the Eleventh National Congress of the Ba'ath Party. There was to be a general revision of national policy, which also included the introduction of measures to consolidate his rule: so he launched huge reformist comprehensive campaign (what became known as Corrective Movement program) and started consolidating his power (what became known as the Assadization). His Ba'athist predecessors had restricted control of Islam in public life and government. Because the Constitution only allowed Muslims to become president, Assad, unlike his predecessor Salah Jadid, presented himself as a pious Muslim. In order to gain support from the ulama—the educated Muslim class— he prayed in Sunni mosques, even though he was an Alawite. Among the measures he introduced were the raising in the rank of some 2,000 religious functionaries and the appointment of an alim as minister of religious functionaries and construction of mosques. He appointed a little-known Sunni teacher, Ahmad al-Khatib, as Head of State in order to satisfy the Sunni majority. Assad also appointed Sunnis to senior positions in the government, the military and the party. All of Assad's prime ministers, defense ministers and foreign ministers and a majority of his cabinet were Sunnis. In the early 1970s, he was verified as an authentic Muslim by the Sunni Mufti of Damascus and made the Hajj—the pilgrimage to Mecca. In his speeches, he often used terms such as jihad (struggle) and shahada (martyrdom) when referring to fighting Israel.

After gaining enough power, Assad needed to become leader of the Ba'ath Party, so he ordered the arrests and discharge of the incumbent party leaders, replacing them by his own supporters in the Ba'ath Regional Command. They promptly elected him as secretary-general of the party's Syrian branch, confirming his status as the country's de facto leader. The Regional Command also appointed a new People's Assembly, which in 1971 nominated him for the presidency as the only candidate. On 22 February 1971, Assad resigned from the Syrian Air Force and was subsequently endorsed as president with 99.6% of the vote at the referendum held on 12 March 1971. He also returned the old Islamic Presidential Oath of Office. While continuing to use the Ba'ath Party, its ideology and its expanding apparatus as instruments of his rule and policies, Assad established a powerful, centralized presidential system with absolute authority for the first time in Syria's modern history.

Assad wanted his government to appear democratic. The People's Assembly and his cabinet consisted of several nationalist and socialist parties under the umbrella of the National Progressive Front, which was led by the Ba'ath Party. Half of his cabinet were representatives of peasants and workers, and a number of popular organizations of peasants, workers, women and students were established in order to participate in the decision-making process. As he gained support from the peasantry, workers, the youth, the military and the Alawite community, Assad wanted to destroy his remaining opposition. He tried to present himself as a leader-reformer, a state-builder and nation-builder by developing and modernizing the country's socio-economic infrastructure, achieving political stability, economic opportunities and ideological consensus. As he wanted to create ideological consensus and national unity, Assad advocated a dynamic regional policy while opposing Zionism and imperialism.

On 31 January 1973, Assad implemented the new Constitution which led to a national crisis. Unlike previous constitutions, this one did not require that the president of Syria must be a Muslim, leading to fierce demonstrations in Hama, Homs and Aleppo organized by the Muslim Brotherhood and the ulama. They labeled Assad as the "enemy of Allah" and called for a jihad against his rule. Robert D. Kaplan has compared Assad's coming to power to "an untouchable becoming maharajah in India or a Jew becoming tsar in Russia—an unprecedented development shocking to the Sunni majority population which had monopolized power for so many centuries." Assad responded by arresting about 40 Sunni officers who were accused of plotting. Nevertheless, Assad returned the requirement to the Constitution to please the Sunnis, but he stated that he "rejects every uncultured interpretation of Islam that lays bare an odious narrow-mindedness and loathsome bigotry". In 1974, to satisfy this constitutional requirement, Musa Sadr, a leader of the Twelvers of Lebanon and founder of the Amal Movement who had unsuccessfully tried to unite Lebanese Alawis and Shias under the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council,Riad Yazbeck. "Return of the Pink Panthers? " Mideast Monitor. Vol. 3, No. 2, August 2008. issued a fatwa stating that Alawis were a community of Twelver Shia Muslims.The New Encyclopedia of Islam by Cyril Glasse, Altamira, 2001, pp. 36–37.

For his entire tenure as Syria's president, Assad ruled under the terms of a state of emergency dating from 1963.Syria country profile, pp. 15–17. Library of Congress Federal Research Division (April 2005). This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain. Under the provisions of the emergency law, the press was limited to three Ba'ath-controlled newspapers and political dissidents were often tried in security courts that operated outside the regular judicial system. Human Rights Watch estimated that a minimum of 17,000 people disappeared without the formalities of a trial during Assad's rule.Wasted Decade: Human Rights in Syria during Bashar al-Asad’s First Ten Years in Power, Human Rights Watch, 2010 Report Every seven years, Assad was nominated as the sole candidate for president by the People's Council, and confirmed in office by a referendum. He was re-elected four times, each time gaining over 99 percent of the vote—including three times in which he received unanimous support, according to official figures.Nohlen, D, Grotz, F & Hartmann, C (2001) Elections in Asia: A data handbook, Volume I, p221 For all intents and purposes, he held complete political control over the country.

Islamist uprising

The government faced further threats from a resurgence of the Islamist opposition. Assad's earlier support of the Christian Maronites and his military actions against the Muslim radicals in Lebanon provoked a new and unprecedented phase of Muslim resistance in the form of well-organized and effective urban guerrilla warfare against the government, military, and Ba'athist officials and institutions. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Islamic jihad became almost an open rebellion as many Alawite soldiers, officers and senior officials were killed, and government and military centres were bombed by the Muslim mujahideen.

Facing a serious threat to his government and possibly to his life, Assad for the first time lost his self-confidence and reacted with fury and desperation. His health also started to deteriorate during this period. Under his personal orders a campaign of repression was launched against the Muslim Brotherhood. Assad escaped an attempted assassination in a grenade attack in 1980. In response, troops led by his brother Rifaat took revenge by killing 250 inmates at Tadmor Prison in Palmyra.MacFarquhar, Neil. Hafez al-Assad, Who Turned Syria Into a Power in the Middle East, Dies at 69. New York Times, 2000-06-11. In February 1982, the rebellious city of Hama was bombed by Assad's troops, killing between 10,000 and 40,000 people. It was later described as "the single deadliest act by any Arab government against people in the modern Middle East." Over the next few years, thousands of Muslim Brotherhood followers were arrested and tortured, and many of them were killed or disappeared. Assad realized that his previous efforts to bring about national unity in Syria and to gain legitimacy from the Sunni urban population had totally failed. He was confronted with resistance from the Muslim Brotherhood and thousands of their followers. Large sections of the urban intelligentsia, professionals, intellectuals and former Ba'ath Party members, also regarded his government as illegitimate. Later, Assad used the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood to justify his heavy-handed rule.

Society Assad became increasingly reliant on the further cultivation of his close constituencies as a support base and a new political community consisting of large sections of peasants and workers, salaried middle-class and public employees—both Sunnis and non-Sunnis. These groups, mostly organized in the Ba'ath Party, mass syndicates, and trade unions, like most Alawites, and Christians, greatly benefited from Assad's policies, and either depended on him or were ideologically identified with his government. Many young Syrians also had a strong allegiance to Assad, since they had been educated or indoctrinated in the notions of the Ba'ath Party as formulated by Assad. These sections of the population rendered legitimacy to Assad's government and were periodically mobilised by Assad to actively support his policies and curb his domestic enemies. Assad's main support base remained the Alawite community, the combat units of the Syrian Armed Forces and the wide network of security and intelligence organizations. The Jews were also treated well by Assad.

Members of the Alawite community and non-Alawites loyal to Assad virtually controlled the security, intelligence and military apparatuses. They manned or commanded about a dozen security and intelligence networks and most armoured divisions, commandos and other combat units of the Syrian Armed Forces. Assad had turned some of his intelligence networks into apparatuses for terrorism against targets in the Middle East and in Europe.

Health problems In November 1983, Assad—who was a diabetic—suffered a serious heart attack, which was complicated by phlebitis. He withdrew from public life and a battle for succession took place between Rifaat and the army generals. Assad's recovery and return brought an end to the discord and he took advantage of the situation to undermine his brother's position, eventually sending him into exile. Assad's return to supreme power was confirmed at the eighth party congress in January 1985.

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