Hafiz al-Asad dealt ruthlessly with his party rivals. Many were imprisoned for long periods—sometimes until they died in detention.
Nikolaos van Dam*
Priority: Arabism or Socialism?
In ideological terms, the disagreements among the original leaders of the Syrian Ba’th regime primarily revolved around priorities. Party members such as General Salah Jadid—who, until his imprisonment in 1970, was one of the most powerful figures within the Ba’th Party—gave precedence to implementing socialist reforms within Syria.
This focus came at the expense of any willingness on his part to cooperate with certain Arab regimes. For instance, Jadid refused to collaborate with Arab governments he deemed reactionary, such as the monarchies of Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Hafiz al-Asad, by contrast, prioritized pan-Arab cooperation to achieve a level of military-strategic parity with Israel. To this end, he was open to working with other Arab states regardless of their political orientation. This also explains Asad’s later cooperation with the Islamic Republic of Iran during the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988).
In a move completely contrary to Ba’thist principles, Asad sided with non-Arab Iran against his fellow Ba’thist, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. He believed that Iranian military support could strengthen Syria’s strategic position vis-à-vis Israel.
Asad also took part in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, assisting the United States in expelling the Iraqi army from Kuwait. However, he would not have supported the occupation of Iraqi Arab territory.
Despite such ideological differences, nearly all prominent Ba’thist leaders agreed on one fundamental point: they were ardent supporters of Arab unity—but only with themselves as the sole rulers. This principle applied equally to Hafiz al-Asad and Saddam Hussein. Power-sharing or collective leadership simply did not work.
The Decisive Role of Sectarianism and Arabic-Speaking Religious Minorities
Officially, the theme of sectarianism—in the sense of appealing to loyalties within religious communities—was strictly taboo within the Ba’th Party and the army. Anyone who so much as hinted that Alawite officers such as al-Asad played a disproportionately prominent role—which was clearly the case—was dismissed from both the army and the party. Ironically, this suppression of discourse only reinforced the increasing dominance of Alawite military officers.
This did not, however, prevent a power struggle from unfolding within the Alawite community itself, with General Hafiz al-Asad ultimately emerging as the victor. After Asad’s seizure of power in 1970, his rivals made one last attempt to challenge him—unexpectedly, from within his own inner circle. In 1983, when the president suffered serious heart problems, his brother Rif‘at al-Asad attempted a coup with the help of his notorious Saraya al-Difa’ (Defense Battalions).
Although these battalions had previously been dominant, they had one critical vulnerability: their most important combat units were primarily recruited from the Alawite sect of the Murshidiyin. When President Hafiz al-Asad personally appealed to the Murshidiyin to abandon their posts in Rif‘at’s Saraya al-Difa’, his brother’s power base collapsed almost instantly. Rif‘at was granted the symbolic position of vice president but was soon forced to leave Syria and enter long-term exile.
Ruthlessness Toward Any Form of Opposition
Hafiz al-Asad dealt ruthlessly with his party rivals. Many were imprisoned for long periods—sometimes until they died in detention, as was the case with Salah Jadid. Others were executed without mercy. Non-Ba’thist opponents of the regime were treated just as harshly—if not far more brutally.
Torture had already become a standard practice in Syrian prisons from the very beginning of the Ba’th regime in 1963—though it was also widespread during the 1950s under the notorious head of Syrian intelligence, Colonel ‘Abd al-Hamid Sarraj.
As early as 1964, the Syrian ex-Ba’thist Muta‘ Safadi wrote in detail about these torture practices, often carried out by prison guards from religious minorities such as Alawites, Druze, and Christians. He gave his book the title The Ba’th Party: The Tragedy of Its Beginning and Its End—a title that proved premature, since the end of the Ba’th regime would not come for another sixty years.
The prisoners tried to stop themselves from hating all Alawites, even though the prison director, the head of the torture unit, and most of his assistants were Alawites—men who made their sectarian identity known by openly insulting the faith of the [Sunni] detainees.
These torture practices were already occurring in the early 1960s. During the Syrian Revolution (2011–2024), however, conditions in Syrian prisons deteriorated even further. Tens of thousands of detainees were executed without mercy and buried in unmarked mass graves. Similar brutal repression had also occurred during earlier uprisings under Hafiz al-Asad’s regime, most notably during the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama in 1982, in which over 30,000 Syrians were killed. The mass executions in prisons such as Palmyra (Tadmur) were no less horrific.
Anyone even suspected of intending to undermine the Syrian Ba’th regime could expect bloody consequences and severe repression. All the more remarkable, then, that so many Syrians dared to rise up against the regime in 2011—despite being woefully under-equipped to overthrow it. Inspired by events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, they believed that something similar might be possible in Syria. But Syria’s situation proved to be fundamentally different.
*Nikolaos van Dam is the former Dutch ambassador to Indonesia, Germany, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Egypt, and Iraq, as well as former Special Envoy for Syria. He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Syria (4th ed. 2017), Destroying a Nation: The Civil War in Syria (2017) and My Diplomatic Journeys in the Arab and Islamic World (forthcoming, 2025). Website: http://nikolaosvandam.academia.edu