MILNET: Country Studies

Rivalry among the country's various religious and ethnic minorities has been a perennial source of instability in Syria. During the 1980s, the primary cause of conflict was domination of top-level political and military posts by the minority Alawi community to which Assad belongs (see Armed Forces and Society, this ch.; Political Dynamics, ch. 4).

More worrisome perhaps was intra-Alawi friction. For example, some Alawis honored the memory of former political figure Major General Muhammad Umran, assassinated in Lebanon in 1972, reportedly by Syrian agents. Likewise, some Baath Party members remained loyal to the faction Assad overthrew in his 1970 Corrective Movement (see Political Dynamics, Background, ch. 4). This group, named the 23 February Movement, supported ex-Party Secretary Salah Jadid, ex-president Nureddin Atassi, and ex-prime minister Yusuf Zuayyin--all three of whom were incarcerated in Syria. Assad has repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, attempted to negotiate with these figures, offering them freedom in return for their approval of his government. In many respects, the Assad regime was more concerned with the activities of the 23 February Movement than with the open revolt of the Muslim Brethren (see below). Whereas the fundamentalists carried out terrorist attacks, the 23 February Movement staged several well-planned but abortive coup attempts in the 1980s and, because Umran and Jadid were Alawis, threatened to split the Alawi community.

On the other hand, Sunni Islamic fundamentalists have posed the most sustained and serious threat to the Baath regime. The government referred to these militants as the Muslim Brethren or Brotherhood (Ikhwan al Muslimin), although this is a generic term describing a number of separate organizations. The most important groups included the Aleppo-based Islamic Liberation Movement, established in 1963; the Islamic Liberation Party, founded in Jordan in the 1950s; Shabab Muhammad (Muhammad's Youth); Jund Allah (God's Soldiers); and At Tali'a al Muqatila (The Fighting Vanguard), established by the late Marwan Hadid in Hamah in 1965 and led in 1987 by Adnan Uqlah. The At Tali'a al Muqatila group, which did not recognize the spiritual or political authority of the exiled veteran leader of Syria's Sunni fundamentalists, Issam al Attar, bore the brunt of the actual fighting against the regime. In the early 1980s, the Muslim Brethren staged repeated hit-and-run attacks against the Syrian regime and assassinated several hundred middle-level government officials and members of the security forces and about two dozen Soviet advisers. The armed conflict between the Muslim Brethren and the regime culminated in full-scale insurrection in Aleppo in 1980 and in Hamah in February 1982. The government responded to the Hamah revolt with brutal force, crushing the rebellion by killing between 10,000 and 25,000 civilians and leveling large parts of the city (see The Assad Era, ch. 1).

On the third anniversary of the Hamah rebellion in February 1985, the government announced an amnesty for Muslim Brotherhood members. About 500 of the Muslim Brethren were released from prison, and those who had fled abroad were encouraged to return to Syria. As a result of the amnesty many members of At Tali'a al Muqatila surrendered to government authorities.

Following the Hamah uprising, extremist antiregime Muslim groups in Syria seemed fragmented and presented little threat to the Assad regime. The next series of major antiregime terrorist attacks occurred when a truck exploded in northern Damascus on March 13, 1986, followed by explosions on buses carrying military personnel on April 16. A Lebanese, claiming he had been sent by the Iraqi government, publicly confessed to the March incident and was hanged. Outside observers, however, were unable to verify his or Iraqi complicity. Other potential instigators included Lebanese Christian groups (in retaliation for the Syrian role in artillery shelling and car bomb explosions in East Beirut), PLO factions such as al Fatah, and Israel.

Despite these dangers to Syrian internal security, the overall situation in the mid- and late 1980s was stable compared with the situation between 1946 and 1970. The traditional centers of dissatisfaction--students, labor unions, and dissident Communist Party organizations--were thoroughly infiltrated by Syrian security personnel and in early 1987 posed no significant threat to the government. However, Syrian society is a mosaic of social groups whose interests and loyalties have often conflicted. President Assad, more than any leader in the Syria's modern history, has been able to focus these conflicting interests and loyalties on national goals. Nevertheless, centrifugal forces, such as sectarianism, persisted in this volatile Arab nation, and the armed forces will probably long remain the ultimate arbiters of power.

Opposition movements to the Syrian government in the 1980s were based on ideological, ethnic, or religious motives. However, because of the interrelationships in Syria between ideology and sectarian questions, distinctions among the reasons for dissent were often blurred.

Ideologically Based Opposition Movements

Although the Syrian government has frequently blamed Iraqi agents for many breaches of internal security, several other groups also were real or potential threats to Syrian political stability. In 1987 Syria's armed forces constituted the greatest potential threat to the regime, if only because they had been the kingmakers in every change of government since 1949. By early 1987, however, Assad had not been seriously challenged by the military in his sixteen years in power. This situation can be attributed to effective intelligence agents within the officer corps and to Assad's genuine popularity with the military. Assad is popular because, like Assad, most of the top army officers have been Alawis. Also, tremendous attention has been devoted to building the armed forces, which are well paid. Nevertheless, amid mounting tensions with Iraq, in 1975 there were reports that 200 military and civilian members of the Syrian Baath Party had been arrested and charged with plotting against the government.

The Syrian Communist Party (SCP), with a membership of about 5,000, was the largest communist organization in Syria. Although banned in 1981 when a campaign of arrests was ordered against supporters of its veteran leader, Secretary General Khalid Bakdash, it was reported in 1986 that as a concession to Syria's Soviet ally, the SCP was restored to favor and had rejoined the ruling National Progressive Front (see The Syrian Communist Party, ch. 4).

Until its banning in the late 1970s, the Communist Party Political Bureau (CPPB) was one of the main ideological opposition groups in Syria. Created in 1974 as a result of a split within the legal SCP, the CPPB provoked the ire of the Assad regime by protesting against Syria's intervention on behalf of the Christian Phalangists in the Lebanese civil war. In 1987 CPPB First Secretary Riad at Turk (imprisoned without trial since October 1980) and about 150 party members continued to be confined in Al Mezze military prison in Damascus. Nevertheless, CPPB remained a threat to the regime and throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s At Turk's sympathizers staged numerous terrorist attacks against Syrian targets. CPPB also published several pamphlets condemning the Baath regime and printed its own newspaper, Ar Rayah al Hamrah (The Red Banner).

In the 1980s there were additional communist groups in Syria, although they were officially banned and many of their members held in detention. These groups included the Party for Communist Action (PCA), with about 100 party members still in detention in 1985. In 1980, the Base Organization was formed by Yusuf Murad, a former member of the SCP Central Committee. The Union for Communist Struggle, formed in May 1980, was another opposition group. Its seven members were arrested and three of them continued to be detained through 1985. In 1983 a communist organization called the "Popular Committees" took root among Syria's Palestinian refugees. In July 1986, a third division occurred within the SCP when Central Committee members Ibrahim Bakri and Umar as Sibai split off over the Palestinian issue and created a new "Central Committee." In mid-1986, as an unknown terrorist group was detonating bombs in public places, the government cracked down on the proliferating and expanding communist opposition movements in Syria and arrested about 1,000 suspected activists.