Arabs (85 page)

Confrontation between the Islamist underground and the Syrian government became inevitable when the Ba’thist commander of the Syrian air force, General Hafiz al-Asad, came to power in the coup of November 16, 1970. As a member of the Alawite minority community, al-Asad was Syria’s first non-Sunni Muslim leader. He made efforts to placate Sunni Muslim sensitivities in his early years in office, but to no avail. The introduction of a new constitution in 1973, which for the first time did not stipulate that the president of Syria would be a Muslim, revived questions of religion and state. The constitution sparked violent demonstrations in the Sunni Muslim heartland of Hama. Further Islamist violence followed al-Asad’s decision to intervene in the Lebanese civil war on the side of the Maronite Christians and against the progressive Muslim forces and the Palestinian movement in April 1976.

Al-Asad’s intervention in the Lebanon War raised grave concerns among Syria’s Muslim majority. Many disgruntled Sunnis, who had found themselves marginalized by the Alawite-dominated government since al-Asad came to power in 1970, suspected the new regime of promoting a “minority alliance” that bound Syria’s ruling Alawites with the Lebanese Maronites to subjugate the Muslim majority of Syria and Lebanon. With tensions growing between the government and the Sunni community, al-Asad ordered a crackdown on the Syrian Muslim Brothers. In 1976 the authorities arrested Hama’s radical imam, Shaykh Marwan Hadid. The Islamist recruiter immediately went on a hunger strike, and he died in June 1976. The authorities insisted that Hadid had taken his own life by starvation, but the Islamists accused the government of his murder and promised to avenge Marwan Hadid’s death.

It took three years for Syria’s Islamists to organize their retaliatory blow against the Asad regime. In June 1979, the Islamist guerrillas attacked a military academy in Aleppo, the majority of whose students—some 260 of the 320 cadets—were from the Alawite community. The terrorists killed 83 cadets, all of them from the Alawite minority.

The attack on the military academy was the opening volley in an all-out war between the Muslim Brotherhood and the regime of Hafiz al-Asad that was to rage for the next two and one-half years, dragging Syria into a hellish daily back-and-forth of terrorism and counterterrorism.

 

The Muslim Brothers in Syria, convinced of the righteousness of their cause, refused to negotiate or compromise with the Asad regime. “We reject all forms of despotism, out of respect for the very principles of Islam, and do not seek the fall of the Pharaoh so that another might take his place,” they announced in a leaflet distributed across
the towns and cities of Syria in mid-1979.
¹¹
Their language echoed the Islamist militants in Egypt, who were similarly bent on overthrowing the Sadat government by violence, and who gave moral support to their Brothers in Hama in their revolt against Syria’s pharaoh.

With no scope for reconciliation, the hard-liners in the Syrian government, headed by the president’s brother, Rifa’at al-Asad, were given a free hand to suppress the Islamic insurgency by force. In March 1980, Syrian commandos descended by helicopter on a rebel village between Aleppo and Latakia and placed the entire village under martial rule. According to official figures, more than two hundred villagers were killed in the operation.

Emboldened by its success in the countryside, the Syrian government sent 25,000 troops to invade the city of Aleppo, scene of the cadet massacre one year earlier. Soldiers searched every house in those quarters known to support the Islamist insurgency and arrested more than 8,000 suspects. Rifa’at al-Asad warned the townspeople from the turret of his tank that he was ready to execute 1,000 a day until the city was cleansed of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brothers struck back on June 26, 1980, with an assassination attempt against President al-Asad. Militants threw hand grenades and fired machine guns at the president while he received a visiting African dignitary. Al-Asad was shielded by his bodyguards and narrowly escaped death. The following day, Rifa’at al-Asad sent his commandos to the notorious Tadmur Prison, where Muslim Brother prisoners were detained, to exact a terrible revenge.

’Isa Ibrahim Fayyad, a young Alawite commando, would never forget his first mission, when he was ordered to massacre unarmed prisoners at Tadmur. The Syrian soldiers were flown by helicopter to the prison at 6:30 A.M. There were perhaps seventy commandos in all, divided into seven platoons, each dispatched to a different cell block. Fayyad and his men took up their positions and went to work. “They opened the gates of a cell block for us. Six or seven of us entered and killed all those we found inside, some 60 or 70 people in all. I must have gunned down fifteen myself.” The cells echoed with machine-gun fire and the screams of the dying shouting “
Allahu Akbar.
” Fayyad had no compassion for his victims. “Altogether some 550 of those Muslim Brother bastards must have been killed,” he reflected grimly. Other participants estimated as many as 700–1,100 Muslim Brothers were gunned down in their cells. The unarmed prisoners made desperate attacks on the commandos, killing one and wounding two others in the melee. When the commandos were finished, they had to wash the blood from their hands and feet.
¹²

Having exterminated the Muslim Brothers in Tadmur Prison, al-Asad took the initiative to eliminate the Brotherhood from Syrian society. On July 7, 1980, the Syrian government passed a law that made membership in the Muslim Brotherhood an
offense publishable by death. Undaunted, the Islamist opposition movement embarked on a series of assassinations against prominent Syrian officials, including some of President al-Asad’s personal friends.

The Syrian government responded in April 1981 by sending the army into the Muslim Brothers’ stronghold in Hama. The fourth-largest city in Syria, with a population at the time of about 180,000, Hama had been the center of Islamist opposition since the 1960s. When the troops arrived, the townspeople put up no resistance, assuming this would be a raid like those in the past, in which people were detained for questioning and intimidated by the commandos before being released. They were wrong.

The Syrian army decided to make an example of the civilians of Hama, killing children and adults indiscriminately. One eyewitness described the carnage to a Western journalist: “I walked a few steps before coming on a pile of bodies, then another. There must have been 10 or 15. I walked by them, one after the other. I looked at them a long time, without believing my eyes.... In each pile there were 15 bodies, 25, 30 bodies. The faces were totally unrecognizable.... There were bodies of all ages, 14 and up, in pyjamas,
gelebiyehs
[native robes], in sandals or barefoot.”
¹³
Estimates ranged from 150 to several hundred killed in the attack. The total death toll in two years of hostilities between government forces and Islamists already exceeded 2,500.

The Muslim Brothers responded to the army’s Hama atrocity in kind, initiating a terror campaign against innocent civilians in the major towns and cities of Syria. The Islamists shifted the battlefield from the northern towns of Aleppo, Latakia, and Hama to the capital city of Damascus. The Muslim Brothers planted a series of explosive devices that shook the Syrian capital between August and November of that year, culminating in a massive car bomb in the city center on November 29 that killed 200 and wounded up to 500—the largest casualty toll of any single bomb the Arab world had witnessed up to that point.

Anwar Sadat’s assassination in October 1981 coincided with President Asad’s fifty-first birthday; Syrian Islamists circulated leaflets threatening him with the same fate. Al-Asad authorized his brother Rifa’at to conduct an extermination campaign against the Muslim Brothers in their stronghold in Hama, to defeat the movement once and for all.

The Syrian government went to war against the Muslim Brotherhood in their stronghold of Hama in the early morning hours of February 2, 1982. Helicopter gunships ferried platoons of commandos to the hills outside the city. After the government’s murderous raid in April 1981, the townspeople were on high alert, and the vigilant Islamists were quick to react when they heard the incoming helicopters. Shouting “
Allahu akbar
,” the Muslim Brothers rose in armed revolt against the Syrian state.
The call to jihad, or holy war, was made over the loudspeakers of the city’s mosques, normally used for the daily calls to prayer. The leader of the Muslim Brothers urged the townspeople to drive the “infidel” Asad regime from power once and for all.

By dawn, the first wave of soldiers was in retreat and the Islamist fighters went on the attack, killing government officials and Ba’th members in Hama. Early success gave the insurgents a false hope of victory. For behind the first wave of army commandos lay tens of thousands of soldiers, supported by tanks and aircraft. It was a battle the government could not afford to lose and that the insurgents lacked the means to win.

For the first week, the Muslim Brothers managed to fight off the Syrian army onslaught. Yet the government’s superior firepower took its toll, as tanks and artillery leveled whole city blocks, burying their defenders under the rubble. When the town finally fell, government agents exacted a bloody toll of the survivors, arresting, torturing, and arbitrarily killing the townspeople of Hama for the slightest suspicion of support for the Muslim Brothers.
New York Times
correspondent Thomas Friedman, who entered Hama two months after the violence, found a city in which whole quarters had been destroyed and leveled by bulldozers and steamrollers. The human toll was far more terrible. “Virtually the entire Muslim leadership in Hama—from sheiks to teachers to mosque caretakers—who survived the battle for the city were liquidated afterward in one fashion or another; most anti-government union leaders suffered the same fate,” Friedman reported.
¹⁴

To this day, no one knows how many people died in Hama in February 1982. Journalists and analysts have estimated a death toll ranging somewhere between 10,000–20,000, but Rifa’at al-Asad boasted of having killed as many as 38,000. The Asad brothers wanted the world to know they had crushed their adversaries and dealt the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria a blow from which it would never recover.

The stakes were now higher than ever in the conflict between Islamists and pharaohs. Whereas the Egyptian authorities had resorted to widespread torture and selective execution of its Islamist opponents, the Syrian regime engaged in mass extermination. A higher degree of training, planning, and discipline were required for the Islamists to topple such powerful adversaries.

The experiences of Islamists in Syria and Egypt had shown that Arab states were too strong to be toppled by assassination or subversion. Those Islamists who hoped to overturn secularism and establish Islamic states would have to look elsewhere. The conflict in civil war Lebanon provided one opportunity for Islamist parties to promote their ideal vision of an Islamic society. Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion presented a different option. In both cases, Islamist parties took their struggle to the international arena, broadening the scope of their battle to combat regional and global superpowers like Israel, the United States, and the Soviet Union. What
had begun as a domestic security struggle for individual states was becoming a global security issue.

Two nearly simultaneous bombs shook the very foundations of Beirut on Sunday morning, October 23, 1983. Within seconds, over 300 people had perished: 241 U.S. servicemen, 58 French paratroopers, 6 Lebanese civilians, and 2 suicide bombers. The U.S. Marines faced the highest single-day death toll since Iwo Jima, the French had absorbed the greatest single day’s casualties since the Algerian war, and the suicide bombers had transformed the conflict in Lebanon.

The bombers approached their targets in trucks laden with tons of high explosives. One approached the U.S. Marines’ barracks, a concrete building in the Beirut International Airport compound, through a service entrance at 6:20 A.M. He gathered speed and smashed through the metal gates. The shocked sentries did not have time even to load their weapons to stop him. One survivor watched the truck speed by. All he could remember after the blast was that “the man was smiling as he drove past.”
¹⁵
The driver was clearly delighted that he had penetrated the American compound, no doubt believing that his violent death would open the Gates of Paradise before him.

The blast was so strong that it severed the building from its foundation; the compound collapsed like a house of cards. The ruins were rocked by secondary explosions as the Marines’ ammunition stores in the basement were detonated by the heat.

Three miles to the north, another suicide bomber drove his truck into the underground parking garage of the high-rise building that served as headquarters to the French paratroopers. He detonated his bomb, leveling the building and killing fifty-eight French soldiers. Journalist Robert Fisk, who reached the ruins of the French compound moments after the explosion, could not grasp the enormity of the destruction. “I run up to a smoking crater, 20 feet deep and 40 wide. Piled beside it, like an obscene sandwich, are the nine floors of the building....
The bomb lifted the nine-storey building into the air and moved it 20 feet. The whole building became airborne. The crater is where the building was.
How could this be done?”
¹⁶