Syria. More than half a century of rule by the Assad regime. Summary

Created from part of a former Turkish province after World War I, and proclaimed an independent state during World War II, Syria was ruled by two people for over half a century. In November 1970, as a result of a military coup, Hafiz al-Assad came to power and held it until his death in 2000. His son, Bashar Hafiz al-Assad, who ruled after him, fled on the night from Saturday to Sunday when armed troops entered Damascus his opponents.

Hafiz al-Asad was a military man and had been involved in politics since his school years. He owed his power to a large extent to himself – both to his abilities and to his ruthlessness towards his opponents. Thanks to these features, during his three decades in power, his position was never threatened, even though he changed both domestic and foreign policy.

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Born in 1930, Hafiz al-Assad came to power as a result of a bloodless military coup on the night of November 12-13, 1970. He began his path to rule seven years earlier, as the youngest representative of the leadership of the Socialist Arab Revival Party (Baath), whose program was a mixture of nationalism and socialism.

In March 1963, all parties except Baath were banned in Syria, and Al-Assad soon became head of the Air Force (he was a pilot himself) and then defense minister. He took advantage of disputes between civilian and military representatives of his party. He took full power in 1970. Under his rule, Syria became one of the key countries in the Middle East.

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Al-Assad, like other leaders of Arab countries, pursued an anti-Israel policy, but unlike many others, he realized that “pushing Israel into the sea” – the flagship goal of these countries – was impossible to achieve. An example of al-Assad's pragmatism was, to some extent, the so-called the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Together with Egypt, Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel. Al-Assad declared his victory, although he managed to regain only 10 percent. the Golan Heights occupied by Israel in 1967. Seeking to strengthen his armed forces, al-Assad relied mainly on the Soviet Union.

The civil war that broke out in Lebanon in 1976 became an opportunity to strengthen Syria's international position. Al-Assad sent his army there and initially supported right-wing Christian organizations and fought against Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. However, when Israel joined the conflict, al-Assad changed the front. This initiated a long war, as a result of which Lebanon found itself in the Syrian sphere of influence.

At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, he had to face a series of attacks led by extreme Islamist organizations, including: Muslim brothers. In 1980, he almost died in an attack (the bodyguard who saved him died). In retaliation, he tightened his policy – several hundred Islamists imprisoned there were murdered in the prison in Palmyra. Two years later (in February 1982), the army sent by al-Assad bloodily pacified the city of Hama, which was controlled by Islamists. According to various sources, up to 25,000 people died in this city. people.

Under al-Assad, Syria was modernizing. Universal education was introduced, and thanks to the construction of a dam and a hydroelectric power plant on the Euphrates, most of the country was electrified. The first decade of Bashar al-Assad's rule did not herald any major changes.

Bashar al-Assad, who took power in Syria in 2000 after the death of his father, was in many ways nothing like him at all. His older brother Basil was being prepared to take over, but he died in a car accident in 1994. Only then did Bashar Hafez al-Assad, a Western-educated ophthalmologist, begin to be considered by his father as his heir. Although formally the decision on who will rule in Syria is decided by popular elections, in practice it has been decided for many years by the military and controlled by the Assads.

In the spring of 2011, protests began in Syria, encouraged by the success of the “Arab Spring” in Tunisia and Egypt. Bashar al-Assad ordered the army to brutally suppress the demonstrations, which only inflamed the situation. Since February 2012, the regime in Damascus has been in international isolation (with the exception of Russia and China). This happened after a rocket attack by government troops on the rebellious city of Homs. The civil war and the ensuing chaos resulted in the mass flight of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians abroad.

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In mid-2012, Bashar al-Assad controlled only a small part of the country. The rest were ruled by the so-called troops. Islamic State and Syrian Democratic Forces. The areas on the border with Turkey at some point came under the control of the Kurds, who were demanding their own state (or at least autonomy). The situation began to change to al-Assad's advantage, among others. due to Russia's increasing military and political involvement. In July 2012, the army subordinated to al-Assad drove the rebels out of Damascus, using, among others, artillery and aviation.

The offensive of Islamist forces in November 2024 came as a surprise to most experts observing the conflict in Syria.