Amin al-Hafiz
Amin al-Hafiz ruled Syria for three years as the last Ba'athist head of state who was not from the sect that has held the country ever since. He was a Sunni officer from Aleppo, a professional soldier who had trained in Britain and was serving as military attache in Argentina when the Ba'ath Party seized power in Damascus in March 1963. He was recalled to be interior minister within days, and by the summer he had put down a counter-coup by Nasserist officers with an artillery bombardment of the Damascus radio station and several hundred executions, which established both his authority and the character of the new government. He became head of state that November. The three years that followed were the period in which the Ba'ath turned from a party into a military regime. The civilian founders who had written its doctrine of Arab unity and socialism were progressively displaced by the officers of the Military Committee, a group formed in Egyptian exile and drawn heavily from the Alawite, Druze and Ismaili minorities, for whom the army had been the only route out of rural poverty. Al-Hafiz presided over the nationalisation of banks, insurance and most large industry, and over land redistribution that broke the Sunni landowning families of the north; he also presided, without ever controlling it, over the systematic purge of Sunni officers from the command structure by the committee that had installed him. In February 1966 those officers overthrew him in the bloodiest coup in Syrian history, fighting through Damascus for a day and storming his house while he defended it with a machine gun. He was sentenced to death, released in 1967 and exiled to Lebanon and then Iraq, where he spent thirty-five years as a guest of the rival branch of his own party. He came home in 2003 after the Iraqi state that had sheltered him was destroyed, and died in Aleppo in 2009 having watched the men who deposed him hand the country to a family.
- Lived: 1921 CE – 2009 CE
- Nationality: Syrian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
