Hafez al-Assad
Hafez al-Assad ruled Syria for thirty years and built the state his son inherited. Born in 1930 in the coastal mountains to a poor Alawite family — a minority sect long at the bottom of Syrian society — he was the first in his family to finish school, joined the Ba'ath Party at sixteen, and entered the air force academy because it was free and open to those without money. He became commander of the air force at thirty-four, and defence minister in 1966. Syria lost the Golan Heights under his ministry in the Six-Day War of 1967, which he survived politically by blaming others. He took power in the corrective movement of November 1970, arresting the civilian party leadership, and became president the following year. He ended two decades of coups by making the state coup-proof: overlapping intelligence services watching each other, the elite units commanded by Alawite officers and relatives, and the party made an instrument of the presidency rather than a rival to it. He launched the October War of 1973 with Egypt, took ground on the Golan and lost it again, and treated the war as a political success. He intervened in Lebanon in 1976 and stayed for nearly three decades. He destroyed the Muslim Brotherhood rising at Hama in February 1982, shelling the city for weeks and killing something between ten and twenty-five thousand people. He joined the coalition against Iraq in 1991 and negotiated with Israel without concluding. He died in 2000, and the constitution was amended in minutes to lower the age of eligibility for his son.
- Lived: 1930 CE – 2000 CE
- Nationality: Syrian
- Roles: head_of_state, dictator, military_leader
