Nureddin al-Atassi
Nureddin al-Atassi was the civilian face of the most radical government Syria has had, lost the Golan Heights while holding it, and died in prison after twenty-two years without trial. He was a physician from Homs, from a family that had already given Syria two heads of state, and he had fought as a volunteer doctor in the Algerian war. He belonged to the Ba'ath Party's left, which held that Arab unity was worthless without a social revolution first, and he was installed as head of state after the coup of February 1966 by the officers who had made it. Real power lay with the deputy chief of staff who had organised that coup, and al-Atassi was the visible civilian over a military faction - an arrangement he seems to have understood and accepted. His government was the most ideologically committed in Syrian history: further nationalisation, an alliance with the Soviet Union close enough to be described as clientage, open support for Palestinian guerrillas operating across the Israeli frontier, and a doctrine of popular liberation war. The raids and the shelling across the demilitarised zones were among the immediate causes of the crisis of 1967, and in June of that year Syria lost the Golan Heights in two days of fighting after Egypt had already been defeated. The regime's response to the catastrophe was to blame everyone but itself and to radicalise further. The defeat split it. The defence minister argued that the priority was now a functioning army and an alliance with the conservative Arab states; al-Atassi and the party left argued that the priority was the revolution. The argument ran for three years and ended in November 1970 when the defence minister arrested the entire civilian leadership, including the head of state, in a bloodless coup he called the Corrective Movement. Al-Atassi was taken to a military prison in Damascus and held there without charge for twenty-two years, released only when he was dying of cancer in 1992.
- Lived: 1929 CE – 1992 CE
- Nationality: Syrian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
