|
Syria Ethnic and Religious Opposition Movements
Rivalry among the country's various religious and ethnic
minorities has been a perennial source of instability in Syria.
During the 1980s, the primary cause of conflict was domination of
top-level political and military posts by the minority Alawi
community to which Assad belongs
(see
Armed Forces and Society
, this ch.;
Political Dynamics
, ch. 4).
More worrisome perhaps was intra-Alawi friction. For example,
some Alawis honored the memory of former political figure Major
General Muhammad Umran, assassinated in Lebanon in 1972,
reportedly by Syrian agents. Likewise, some Baath Party members
remained loyal to the faction Assad overthrew in his 1970
Corrective Movement
(see Political Dynamics,
Background
, ch. 4).
This group, named the 23 February Movement, supported ex-Party
Secretary Salah Jadid, ex-president Nureddin Atassi, and ex-prime
minister Yusuf Zuayyin--all three of whom were incarcerated in
Syria. Assad has repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, attempted to
negotiate with these figures, offering them freedom in return for
their approval of his government. In many respects, the Assad
regime was more concerned with the activities of the 23 February
Movement than with the open revolt of the Muslim Brethren.
Whereas the fundamentalists carried out terrorist
attacks, the 23 February Movement staged several well-planned but
abortive coup attempts in the 1980s and, because Umran and Jadid
were Alawis, threatened to split the Alawi community.
On the other hand, Sunni Islamic fundamentalists have posed
the most sustained and serious threat to the Baath regime. The
government referred to these militants as the Muslim Brethren or
Brotherhood (Ikhwan al Muslimin), although this is a generic term
describing a number of separate organizations. The most important
groups included the Aleppo-based Islamic Liberation Movement,
established in 1963; the Islamic Liberation Party, founded in
Jordan in the 1950s; Shabab Muhammad (Muhammad's Youth); Jund
Allah (God's Soldiers); and At Tali'a al Muqatila (The Fighting
Vanguard), established by the late Marwan Hadid in Hamah in 1965
and led in 1987 by Adnan Uqlah. The At Tali'a al Muqatila group,
which did not recognize the spiritual or political authority of
the exiled veteran leader of Syria's Sunni fundamentalists, Issam
al Attar, bore the brunt of the actual fighting against the
regime. In the early 1980s, the Muslim Brethren staged repeated
hit-and-run attacks against the Syrian regime and assassinated
several hundred middle-level government officials and members of
the security forces and about two dozen Soviet advisers. The
armed conflict between the Muslim Brethren and the regime
culminated in full-scale insurrection in Aleppo in 1980 and in
Hamah in February 1982. The government responded to the Hamah
revolt with brutal force, crushing the rebellion by killing
between 10,000 and 25,000 civilians and leveling large parts of
the city
(see The Assad Era
, ch. 1).
On the third anniversary of the Hamah rebellion in February
1985, the government announced an amnesty for Muslim Brotherhood
members. About 500 of the Muslim Brethren were released from
prison, and those who had fled abroad were encouraged to return
to Syria. As a result of the amnesty many members of At Tali'a al
Muqatila surrendered to government authorities.
Following the Hamah uprising, extremist antiregime Muslim
groups in Syria seemed fragmented and presented little threat to
the Assad regime. The next series of major antiregime terrorist
attacks occurred when a truck exploded in northern Damascus on
March 13, 1986, followed by explosions on buses carrying military
personnel on April 16. A Lebanese, claiming he had been sent by
the Iraqi government, publicly confessed to the March incident
and was hanged. Outside observers, however, were unable to verify
his or Iraqi complicity. Other potential instigators included
Lebanese Christian groups (in retaliation for the Syrian role in
artillery shelling and car bomb explosions in East Beirut), PLO
factions such as al Fatah, and Israel.
Despite these dangers to Syrian internal security, the
overall situation in the mid- and late 1980s was stable compared
with the situation between 1946 and 1970. The traditional centers
of dissatisfaction--students, labor unions, and dissident
Communist Party organizations--were thoroughly infiltrated by
Syrian security personnel and in early 1987 posed no significant
threat to the government. However, Syrian society is a mosaic of
social groups whose interests and loyalties have often
conflicted. President Assad, more than any leader in the Syria's
modern history, has been able to focus these conflicting
interests and loyalties on national goals. Nevertheless,
centrifugal forces, such as sectarianism, persisted in this
volatile Arab nation, and the armed forces will probably long
remain the ultimate arbiters of power.
Data as of April 1987
|
