The History That Syria’s New Leaders Will Need to Overcome

After 13 years of civil war, and 54 years of ruling Syria with an iron fist, the brutal Assad regime has fallen. This marks a pivotal opportunity for Syrians to rebuild a social compact, create viable political alternatives, and chart a brighter future for the country.

But to take advantage of this crossroads, Syrians need to understand their country’s post-independence history. It suggests that a successful transition to a post-Assad Syria will require efforts to foster an inclusive national identity and a political conscience that transcends the sectarian and ethnic divides entrenched by Assad family rule and the civil war.

In 1946, the French left Syria, marking the country’s independence. This ushered in a quarter century of instability, marked by frequent coups, military revolts, and civil disorders. The country was the most coup-prone country in the Arab world and it was more often governed by military officers than civilian governments.

In 1963, the Ba’ath Party seized power, initiating a 61-year era of military rule. Syria became the ideological heart of Ba’athism, a political ideology that combined elements of secularism, Arab nationalism, and Arab socialism. Yet, Ba’ath rule did not immediately bring stability. For the first seven years, two party factions remained locked in a power struggle. One side was led by Aflaq and al-Bitar, two prominent Ba’ath politicians, and the other by Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad, an ultra-left-wing general and the commander of the Syrian Air Forces respectively.

Then Assad staged a coup in 1970, known as the Corrective Movement, ousting Syria’s de facto leader, Salah Jadid. In order to bring authoritarian stability to Syrian politics, Assad deployed unrestrained violence. He also exploited sectarian and ethnic divisions to consolidate power, and cultivated international alliances to avoid outside scrutiny or pressure.

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Assad elevated people from his own minority religious group — the Alawite community — to positions of power in the military and intelligence operations and cultivated an intricate web of patronage. His regime redefined Alawite identity to revolve around Assad’s personality cult. This tactic provided him with a base of support and suppressed dissent. The regime also encouraged Alawites to move from their traditional home in northwest Syria to specific neighborhoods in Damascus. By increasing the Alawite presence in strategically important areas, Assad aimed to counterbalance the Sunni majority in the city and secure a loyal base close to the political and military center of the country. 

However, Assad recognized that Alawite support alone would not be enough to ward off threats to his rule. So he set out to co-opt Syria’s Sunni elites. He appointed them to senior posts in his government and cultivated new networks of support among the powerful Sunni merchants in cities such as Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and Hama. Assad and his allies even regularly intermarried across confessional lines in an attempt to broaden their patronage and client networks beyond the Alawite minority.

Yet, his courtship of Sunni elites merely created the illusion that Assad’s regime was inclusive. In reality, even as he appointed them to positions of power, he also disenfranchised and repressed Sunnis more broadly. 

Nonetheless, the combination of a fearsome security apparatus and Assad’s elite network across ethnic and religious lines safeguarded him against the sort of coups that had felled numerous leaders between 1946 and 1970.

Assad also used foreign policy as a tool to entrench his regime and build public support. 

In 1973, Syria and Egypt staged a coordinated attack on Israel to regain the territory they had lost in the 1967 Six-Day War. Assad hoped to regain the Golan Heights and to gather favor from the Syrian public. Although Syria was defeated, the campaign made Assad a national hero.

Additionally, Assad skillfully managed to align himself closely with the Soviets — securing military and economic aid — while also seeking limited engagement with the West. Notably, in 1974, he hosted Richard Nixon, in the first visit by a U.S. president to Syria. Assad's goal for Nixon’s visit was to position Syria as a regional power and signal openness to diplomacy after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

All the while, Assad remained a brutal tyrant at home. His disenfranchisement of Sunnis drew opposition from the Muslim Brotherhood dating to the early days of Assad’s regime. Over time, the group gained support among Sunni conservatives, urban elites, and segments of the middle class. 

Initially, Assad tried to appease this religious opposition by presenting himself as a pious Muslim. He inserted a provision in Syria’s Constitution that the country’s president must be Muslim, prayed in Sunni mosques, and made the Hajj — the pilgrimage to Mecca. Yet, these gestures did little to eliminate the Islamist threat to his rule. 

The matter came to a head in Hama in 1982. Muslim Brotherhood fighters launched a coordinated attack on government buildings, military barracks, and Ba’ath Party offices and declared the city an autonomous zone, encouraging an open rebellion against Assad. The dictator responded by deploying artillery fire and chemical weapons, killing an estimated 10,000-25,000 people in what some pundits have labeled “the single deadliest act by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East.” The massacre hardened the sectarian perceptions of Assad as embracing Alawite minority rule and made it clear that winning back the loyalty of the vast majority of the Sunnis would be highly unlikely. 

That caused Assad to double down on the three key strands of his leadership — using repressive violence when necessary, relying on support from the Alawite community and some Sunni elites to overcome broader Sunni opposition, and savvily courting international power players — to maintain control of the country. 

Assad had always seen his brother Rifaat as his logical successor. But in 1984, Rifaat joined in a coup attempt, which failed, leading to his exile. That made Hafez’s eldest son, Bassel, the heir apparent. A decade later, however, Bassel al-Assad died in a car accident, which meant that Hafez’s heir would almost certainly be his other son, Bashar, a Western-educated ophthalmologist with minimal political experience. Six years later, in 2000, Bashar became ruler when his father died.

Bashar’s rise was largely unanticipated, as his father had not groomed him for leadership until after his brother died. However, he quickly consolidated power through political maneuvering and obtaining loyalty from the military and security apparatus. Initially there was substantial optimism and enthusiasm that Bashar, who was married to a British-born Sunni woman, would adopt a more liberal, non-sectarian approach. His early years witnessed tentative attempts at economic and political reform, such as the easing of media restrictions and the launch of the short-lived “Damascus Spring,” during which intellectuals and activists were allowed to form discussion forums and voice demands for greater political freedoms.

Yet, over time, Bashar Assad inherited his father’s obstinacy and brutality and increasingly relied on the security apparatus to maintain control, stifling dissent and curbing opposition. 

In December 2010, the Arab Spring unleashed widespread anti-authoritarian protests and uprisings across the region, including in Syria. Assad reacted brutally, tenaciously clinging to power, even as authoritarian leaders fell in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen.

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The result was a 13-year civil war pitting his security forces against a fractured opposition composed of both moderate and extremist factions. The war quickly evolved into a complex, multi-front struggle, drawing in international powers. Russia and Iran backed Assad, providing crucial military and economic support and further sectarianizing the conflict, while the U.S., Turkey, and the Gulf states supported various opposition factions. The rise of ISIS in 2014 further complicated the conflict, leading to a global coalition fighting the terrorist group. 

Despite numerous ceasefires and peace talks, the war became increasingly protracted, with millions of Syrians displaced and the country ravaged. Once a key regional player, the prolonged war weakened and isolated Syria.

In 2020, Russia and Turkey brokered a ceasefire, under which Assad controlled much of the territory lost during the initial phases of the war. Yet, in November, after four years of relative stalemate, opposition groups launched a surprise offensive as Assad’s three key allies — Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah — were stretched thin with other conflicts. Within weeks, Assad’s forces succumbed, ending his family’s 54-year reign.

There are reasons for cautious optimism about Syria’s future but also concerns that it could disintegrate politically and geographically. Most critically, those who build Syria’s next political system will need to overcome the most important legacy of the half century of Assad rule: the ethnic and sectarian conflict and strife nurtured by the Assads. They pitted Alawites and other minorities against the majority Sunnis, creating deep divisions.

A healthy political system in Syria will require dismantling entrenched ethnic and sectarian divides and fostering an inclusive national identity that unites its diverse communities. 

It will also require international actors, including the U.S. and Turkey, to support policies that promote harmony and tangible progress toward pluralistic and democratic governance. This will be a challenge, given that each opposition faction, and their foreign allies, have diverging goals. But it’s only way to create a vibrant, stable, pluralistic Syria.

Sefa Secen is assistant professor of political science at Nazareth University in Rochester, N.Y. He studies Middle East politics, refugees, international security, foreign policy, and political behavior. More information is available on his website: https://sefasecen.weebly.com.

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