Paradise lost? Rethinking Sectarianism and Nationalism in pre-baʿth syria

In his pacesetting work on ethnic conflicts, Donald L. Horrowitz defines ranked systems as societal hierarchies construed along “clearly understood conceptions of superordinate and subordinate status.”Footnote ⁴ The Ottoman world was such an order in which one group (Sunni Muslims) enjoyed a superior status as the community of power, and others occupied lower echelons on the ladder, whether they be non-Muslim (e.g. Christians, Jews), or heterodox Muslims (e.g. Shia, Druze, ʿAlawis). Albert Hourani and Stephen Longrig are worth quoting at length in this regard, respectively:

It goes beyond the limits of this article to engage the voluminous literature on identity and group formation comprehensively, but some conceptualization is nonetheless in order. I define sectarianism as a sense of “we-ness” that transcends religious distinctiveness to include what Stuart Kaufman labels the “myth-symbol complex,” i.e. a combination of values, lore, and understanding of status and history glorifying the in-group, and reifying out-groups as permanent others.Footnote ⁷ Due to the demographic preponderance of Sunnis in the Middle East, but also to the fact that the great Islamic empires of the region were Sunni (with the notable exceptions of the Ismaʿili Fatimids, and the Shiʿa Safavids), much of the minority groups “we-ness” was construed against a backdrop of hostility to, and atavistic fear of Sunni Islam. The latter, in turn, tolerated minorities as dhimmis, i.e. groups allowed to dwell in the realm of Islam provided they accepted their constrained position in a hierarchy suffused with overtones of domination and subordination. To be sure, incidents of physical violence against non-Sunnis were the exception rather than the rule. But the religious and political inferiority of dhimmis was a foregone conclusion from a Sunni perspective; the notion of equality in the body politic irrespective of creed was foreign to the traditional understanding of society and state.Footnote ⁸

Against this backdrop, many foreign observers who dwelled or studied the region maintained that the “Orient” was imbued with a religious essence that made it hopelessly impervious to the modern concept of secularism. The following excerpt from a diplomatic missive that the French general consul in Syria, E. de Lesseps conveyed to the Quai d'Orsay in August 1856 is an eloquent example in this regard:

Perhaps in reaction to the essentialism of such Orientalist accounts that remain alive in Western political discourse and journalistic accounts on the Middle East, scholars generally tend to underplay the importance of sectarian identity in shaping political consciousness in the region. The eminent Syranist Philip Khoury is a case in point. His seminal book, Syria And The French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945, is built on the premise of the rise of Arab nationalism in reaction to the imposition of European and Christian rule after the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire. Not only did nationalism provide cohesion in the face of the French occupier, but it allegedly became the “dominant political ideology in Syria” whereas Islam “lost much of its power owing to the spread of secularism.”Footnote ¹⁰ In another work, Khoury maintained that parochial ties pertaining to sect or religion or ethnicity were corroded in post-Ottoman Syria by “the rise of new loyalties” centered upon modern nationalism.Footnote ¹¹ Along similar lines, Michel Provence argued that the 1925 revolt against French rule in Syria was a turning point that gave way to a nationalist feeling transcending sectarian attachments and parochialisms:

Patrick Seale, for his part, does not explicitly say that particularisms were vanishing in pre-Baʿth Syria, but pays them almost no attention, especially in his first book, The Struggle For Syria, indirectly suggesting that they played only a peripheral role in shaping politics and structuring outcomes. The same is true of other classical studies of Syria, including Itamar Rabinovich, Raymond Hinnesbusch, or Gordon H. Torrey.Footnote ¹³ On the opposite end of the spectrum, Nikolaos Van Dam puts sectarianism and parochial loyalties at the center of his approach to Syria. Whereas Khoury and Provence contend that modern nationalism united the various Syrian sects behind a common identity and purpose, Van Dam maintains that the old rift opposing Sunnis to religious minorities actually “widened during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”Footnote ¹⁴ Joshua Landis argues for his part in a study on Jabal Druze that though minority separatism was defeated following independence, “ethnopolitics in Syria were very much alive” in the 1950s. Landis reaches a conclusion diametrically opposed to Khoury's, and Provence's:

In brief, there are two orientations pertaining to identity politics in Syria. The first gives, at best, oblique attention to sectarianism which it downplays in favor of an alleged modern nationalism transcending particularisms (Khoury, Provence); or geopolitics and Syria's role in the Arab-Israeli conflict (Seale); or socioeconomics and class analysis (Hinnebusch). Another puts ascriptive loyalties at the heart of its approach to Syrian politics and is skeptical of a reflexive tendency among many scholars to dismiss sectarianism as irrelevant or vanishing (Van Dam). I contend in this article that the memoirs published in the last decades do not justify the claim that nationalism triumphed in pre-Ba‘th Syria, while sectarianism and other sub-national particularisms were eclipsed. The supposed golden age of national unity never existed and pre-Ba‘th Syria was not one. The military in particular was not a bastion of unity and modern nationalism; sectarianism was central to the dynamics of power struggle within the armed forces and society at large. I develop these observations in the rest of this article.

Center and periphery: contending visions of pre-baʿth syria

Sunni Muslims dominated the ruling classes of the Ottoman Arab provinces for centuries. This observation may seem too obvious to mention, but it is nonetheless a necessary starting point to understanding post-Ottoman Syrian politics. Under the French mandate in Syria, Sunni notables worked assiduously to reproduce the same power hierarchies of old. In contrast, powerful ʿAlawi chieftains such as Jabir al-‘Abbas and Ibrahim al-Kanj, respective leaders of the large Khayyatin and Haddadin tribal confederations, openly favored the creation of an independent entity in Jabal al-Nusayriyya, the ʿAlawi stronghold in northwestern Syria. Ultimately, however, the ʿAlawi elites were neither unanimous nor consistent in pursuing separatism. Whether driven by self-interest, a genuine change of heart, or a loss of faith in the cause of independence, a number of important ʿAlawi figures advocated for the establishment of a decentralized Syria that they hoped would provide for minority self-rule.Footnote ¹⁶ Several Druze chieftains in Southern Syria—as well as the Christians and Kurds in the eastern Jazira—harbored similar ambitions ranging from autonomy to independence, though other leading members of the community favored Syrian unity. Meanwhile, the landed Sunni notables (a‘yān) loosely united in the pro-independence National Bloc were adamant in their efforts to perpetuate their traditional predominance. Such conflicting ambitions structured the background of inter-communal relations during the mandatory years, and beyond.

Independence in 1946 did little to assuage such frictions. One anecdote is telling in this regard. Salih al-‘Ali and Sultan al-Atrash, respectively an ʿAlawi and a Druze chieftain, had led two early uprisings against mandatory authorities in Syria. When the Syrians celebrated the French departure in April 1946, al-‘Ali came to Damascus to participate in the festivities. The government arranged for him to stay at a lowly two-star hotel in the capital, which was perceived as a deliberate affront to him and his ʿAlawi constituency. As for al-Atrash, he boycotted the event altogether to signal his displeasure with the policies of the Sunni notables toward himself and his community.Footnote ¹⁷ The demands of ʿAlawi and Druze leaders at the time were twofold: first, a decentralized political system in which ʿAlawis and Druze could enjoy autonomy in their respective regions under the control of autochthone governors; and second, substantial political representation in the central government in Damascus. The Sunni leaders ignored both demands. In so doing, they were supported by British officials who combined their ascendency following France's defeat in the Second World War with indifference to Syrian minorities perceived to be pro-French.Footnote ¹⁸ And so the notables lost no time after independence in decreasing, and then eliminating, communal representation in the parliament, which the French mandate had guaranteed for Syrian minorities. In the very first years of independence, the representation of Christians in the parliament decreased from fourteen to nine seats, and that of ʿAlawis and Druze from seven and five to four and three, respectively. The Jewish community lost its only seat in the parliament, and so did the Kurds, Circassians, and Turkomans. Minority representation dwindled further under the Adib al-Shishakli regime (1949–1954), and indeed was completely abolished in 1953, together with special jurisdictional rights that Druze and ʿAlawis had previously enjoyed. And in successive governments prior to the 1963 Ba‘th coup, minority influence remained negligible and sometimes altogether absent.Footnote ¹⁹ What classic scholarly work on Syria has labeled a Sunni, “intolerance of local particularism,” failure to “demonstrate sensitivity,” to the anxieties of minorities, or commitment to an assimilation process carried out “hastily and tactlessly,” only served to heighten tension in intra-communal relations.Footnote ²⁰ The ʿAlawis in particular closed ranks in common disapproval of the National Bloc, as even supporters of union with Syria gradually became alienated from the ruling elite.

The Sulayman al-Murshid affair crystallized the confrontation between the Sunni power structure and ʿAlawis. Al-Murshid had risen from humble peasant origins to become in the 1930s an influential politician considered by many ʿAlawis as “the most efficacious of temporal masters.”Footnote ²¹ In addition to his political standing, his supporters venerated him as a religious figure endowed with supernatural powers. Al-Murshid spearheaded the ʿAlawi opposition to the National Bloc, which had him arrested and sentenced to death in 1946, marking the first political execution in independent Syria. Al-Murshid's ʿAlawi supporters were then subjected to a harsh collective punishment: their houses were plundered and properties confiscated, while scores were imprisoned and labeled as bandits and traitors to Syria. In the meantime, several Sunni leaders threatened ʿAlawis with expulsion from their mountainous stronghold, or suggested that imams in ʿAlawi villages should be replaced with Sunni imams. In 1952, al-Murshid's son, Mujib, who had taken up his father's cause, attempted a failed revolt. Adib al-Shishakli, Syria's strongman at the time, eventually ordered him killed.Footnote ²² The execution of al-Murshid and his son sent a chilling message to his constituency, prompting even rivals to lament the bloodshed. As one chieftain declared:

But dealings between the Sunni elite and the Druze were even more tumultuous. In the late Ottoman era, the Druze rose several times in rebellion against central authority when it encroached upon their traditional autonomy and attempts to force their religious leaders to convert to Sunni orthodoxy. A fascinating tranche of documents from the Ottoman archives recently translated by historian ʿAbd al-Rahim Abu Husayn highlights the extent to which Ottoman officials distrusted the Druze of Syria, labeling them in various reports as “treacherous,” “corrupt,” “killers,” “barbarians,” and so forth. Damascenes also largely shared this negative impression of the Druze. In the capital, Ottoman campaigns against the minority group were celebrated, and the power and firmness of Ottoman authorities were partially seen as a function of their capacity to repress the Druze.Footnote ²⁴ As mentioned previously, some Druze leaders viewed the French mandate as an opportunity to achieve independent statehood for their sect. These aspirations caused a great deal of concern in Damascus. In December 1938, future Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli asked the Syrian government in a fiery speech at the Parliament to bring separatist Druze leader ʿAbd al-Ghaffar al-Atrash “in chains” to the Syrian capital. In reaction, Druze mobs in Jabal al-Druze clamored for cutting all ties with Syria and declaring the Jabal's immediate independence. A year later in 1939, Druze separatists in the Jabal rioted again, expelled officials appointed by the central government and declared the independence of their mountain under French protection.

This troubled legacy formed the backdrop of Druze relations with Damascus in the wake of independence. As early as 1945, a Syrian newspaper reported that President al-Quwatli had labeled the Druze a “dangerous minority”; the iconic leader Sultan al-Atrash threatened to unleash his warriors on Damascus and occupy it in retaliation.Footnote ²⁵ For his part, Hasan al-Atrash, the paramount Druze leader at the time, doubted that his community could ever be treated fairly in Syria. In a meeting with the British ambassador in Damascus, he lamented:

The memoirs of Syrian politician Muhsin al-Barazi are telling of the extent to which the ruling elite in Damascus felt uneasy about the Druze—and intended on subduing them. The minority issue was a central theme in a series of conversations in Riyadh between al-Barazi and the Saudi King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz. Al-Barazi, who was dispatched by Syrian President al-Quwatli to Saudi Arabia as a special envoy in August 1947, boasted repeatedly that Damascus had finally gained the upper hand over Syria's restless minorities, namely the Druze:

The polarization of post-independence party politics further complicated inter-communal relations. On one hand, minorities and rural Sunnis were over-represented in the new parties such as the Baʿth or the Syrian Social National Party (SSNP). On the other, the traditional power structure was essentially Sunni and urban; and Sunni religious leaders relentlessly denounced the supposed godlessness of the secular parties. In one incident, Aleppo's ʿulama’ tried to prevail upon authorities to forbid Baʿthi leaders from even visiting their city during the 1954 parliamentary electoral campaign. The ʿulama’ maintained that the mere presence of Baʿthis in overwhelmingly Muslim Aleppo represented a slur to Islam. Meanwhile, the ʿulama’ of Damascus called electors to vote for those who “practice and defend Islam” and supporters of the Muslim Brothers maintained, “man qatala Baʿthiyyan duminat lahu al-Janna” (He who kills a Baʿthi is guaranteed to go to Paradise).Footnote ²⁸ Thus, energized by such vehement sentiments, the alliance between traditional and religious Sunni leadership posed a tremendous obstacle to the new parties. Minorities and rural constituencies rooting, say, for the Baʿth, or the SSNP, were condemned to remain on the margins as long as ruling elite were chosen via electoral procedures.Footnote ²⁹ In effect, Damascus thwarted ʿAlawi and Druze aspirations for independence or autonomy under the mandate, and subsequently reduced them to political irrelevance. Such was the fraught, contentious backdrop against which military politics unfolded. It could not have fostered harmony in the officer corps; indeed, it did not.

Minority officers and politics in pre-baʿth syria

Though militaries stand as quintessential symbols of national pride and statehood, the Sunni elite were generally unenthusiastic about the nascent Syrian armed forces under the mandate (Les Troupes Spéciales). To be sure, more Sunnis enlisted in the military after 1936, as Iraq and Egypt gained control over their internal affairs and Syria appeared to be heading in the same direction. The trend stepped up after independence in 1946. While minorities made up 37 percent of officers who graduated that year, that figure dropped to 17 percent in 1947.Footnote ³⁰ Nonetheless, the military still had, at the time, some minority representation in its officer corps and an ʿAlawi majority in the lower ranks. Neither factor endeared the armed forces to the traditional power structure.

Lest we forget, the 1936 coup in Iraq sent shockwaves through Syria after the military overthrew the civilian prime minister, Yasin al-Hashimi. The Syrian elite worried about a possible contagion effect. It wasn't lost on them that al-Hashimi was a an urban Sunni notable whose background mirrored that of his Syrian peers, whereas the coup leader, General Bakr Sidqi, hailed form the Kurdish minority. The presence of minority officers in the Syrian officer corps made the Iraqi affair particularly worrying.Footnote ³¹ Yet another Iraqi coup in 1941 raised the specter of military interventionism in politics again, heightening the fears of the Syrian elite.Footnote ³² And so it was perhaps understandable that Premier al-Jabiri would argue in 1943 that his cabinet was not ready to wrest the Syrian military from the French. When Syria did eventually gain control of the armed forces in 1945, National Bloc MPs maintained that funds earmarked for the military would be better spent on social issues. As debates pertaining to the armed forces raged in parliament, a National Bloc MP, Hilmi al-Atassi, suggested derisively that closing down the military academy and disbanding the armed forces altogether would provide a radical solution to the matter. Meanwhile, Premier Faris al-Khuri declared that he “was not interested” in the fate of the military academy.Footnote ³³ Revealingly, the first defense minister after independence, Nabih al-ʿAzmi, promised in 1945 to eradicate the “puppets of imperialism” and the “retrograde elements” from the armed forces. These were epithets typically used by radical Sunnis to refer to ʿAlawis and minorities in general.Footnote ³⁴ A year later, clashes erupted at the Homs Military Academy between Sunni soldiers and their ʿAlawi colleagues; the latter feared being sacked from the armed forces in the wake of independence.Footnote ³⁵

Ill-feeling went both ways. Minority officers were affected by the rising communal polarization, and were increasingly inclined to support new parties such as the SSNP, and, later, Akram al-Hawrani and the Baʿth, rather than the National Bloc. The fact is officers overall did not cease identifying with their fellow ʿAlawi and Druze simply because they replaced their civilian garb with military fatigues. The memoirs I used for this article repeatedly show that officers cared deeply about the prospects of their respective communities in post-independence Syria. For instance, Amin Abu ʿAssaf bemoans that his fellow Druze were always “besieged by the animosity and hatred of everyone around them.”Footnote ³⁶ Abu ʿAssaf adds that the Druze neither recognized Damascus as their capital nor felt a sense of belonging to the Arab nation precisely because of the entrenched bias against them. For his part, Muhammad Maʿruf clearly shows in-group sympathy to Murshidis as fellow ʿAlawis.Footnote ³⁷ And in a similar vein, Muhammad Ibrahim al-ʿAli rails against the persecution of the Murshidis under al-Quwatli, al-Shishakli, the United Arab Republic, and the separatist regime that held sway in Syria between 1961 and 1963.Footnote ³⁸ To be sure, scores of minority officers belonged to the Baʿth and the SSNP, which were explicitly anti-sectarian. But the actual behavior of minority officers did not always align with the ideology of their parties. Baʿthi officer ʿIzzat Jadid is a case in point. When leading officers Hafiz al-Asad and Salah Jadid vied in a deadly struggle for power in the latter half of the 1960s, ʿIzzat Jadid reminded them that they both were ʿAlawis and urged them to put aside their rivalry in the greater interest of ethno-religious unity: “maslahat al-taʾifa taqtadi alla yatakhasam abnaʾuha” (the interest of the sect requires that its members do not quarrel among themselves).Footnote ³⁹ Other similar examples abound in the memoirs.

Apart from generalized feelings of concern for the sect as a whole, more concretely, minority officers felt uncertain about their own individual prospects in the post-independence Syrian military as well. Husni al-Zaʿim's brief tenure (March-August 1949), but especially al-Shishakli's (December 1949-February 1954), heightened their fears, as both leaders preferred to appoint Sunni officers to higher-command positions in the armed forces. The Muhammad Nasir affair compounded anxieties. Colonel Nasir was the commander of the Syrian Air Force in the late 1940s and headed, together with Colonel ʿAziz ʿAbd al-Karim, a faction of ʿAlawi officers opposed to al-Shishakli. In early 1950 the officers initiated contact with the Iraqi embassy in Damascus and asked for support as they plotted a putsch. On February 15, 1950, the Iraqi ambassador sent the following cable to Baghdad:

Al-Shishakli had Muhammad Nasir assassinated in July that year and replaced him with a fellow Sunni officer from Hama, Rashid al-Kilani. The plot against al-Shishakli subsequently unraveled but the affair poisoned inter-sectarian relations in the officer corps.Footnote ⁴¹ In 1955, the assassination of another leading officer, Deputy Chief of Staff Colonel ʿAdnan al-Maliki, polarized the armed forces further. Al-Maliki was an independent Sunni officer. The motives behind his assassination were perceived to be ideological and sectarian in nature. The fact is the SSNP figures said to have masterminded the assassination, Ghassan Jadid and Georges ʿAbd al-Massih, were, respectively, an ʿAlawi officer, and a Lebanese Christian party leader. In addition, Yunis ʿAbd al-Rahim, the sergeant who murdered al-Maliki, was ʿAlawi. ʿAbd al-Rahim was convinced that al-Maliki was biased against his sect and had sacked officer Ghassan Jadid from the armed forces because of his ʿAlawi communal background.Footnote ⁴² The SSNP militants who were tried in person for their role in the assassination, namely Fuʾad Jadid—Ghassan Jadid's brother—Badiʿ Makhluf, and ʿAbd al-Munʿim Dabussi, were also ʿAlawis. On another hand, al-Maliki was the most prominent officer from Damascus at the time, and several of his fellow Damascene officers considered his death a plot to undermine their political clout. The affair unleashed a torrent of ideological, sectarian, and regional animosities in the military, and even society at large—it was no coincidence that in the wake of al-Maliki's assassination, the chief of the Military Intelligence Bureau, ʿAbd al-Hamid al-Sarraj, would investigate the background of non-commissioned-officers (NCOs) in the armed forces. He was astonished to find that at least 55 percent of them were ʿAlawis.Footnote ⁴³ Nor was it a coincidence that scores of SSNP ʿAlawi officers from Latakia were sacked in the ensuing trials, which only further exacerbated intra-military sectarian tensions.Footnote ⁴⁴

Unsurprisingly in that context, when Colonel ʿAziz ʿAbd al-Karim was passed over as chief of staff in 1956, even though he served as assistant chief of staff since 1951, it was widely rumored that his ʿAlawi background had prevented his promotion to the pinnacle of military leadership.Footnote ⁴⁵ Interestingly, officer Muhammad Maʿruf reports in his memoirs an earlier conversation with ʿAbd al-Karim, who thought, perhaps correctly, that his sectarian background would disqualify him from becoming chief of staff, and confided to Maʿruf, “La tansa annani min taʾifa muʿayyana” (Don't forget that I belong to a certain sect).Footnote ⁴⁶ Furthermore, all three officers who led the failed 1956 coup attempt hailed from minority backgrounds: Ghassan Jadid and Muhammad Maʿruf were ʿAlawis, while Muhammad Safa was Shiʿa. The three officers had mainly recruited to their cause discharged ʿAlawi soldiers and NCOs who had served previously in Les Troupes Spéciales under the French. Maʿruf mentions in his memoirs that several important ʿAlawi clans in Latakia, including supporters of the slain leader Sulayman al-Murshid, planned on backing their movement and rebelling against Syrian authorities once the coup unfolded.Footnote ⁴⁷

Druze officers also played an important role in early putsches. Civilian Druze leaders frequently spurred them to action in order to defend the group, although Druze officers had their own reasons to involve themselves in such schemes.Footnote ⁴⁸ To the best of my knowledge, only three Druze officers who served in the Syrian armed forces published political memoirs, namely, Fadl Allah Abu Mansur (1959), ʿAbd al-Karim Zahr al-Din (1968), and Amin Abu ʿAssaf (1996). All three of them accused the Sunni leadership in no uncertain terms of sectarian bias and discrimination against Druze officers in the armed forces. It is important to pinpoint here that antagonism between Damascus and the Druze did not subside after coups replaced the traditional ruling elite with military strongmen. The latter, it quickly became clear, were not any better predisposed toward the community. Still, no Druze actually mounted a coup or threatened to seize power for himself—possibly because Druze officers believed at the time that only a Sunni could credibly lead a putsch in Syria.Footnote ⁴⁹

In his memoir, Druze officer Amin Abu ʿAssaf maintains that he and other Druze in the military officers were treated as “foreigners” (ghurabaʾ) under al-Zaʿim, and that he himself was denied fair promotion because of his sectarian background. Abu ʿAssaf suspected al-Zaʿim of plotting to arrest and then execute prominent Druze leader Sultan al-Atrash, putting him to the same fate as Sulayman al-Murshid.Footnote ⁵⁰ For his part, Fadl Allah Abu Mansur claimed that al-Zaʿim abhorred his sect and hated him personally because of his Druze background: “kana yakhuss al-Druz bi karahiyya shadida” (he [Al-Zaʿim] harbored a particular abhorrence of the Druze).Footnote ⁵¹ Inevitably, al-Zaʿim's perceived anti-Druze bias turned Druze officers against him. Indeed, they figured noticeably in the ranks of conspirators who planned to kill him. Druze leader Hasan al-Atrash actually lobbied Druze officers to assassinate al-Zaʿim, whose intention to move an armored unit to the Jabal al-Druze prompted his downfall. The same scenario repeated itself under al-Shishakli, only more violently. In January 1954, al-Shishakli launched a military campaign against the Druze, who may have suffered more than a hundred casualties during confrontations with Syrian armed forces in al-Suwayda. The military campaign naturally alienated Druze officers, whose presence was, again, conspicuous in the February 1954 putsch that led to al-Shishakli's overthrow.Footnote ⁵² I show below that, ʿAbd al-Karim Zahr al-Din, the third Druze officer mentioned above, held grievances similar to Abu Mansur's and Abu Assaf's.

The rise of the United Arab Republic (UAR) heightened minority alienation. By and large, Syrian minorities feared the loss of demographic weight in an even more overwhelmingly Sunni population under the UAR, which, it appeared, would only amplify their political marginalization.Footnote ⁵³ In addition, minorities had been particularly disaffected under al-Shishakli. Several of his officers had successfully reinvented themselves as stalwarts of Gamal ʿAbd al-Nasser and occupied conspicuous positions of authority under the UAR, including ʿAbd al-Hamid al-Sarraj, Tuʿmi al-ʿUdallah, Akram Dayri, and Ahmad Hunaydi. Footnote ⁵⁴ The seeming kinship between ʿAbd al-Nasser's regime and al-Shishakli's was problematic for many in Syria, especially the Druze.

Minority officers also had their own, more personal reasons to reject the UAR. First, the Nasserist authorities favored the Sunni element in the officer corps, as the next section shows. And second, prior to union with Egypt, minority officers had used the Baʿth, the SSNP, and the military as tools of political influence—but the UAR regime banned parties and prevented military interventionism in politics. Munif al-Razzaz, the former secretary general of the Baʿthi National Command, argues in his memoirs that antagonism toward the UAR was stronger among Baʿthi officers than in the party's civilian ranks, because the former lost more influence after Syria's union with Egypt and felt particularly persecuted by the new regime.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, according to the memoirs of Naziha al-Humsi, Akram al-Hawrani's widow, the Baʿthi officer Muhammad ʿUmran had urged her husband to support an-anti UAR coup only months after the unification of Egypt and Syria in 1958.Footnote ⁵⁶ The fact is ʿUmran and other minority officers had self-centered reasons for opposing unionism in addition to the pervasive hostility toward the UAR among their co-religionists. Indeed, none of the original members of the famous Baʿthi military committee that seized power in 1963 were Sunni, and none wanted to restore Nasserist rule in Damascus. And while Baʿthi officers did not hail exclusively from minority backgrounds, and not all Nasserist officers were Sunnis, the cleavage between Baʿthists and Nassrists corresponded largely with—and reinforced—the dividing line between minorities and Sunnis in Syria.Footnote ⁵⁷

Sunni officers and politics in pre-baʿth syria

In the wake of independence, Sunni officers were frequently at odds with the Sunni power apparatus in Damascus. Contrary to widespread perceptions, Arab Sunni officers were already predominant numerically in the Syrian military under the French mandate.Footnote ⁵⁸ But only a few Sunni officers hailed from the urban aristocracy. The scions of the ruling families looked down upon officers as social inferiors and did little to hide their contempt of those who served the French. For instance, when Jamil Mardam Bey, the minister of defense who hailed from a great Damascene Sunni family, visited troops stationed in the Syrian desert in 1948, he only shook hands with a junior officer (a military doctor from Damascus) but completely ignored other officers, who quipped that Mardam Bey may have been suffering from paronychia.Footnote ⁵⁹ On another occasion, the same Mardam Bey criticized what he deemed to be shortcomings in military training during a visit to troops stationed on the Daughters of Jacob Bridge, over the upper Jordan River, and publicly slapped Colonel Tawfiq Bashur who had dared defend the armed forces during a tense discussion between the two men.Footnote ⁶⁰ Premier Khalid al-‘Azm, another Sunni aristocrat from Damascus, would summon the commander of the armed forces, Husni al-Zaʿim, to his office, keep him waiting for hours, and sometimes dismiss him without meeting with him.Footnote ⁶¹ Al-Zaʿim also had to kiss the hands of Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli to show loyalty and keep his favor. Ascendant officers resented the arrogance of the landowning elite and chafed at civilian disrespect towards them. This friction along class lines did little to assuage civil-military relations in the first years of independence. Table 1 below recapitulates coup attempts in post-independence Syria. Tables 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 review the backgrounds of officers who staged the three successful putsches of 1949, as well as the velvet coup that paved the way to the creation of the UAR in 1958, and the coup that triggered the UAR's breakdown in 1961.I chose to investigate these military takeovers specifically because each was a turning point of particular importance in the history of Syria. The tables debunk the notion that minority officers were always pervasive in the Syrian armed forces because they had been favored by the French throughout the mandate years. The simple fact is Sunni officers were preponderant in the Syrian military from its inception, until 1963. Indeed, that most Syrian coups from 1949 until the Baʿth power grab in 1963 were led by Sunni officers attest to their preeminence in the armed forces.

Table 1.

Coups in Post-Independence Syria (1946–1963)Footnote ⁶²

Table 2.

Leading Officers Involved in the first Syrian Coup (March 1949)Footnote ⁶⁵

Table 3.

Leading Officers Involved in the Second Syrian Coup (August 1949)Footnote ⁷³

Table 4.

Leading Officers Involved in the Third Syrian Coup (December 1949)Footnote ⁷⁸

Table 5.

Leading Officers in the Collective Commandership of the Syrian Military on the Eve of the Velvet Coup that Paved the Way to the Creation of the Uar in 1958Footnote ⁸⁵

Table 6.

Leading Officers Involved in the 1961 “Separatist” CoupFootnote ⁸⁷

That Syria was coup-prone is, of course, well known. Perhaps what is less recognized is the extent to which identity politics loomed large in the coup-proofing efforts of each new regime after usurping power. Consider, for instance, Husni al-Zaʿim, the leader of the first successful putsch in Syria. Following his successful putsch in March 1949, al-Zaʿim moved swiftly to dismiss scores of Druze officers and to reshuffle their appointments away from sensitive positions. According to officer Fadl Allah Abu Mansur, a Turkish delegation that al-Zaʿim commissioned to write a report on the Syrian military warned him that minority officers were overrepresented in leading operational positions, and advised al-Zaʿim to replace them with Sunni Muslims.Footnote ⁶³ It was also alleged that al-Zaʿim was planning to create all-Kurdish and all-Circassian units, and station them in Damascus while deploying regular troops on the front with Israel. In addition, al-Zaʿim considered counter-balancing the military with a presidential guard manned by Yugoslav Muslims, who would have little connection with the rest of the troops and would be, therefore, less likely to engage in military intrigue.Footnote ⁶⁴ While it was relatively easy for al-Zaʿim to discharge rival officers, he did not last long enough in power for his other plans to materialize. But the combination of identity politics, purges, and counterbalancing foreshadowed decades of future practices in Syria unfolding along similar lines.

Consider also Adib al-Shishakli. After rising to power, the colonel quickly dispatched Druze and ʿAlawi officers to far-flung assignments away from the capital and filled their vacant positions in Damascus with Sunnis.Footnote ⁶⁷ In 1951, al-Shishakli had 35 Druze officers and soldiers arrested on charges of espionage for Israel; several officers were later found guilty and executed.Footnote ⁶⁸ Colonel Jasim ʿAlwan claimed that al-Shishakli instructed him to prioritize the entrance of Arab Sunni Muslims to the Homs Military Academy, and to keep the number of cadets hailing from religious and ethnic minorities to an “absolute minimum.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Al-Shishakli also told ‘Abd al-Razzak al-Dardari, a Sunni general who later became a Hafiz al-Asad loyalist, that no minority officer should be recruited into the armed forces, just as observant Catholics alone were allowed to be officers in Argentina.Footnote ⁷⁰ Al-Shishakli indeed favored young officers who were fellow Hamawis—among whom wasone ʿAbd al-Hamid al-Sarraj, who would later become Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser's trusted lieutenant in Syria under the UAR.Footnote ⁷¹ Interestingly, officer Mustafa Hamdun—who was also from Hama—refers to al-Shishakli as a “Hamawi mutaʿssib, lamm al-Hamawiyya hadul hawalayh” (a fanatical Hamawi who surrounded himself with Hamawis).Footnote ⁷² Al-Shishakli, however, also appointed a Lebanese Druze officer, Shawkat Shuqayr, as chief of ctaff. Allegedly, al-Shishakli reckoned that Shuqayr's background would prevent him from building a power base in the military, and thus make him pliable.Footnote ⁷⁴

That said, Husni al-Zaʿim and Adib al-Shishakli were not alone in favoring Sunni officers in the Syrian armed forces. Civilian presidents, too, used identity politics in managing civil-military relations. According to Akram al-Hawrani, President Shukri al-Quwatli, for example, began cultivating in the late 1940s the loyalty of a Damascene power base in the officer corps, and followed the same tactic in the 1950s when he was back to power.Footnote ⁷⁵ In 1957, President al-Quwatli and his Damascene Sunni supporters tried to reduce the influence of Baʿthi/al-Hawrani officers by purging them from sensitive positions in the mechanized brigades, the artillery, and the air force; an immediate mutiny of troops stationed in the Southern city of Qatana forced al-Quwatli to deescalate the confrontation lest military sedition spiral into a full-blown coup.Footnote ⁷⁶ As a result, al-Quwatli instructed Chief of Staff Tawfiq Nizam al-Din to rescind his decisions to replace Baʿthi/al-Hawrani officers with Damascene Sunnis. The Baʿth and al-Hawrani triumphed because their faction in the armed forces was stronger than al-Quwatli's, but the struggle between Damascene Sunni officers and their Baʿthi foes was to remain a fixture of civil-military relations in Syria for years to come.Footnote ⁷⁷

Consider finally the United Arab Republic (UAR) regime. Between 1958 and 1961, during the reign of the UAR, Gamal ʿAbd al-Nasser sacked politically untrustworthy officers or transferred them to Cairo, where they vegetated, removed from any position of power.Footnote ⁷⁹ According to the memoirs of the abovementioned ʿAbd al-Karim Zahr al-Din, the scale of ʿAbd al-Nasser's purges in the officer corps was unprecedented in the history of the Syrian military at the time.Footnote ⁸⁰ Zahr al-Din hints that the UAR regime in Syria favored Sunni officers from Damascus, who were spared the purges and promoted to leading positions in the military. Zahr al-Din also claims that a senior Druze officer was not appointed commander of the First Army (the UAR's troops stationed in Syria) because he wasn't Sunni.Footnote ⁸¹ As for Akram al-Hawrani, he says explicitly in his memoirs that ʿAbd al-Nasser privileged Damascene Sunni officers at the expense of Baʿthis. Al-Hawrani maintains that the tactics of the Egyptian intelligence under the UAR regime heightened sectarianism in Syria, and claims that he warned ʿAbd al-Nasser that Damascene officers could threaten the union between Egypt and Syria because of their bourgeois background and sympathy for the Muslim Brothers.Footnote ⁸² For his part, Egyptian Free Officer Ahmad Hamrush wrote in his seminal work on the ʿAbd al-Nasser era that for an officer to be assigned to leadership positions (marakiz qiyadiyya) in the upper echelons of the UAR's military he had to be religious (mutadayyin).Footnote ⁸³ Hamrush's assertions corroborate the claims of Nabil al-Shuwayri, a Baʿthi leader, who noted in his memoirs that Egyptian officials during the UAR objected to allowing Syrian Christian officers to occupy sensitive positions in the armed forces. Allegedly, several Egyptian officials argued that ʿAlawis and Druze needed to be converted to Islam and have their religious leaders trained at al-Azhar, the center of Sunni Islamic teaching and scholarship in Cairo.Footnote ⁸⁴

In sum, Sunni officers enjoyed preferential treatment in the pre-Baʿthi Syrian armed forces, especially under al-Zaʿim, al-Shishakli, and the UAR. Some Sunni cliques were particularly influential and coup-prone. For instance, three coups out of the five triggered in the “separatist era” following the breakdown of the UAR were mounted by the al-Nahlawi Damascene faction in the officer corps, as Table 1 above makes clear. The Damascene faction certainly held the upper hand immediately following the separatist coup of 1961 and lost no time in cashiering 63 officers from the armed forces, many of them Baʿthi officers hailing from minority background.Footnote ⁸⁶

However, the activism of the Damascene faction triggered a backlash, as partisan, sectarian, and regionalist polarization deepened in the officer corps. On March 28, 1962, a coalition of Nasserist and Baʿthi officers rebelled in Aleppo. The mutineers executed four officers—two majors, and two captains—before their movement fizzled out. Because the officers associated with the killing were ʿAlawi Baʿthis, namely, Muhammad Ibrahim al-ʿAli, and Muhammad ʿUmran, while the slain officers were Damascene Sunnis, the violence in Aleppo took a sectarian undertone and caused a deep consternation in Damascus.Footnote ⁸⁸ In April 1962, senior officers met in Homs to discuss the turbulence in military affairs, and agreed to purge the military of al-Nahlawi and his Damascene supporters. Several factions that otherwise had little in common converged in shared animosity against the Damascenes. Indeed, in the wake of the Homs meeting, al-Nahlawi and five of his top aides left Syria to be appointed military attachés abroad. It is telling of the intra-military polarization pervasive at the time that a Sunni officer from Damascus, Mutiʿ al-Samman, asked at the Homs conference that six non-Damascene officers be dismissed from the military in exchange for the cashiering of six Sunnis from Damascus (i.e. al-Nahlawi and his five loyalists). In January 1963, al-Nahlawi instructed his remaining supporters in the armed forces to stage a mutiny, and came back from exile to lead it. The affair ended in failure. Yet another round of Damascene Sunni officers were dismissed or stationed away from the capital, only to be replaced with officers who, in the significant words of general ʿAbd al-Karim Zahr al-Din, “la yudmirun Iia Dimashq wa ahliha illa al-hiqd wa-l-karahiya” (who felt nothing but loathing and hatred toward Damascus and the Damascenes).Footnote ⁸⁹

Longtime defense minister Mustafa Talass wrote for his part that 25 Damascene officers were cashiered and imprisoned following the third al-Nahlawi coup attempt. He observed quite candidly that the March 1963 putsch that delivered Syria to the Baʿth would not have unfolded so bloodlessly and easily had al-Nahlawi and his followers not been sacked from the armed forces following their failed movement in 1962.Footnote ⁹⁰ Along somewhat similar lines, officer Mutiʿ al-Samman noted that all officers responsible for the failed mutiny in January 1963 hailed from Damascus. When they were sentenced to jail following the breakdown of their movement, a void was created that “others used to seize power.”Footnote ⁹¹ These “others” were Hafiz al-Asad and his colleagues, by then well poised to take advantage of the situation, following the successive elimination of their rivals.

A word here is due on the intense factionalization that was a feature of Sunni politics in the armed forces prior to 1963. The memoirs I used for this article suggest that Sunni officers were essentially divided into five groups following independence, some regionally rooted, others based on political affiliation: Hamawis, Damascenes, Nasserists, independents, and Baʿthis. The Hamawis were especially powerful in the early 1950s. But the rivalry between Adib al-Shishakli and Akram al-Hawrani—both of whom hailed from Hama—pitted some Hamawi officers against others in a bitter struggle for supremacy. Notably, when al-Shishakli lost power in 1954 it was a Hamawi supporter of al-Hawrani, Mustafa Hamdun, who led the rebellion against him.Footnote ⁹² The fall of al-Shishakli weakened one faction of Hamawi officers. The marginalization of Akram al-Hawrani under the UAR sapped another faction as scores of Hawranists left the armed forces including, most importantly, Mustafa Hamdun, and ʿAbd al-Ghani Qannut. The aforementioned Naziha al-Humsi notes in her memoirs that Akram al-Hawrani was apprehensive about transferring Hamdun and Qannut to civilian positions in the UAR government, but was unable to obstruct ʿAbd al-Nasser's decisions in this regard.Footnote ⁹³ For a while, some Hamawis remained prominent in the military such as ʿAbd al-Hamid al-Sarraj, and the independent officer Ziyad al-Hariri. The latter did try to position himself as the new Hamawi champion in the armed forces but only a handful of fellow Hamawis recognized him as such. His clique remained weak.Footnote ⁹⁴ And the Hamawis never regained the clout they once enjoyed as a faction under al-Shishakli.

The Damascenes, for their part, were bereft of a charismatic leader following the violent demise of ʿAdnan al-Maliki in 1955. To be sure, their presence was numerically significant. In addition, they still counted among their ranks influential officers such as Mutiʿal-Samman, and boasted powerful allies such as Chief of Staff Tawfiq Nizam al-Din. But the aftermath of the aforementioned Qatana mutiny in 1957 weakened the Damascenes—especially after the downfall of Nizam al-Din and his replacement with the leftist ʿAfif al-Bizri. Nizam al-Din was not the only victim of Qatana in fact; the triumphant al-Hawrani/Baʿth faction also secured the sacking of several senior Damascene officers, including such prominent figures as Colonels ʿUmar Qabbani, Suhayl al-ʿAshi, and Hisham al-Samman.Footnote ⁹⁵ The Damascenes remained leaderless for a while and the void that al-Maliki's death created persisted until the rise of ʿAbd al-Karim al-Nahlawi. The latter was certainly Syria's most influential officer from the breakdown of the UAR in September 1961 until the abovementioned Homs conference in April 1962. And yet al-Nahlawi's power was quickly curtailed because he suffered from a twofold weakness: first, his faction was almost strictly Damascene, and second, not all Damascene officers recognized him as their leader—Colonel Haydar al-Kuzbari, for example, led a mutiny targeting al-Nahlawi in 1962. Thus, Chief of Staff ʿAbd al-Karim Zahr al-Din was able to maneuver against al-Nahlawi and exile him in 1962, and al-Nahlawi's lack of a wide base of support similarly prevented him from seizing back power when he tried to do so in 1963.Footnote ⁹⁶ From here on, Damascene officers lost relevance just like the Hamawis had been marginalized before them.Footnote ⁹⁷

On the other hand, a significant number of Sunni officers were active Nasserists, including most notably ʿAbd al-Hamid al-Sarraj, and Jasim ʿAlwan. Even after the collapse of the UAR, Nasserists officers boasted a significant presence in the armed forces—perhaps constituting the largest faction vying for power.Footnote ⁹⁸ But the regime that held sway in Syria from 1961 until 1963 considered Nasserist officers as enemies and purged many of them. The failure of Jasim ʿAlwan's coup attempts in 1962 and 1963, and subsequent retaliations against his fellow Nasserists, further debilitated his faction. Independent Sunni officers such as Ziyad al-Hariri or Baʿthis like Amin al-Hafiz, applauded the demise of their Nasserist rivals. And yet it is clear in retrospect that Nasserist power posed at the time the only serious challenge inside the Syrian armed forces to the ascendant minority officers of the Baʿthi military committee. Al-Hariri and al-Hafiz belonged to separate military camps. Even had they joined forces, it is questionable whether they could have stopped the irrepressible rise to power of Salah Jadid, Hafiz al-Asad, and their colleagues in the military committee. In any event, the committee successfully neutralized al-Hariri in April 1963, and al-Hafiz in February 1966, effectively ending the age of Sunni power in the Syrian armed forces.