On February 2, 1982, Syrian government forces, supported by paramilitary "defense brigades", bombed and then stormed the country's fourth largest city, Hama. These events, which took place during the reign of the father of the current Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, received the name “Massacre in Hama” among the opposition. 40 years ago, on February 2, 1982, on the orders of Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, the father of current President Bashar al-Assad, a siege, bombardment, and then an assault on the city of Hama began. All this happened during the suppression of the Islamist uprising raised by the Muslim Brotherhood (an organization banned in Russia), but the capture of the city led to such heavy losses among the civilian population that these events are still considered "one of the most deadly actions of any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East,” in the words of The New Yorker columnist and Syria expert Robin Wright.
In the West, everything that happened then is usually called the “uprising in Hama” or even the “massacre in Hama”.
The tough and decisive actions of Hafez al-Assad and his younger brother Rifaat al-Assad, the uncle of the incumbent President Bashar al-Assad, who led the pro-government “defense brigades”, have long been cited by many Middle East experts as an example, albeit bloody, but effective solution to complex Arab problems - after all for many years, any organized opposition in the country practically ceased to exist, and the Sunni majority was sufficiently intimidated, suppressed and loyal to the current government, consisting mainly of Alawites.
However, with the beginning of a new upsurge in the struggle in Syria in the 2000s, it became clear that the reasons for the confrontation between different groups in society had not been eliminated, and the previous scenarios of uprisings and their suppression were reproduced again, the memory of repressions did not allow the descendants of those killed to return to peaceful life, and The “enlightened”, intelligent, who studied, lived and worked in the West as an ophthalmologist Bashar al-Assad at the head of the state found himself in the same position as his father and uncle.
According to various estimates, the victims of the "massacre in Hama" were from 2 to 40 thousand people, the most likely estimate is 15-20 thousand, and mostly civilians. About 1,000 government soldiers were also killed, and many activists of Assad's Ba'ath Party in Hama were captured and tortured.
In addition, the historical and cultural heritage of this region was severely damaged, and many of the old quarters of the city were completely destroyed. The Muslim Brotherhood also lost hundreds of its most active members. Rifaat al-Assad, living in exile in France, repeatedly denied his involvement in the massacre in Hama, but the CIA report directly linked him to these events, as well as to other episodes of repression, smuggling and corruption (in October 2021, Bashar al-Assad allowed his uncle to return to Syria).
The siege of Hama - the fourth largest city in Syria with a population of about 350 thousand people - was carried out for 27 days. The city was taken into a tight ring by government troops. Artillery fire was opened on the city, multiple launch rocket systems were operating, aviation was active, tanks were used.
The troops went on the assault only after prolonged bombing and shelling, they also acted extremely harshly on the streets of the city, opening fire without warning, using heavy weapons and equipment against the rebels, armed at best with machine guns and sometimes hand grenade launchers and from the very beginning controlled only individual urban enclaves. According to eyewitnesses, in some quarters all men over 14 years old were immediately shot on the spot, an episode is also mentioned when no one else came out alive from the building of the technical school where people were driven.
After four days of fighting that reduced the rebellious city to ruins, systematic purges continued for several weeks, thousands of citizens were imprisoned, and many residents of the city later had property problems because they were not given death certificates. 63 mosques and 4 churches were completely destroyed.
“On the fourth day of the massacre, our area was besieged, and regime soldiers began rounding up houses,” witness Ibeisi, 62, told Anadolu Turkish news agency. The soldiers started shooting at men, old people and children in front of their houses. Leaving the next day, we saw that corpses were lying everywhere in the city. There were also wounded, but no one dared to approach them to provide assistance, since our area was surrounded by soldiers. The bodies remained on the streets for at least a week. Later, these bodies were buried en masse.”“I was walking along the main street and it was littered with rubble. I passed by the famous clock of Hama - not a trace of them remained. Not a trace of the great mosque remained. I saw areas that turned into ruins,” another local resident describes the first days after the suppression of the uprising.
“The massacre in Hama was taboo. People didn't even talk about it among themselves. Those who were killed and disappeared were not mentioned even in their families",
- said Yasser al-Hamawi, who lived at that time in this city. “The incident was referred to simply as 'events'.
Muayyad Kandakzhi spoke about how these “events” looked from the point of view of those who suppressed the rebellion in an interview with Pravda.Ru: “I had a lot of relatives living in Hama. And my brother, a tank officer, took part in the suppression of this speech.
In Hama, there really was an armed uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood. But not at all on such a scale as the then authorities drew. The whole city was not captured by the militants, but only its individual areas, since the local radical opposition included only about 500 people. And part of the population gave her moral support ... The order to storm Hama was at the same time a very cruel and very stupid decision that divided power and a significant part of the people. And Bashar al-Assad has to pay for it now, among other things.
All these 30 years, the memory of the perfect atrocity against the whole city lived and was passed on from mothers to children. And one cannot fail to note another negative point - foreign intervention, carried out by both the West and the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf, who are trying to use people who have suffered from the regime.
All these events in Hama were preceded by unrest among Sunnis throughout Syria, which is sometimes referred to as the "Islamist uprising", and a series of provocations and terrorist attacks, either committed by the "Muslim Brotherhood", or organized by the special services of certain countries - in order to provoke new speeches of the opposition, or, on the contrary, to mobilize supporters of Assad Sr.
In particular, on June 16, 1979, from 50 to 83 Alawite cadets of the Aleppo Artillery School were killed, before that they were called by the duty officer to a morning meeting in the canteen. The Syrian Interior Minister Adnan al-Dabbagh blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for the massacre of the cadets, but this organization itself has always denied its participation in this massacre and accused the Syrian government of simply trying to tarnish their image.
During the events that preceded the "massacre in Hama", Soviet specialists sent to help the Assads also died.
During the two attacks, ten military advisers were killed, including the adviser to the chief of staff of the SAR Air Force, Major General Glagolev, but the Syrian opposition also believed that their death was the work of the special services.
The confrontation between the Baath Party in Syria, which Hafez Assad relied on, and the Muslim Brotherhood has not stopped since the 1960s. Behind all this were not only religious strife. The Baath was nominally considered secular and advocated the ideology of Arab nationalism and socialism, and the Muslim Brotherhood, in addition to promoting Sunni Islamist ideology, considered Baath nationalism to be un-Islamic, and religion to be inseparable from politics and power.
Most members of the Ba'ath Party, including the Assads, came from poor families and advocated regulation of the economy from above, while Sunni Muslims viewed government intervention in the economy as a threat to their interests. Of course, not all oppositionists were fundamentalists, but even politicians far from religion often saw in the Brothers an effective tool against the Baath and Assad, who came to power in the course of another military coup in 1970, who actively cooperated with the USSR and other socialist countries, in particular , with Romania from the time of Ceausescu.
At the same time, Hama was considered a "stronghold of conservatism" and for a long time remained a formidable opponent of the Baathist state. The first full-scale clash between these two forces in Hama occurred shortly after the 1963 coup, when the Ba'ath Party first came to power in Syria. In April 1964, riots broke out in Hama, Muslim rebels seized weapons and set up roadblocks. Then, tanks were also introduced to suppress the uprising, 70 members of the Muslim Brotherhood were killed, many were injured or captured, and an even greater number of oppositionists simply went missing. After this uprising in Hama and retaliatory reprisals by the authorities, there were more than once, and a not so large-scale “massacre” of 1981 in Hama is also known.
bbabo.Net