In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [5]
The second were rural Sunni farmers like Leila’s extended family. For centuries, these families eked out an existence in the Euphrates Valley to the east and the Houran area south of Damascus. Like Syria’s minorities, these peasants didn’t fare well under Ottoman rule and were generally regarded as uncivilized by Damascus’s trading elite. Assad offered peasants who joined the Baath Party and its professional associations an education, jobs in the public sector, state financing for houses, and, for the most talented, a chance to live and work in the capital.
Assad’s policies earned him respect among a majority of Syrians, and the regime quickly stabilized. He buttressed his domestic moves with aggressive moves on the regional level as well—he joined Egypt in a surprise attack on Israel in the October War of 1973. Syrian forces were ultimately defeated, but international intervention to stop the war transformed Syria’s conflict with Israel into a cold war battlefield. The Soviet Union provided Syria with millions of dollars in military equipment and financial aid. Persian Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, provided Syria with billions of petrodollars in aid—money that had resulted from the war’s boom in the price of oil. The United States engaged Syria as well, extending $534 million in foreign assistance between 1975 and 1979 to coax Syria to the peace table with Israel and out of the eastern camp.
From what I could remember of recent regional history, the courting didn’t last long. When Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel and moved into an American orbit, Syria formed the “rejectionist front” of groups opposing what became known as Camp David. The same year, Syria formed an alliance with the leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolution against their common rival, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. As Iran continued to rail against America as “the Great Satan,” the United States’s Gulf allies, led by Saudi Arabia, cut off aid and investments to Syria. The country’s economy contracted, and discontent set in.
It was then that Assad’s new order was challenged by the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization with a strong following in the conservative northern Syrian cities of Hama, Idlib, and Aleppo. Branding the Alawite-dominated Assad regime as “apostates,” the militant wing of the Brotherhood waged a terrorist war against regime figures and government institutions. Leila said she remembered her father taking her out of her first-grade classroom after the Brotherhood car bombed the Ministry of Information across the street from her family’s apartment.
In February 1982, Assad ordered Syrian special forces to surround the Brotherhood’s headquarters in Hama. What happened next was something that featured prominently in almost every Syria domestic news story I had ever read. Using artillery, the regime leveled the Brotherhood’s warren in the backstreets of Hama’s Old City. Tens of thousands of people were killed. The regime also launched a sweeping campaign of arrests—not only of suspected Brotherhood members but virtually all regime opponents, including communists and Arab nationalists who hated the Brotherhood as much as the regime. Acute fear gripped the country as the economy fell deeper into recession.
Nearly a decade later, Syria emerged back on the international scene, due largely to tectonic shifts in the international balance of power and shifts in its regional alliances. With its Soviet patron in political and economic chaos, Assad joined the American-led alliance to oust the forces of his Baathist rival, Saddam Hussein, from Kuwait. In return, the United States gave its tacit consent for Syria to use its forces in neighboring Lebanon to implement the Lebanese