The Hama massacre occurred in February 1982 when the Syrian Arab Army and the Defense Companies paramilitary force, under orders of president Hafez al-Assad, besieged the town of Hama for 27 days in order to quell an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood against the Ba'athist government. The campaign that had begun in 1976 by Sunni Muslim groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, was brutally crushed in an anti-Sunni massacre at Hama, carried out by the Syrian Arab Army and Alawite militias under commanding General Rifaat al-Assad.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria is a Syrian branch of the Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood organization. Its objective is the transformation of Syria into an Islamic state governed by Sharia law through a gradual legal and political process.
The Damascus Spring was a period of intense political and social debate in Syria which started after the death of President Hafiz al-Assad in June 2000 and continued to some degree until autumn 2001, when most of the activities associated with it were suppressed by the government. It started with the Statement of 99 and the establishing of the Committees of Civil Society, then the Statement of 1000 was issued carrying the signature of 1000 Syrian intellectuals in 2001.
Rifaat Ali al-Assad is the younger brother of the late President of Syria, Hafez al-Assad, and Jamil al-Assad, and the uncle of the incumbent President Bashar al-Assad. He was the commanding officer of the ground operations of the 1982 Hama massacre ordered by Hafez al-Assad.
Tadmor prison was located in Palmyra in the deserts of eastern Syria approximately 200 kilometers northeast of Damascus.
Human rights in Syria are effectively non-existent. The country's human rights record is considered one of the worst in the world. As a result, Syria has been globally condemned by prominent international organizations, including the United Nations, Human rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the European Union. Civil liberties, political rights, freedom of speech and assembly are severely restricted under the Ba'athist government of Bashar al-Assad, which is regarded as "one of the world's most repressive regimes". The 50th edition of Freedom in the World, the annual report published by Freedom House since 1973, designates Syria as "Worst of the Worst" among the "Not Free" countries. The report lists Syria as one of the two countries to get the lowest possible score (1/100).
Terrorism in Syria has a long history dating from the state-terrorism deployed by the Ba'athist government since its seizure of power through a violent coup in 1963. The Ba'athist government have since deployed various types of state terrorism; such as ethnic cleansing, forced deportations, massacres, summary executions, mass rapes and other forms of violence to maintain its totalitarian rule in Syria. The most extensive use of state terrorism in the 21st century was the extensive state deployed violence against civilians during the 2004 Qamishli massacre.
Ali Sadreddine Al-Bayanouni is a Muslim Brotherhood leader in exile in London. He was born in 1938 in Aleppo and brought up in a religious family, where his father and grandfather were both well-known Muslim scholars. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood while in secondary school, in 1954, and went on to graduate with a law degree from the University of Damascus in 1963. He served as a reserve officer in the Syrian Army from 1959 to 1960. Bayanouni became a member of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood's Shura Council and Executive Office in 1972. Due to his membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, Bayanouni was imprisoned from 1975 to 1977. After his time in prison, he emerged to become the deputy leader of the Brotherhood in 1977. He left Syria two years later and eventually settled in Jordan, where he remained for twenty years. He arrived in Britain as a political refugee in 2000, after the Jordanian authorities requested he leaves the country.
The Brigades for the Defense of the Revolution, commonly referred to as Defense Companies, Defense Corps or Defense Brigades, were a Syrian all-Alawite paramilitary force commanded by Rifaat al-Assad. Their task was to safeguard and defend the government of Hafez al-Assad, and the capital Damascus, from internal and external attack.
Kamal al-Labwani is a Syrian doctor and artist, He was released from Adra Prison, near Damascus on November 15, 2011, according to state media. Before his release, Amnesty International called him a prisoner of conscience.
The Islamist uprising in Syria comprised a series of protests, assassinations, bombings, and armed revolts led by Sunni Islamists, mainly members of the Fighting Vanguard and, after 1979, the Muslim Brotherhood, from 1976 until 1982. The uprising aimed to establish an Islamic republic in Syria by overthrowing the Ba'athist government, in what has been described by Ba'ath Party as a "long campaign of terror".
The siege of Aleppo refers to a military operation conducted by forces of the Syrian government led by Hafez al-Assad in 1980 during the armed conflict between the Sunni groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Syrian government. Government forces committed several massacres in the course of the operation.
The 1981 Hama massacre was an incident in which over 300 residents of Hama, Syria, were killed by government security forces.
Shabiha is a colloquial and generally derogatory term for various loosely-organised Syrian militias loyal to Assad family, used particularly during the initial phase of the Syrian Civil War. As the war has evolved, many groups which had previously been considered shabiha were amalgamated into the National Defence Force and other paramilitary groups.
The Aleppo Artillery School massacre was a sectarian massacre of Syrian Army cadets on 16 June 1979. It was carried out by a handful of members of the Muslim Brotherhood's Fighting Vanguard led by Adnan Uqlah and Ibrahim al-Youssef, without the permission of the leader of the Fighting Vanguard, Hisham Jumbaz. The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria later tried to cover up their involvement in the massacre by condemning it, but the Syrian government decided to conduct a large-scale crackdown against it to prevent any reoccurrence.
On 23 December 2011, two seemingly coordinated bombings occurred in the Syrian capital Damascus. The alleged suicide car bombs exploded outside Syrian military intelligence agency buildings, killing 44 people and injuring 166. According to Syrian state media, most of the dead were civilians. The attacks took place during the Syrian uprising. The Syrian government blamed Islamist militants, while the Syrian opposition accused the government of staging the attacks to justify its crackdown on the uprising.
On 6 January 2012, a bomb exploded in the Al-Midan district of Damascus, Syria. According to the Syrian government, a suicide bomber attacked buses carrying riot police shortly before an anti-government protest was to begin. It said that 26 people were killed and over 60 were injured. Most of the victims were civilians, though the Syrian government showed footage of what it claimed to be the funeral of 11 police officers killed in the attack.
The following is a timeline of the Syrian civil war from May to December 2013. Information about aggregated casualty counts is found at Casualties of the Syrian Civil War.
Adnan Saad al-Din (1929–2010) was the fourth supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria between 1976 and 1981.
The Fighting Vanguard of the Mujahideen, also known as the Fighting Vanguard of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, was an offshoot of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood that took part in violent actions against the ruling Baath regime during the Islamist uprising in Syria mainly between 1976 and 1982.
