The Hama massacre occurred in February 1982 when the Syrian Arab Army and the Defense Companies paramilitary force, under the 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 the command of Major 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 Hafez 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 of his son Bashar al-Assad. 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, known as the "Butcher of Hama", is a Syrian former military officer and politician. He is the younger brother of the late President of Syria, Hafez al-Assad, and Jamil al-Assad, and the uncle of the former President Bashar al-Assad. He was the commanding officer of the ground operations of the 1982 Hama massacre ordered by his brother.
Tadmor prison was located in Palmyra in the deserts of eastern Syria approximately 200 kilometers northeast of Damascus.
There has been a varying nature of human rights under various governments that ruled Syria since the French colonial rule in Syria starting in the 1920s.
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, led by the notoriously violent leader Anas Mahmoud, 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, known for being imprisoned for several years by Bashar al-Assad's regime. He was released from Adra Prison, near Damascus on November 15, 2011. Before his release, Amnesty International called him a prisoner of conscience. At the beginning of the Syrian civil war, he was briefly a member of the Syrian National Council.
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 neo-Ba'athist government, in what has been described by the Ba'ath Party as a "long campaign of terror".
The siege of Aleppo refers to a military operation conducted by forces of the Ba'athist Syria led by Hafez al-Assad in 1980 during the armed conflict between the Sunni groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Ba'athist Syrian regime. Ba'athist Syrian 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.
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 revolution. The Syrian government blamed Islamist militants, while the Syrian opposition accused the government of staging the attacks to justify its crackdown on the uprising.
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.
Hafez al-Assad served as the President of Syria from 12 March 1971 until his death on 10 June 2000. He had been Prime Minister of Syria, leading a government for two years. He was succeeded by his son, Bashar al-Assad.
The history of Syria covers events which occurred on the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic and events which occurred in the region of Syria. Throughout ancient times the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic was occupied and ruled by several empires, including the Sumerians, Mitanni, Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Arameans, Amorites, Persians, Greeks and Romans. Syria is considered to have emerged as an independent country for the first time on 24 October 1945, upon the signing of the United Nations Charter by the Syrian government, effectively ending France's mandate by the League of Nations to "render administrative advice and assistance to the population" of Syria, which came in effect in April 1946.
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 Mujahidin, 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 regime of Hafez al-Assad during the Islamist uprising in Syria, mainly between 1976 and 1982.
