Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria Read online

  ASHES OF HAMA

  Ashes of Hama

  The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria

  RAPHAËL LEFÈVRE

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  Copyright © 2013 by Oxford University Press

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  Published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lefèvre, Raphaël.

  Ashes of Hama : the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria / Raphaël Lefèvre.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-19-933062-1 (alk. paper)

  1. Jam’iyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Syria)—History. 2. Syria—History—20th

  century. 3. Syria—History—21st century. I. Title.

  BP10.J386L44 2013

  322.4’2095691—dc23

  2013014739

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Printed in India

  on Acid-Free Paper

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  PART I

  POLITICIZING ISLAM (1860–1963)

  1. The Emergence of a Politicized Islam in Syria (1860–1944)

  The “Damascus school”: the Salafiyya movement in Syria

  Politicizing Islam: the rise of the “Islamic populists”

  2. Islam and Democracy: The Muslim Brotherhood in Post-independence Syria (1946–1963)

  Egyptian roots

  The Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood

  Competing for power in Syria’s parliamentary democracy

  Defending Islam with pragmatism

  “‘Islamic socialism’: a Muslim drink in a Marxist cup”

  Losing ground to the Ba’ath Party

  PART II

  THE ISLAMIC OPPOSITION TO BA’ATHISM (1963–1982)

  3. The Islamic Reaction to the Ba’athist Revolution

  A clash of ideologies

  A clash of constituencies

  The ideological failure of Ba’athism

  Urban uprisings

  4. “A Minority Cannot Forever Rule a Majority”

  Sunnis and Alawis: a history of mistrust

  The “revenge of a minority”?

  The “Alawization” of the Syrian regime: myth or reality?

  Atmosphere of sectarian civil war

  PART III

  THE RISE OF JIHADISM IN LATE 1970s SYRIA (1963–1982)

  5. The Radicalization of the Islamic Movement (1963–1980)

  The moderation of the Damascus Ikhwan

  The split in the “Damascus wing”

  The radicalization of the Islamic movement

  Birth of an extremist organization: the Fighting Vanguard

  6. Endorsing Jihad Against The Ba’ath (1980–1982)

  State repression

  The Muslim Brotherhood’s jihad

  A last stand: the Hama uprising

  A “Camp David conspiracy”?

  PART IV

  ASHES OF HAMA: THE SYRIAN ISLAMIST MOVEMENT SINCE 1982

  7. Militant Islam After Hama

  Al-Qaeda: the Syrian connection

  The Syrian mukhabarat and radical Islam: a blowback?

  Taming political Islam

  8. Struggling for Relevance: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Exile

  Divided between the “Hama clan” and the “Aleppo faction”

  Back to basics: the ideological evolution

  Engaging with the Syrian opposition

  9. Uprisings in Syria: Revenge on History

  Fostering Islamic radicalization

  The Brotherhood’s rebirth from ashes

  Back to Syria: opportunities and challenges

  Epilogue

  APPENDICES

  Appendix 1: List of the successive leaders of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood

  Appendix 2: Abdullah Azzam on the role of Marwan Hadid during the 1964 Hama riots

  Appendix 3: Abdullah Azzam on Marwan Hadid’s death

  Appendix 4: Abu Mus’ab al-Suri on the training tactic of al-Talia al-Muqatila

  Appendix 5: Abu Mus’ab al-Suri on the Battle of Hama in February 1982

  Appendix 6: The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood’s most important statement regarding their evolution and their vision of Syria’s future

  Notes

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank all the people without whom this research project would not have become a reality. I am primarily indebted to Professor George Joffé who not only provided me with excellent supervision throughout my studies at the University of Cambridge but has also acted as an insightful adviser and a constant source of support ever since. My warmest thanks are also directed to Patrick Seale who, from the very beginning, supported my willingness to dig into Syria’s history and shed light on previously little-discussed aspects by providing much advice. I am also deeply indebted to Ignace Leverrier whose expert knowledge of Syrian political life helped to guide me through the maze of Ba’athist politics. Without his numerous contacts and the quality of the material he kindly provided me with, this study would not have been possible. The same is true of Ahmed al-Othman whose generosity is a key pillar upon which this book rests. His willingness to introduce me into the world of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood proved invaluable. In this respect, I am also thankful for the access I was granted to numerous leaders and rank-and-file members of the Islamist organization as well as their opponents from various fields—some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. This study owes much to their trust. I would also like to express my warmest gratitude and friendship to Mehdi Laghmari in Paris, Mohammed Laroussi and Hadia al-Attar in Aachen, Abdullah Ali, Walid Safour, Obeida Nahas and Malik al-Abdeh in London, Emira Bahri and Yassine in Tunis, and Ahmed al-Othman in Istanbul and Paris, who all contributed greatly to the publication of this book by expressing their readiness to help translate original material from Arabic. I am also deeply grateful for Rana Kabbani’s friendship and her early encouragements both of which acted as important sources of inspiration. Additionally, many experts and critical readers gave insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this study. In this respect, I am particularly thankful to Dr Bente Scheller, Dr Nikolaos Van Dam, Professor George Joffé and Professor Philippe Droz Vincent for their time. Needless to say, any mistakes that remain are entirely my own.

  As this book went through several rounds of drafts and re-drafts, I am deeply grateful for all the time Anne Wolf, Anna Carden and Banu Turnaoglu
spent reviewing earlier versions, giving substantial feedback. The staff at Hurst were also very helpful in this respect and in particular I owe much to Michael Dwyer who, by immediately giving his trust and confidence, made the publication of this book possible. The process of writing took a long time, however, and at times proved challenging. All my thanks go to Anne Wolf who, in addition to reading and editing successive drafts, also proved to be a constant and unyielding source of support. Finally, I would like to stress how much support I received from my family, whose sustained encouragement was a great source of motivation.

  PROLOGUE

  When references to the advent of an “Arab Spring” started to emerge after popular uprisings toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, many commentators suggested it was unlikely that this revolutionary Arab mood would reach Syria.1 They argued that the country’s collective consciousness was still profoundly marked by the so-called “Hama rules”2—that an authoritarian regime can crush an opposition movement with the application of force on a brutal scale as the Assad regime did in Hama to crush an Islamist rebellion.3 Throughout the month of February 1982, the Ba’ath regime’s most loyal forces shelled entire quarters of the city and bombed many of its residential areas—leaving between 25,000 and 40,000 dead.

  Analysts were right to point out the significance of the memory of the massacre in the hearts and minds of the Syrian people. What they failed to foresee, however, was that this collective scar would not forever restrain Syrians from defying the regime that rules over them. Instead, it would fuel such a degree of resentment and anger that the uprisings which started in March 2011 at Dar’a soon spread throughout the country with ever increasing pace and intensity. In virtually every Syrian city, the message of local opposition leaders and protest organizers soon boiled down to a simple sentence: “We will not let the massacres of 1982 be repeated!”4

  Uprisings in Syria: the burden of history

  Soon, however, these Syrians must have felt as if they were reliving their own history. In February 2012 Bashar al-Assad’s younger brother Maher ordered a three week artillery siege of the Baba Amr quarter in Homs which left thousands of inhabitants dead—much as Hafiz al-Assad’s regime henchmen had done to Hama exactly thirty years before.

  The memory of atrocities suffered in the early 1980s by Syria’s Islamists at the hands of the regime seemed to be an increasingly important mobilizing factor in the uprisings. A journalist, reporting on the revolt from northern Syria, observed: “A village elder with a handgun strapped to his side […] said he was arrested [in the late 1970s] as part of the regime’s crackdown on suspected Muslim Brothers and served 15 years in prison. In Aleppo’s countryside, the rebellion is fuelled by memories of that crackdown. Men in every village, it seems, can recite the names of men who were killed or disappeared into regime prisons or were forced into exile.”5

  It is against this background that the rebels’ uncompromising demand for the overthrow of the regime should be understood: their call for revenge resonates with the country’s bloody history of opposition between the regime and its Islamist rivals. “For me, the revolution started a long time ago, when my brother was arrested,” confirmed a rebel in Damascus. “He was part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s revolution of 1980.” Then, “one day the mukhabarat intelligence men came in three cars and arrested him. Nobody knows where they took him—not even until now, 32 years later,” he explained. “Now my revolution is getting bigger.”6

  But such a sense of historical continuity between the current uprisings in Syria and the situation prevailing in the 1980s is not only characteristic of anti-regime militants. Much of the support the Ba’athist rulers still retain among certain segments of the Syrian population is also framed in terms only understandable when seen through the prism of history. For instance, the apprehension voiced by members of minority communities about the demise of the secular Ba’ath regime and its potential replacement by a government dominated by Islamist forces emerged out of the fear that they could again be the target of violence perpetrated by extremist Sunni groups. The Alawis in particular, a religious sect from which most of the country’s decision-makers come, have since March 2011 expressed their fear of a return to a situation similar to that which prevailed between 1979 and 1982. Then, sectarian provocations ignited by a handful of radical Islamic militants brought the country to the verge of civil war, drawing the various religious communities into a seemingly endless cycle of retaliation against one another.

  Today, just as in the past, the Ba’athist rulers depict the revolt as the final act of Syria’s long struggle “between Islamism and secular pan-Arabism”7—a way for the regime to stress its inclusive nature and contrast it to the supposedly polarizing demands of the rebels. In this framework, it is of little surprise that Bashar al-Assad’s first instinct after the uprisings erupted was to blame them on the Syrian Brotherhood. “We’ve been fighting the Muslim Brotherhood since the 1950s and we are still fighting with them,”8 he insisted in an October 2011 interview. But who are these “Syrian Brothers” the regime claims to be at war with?

  Exploring the Syrian Brotherhood’s legacy

  Over the past thirty years, the Syrian Ba’ath has enjoyed a free hand to caricature its most influential competitor in terms closely associated with radicalism and violence. The regime’s approach was exemplified in December 2011 after the Ba’athist rulers set up a fake Syrian Brotherhood website which was to claim the organization’s responsibility for terrorist attacks that struck Damascus a few weeks later.9 But, despite the group’s repeated denials, published on its real website, the damage was done: amid the media frenzy, most Western and Syrian newspapers had already printed the news.10 Since then, the regime’s attempt to tarnish its powerful rival has been steadily successful—insofar as it has blurred the lines both inside Syria and abroad on what the Brotherhood’s real intentions are.

  Suspicion of the group’s agenda is also heightened by a lack of detailed knowledge on the organization and its leaders. “The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is considered more conservative than its Egyptian counterpart; the Syrian Brotherhood also had more history of violent resistance to the Assads. But not much more is known about the current internal dynamics of the group,”11 a journalist from the New York Times acknowledged a year into the Syrian revolt. This lack of knowledge, in turn, seems particularly problematic in relation to the current uprisings as the biased nature or outright lack of information about the organization may have a significant impact on Western policy towards Syria.

  This book attempts to bridge this gap in the available literature by providing an account as comprehensive and objective as possible of the Syrian Brotherhood’s political history, ideological evolution and internal politics—free from regime propaganda. While there has been a considerable amount of work published on the Syrian Ba’ath—its ideological origins,12 socioeconomic roots,13 foreign policy14 and the religious background15 of its leaders—much less has been published on its Islamist adversary. There have been a few publications devoted to it but most were written in the early 1980s and, while the background information they provide is excellent, they lack the perspective needed to analyse the organization’s modern evolution.16 More recently, the short-lived alliance between the Syrian Muslim Brothers and the former Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam has generated a renewed interest in the movement, but most of the journal articles published at the time tended to be more concerned with exile politics than with the group’s internal dynamics.17 All in all, the Syrian Brotherhood has received much less attention from journalists and academics alike than its Egyptian sister and this despite its considerably rich and eventful history.18

  Since existing literature on the subject is scarce and given the extent to which current narratives on the organization are largely shaped by the regime’s discourse, a significant effort was made in this book to reach out to members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood themselves. A series of long interviews were carried out with prominent leaders of
the organization whose insights into previously little-discussed issues will provide experts and academics of Syria with useful material to reflect on. Aware of the risk of obtaining biased answers—because some events discussed are long past and some of the topics touched on arouse highly polarized views—the author was careful to select corroborated interview material. Leaders and members of each “group” within the organization were therefore interviewed—from the “Damascus wing” to the “Aleppo faction” and the “Hama clan”. The information obtained was verified and confirmed by other more independent experts—analysts of the movement, former members of the organization or Islamists who never belonged to it. In addition, the Syrian Islamists’ account, the first of its kind in the literature, was further checked by an equally comprehensive series of interviews held with senior or former prominent members of the Ba’ath regime who agreed to speak, sometimes on condition of anonymity, on the long struggle between political Islam and secular forces which has come to shape modern Syria.

  The author’s access to the memoirs of two former Syrian jihadists, Mustafa Setmarian Nasar—widely known as Abu Mus’ab al-Suri—and Ayman al-Shorbaji, as well as the autobiography of the former Brotherhood leader Adnan Saadeddine, was crucial insofar as it provided a surely biased yet insightful account of the Syrian jihad. Documents produced by members of al-Qaeda relating to Syria and found during the American raid on Usama Bin Laden’s home in Abbottabad, Pakistan were also used by the author after they were made publicly available on the website of West Point’s Center for Counter Terrorism (www.ctc.usma.edu). In addition, archival research was carried out in the original files of the British Foreign Office available at the National Archives at Kew and the Confidential Print at the library of the University of Cambridge. Reading the cables sent by successive British diplomats posted in Damascus was helpful in putting events back into their sociopolitical context, even though the restricted public availability of these documents (only released as late as winter 1964) limited the scope of such research. For their part, the cables sent over the last thirty years to Washington by the US Embassy in Damascus, now publicly available online (www.cablegatesearch.net), were useful as they provided a glimpse into more contemporary Syrian politics.