Why the Syrian Conflict Was Never About Sunnis and Shi‘is

Mohamed Ousman

Dhu al-Qa'dah 03, 1446 2025-05-01

Daily News Analysis

by Mohamed Ousman

The Ba‘thists came to power in Syria in 1963. Seven years later (1970), Hafez Al Asad, an air force general and Bashar’s father, carried out a coup and grabbed power.

Syrian rule under both Hafez and Bashar was authoritarian where political opposition was not tolerated from any quarter—Sunnis, Alawis, Christians, Druze or Kurds.

Under both rulers, Sunnis who supported the Ba‘thist regime, were welcomed and received help.

Alawites who opposed it, were crushed.

Neither the father nor son was sectarian.

Rather, they were Pan-Arabian who ensured that their regimes were established on Arabian nationalist foundations.

This is an important issue to clear up because the media continues the narrative that the majority Sunni population was fed up of minority Alawite rule.

The main pillar of the Ba‘thist regime was the military which both father and son ensured was loyal to them and the Ba‘thist state.

As such, military orders did not come only from the Defense Ministry or the Chief of Staff but also from the Presidency.

When Hafez came to power he ensured that people from diverse backgrounds of Syrian society contributed including people from the Sunni majority, many of whom were his loyal friends who participated in the coup.

There were Sunnis who were included as ministers and generals in the Syrian Ba‘thist army.

For example, the defense minister of Syria, Mustafa Tlass, was his close ally. Bashar’s wife is Sunni.

Under the Asad regime, Sunnis held positions such as Defense Minister, Farouk Al Sharaa former Vice-President, Ali Mamlouk as former Head of Syrian National Intelligence, etc.

In fact, Farouk Al Sharaa had extensive diplomatic experience in managing the affairs of Syria and was Foreign Minister under Hafez when he negotiated with the Americans and the Israelis.

To build his regime, Hafez needed popular support for which he implemented socialist economic policies.

There was a key difference between Hafez, the father, and Bashar, the son.

Hafez uplifted the low and middle classes economically, especially in the rural areas which prior to his rule were mired in poverty.

It was after Hafez’s policies of land redistribution to the farmers that the rural areas began to have electricity, schools, universities, health care and agricultural activity.

The government purchased all the fresh produce thereby guaranteeing the income of food producers and distributed it within the local markets.

These economic policies also secured loyalty for Hafez in the rural areas as a result of which the first regime change efforts between 1979 and 1982 did not find popular support in the rural areas.

The focus of the regime change efforts endured mostly in the cities of Hama and Aleppo.

This lack of popular support emboldened him to brutally crush the Islamic uprising whose members wanted a representative Islamic system.

In contrast, Bashar focused mostly on the cities and generally neglected the rural areas economically—from where the insurgency against him was launched.

Hafez was politically more astute that Bashar. He incorporated moderate elements like Abdul Halim Khaddam and the Shihabi clan, into his regime.

They had ties with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United States.

Hafez used them to maintain communication at the minimum level with those countries despite their hostile position towards his regime.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the mainstay of Syrian military and economic system, Hafez opened channels with the US.

He cooperated with it during the second Gulf War and even contributed soldiers to the war against fellow Ba‘thist, Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

It deemed solidarity with the Arabians of Kuwait to be more in line with the Ba‘thist ideology of Arabian nationalism.

Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was seen as a violation of that rule.

When Hafez was supported by the Arab League during the Lebanese civil war, he intervened militarily and confronted the US and Israeli presence in Lebanon.

In the 1990s, he secretly also supported Hizbullah and kept good relations with Iran without upsetting regional and global powers.

Bashar was not a politician in the typical sense.

He was practicing his eyecare profession in London.

At the time, his elder brother, Basel, was being groomed in the military to take over from his father.

He was killed in a car crash in 1994 which necessitated Bashar returning to Syria.

At the time Bashar was an inexperienced 34-year-old young man and by the time he assumed power in 2000 he was 40.

Bashar did not understand regional and global power dynamics and thus was less flexible and less diplomatic than his father.

Bashar reduced the flexibility of moderate elements in his regime, openly supported the resistance against zionist Israeli and its US backer and involved the Turks, Qataris and Iranians more than Egypt and Saudi Arabia in dealing with regional challenges.

Bashar appointed, yet another Sunni, Abdullah Dardari as Deputy Minister of economic affairs. He was groomed by the World Economic Forum and his economic liberalization and privatization policies were different from the socialist policies that Syria had hitherto pursued. During this time the borders were opened with Turkey and tariffs were removed enabling Ankara to export to Syria not only goods with zero tariffs but also takfiri terrorists while the Syrian economy was still undeveloped for exports.

These economic policies began to fuel resentment especially in the rural areas where they were exploited to bring about regime change.

In 2011, the Arab Spring began in the rural areas, particularly in Dara‘a which was a stronghold of the Ba‘ath Party.

In 2018, the military operations subsided.

Iran and other Bashar allies expected and encouraged him to engage the opposition, include them in the government, reconcile with the Kurds, etc.

Bashar failed to show flexibility which proved to be his undoing six years later.