Hafez al-Assad

Hafez al-Assad, an air force officer from a poor Alawite family, took control of Syria in 1970 and ruled it as president from 1971 until his death in 2000. He gave the country a stability it had lacked since independence and made it a regional power, especially in Lebanon, but did so through a highly centralised and repressive state. His son Bashar inherited the presidency.

Assad was born in Qardaha on 6 October 1930. The village lay in the mountains of north-western Syria, then under French mandate. His family belonged to the Alawite minority, and he was the first of them to attend secondary school, in Latakia, where he joined the secular, pan-Arab Ba'ath Party in 1946. Unable to afford medical school, he entered the military academy in Homs in 1950 and trained as a fighter pilot. During Syria's union with Egypt, which began in 1958, he was posted to Egypt, and with fellow officers including Salah Jadid he formed a secret Ba'athist Military Committee.

The committee helped bring the Ba'ath to power in a coup in March 1963, after which Assad rose to command the air force. In February 1966 he took part in a second coup, which installed Salah Jadid as the real power in the state and made Assad defence minister. The following year Syria lost the Golan Heights to Israel in the Six-Day War, a defeat that deepened his rivalry with Jadid. In November 1970 Assad arrested Jadid and his allies in a bloodless takeover, and a referendum in March 1971 confirmed him as president.

Assad relaxed some of his predecessors' radical policies and mended relations with conservative Arab states, while relying on the Soviet Union for arms. Power was concentrated in the presidency, the security services and the army, many of whose key posts went to Alawites and trusted relatives, and an elaborate personality cult grew up around him. Infrastructure, health care and education expanded, but political opposition was not tolerated, and human rights groups such as Amnesty International documented torture and mass executions of detainees.

To recover the Golan, Assad planned a joint attack with Egypt's Anwar Sadat. On 6 October 1973 their armies struck in the Yom Kippur War; Syrian forces broke through on the Golan but were driven back within days, and Sadat's separate ceasefire diplomacy left a lasting distrust between the two leaders.

In 1976 Assad sent troops into the Lebanese Civil War, first against the Palestinian and leftist forces then gaining ground, and Syrian forces, some 30,000 men at the outset, stayed in Lebanon for the rest of his life. His government was accused of involvement in the killings of the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt in 1977 and of Lebanon's president, Bachir Gemayel, in 1982, both of whom had resisted Syrian domination.

From the late 1970s the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups waged an armed campaign against the government, killing officials and Alawite figures and nearly assassinating Assad in 1980. In February 1982 the army and his brother Rifaat's Defence Companies besieged the city of Hama and crushed the uprising there with artillery and bulldozers, destroying much of the city. Estimates of the dead vary widely: early diplomatic reports suggested about 1,000, later estimates range from at least 10,000 to 40,000, most of them civilians.

After Assad suffered a heart attack in 1983, Rifaat attempted to take power in 1984 and was sent into exile. Assad then groomed his eldest son, Bassel, but Bassel died in a car crash in 1994, and the younger son Bashar, then a medical student in Britain with no political experience, was brought home and rapidly promoted. Assad died of a heart attack in Damascus on 10 June 2000 and was succeeded by Bashar, making Syria the first Arab republic to pass power from father to son.

Our 1960 map shows Syria during its brief union with Egypt, and the 1985 and 1994 maps show the country under his rule.