In the first week of May, two important figures in Syria passed away. In fact, their importance stemmed from the ranks and communities they represented. One was Rifaat al-Assad, brother of Hafez al-Assad, uncle of Bashar al-Assad and known as the “Butcher of Hama”. The other was Issam al-Attar, the former head of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (or Ikhwan movement), the most prominent opposition group in Syria, which has its roots in Egypt and has made waves in many parts of the Middle East, and whom Assad exiled.

Issam al-Attar had been elected to the Syrian Parliament in 1960 from the Muslim Brotherhood, but as a result of the Baathist coup in 1963 – for the regime, of course, this would be the “March 8 Revolution” – al-Attar, who was on a pilgrimage, was denied entry and died in Aachen, Germany, after 50 years in exile. Rifaat al-Assad was found dead in his home in Latakia, Syria, where he returned in 2021 after 36 years of exile in France following a failed coup against his brother Hafez al-Assad in 1984, but this death has not yet been confirmed by official sources. He had been sentenced to 4 years in prison in France for war crimes and money laundering in Syria before fleeing in 2021, and an arrest warrant was issued by Switzerland in August 2023.

The Historical Background of SMB

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, and according to him, the Islamic world needed to be liberated from Western rule, and the way to do this was through the Qur’an and the Sunnah; in other words, through Sharia. The Muslim Brotherhood, which had a pan-Islamist structure, took an oppositional stance against the colonialists and provided services such as schools, hospitals, etc. almost like a non-governmental organization.

In 1946, when Syria was liberated from the French mandate, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was founded by Mustafa al-Sibai, a friend of Hassan al-Banna. Although the scholars who formed Hassan al-Banna’s world of thought were Salafists, Banna had also been exposed to Sufi culture in the early years of his life. The Muslim Brotherhood existed as a Sufi-Salafi movement. Mustafa al-Sibai had studied at Egypt’s Al-Azhar, the oldest university in the Islamic world, and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood movement entered the political arena early on, fielding independent candidates in the first parliamentary elections in 1947.

In 1950, al-Sibai was even part of the commission that drafted Syria’s first constitution. As a party, the Muslim Brotherhood was based on anti-communism, anti-capitalism, anti-Pan-Arabism and anti-secularism, and advocated pan-Islamism. Of course, the Syrian Ikhwan was also influenced by the times and socialism. The organization even ran for elections in 1949 under the name “Socialist Islamic Front” and Mustafa al-Sibai wrote a work called “Islamic Socialism”, but this was criticized by more conservative elements. But it still had a structurally ummahist stance. So from the 1951 coup by the socialist-nationalist Edip Cicekli in 1951 until 1955, the Muslim Brotherhood was persecuted for dissent.

Following 1955, while trying to continue its activities, it entered a difficult period again in 1958. During the period when Egypt and Syria merged to form the “United Arab Republic”, the Syrian Ikhwan was oppressed under the policies of the socialist pan-Arabist leader Gamal Abdunnasır and was subjected to bans and exile. Issam al-Attar, who recently passed away and came from a family of supporters of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, took over the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood from Mustafa al-Sibai in an independent Syria after the end of the United Arab Republic in 1961 – following a coup d’état in Syria – and was elected as an MP from Damascus that same year. In 1963, just when the Muslim Brotherhood had found a comfortable operating environment, the Baathist coup d’état took place, this time again a socialist-Arabist movement.

Beginning of Assad Regime

After this coup, the Syrian army became more like Alawite. The leading members of the military committee that carried out the coup, Muhammad Umran, Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad, were Alawites. The Sunni Amin Hafez, who became president after the coup, was ousted in 1966 in another coup led by Salah Jadid. The leading leaders of the Ba’ath Party were arrested, its founders were exiled, and Hafez al-Assad, the commander of the Air Force, became minister of defense in the newly formed government. At the end of 1970, another coup took place and this time Hafez al-Assad became prime minister. In 1971, he became president in an election in which only Assad was a candidate and received 99% of the vote.

The relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Syrian government was no longer based solely on an Islamist-Laic basis; now the sectarian Sunni-Nusayri factor was added on top of that. With the onset of the Assad regime, the Brotherhood continued to exist as an “organization in exile” and became associated with acts of violence. From 1980 onwards, the two sides entered a more heated period. Despite the opposition of the exiled leader Issam al-Attar, the movement began to take up arms. Following an assassination attempt against Hafez al-Assad in June 1980, Law 49 was passed in July, stipulating that “anyone who is a member of the Ikhwan al-Muslimin organization is guilty and shall be punished with the death penalty.”

The day after this attempt, under the command of Rifaat al-Assad, some 1,000 prisoners were gunned down in their sleep at night in the notorious Tedmour prison for torturing dissidents. There were hundreds of educated, dissident Sunnis arrested on pretexts. In response, in December, the Ikhwan published a manifesto for an Islamic state in Syria, while continuing to operate secretly in Damascus and Hama.

In February 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Assad regime engaged in major violence in Hama. Since the mid-1960s, there had been internal fractures in the organization, particularly over armaments. These fractures culminated in 1976, when a more radicalized faction of the Muslim Brotherhood began assassinating Assad supporters, and between 1979 and 1981, some 300 supporters – many of them soldiers or bureaucrats – were killed in Aleppo alone. It is worth recalling the mujahideen movements that emerged in 1979 with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Khomeini revolution in Iran that same year, and the raid on the Kaaba in Mecca. 1979 was a year of flare-up of religious movements in the Middle East.

In 1982, the Ikhwan launched an uprising in the conservative Sunni city of Hama. This uprising was crushed by Rifaat al-Assad, later known as the “Butcher of Hama”, who massacred between 10,000 and 50,000 people, mostly civilians, with brigades under his command. Rifaat al-Assad’s record was not limited to these. He was also the founder of the “Shabbiha”, which means “ghosts” in Arabic, which terrorized the civilian population in Syria and used all kinds of evil means to suppress the opposition. In 1984, he attempted a failed coup d’état against his brother Hafez al-Assad, which led to his 36-year exile in France, but when he was convicted in France in 2021, he was forced to flee and seek refuge in Damascus. 

Although the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria was partially active in the Arab Spring, the vast majority of the opposition, both in the protests and in the civil war, was made up of people independent of this organization and they were not as active as in Egypt. There are two important reasons for the Syrian Ikhwan’s lagging behind. First, the organization is in exile and its former great leaders are not in Syria. Second, the Arab Spring was an uprising that represented all Syrians, not just Sunnis or even Muslims.