Ali al-Assad


Ali ibn Sulayman al-Assad was a Syrian farmer and tribal leader who was the father of Syrian Presidents Hafez al-Assad, in power from 1971 to 2000, and grandfather of Bashar al-Assad, in power from 2000 to 2024.

Personal life

Ali ibn Sulayman al-Wahhish was the son of Sulayman ibn Ahmed ibn Ibrahim ibn Sulayman al-Wahhish. The al-Assad family lived in Qardaha, an Alawite town in the mountainous Latakia Sanjak of the Ottoman Empire. They were members of the Alawite Kalbiyya tribe.
Ali was known for protecting the weak and in the 1920s had assisted refugees fleeing the former province of Aleppo when France gave parts of it to Turkey. He was one of the few literate Alawites in his village and the only man in the village to subscribe to a newspaper. For his accomplishments, Ali was called al-Assad by his fellow Alawites, and made the nickname his surname in 1927.
Ali married two times and over three decades had eleven children. His first wife, Sa'ada Falfal, was from the district of Haffeh. They had three sons and two daughters. His second wife Na'isa Shalish was twenty years his junior. She was the daughter of Uthman Abbud from the village of Qutilba, about 12 kilometres further up the mountain. They had one daughter and five sons. The fourth child, Hafez, was born on 6 October 1930.

Political influence

Ali ibn Sulayman al-Assad was one of the signatories of a supposed letter "No. 3547" addressed to French Prime Minister Léon Blum on 15 June 1936, which implored the French not to abandon Syria. However, historian Stefan Winter argues that this letter is a forgery. Historian Yaron Friedman located a copy of the original Alawi petition to Léon Blum, preserved under catalog number SDN 242QO Petition 598 in the French diplomatic archives. It is suggested that this petition was written by a single Alawi poet, Badawi al-Jabal, rather than being signed by notable Alawi leaders or ancestors of the al-Assad family. The disputed letter states:
The letter praises the Jews in Palestine and includes them among the groups that are persecuted by the Muslims. It is possible that this aspect of the letter was not sincere but was intended to curry favor with Léon Blum, the French Prime Minister to whom it was addressed, who was a Jew.
On 31 August 2012, the permanent representative of France to the United Nations Gérard Araud mentioned the letter in response to the Syrian diplomat Bashar Jaafari.