Assadism
Assadism or Assadist Ba'athism is a left-wing ideology and a variant of neo-Ba'athism based on the policies and thinking of the Assad family, which governed Syria as a totalitarian hereditary dictatorship from 1971 to 2024. Assadism was characterized by Arab nationalism, socialism, totalitarianism, extreme militarism, and a cult of personality around the Assad family. This period spanned the successive regimes of Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad. The Assads rose to power as a result of the 1970 Syrian coup d'état, leading to the consolidation of Alawite minority dominance within the military and security forces. Their governance was largely characterized by nepotism, sectarianism, and ethnic favoritism. The ideology enshrines the Assad family's leadership role in Syrian politics and presented the Assad regime in a very personalist fashion, creating a government based upon and revolving around its leader. Under this system, the Syrian Ba'ath Party portrayed the wisdom of Assad as "beyond the comprehension of the average citizen." Syrian state propaganda cast Assadism as a neo-Ba'athist current that evolved Ba'athist ideology with the needs of the modern era.
The Assad family cultivated extensive patronage networks, securing loyalty while monopolizing vast portions of the Syrian economy and fostering widespread corruption. The Syrian Ba'ath party used its control over Syria's political, social, economic, cultural, educational and religious spheres to enforce its neo-Ba'athist ideology in the wider society and preserve the Assad family's grip on power. Hafez al-Assad's goal upon coming to power was to consolidate the socialist state with the Ba'ath party as its vanguard by establishing a "coup-proof" system that eliminated factional rivalries. As soon as he seized power, the armed forces, secret police, security forces, and bureaucracy were purged, subjugating them to party command by installing Alawite elites loyal to Assad. To maintain control, although Assadism initially attempted to solve problems within the country through political maneuvering in 1970s, by the early 1980s the regime had shifted toward the use of brute force and relentless oppression, exemplified by the Hama massacre in 1982 and the several sectarian massacres over the course of the Syrian civil war since 2011. Following the fall of the Assad regime in 2024 as a result of a Syrian opposition offensive amid the civil war, Assadists loyal to the former regime have engaged in an insurgency across Alawite strongholds in western Syria.
History
Pre-1970
Prior to Hafez al-Assad's seizure of power in 1970, the neo-Ba'athist movement in Syria had been dominated by strongman Salah Jadid, who came to power after a successful coup in 1966.Salah Jadid pursued a very radical Marxist–Leninist policy internally, and aggressive and interventionist externally. In the end, his uncompromising radicalism and brutal imposition of his ideas alienated almost all layers of Syrian society, as well as members of the ruling party, who believed that the situation required a more moderate approach: The latter united around Hafez al-Assad, who was opposed to Jadid's adventurism.
Tensions between Jadid and Assad increased following the Six-Day War in 1967 and invasion of Jordan in 1970. The conflict was not limited to heated debates at party meetings and congresses, sometimes escalating into military clashes between supporters of both parties, especially in 1969. Hafez al-Assad took advantage of his control over the military to dismantle Jadid's support network, before carrying out a coup and imprisoning Jadid and then Syrian president Nureddin al-Atassi.
After 1970 coup
After Assad seized power, the ideology of neo-Ba'athism transformed into Assadism, with even greater nationalism, militarism and the now established cult of personality of the Assad family. Assadism is very different from the ideas propagated by the original leaders of the Ba'athist movement, Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, which caused them great dissatisfaction with such an ideological transformation. Assad set upon a project of rapid institution-building, reopened parliament and adopted a permanent constitution for the country, which had been ruled by military fiat and a provisional constitutional documents since 1963.Political participation was limited to the National Progressive Front, the ruling coalition of Syrian Ba'ath and Marxist–Leninist parties; entrenching itself firmly within the Soviet Bloc. The Party also began building a personality cult around Assad and brought the elite of the armed forces under Assad's grip and the officer corps were installed with Alawite loyalists, further alienating the Sunni majority from the party.
The Ba'athists initially pursued a very militaristic policy aimed at some kind of "mobilization of the nation to fight against the Israeli enemy." But under Assad, militarism reached new heights. Following the Syrian loss during the Six-Day War with Israel, Hafez initiated a huge expansion of the military to achieve military parity with Israel. Assad gave a high priority to building a strong military and preparing it for a confrontation with Israel, both for offensive and defensive purposes and to enable him to politically negotiate the return of the Golan Heights from a position of military strength. He allocated up to 70 percent of the annual budget to the military build-up and received large quantities of modern arms from the Soviet Union. The Syrian Arab Army, which was mainly a conscripted force, increased from 50,000 personnel in 1967 to 225,000 in 1973, and to over 350,000 by the 1990s.
Yom Kippur War
In 1973, Syria, together with Egypt, launched an almost successful war against Israel: despite facing stiffer resistance than their Egyptian allies, the Syrian army was able to break through the Israeli defenses. However, due to the lack of coordination and the Egyptian operational pause from October 7 to 14, Syria faced the full fury of the Israeli forces and were forced to retreat. Israel again invaded Syrian territory, the Bashan region, hoping to reach Damascus. However, Syria was able to stop its advance and a war of attrition began, which lasted until May 1974, when Syria signed a disengagement agreement. Although Syria did not liberate the Golan Heights, its army was not defeated, which earned Assad respect inside Syria and abroad.Islamist uprising
Bitterness towards the Assadist regime and the Alawite elite in the neo-Ba'ath and armed forces became widespread amongst the Sunni majority, laying the beginnings of a Sunni Islamic resistance. Prominent leaders of Muslim Brotherhood like Issam al-Attar were imprisoned and exiled. A coalition of the traditional Syrian Sunni ulema, Muslim Brotherhood revolutionaries and Islamist activists formed the Syrian Islamic Front in 1980 with objective of overthrowing Assad through Jihad and establishing an Islamic state. In the same year, Hafez officially supported Iran in its war with Iraq and controversially began importing Iranian fighters and terror groups into Lebanon and Syria. This led to rising social tensions within the country which eventually became a full-fledged Islamist rebellion in 1976–1982; led by the Fighting Vanguard and local Muslim Brotherhood movement. The regime responded by slaughtering the Sunni inhabitants in Hama and Aleppo and bombarding numerous mosques, killing around 20,000–40,000 civilians. The uprising was brutally crushed and the Muslim Brotherhood armed movement was demolished. After the uprising the government resumed its version of militaristic Leninism, repealing liberalization introduced when Assad came to power.Ideology's tenets
Militarism
The Assadist regime was characterized by a very large-scale militarization of the entire Syrian society and a highly militaristic propaganda in the media and education system, mixed with the personality cult of Hafez al-Assad. The degree of Assadist's militarism of was indecently high: Syria's air force and tank fleets were not much smaller than those of large European countries. In 1979, Syria was one of the four largest arms importers in the world. Even if a person has not yet served in the army and is a student, he will eventually receive some military training, such as assembling weapons, in schools run by Assadist youth organizations, membership in which was mandatory. These organizations would mobilize boys through enforced training and then membership of paramilitary groups.Organizations like the RYU also carried out intensive ideological training and spread of Assadist ideas in schools, helping to create "ideologically correct" youth. School students also were taught Ba'athism and Assadism through a course known as "Political Arab Sociology". Students sat through a lesson every week about how to become an "active Ba'athist" and how to show their love for both the nation and the leader, particularly through celebrating a physically strong body and military training. A compulsory 15-day summer camp gave to male students extra time to learn about the soldiers life, in an attempt to prepare them for compulsory army conscription when they finished high school. During enforced marches to celebrate the “great leader”, at the time, Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez, Syrians learned by heart the slogan: “With blood and soul, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Hafez.” According to the Constitution of Syria of 1973, Chapter 3: Educational and Cultural Principles, Article 21, it is written:
Neo-Ba'athism
Neo-Ba'athism is a far-left version of Ba'athism that originated in Syria. Gradually, neo-Ba'athist military officers led by General Salah Jadid ousted less radical Ba'athists and Aflaqites from all important positions in the traditional civilian elites, government, army and intelligence services since 1963 coup, strengthening their power in the ruling party, but they finally consolidated their power after a military coup in 1966, overthrowing a National Command, driving Michel Aflaq and his supporters out of Syria.Neo-Ba'athism is very different from the original ideas of the old Ba'athists, including the increased role of the military and the purging of the leadership from members of the old guard – Aflaq and al-Bitar. The Neo-Ba'athists were heavily influenced by the ideas of Marxism–Leninism, which put this ideology on the verge of communism: neo-Ba'athist regime espoused radical leftist doctrines such as war Leninism and revolutionary socialism, prioritised "internal revolution", abandoned pan-Arabism, sought to strengthen ties with the Soviet Union, and came into conflict with such ideologies as Arab nationalism, Nasserism and the Iraqi Ba'athists,. The rise of the neo-Ba'athists to power in Syria caused the deepest split in the Ba'athist movement: the party divided into two factions, Syrian and Iraqi, and the Syrian became independent from the National Command, which it overthrew. The neo-Ba'athists condemned Aflaq and accused him of "stealing" ideology from Zaki al-Arsuzi, sentencing him to death in absentia, while Iraqi Ba'athists continued to consider Aflaq the creator of that ideology.
Domestically, the Jadid regime pursued a highly anti-religious policy: it imposed severe restrictions on religious freedom, persecuted the clergy, labeled religious clerics as class enemies, and government officials and party mass media preached about the dangers of religion and its imminent demise through socialist revolution. The Neo-Ba'athist regime also pursued very active attempts at radical socialist transformation, for example by confiscating the property of businessmen, merchants and landowners. Its relations with most of the Arab world remained largely poor: its interventionist policies and calls for the overthrow of reactionary governments alienated most of its neighbors. The neo-Ba'athist regime was very active in supporting the Maoist concept of "people's war," which was expressed in its huge support for leftist Palestinian fedayeen groups, granting them considerable autonomy and allowing them to carry out attacks on Israel from Syrian territory.
But after his rise to power, Assad eased the government's repressive and radical policies. Although Assad supported many of Jadid's ideas, he rejected the aggressive imposition of its radical ideas in Syria. He abolished persecution of religion and made overtures to the Writers' Union, rehabilitating those who had been forced underground, jailed or sent into exile for representing what radical Ba'athists called the reactionary classes. He cut prices for basic foodstuffs 15 percent, which won him support from ordinary citizens, and the confiscation of goods under Jadid was reversed. The urban middle class, which had been hurt by the Jadid's policy, had new economic opportunities. His reign was marked by the virtual abandonment of Pan-Arab ideology; replacing it with the doctrine of socialist transformation and giving overriding priority in constructing socialist society within Syria. However, despite the abandonment of pan-Arabism and Nasserism, Assad often represented himself as a successor to Gamal Abdel Nasser: he modelled his presidential system on Nasser's and hailed Nasser for his pan-Arab leadership. In addition to Assad's ambition to turn Syria into a regional power and for himself to become a pan-Arab leader, Assad calculated that working for Arab unity and stepping up the struggle against Israel were likely to strengthen his legitimacy and leadership among the various sections of the Syrian population. The Assadists actively promoted the values of Arab socialism, but the regime's policy in this regard changed several times: from the implementation of socialism itself to ideas bordering on communism or on the contrary, reforms encouraging capitalism. In the 1980s, Assad brought back the Leninist ideology that had existed under Jadid, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, he began economic and political liberalization again.
The neo-Ba'athist ideology continued to largely determine the regime's policies on socialism and nationalism, albeit with some differences. For example, already in the first three years of Assad’s rule, all attempts at collectivization, proposed under Jadid, were stopped, and state farms were mostly disbanded.