Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria by Raphael Lefevre

Author:Raphael Lefevre [Lefevre, Raphael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

A “Camp David conspiracy”?

Surprised by the strength and resilience of the movement encountered at Hama, the regime launched a massive investigation which led to the discovery of over 15,000 machine guns allegedly belonging to armed members of the Islamist opposition.67 Their provenance left the regime in no doubt about their origins, as their serial numbers referred to weapons having transited through Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, all of whom had differing interests in further polarization of the Syrian political scene.

Of these countries, Iraq was the most prominent provider of training, money and weaponry to the Syrian Islamists. At first glance, this can be seen as surprising, given the shared ideological features of the Syrian and Iraqi Ba’ath regimes. However, by 1966 the Ba’ath Party had separated into two competing branches, a left-wing Syrian “neo-Ba’ath” and a more centrist Iraqi Ba’ath which welcomed Syrian dissidents belonging to the “old guard” such as Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar.68 According to one author, Syria and Iraq were thus ruled by “two mutually antagonistic elites, each claiming to be the sole representative of the true Ba’ath Party.”69 Perhaps most important, the two countries shared a history of rivalry in the struggle for regional primacy. Relations between Baghdad and Damascus reached a historic low when Hafiz al-Assad supported the Ayatollahs in Tehran upon Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in September 1980. According to the former Ba’athist Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam, this was the proof that interests have always trumped ideology in Syrian-Iraqi relations. According to him, “despite our common ‘Ba’athist’ nomination, the Iraqi security services became actively involved in supporting the Islamist movement in Syria while [the Syrian government was] financing rebel Iraqi Islamists.”70 The estrangement between the two governments was such that, in 1981, Saddam Hussein went as far as publicly welcoming a delegation of prominent leaders of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in Baghdad, promising them “full support and money”.71 Although the Syrian Ikhwan have historically been reluctant to recognize the Iraqi Ba’athist provenance of the bulk of their external help, many inside the Brotherhood retrospectively recognize that Baghdad might have, at the very least, “logistically facilitated”72 their struggle against the Syrian regime.

The Iraqi capital thus quickly became a safe haven for Syrian Islamist activists who could undergo military training in any of the numerous camps set up at their disposal by the Iraqi Ba’ath’s security apparatus. Adnan Saadeddine in particular and his Hamawite followers in general seem to have enjoyed a special relationship with Saddam Hussein, this becoming obvious throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s (see Chapter 8). For quite some time, Iraq remained a strong and steady provider of arms, funds and security to Islamic militants from Syria. “For once in our lives, we were prized by the Ba’athists!” Muhammed Riyadh al-Shuqfah—who himself found refuge in Baghdad after fleeing Hama in the late 1970s—claimed with irony. He remembered the extent of the Iraqi regime’s help to the Islamic movement at such a crucial moment of Syrian history:

The Iraqis were

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