Hama Massacre, the 35 anniversary

- Thirty five years since the darkest pages in the Syrian history have been written by the regime when about 40,000 people brutally killed in the central city of #Hama.

The bloody repression by the regime army was not against the armed uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in February 1982, But was against hundreds of thousands of civilians who had been killed and displaced.  

 The rebellion and ensuing crackdown by the Defense Brigades, an elite force led by Rifaat al-Assad, brother of then president Hafez al-Assad, left about 40,000 people dead.

 The 1982 events in Hama started on February 2 ─ or February 3 according to the Syrian authorities ─ with the massacre of around 20 leading members of the ruling Baath party by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab world’s most influential Sunni Islamist movement.

Brotherhood members then holed up in mosques, from where they issued calls for an insurrection.

It took the regime forces more than three weeks, backed by artillery, armored vehicles and air strikes, to overcome the uprising, with considerable destruction and massive loss of life.

According to witnesses, more than 10,000 soldiers were deployed to Hamas, a city in the Orontes valley, some 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of Damascus.

The events were the culmination of clashes between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood which started in March 1979 with an attack against the military academy in the northern city of Aleppo, in which 35 cadets were killed.

Most of them were Alawites, the minority community in Syria to which the Assad family belongs.

The organizer of the attack, a Sunni training officer, Ibrahim Youssef, said that it was an act of protest against what he described as a sectarian regime that discriminated in favor of Alawites and against the Sunni majority.

The regime’s crushing of the Brotherhood led to hundreds of executions and thousands of arrests, particularly in Aleppo ─ Syria’s second-largest city ─ and in the desert town of Palmyra, as well as in Hama itself. 

In mid 2011, Hama was among the first Syrian cities to uprise against Bashar al-Assad's crackdown where thousands of people went to streets and most ever-lasting slogans were chanted by the revolutions Icon Ibarhim Qashoush ,Yalla Irhal Ya Bashar' or "Come on, Bashar, leave". Such a chant cost him a throat cut. (With AFP)