Syria’s former VP and “Butcher of Hama” dies aged 88

Rifaat al-Assad, who earned the nickname, “the Butcher of Hama,” in 1982, for killing up to 40,000 people who attempted an uprising against his brother, Syrian ruler Hafez al-Assad, has died aged 88, according to The New York Times on January 21st. His death was announced by his son Siwar al-Assad on social media.

For more than five decades, Rifaat al‑Assad remained a central figure within the family that ruled Syria with a vicious iron grip, at times pushing from within for greater influence, and at other moments operating from afar, after failing to gain the support needed to assert supremacy within his country.

His grim legacy in Syria was cemented by his role overseeing the large‑scale massacre of civilians in Hama in 1982, an operation that later served as a template for future high ranking Syrian officials’ own methods of crushing dissent.

Rifaat al‑Assad was leading an elite paramilitary unit, the Defense Forces, when his brother dispatched him to suppress an uprising in the west‑central city of Hama in February 1982. At the time, Hama was controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, a fierce opponent of the secular Ba’ath Party government headed by Rifaat’s elder brother, Hafez al‑Assad.

The uprising was put down with extreme brutality during a siege that stretched on for nearly a month. Rifaat al‑Assad’s forces launched an indiscriminate assault on Hama’s residential districts, using the Syrian Air Force and ground units “without distinguishing between civilians and combatants,” according to a report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights.

“The regime forces carried out deliberate killings of wounded people, targeting entire families, including women, children and young people,” the report said. As the officer in charge of operations in Hama, Rifaat al‑Assad “ordered murders, acts of torture, acts of cruelty, and illegal imprisonments,” according an indictment by Swiss prosecutors. The regime concealed the extent of the massacre, and no official death toll was ever released.

Relations between the two brothers had always been tense, and in 1984, while Hafez al-Assad lay ill, Rifaat deployed some 55,000 members of his Defense Forces around Damascus in a bid to seize power. They were soon met by units loyal to Hafez. “The Butcher of Hama” had rarely returned to Syria after his failed bid to unseat his brother Hafez, just two years after the massacre.

A later meeting between the two brothers, held in the presence of their elderly mother, ultimately defused the standoff, and Rifaat agreed to back down in return for being named “vice‑president,” a title that proved to be purely symbolic.

In 2020, a French court handed Rifaat al‑Assad a four‑year prison sentence for “crimes of exceptional gravity” tied to large‑scale embezzlement, and ordered the seizure of his extensive property, but his nephew Bashar allowed him to return to Syria, sparing him from serving the sentence.

Rifaat al‑Assad had spent decades enjoying a life of lavish exile. He never served a single day in prison, neither for directing the Hama massacre nor for amassing an enormous collection of luxury properties across Europe and the Caribbean, bought with funds siphoned from the Syrian state and valued at more than 800 million USD.

The New York Times, Maghrebi.org