The Rise of the Assad Regime 57 Palestinians in the United States and Britain. Syria’s independence was also followed by years of constant turmoil. Many Syrian Jews fled to the emergent state of Israel after Syria’s loss in the 1948 Arab–Israeli war. Coup after coup ensued by colonels as different military factions vied for control. An alignment between Syria and the USSR pitted them against Turkey, leading to a cold-war era conflict that continues to influence Syrian politics today. In 1958, Syria merged with Egypt, under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, to form the United Arab Republic, but Syria experienced another coup and withdrew from the union. In 1962, the government continued to discriminate against Kurds as so-called foreign agitators by stripping citizenship from some 120,000 of them (roughly 20 percent of this minority group). This policy trapped them in a country that had rendered them stateless as part of a vicious Arabization campaign (Chatty 2010; Human Rights Watch 1996). In 1963, a group of officers launched a coup d’état against Syria’s government that would eventually bring its Baʻath Party members to power. During this time, a young officer named Hafez al-Assad was promoted to Minister of Defense. By November 1970, Hafez launched a so-called corrective revolution that made him prime minister. In 1971, President Hafez ushered in an ironfisted dynasty that would last decades, enforcing total control over Syria’s diverse population by forming a powerful coalition of Alawis (a minority sect of Shi’a Islam of which Hafez was a member), Sunni military men, and the business class. The regime also deployed a whopping twelve security agencies to surveil the population, subjecting regime critics, leftists, Islamists, and minorities to totalitarian state terror (Ziadeh 2011). As Syria expert Lisa Wedeen (2015[1999]) argues, Hafez built himself into a cult personality, and people were forced to perform “as if” they loved him unconditionally in elaborate public rituals. As the regime came to employ at least one person in every five, intelligence agents of al-Mukhabarat were literally everywhere. Activists and everyday people were detained without charge, and prisons were rife with unspeakable acts of torture, from the “German chair,” designed to induce unconsciousness and break detainees’ backs, to rapes and beatings with iron rods (Paul 1990). As is often the case, extreme repression provoked a backlash,9 particularly by groups suffering from the brunt of regime repression, such as the Kurds and the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. The regime and the Brotherhood’s radical flank waged war on each other until Hafez al-Assad dealt the group a decisive blow in 1982. After a Brotherhood cell in Hama reacted against a regime ambush in the early hours of February 2, Hafez responded by deploying at least ten thousand troops to seal off the city and destroy the resistance once and for all. Within a week, it was reported that “Syrian tanks are methodically 9 For superb demonstrations of severe repression’s backlash effect, I recommend works by Goodwin (2001), Hess and Martin (2006), and Rasler (1996). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press