58 Exit from Authoritarianism leveling vast areas of Hama.”10 The entire city was cut off from electricity, telephone communications, food, and water; regime soldiers looted people’s homes and raped inhabitants. Residents succumbed to starvation and death from otherwise treatable injuries. Those who tried to flee were often caught at military checkpoints, and the highways running through the city remained under lockdown.11 The press blackout during this period was highly effective as the city remained officially sealed off from outsiders for months. By May, reports were circulating figures of ten, twenty-five, and fifty thousand civilian casualties. Even Assad’s biographer, Patrick Seale (1982), reported in the British press that “refugees from Hama claim that ‘at least 25,000 people’ were slaughtered and whole neighborhoods devastated in a two-week orgy of killing, destruction and looting.” What became known as the Hama Massacre would foreshadow the regime’s merciless reaction to the 2011 uprisings and the many massacres to come during the Arab Spring. 2.5 escape from the cult of assad After the United States and Britain changed entry rules for immigrants from the Middle East and Asia in 1965, Syrian immigrant communities began to settle in Britain and became far more diverse in the United States. They came to include non-Christians, political refugees, students on state-sponsored scholarships, and businessmen. Survivors of the Hama Massacre of 1982, for instance, and many Muslim Brothers were forced abroad in the wake of this atrocity. One survivor of the crackdown named Walid Saffour formed the oldest known antiregime group in either the United States or Britain in the late 1980s. This London-based organization was called the Syrian Human Rights Committee. This organization was dedicated to publicizing atrocities committed by the regime during and since the Hama Massacre. Dr. Saffour and other exiles also held periodic protests outside the Syrian embassy in London to commemorate these events. When I met his daughter Razan in Manchester, she told me, 10 11 Reports circulated that some army units defected within the first week of the assault, which were difficult to verify. The loyalty of the security forces most certainly came under significant stress during this period, as in Daraʻa and elsewhere (Abdulhamid 2011). Out of a quarter of a million members, more than half are conscripts (see Heydemann 1999; Ziadeh 2011). The massacre of primarily Sunni civilians by Sunni army conscripts on behalf of the Alawite-dominated government caused a significant rupture in the regime’s offensive. While few details are known and it is not clear how many soldiers defected, this likely prolonged the conflict significantly. Responding in an Orwellian fashion, the Syrian government denied anything unusual was happening in Hama. Ahmed Iskander, Minister of Information, described reports of mass murder as the “stuff of dreams”; other officials went further, dismissing accusations of “serious disturbances” as “lies” and “a flagrant intervention” in Syria’s affairs (Seale 1982). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press