On 8 March 1963, a small group of officers from the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party seized control of Syria. It was the kind of coup that barely makes the news: a handful of men, some tanks, a bicycle, no blood worth mentioning. The population, which had lived through three coups in 1949 alone and a half-dozen governments since, greeted it with the indifference of people who had stopped expecting the next government to differ from the last. They were not wrong about the pattern. They were wrong about almost everything else.
The mechanics, as coups go, were routine. The night before — 7 March — Syrian intelligence had raided the apartment where the conspirators were due to assemble. So a young air force officer named Hafez al-Assad was sent out to notify the other units: postponed by one day. The next morning, tanks loyal to the Ba’ath military committee moved on Damascus. A colonel named Ziad al-Hariri led a brigade in from the Israeli front. Two more brigades were secured from their camps. The commander of the 70th Armoured Brigade was caught in a pincer and surrendered. Salah Jadid, one of the three men running the operation, bicycled into the city that morning and walked into the Bureau of Officers’ Affairs, which he would run as a personal empire for the next three years. Assad took a company to capture the al-Dumayr air base forty kilometres from Damascus — a base whose garrison could have defeated him in a straight fight. He sent an emissary ahead with a message: surrender or be shelled. The commander negotiated. The radio station fell. The Ministry of Defence was taken without resistance. By that afternoon, the coupmakers were at army headquarters, celebrating. Not a single casualty was reported.
That was not surprising given the country’s recent history. Modern Syria had been a French mandate from 1920 to 1946, administered by a colonial power that ran it the way France ran most of its colonies: through a combination of client elites, divide-and-rule minority recruitment, and a studied indifference to whether the resulting state would hold together once the French left. When they did leave, the same landowning oligarchy that had governed under the mandate carried on governing. They lasted three years. The humiliation of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war — in which Syrian forces, like everyone else’s, performed badly — finished off whatever legitimacy the traditional elite had retained. In 1949, Syria had three separate coups. By 1953, a military dictatorship under Adib Shishakli had given way to a brief democratic experiment that the Ba’ath Party participated in without ever winning much. Then in 1958, the Ba’athists gambled everything on a merger with Nasser’s Egypt — the United Arab Republic, a pan-Arab dream that lasted three years before another coup dissolved it. By 1963, Syria was a country whose political class had been through so many upheavals that a new one registered barely a shrug.
The Ba’ath Party that seized power that morning was a peculiar vehicle for what came next. It had been founded in the 1940s by Michel Aflaq, a Greek Orthodox Damascene schoolteacher and political romantic, together with Salah al-Din al-Bitar, a Sunni Muslim from the same city. Their ideology — pan-Arab nationalism, secular socialism, the unity of the Arab world against colonialism and against each other’s sectarian divisions — was genuinely idealistic, and genuinely out of touch with how power actually worked. The party had no real mass base. Its civilian leadership, which included Aflaq, had consented to the coup because they had no other path to power; they needed the military committee’s guns. The military committee needed Aflaq’s name for legitimacy. No agreement was made about how to share power once the soldiers had done their work. Aflaq was in the position of a man who loans his car to someone with a criminal record: he knew what kind of loan it was, and he made it anyway.
What the military committee was, beneath the Ba’athist slogans, was three Alawite officers: Umran, Jadid, and Assad. The Alawites were a heterodox Shia-derived religious minority who made up perhaps 12 per cent of Syria’s population and lived mostly in the mountains along the coast — poor, marginalised, and mistrusted by the Sunni majority that dominated Syrian cities and commerce. The French had deliberately recruited them into the colonial army, the Troupes Spéciales du Levant, for precisely this reason: a soldier who cannot rely on his own community for support is more reliable to the authority paying him. By the time independence came, Alawites had built up decades of professional military experience that the urban Sunni middle class had largely avoided. After 8 March, the military committee moved systematically to turn this demographic foothold into structural dominance. Ninety per cent of the officer corps was replaced with Alawite relatives, co-sectarians, and loyalists. Nobody announced this as a policy. It happened appointment by appointment, transfer by transfer. Robert Kaplan, writing in The Atlantic thirty years later, put it cleanly: “Though Alawites constituted just 12 percent of the Syrian population, they now dominated the corps of young officers.” That sentence is the key to everything that followed.
The new government declared a state of emergency on the day of the coup. Under it, the Mukhabarat — the security apparatus — could detain without charge, try civilians before military courts, and suppress any organisation the government chose to designate a threat. The state of emergency was never lifted. It remained in force, continuously, for forty-eight years — until 2011, when the uprising made it moot. This is, by most counts, the longest unbroken state of emergency in modern history. In the months after March 8, the purges ran in sequence: Nasserist officers first, then independents, then anyone the committee feared. A Nasserist counter-coup in July 1963, backed by Egyptian intelligence, was defeated and met with a response unusual even by Arab standards: twenty-seven participating officers were arrested and shot. The civilian Ba’athist founders watched the executions with horror. Aflaq, who had imagined himself the ideological father of a new Arab state, found his role steadily reduced to that of a useful letterhead.
In February 1966, the neo-Ba’athist officers staged a coup against the coup. Aflaq and the civilian old guard were expelled or arrested. Aflaq himself fled to Iraq, where the Iraqi Ba’ath — with a certain irony — made him Secretary-General of their national command. He spent the rest of his life in Baghdad, still theorising about Arab unity while two different branches of his party ran two different countries in his name. He died in 1989 and is buried there. In Damascus, Salah Jadid ran the country from his position as assistant secretary-general of the party. Assad, now commanding the air force, ran the armed forces. For four years, they cooperated. Then, in November 1970, Assad moved against Jadid in what he called the Corrective Revolution — a phrase that managed to suggest everything needed correcting without specifying what. Jadid was arrested, taken to Mezze prison, and held there for the rest of his life. He died in 1993, twenty-three years a prisoner, without ever being charged or tried. Assad Senior ruled Syria for thirty years, until his death in June 2000.
His heir was Bashar, an ophthalmologist. The intended heir had been Bassel, the eldest son, a cavalry officer with his father’s bearing — killed in a car crash in 1994. Bashar had been studying retinal diseases in London, and was called home to be groomed for a succession he had not expected and, by most accounts, had not sought. He inherited the state of emergency, the Mukhabarat, the Alawite officer corps, the party apparatus, and the family’s particular theory of power: that the only safe response to any challenge was disproportionate force. In March 2011, protesters in Deraa — demonstrating after security forces arrested and tortured teenagers who had spray-painted anti-regime slogans on walls — were met with live fire. The civil war that followed took thirteen years to end. By the time Bashar fled to Moscow in December 2024, the estimated death toll was over 500,000. Roughly twelve million Syrians had been displaced — approximately half the pre-war population. The ruins of eastern Aleppo, reduced to rubble by barrel bombs, air strikes, and siege, became the image the war left behind. The Ba’ath Party had ruled Syria continuously from that morning in 1963 until it collapsed in a matter of days in December 2024 — sixty-one years and nine months of uninterrupted control.
The state of emergency declared on 8 March 1963 was finally lifted in April 2011. Not because the government had decided to lift it: because the uprising had made it unenforceably obsolete, and the government was trying, briefly and unsuccessfully, to offer concessions. A state of emergency issued to consolidate a bloodless coup had outlasted the government that issued it by forty-eight years, and had been used to justify everything done in between. The coupmakers had called it the March 8 Revolution. By the time it ended, the word “revolution” had been discredited by everything done in its name. A bicycle ride into a government building, a bluff at an air base, and a radio announcement that there was a new government. Nobody noticed that morning. Syria and the rest of the world noticed later.