Robert Fisk: Syria Has Seen Similar Bloodshed Before

Robert Fisk is an award-winning Middle East correspondent for the Independent. A journalist with decades of experience in foreign reporting, Fisk has interviewed Osama bin Laden multiple times and has been repeatedly recognized and awarded for his work.

History comes full circle in Syria. In February 1982, President Hafez al-Assad’s army stormed into the ancient cities to end an Islamist uprising. They killed at least 10,000 men, women and children, possibly 20,000. Some of the men were members of the armed Muslim Brotherhood.

Almost all the dead were Sunni Muslims, although even senior members of the Baath party were executed if they had the fatal word Hamwi—a citizen from Hama – on their identity cards. “Death a thousand times to the hired Muslim Brothers, who linked themselves to the enemies of the homeland,” Assad said after the slaughter.

Years later a retired Dutch diplomat, Nikolaos Van Dam, wrote a detailed study of the Baath party and its Alawi leadership, The Struggle for Power in Syria, and stated presciently of the Hama massacre, that “the massive repression… may very well have sown the seeds of future strife and revenge.” Never a truer word—and if the activists’ estimate that there were 250,000 citizens on the streets of Hama at the weekend to demand the end of the Assad family’s rule is correct, then the seeds of future strife were indeed planted in the historic city’s soil 29 years ago....