Circumstances of history beyond the scope of this column have suppressed Syrian patriotism and placed the term between scare marks. The Baath’s notorious lexicon rendered Syria, “the beating heart of ...

The situation turned in 1966, when Hafez al-Assad came to power in an internal coup within the Ba'ath Party, and the Soviet Union refused to sell more weapons to Syria. Syria was subject to Soviet ...

In 1982 an uprising in the city of Hama by the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist group originating in Egypt, challenged ...

Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, ruled Syria for more than half a century but how did one family achieve and maintain power?

Hafez al-Assad ... itself with the Soviet Union (as it then was), although it was mostly pragmatic in its dealings with the US and Israel. A personality cult was built around Assad.

Russia and the former Soviet Union were long the leading suppliers of military hardware to Syria under the rule of recently ...

TYRANT Assad’s desperate final plea to Putin and his nerve-racking wait to be smuggled into Russia have been revealed. The ...

Hafez al-Assad was one of a generation of Arab strongmen – among ... Syria aligned itself with the Soviet Union (as it then was), although it was mostly pragmatic in its dealings with the US and ...

Geopolitics abhors a power vacuum. One country’s loss is another’s gain, and the space left by Iran is being occupied, for ...

BRITS are feared to have been tortured in ... with the Soviet Union, and an anti-Israel stance. He established a cult of personality and corruption flourished as loyalty to Hafez became the ...