![]() In April 1964 riots broke out in Hama, where Muslim insurgents put up "roadblocks, stockpiled food and weapons, ransacked wine shops." After an Ismaili Ba'ath militiaman was killed, riots intensified and rebels attacked "every vestige" of the Ba'ath party in Hama. The town of Hama in particular was a "stronghold of landed conservatism and of the Muslim Brothers," and "had long been a redoubtable opponent of the Ba'athist state." The first full-scale clash between the two occurred shortly after the 1963 coup, in which the Ba'ath party first gained power in Syria. Section of Hama before the government attack ![]() ![]() According to the Syrian opposition, the vast majority of the victims were civilians. The attack has been described as one of the "deadliest acts by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East". About 1,000 Syrian soldiers were killed during the operation, and large parts of the old city were destroyed. Subsequent estimates vary, with the lower estimates claiming that at least 2,000 Syrian citizens were killed, while others put the number at 20,000 ( Robert Fisk) or 40,000 (Syrian Human Rights Committee). Initial diplomatic reports from Western countries stated that 1,000 were killed. The massacre, carried out by the Syrian Army under commanding General Rifaat al-Assad, effectively ended the campaign begun in 1976 by Sunni Muslim groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, against the government. The Hama Massacre ( Arabic: مجزرة حماة), or Hama Uprising, occurred in February 1982 when the Syrian Arab Army and the Defense Companies, under orders of the country's president Hafez al-Assad, besieged the town of Hama for 27 days in order to quell an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood against al-Assad's government. Syrian President assassination attempt (1980).
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