section_path: History/After Syrian independence
section_name: After Syrian independence
paragraph_text: After Syrian independence
  
  Syria became independent on 17 April 1946. In 1949, after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Syria experienced a number of military coups and the rise of the Ba'ath Party.
  
  In 1958, Syria and Egypt were united by a political agreement into the United Arab Republic. The UAR lasted for three years, breaking apart in 1961, when a group of army officers seized power and declared Syria independent.
  
  A succession of coups ensued until, in 1963, a secretive military committee (including Alawite officers Hafez al-Assad and Salah Jadid) helped the Ba'ath Party seize power. In 1966, Alawite-affiliated military officers successfully rebelled and expelled the Ba’ath Party old guard followers of Greek Orthodox Christian Michel Aflaq and Sunni Muslim Salah ad-Din al-Bitar, calling Zaki al-Arsuzi the " Socrates " of the reconstituted Ba'ath Party.
  
  In 1970, Air Force General Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite, took power and instigated a "Corrective Movement" in the Ba'ath Party, overthrowing Salah Jadid (another Alawite). The coup ended the political instability which had existed since independence. Alawites were among Syria's poorest and most marginalized groups until Hafez al-Assad's seizure of power. Robert D. Kaplan compared his rise to "an untouchable becoming maharajah in India or a Jew becoming tsar in Russia—an unprecedented development shocking to the Sunni majority population which had monopolized power for so many centuries."
  
  Under Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded his father upon his death in June 2000, Alawites made up the majority of Syria's military and political elites, including in the intelligence services and the shabiha (loyalist paramilitaries). The economic and social situation of Alawites improved, but the community remained relatively poor compared to other Syrians, and the Sunni-Alawite divisions persisted.
  
  In 1971, al-Assad declared himself president of Syria, a position the constitution at the time permitted only for Sunni Muslims. In 1973, a new constitution was adopted, replacing Islam as the state religion with a mandate that the president's religion be Islam, and protests erupted. In 1974, to satisfy this constitutional requirement, Musa as-Sadr (a leader of the Twelvers of Lebanon and founder of the Amal Movement, who had unsuccessfully sought to unite Lebanese Alawites and Shiites under the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council) issued a fatwa that Alawites were a community of Twelver Shiite Muslims.
  
  A significant majority of Sunni Syrians accepted Hafez al-Assad's rule, but the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, an Islamist group, did not. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood pushed anti-Alawite propaganda and a violent anti-Ba'athist campaign in Syria. Thirty-two cadets, mostly Alawites, were killed in the June 1979 Aleppo Artillery School massacre. In response to the Brothehood's attempted assassination of Hafez al-Assad in 1980, the regime ordered a violent crackdown; Hafez's brother Rifaat al-Assad ordered the slaughter of hundreds of Brotherhood members at the Tadmor Prison in Palmyra.
  
  The Brotherhood responded with increased violence, culminating in an attempt to seize control of the city of Hama in February 1982. The regime deployed between 6,000 and 8,000 troops to suppress the insurgency, and in the Hama massacre, up to 25,000 people were killed over 27 days. Seeking to ensure that troops would not turn against the government, the Assad regime was careful to ensure the dominance of Alawites in the units deployed to Hama: Rifaat al-Assad's Defense Companies were reported to be 90% Alawite, and in other units, up to 70% of officers corps were Alawites. After 1982, Syria remained relatively stable until the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, but the events in Hama left enduring Sunni-Alawite sectarian resentments.