In 2011, looking back at Bashar's father, he analyzed the strategy of Hafez Al-Assad against the town of Hama in 1982, then the center of the Muslim Brothers. Without this action, seen as extremely brutal and as a war crime by Creveld, Assad's regime would probably have been overthrown. Assad himself and many members of the Alawite community would have been killed. After Assad's removal, perhaps a stable regime would have been established by non-Alawite Muslims, or – the more likely variant in Martin van Creveld's view – there would have been no stable government at all. In this case, there would have been a war of everyone against everyone. "Judging from the experience in neighboring Beirut, such a civil war could have cost hundreds of thousands of people. And, according to what happened in Lebanon and Afghanistan, Syria could have developed into a place teeming with international terrorists of every direction."