Monk-of-Mogadishu wrote:RW is right, Syria's Assad dynasty has a long history of brutality. In the 80s, Syrian agents used to go to the diaspora in places like Germany to hunt down Sunni fundamentalist dissidents.
For some strange reason, Syrian Sunnis tend to be far more fundamentalist than any other Arab group, if they came to power they'd probably wipe out the minority Shia elite and change the politics of the region.
Bashar al azad didn't realize the era of president for life is over and time has changed
V. Legacy of Enforced Disappearances
Bashar al-Asad inherited a country with a legacy of abusive practices, but to date he has not taken any concrete steps to acknowledge and address these abuses or shed light on the fate of thousands of people who have disappeared since the 1980s.
Syria’s security forces were involved in gross human rights violations in the late 1970s and 1980s in an effort to quell opposition to Hafez al-Asad’s regime, including armed opposition by certain segments of the Muslim Brotherhood. The security forces detained and tortured thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, communist and other leftist parties, the Iraqi Ba`ath party, Nasserite parties, and different Palestinian groups—many of whom subsequently disappeared. While no exact figures exist, various researchers estimate the number of the disappeared to be 17,000 persons.[58] Syria’s armed forces and security services also detained and abducted Lebanese, Palestinians, and other Arab nationals during Syria’s military presence in Lebanon, hundreds of whom are still unaccounted for.
On June 27, 1980, commandos from the Defense Brigades under the command of Rif`at al-Asad, Hafez al-Asad’s brother, killed an estimated 1,000 unarmed inmates, mostly Islamists, at Tadmor military prison, in retaliation for a failed assassination attempt against Hafez al-Asad.[59] The names of those killed were never made public. Less than two years later, from February to March 1982, commandos from the Defense Brigades and units of the Special Forces circled the city of Hama, Syria’s fourth largest town and an opposition stronghold, and engaged in heavy fighting against Islamists opposed to the regime. The Syrian security troops committed large scale human rights violations during the fighting, including the killing of hundreds of people in a series of mass executions near the municipal stadium and other sites. While estimates of the number killed in Hama vary widely, the most credible reports put the number at between five and ten thousand people