Syrian Protesters Mark 30th Anniversary of Hama Massacre

Assad and most of his allies were from the minority Shia Alawaites – considered apostates by the conservative Brotherhood.

The clash between the secular nationalist Baathists and the Brotherhood dated all the way back to 1940.

Shortly after Hafez seized power in Syria in a coup in 1963, Muslim insurgents in Hama rioted and fought with government soldiers, leading to the deaths of at least 70 Muslim Brotherhood members.

Then there was a period of relative peace between the Islamists and Assad’s regime, until the mid-1970s.

The Brotherhood and Sunni Muslim allies started a serious campaign against Assad’s Baathist regime in 1976. For the next six years, the Brotherhood committed terrorist acts against the government and its representatives, both military and civilians. By 1979, the Islamic insurgency almost caused a full-scale civil war as the Brotherhood embarked on guerilla warfare against the state.

In June 1979, scores of Alawaite military cadets were killed in Aleppo. The following year saw a spate of car bomb attacks that killed hundreds in Damascus.

By July 1980, the Baath government declared membership in the Brotherhood to be a crime punishable by death.

Still, in the early 1980s, the Brother and other Islamic factions fought an on-again, off-again war against Hafez, which include periodic bomb attacks against regime figures, At one point Hafez himself was almost killed in an attack – which led to the executions of hundreds of imprisoned Brotherhood members.

However, nothing could compare with what happened in February 1982, when decades of fighting between the Assad regime and the Brotherhood came to a shattering climax in Hama.