Background
As president Assad maintained some of the trappings of democracy, standing for reelection at seven-year intervals and regularly winning more than 99 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, he used the security services to quash all threats to his regime, employing arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, and overwhelming force to obliterate any organized opposition. At Hama, where dissidents led by the Muslim Brethren mounted a rebellion in 1982, troops commanded by the president's brother Rifaat killed thousands of people and flattened whole sections of the city.
Assad, who was Syria's defense chief when Israel captured the Golan Heights in June 1967, remained for the next 25 years one of Israel's most implacable foes. After failing to win back the Golan Heights by military force in October 1973, he reached a troop-disengagement agreement with Israel in 1974. From the mid-1970's onward, Assad intervened repeatedly in the Lebanese civil war. Both Syria and Israel sent troops into Lebanon, and Israel accused Assad of allowing guerrillas in southern Lebanon to launch raids against the Jewish state. Both countries, however, reached a tacit understanding in their de facto partition of Lebanon. The United States, which in 1979 began labeling Syria as a sponsor of international terrorism, suspected Assad of complicity in terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens in the 1980's, but the allegations were never proved.
Lacking domestic resources to fund Syria's military ambitions, Assad looked to the Soviet Union for financial support. By the end of the 1980's, however, with the Soviet Union disintegrating, he adroitly turned to the West, siding with the United States and its allies against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War (1990-1991). In the early 1990's, as the Palestine Liberation Organization and Jordan reached their own separate accommodations with Israel, Assad signaled his own willingness to negotiate a permanent peace. He moved warily, however, seeking to gain maximum leverage in exchange for supporting a comprehensive peace process to which his agreement is essential.