Syrian rebels take over Hama: The bloody history of the city

Rebel forces in Syria have taken the city of Hama.

The development comes just days after rebels led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group captured Aleppo — dealing a massive blow to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Hama is important because of its location – it is between Aleppo and Damascus, President Bashar al-Assad’s power base.

The city, with a population of about one million, is predominantly Sunni Muslim but also has a minority from the Alawite sect of Shiite Islam, to which Assad belongs.

His family has ruled Syria for over five decades.

But did you know that Hama, which is Syria’s fourth-largest city, has a dark history?

Let’s take a closer look:

Like other Syrian cities, Hama rebelled in 2011 against Assad after the government’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protests, triggering a civil war that drew in foreign powers and jihadists.

At that time, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Hama, where government troops were absent, and ambassadors from the United States and France arrived to meet the demonstrators, sparking government anger.

On July 31 of that year troops began a major offensive against the city, killing at least 139 people according to opposition groups.

But go back a few decades and you’ll find even a a darker chapter.

In February 1982, a bloody crackdown occurred after an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood. The group was at the time the main opposition to then-president Hafez al-Assad, father of the current president.

In February 1982, Brotherhood members killed cadres of the ruling Baath Party in Hama, triggering brutal reprisals during a military offensive to quell the uprising using artillery and tanks.

Various sources estimate the deaths between 10,000 and 40,000 in the besieged and isolated city over about one month.

Hafez al-Assad’s brother, Rifaat, carried out the repression as head of the “Defence Brigades”, an elite force of the authorities.

The action earned him the nickname, “Butcher of Hama”.

In March,  the office of Switzerland’s attorney general said it was charging Rifaat al-Assad with “ordering homicides, acts of torture, cruel treatments and illegal detentions”.

His alleged “war crimes and crimes against humanity”, it said, were committed “in his capacity as commander of the defence brigades… and commander of operations in Hama”.

They took place “within the context of the armed conflict and the widespread and systematic attack launched against the population of the city of Hama”, it said.

Despite its dark history, Hama is known for its waterwheels, also known as “norias”, which are the city’s principal attraction along the Orontes River.

Developed in medieval times, they brought water to the city’s gardens, bath houses, mosques and wells.

UNESCO, the United Nations world heritage body, calls them “unique, not only on the Orontes and in Syria, but probably in the entire world.”

How they took it over

Following overnight clashes, the rebels stormed Hama “from several sides” and engaged in street battles with Assad’s forces, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor.

The rebels said they seized Hama’s prison and released its inmates. By the afternoon, Syria’s army admitted losing control of the city, strategically located between Aleppo and Assad’s power base in the capital Damascus.

“Over the past few hours, with the intensification of confrontations between our soldiers and terrorist groups… these groups were able to breach a number of axes in the city and entered it,” the army said in a statement, adding units had redeployed outside Hama.

In a video posted online, HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani said his fighters had entered Hama to “cleanse the wound that has endured in Syria for 40 years”, referring to a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982, which led to thousands of deaths.

“I ask God almighty that it be a conquest with no revenge,” he added.

The rapid fall of the city came despite shelling and strikes by the Syrian and Russian air forces, as reported by state media late Wednesday.

Maya, a 22-year-old student who gave only her first name for security concerns, said earlier Thursday that she and her family were staying at home as the fighting raged outside.

“We have been hearing non-stop the sounds of explosions and shelling,” she told AFP by telephone from Hama.

“We don’t know what’s going on outside.”

The Observatory, which relies on a network of sources in Syria, says 727 people, mostly combatants but also 111 civilians, have been killed in Syria since the violence erupted last week.

It marks the most intense fighting since 2020 in a country already ravaged by civil war, which began with the repression of pro-democracy protests in 2011.

Key to the rebels’ successes since the start of the offensive last week was the takeover of Aleppo, which in more than a decade of war had never entirely fallen out of government hands.

Jolani, the HTS chief, on Wednesday visited Aleppo’s landmark citadel where images posted on the rebels’ Telegram channel showed him waving to supporters from an open-top car.

While the advancing rebels found little resistance earlier in their offensive, the fighting around Hama has been especially fierce.

Assad ordered a 50-percent raise in career soldiers’ pay, state news agency SANA reported, as he seeks to bolster his forces for the counteroffensive.

Rebels drove back the Syrian armed forces despite the government’s sending in “large military convoys”, according to the Observatory.

The monitor said the fighting on Wednesday was close to an area mainly populated by Alawites, followers of the same offshoot of Shiite Islam as the president.

- ‘Scorched-earth counteroffensive’ -

The rebels launched their offensive in northern Syria on November 27, the same day a ceasefire took effect in the war between Israel and Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon.

Both Hezbollah and Russia have been crucial backers of Assad’s government, but have been more recently mired in their own respective conflicts.

The United Nations on Wednesday said 115,000 people had been “newly displaced across Idlib and northern Aleppo” by the fighting.

Human Rights Watch warned the fighting “raises concerns that civilians face a real risk of serious abuses at the hands of opposition armed groups and the Syrian government”.

Until last week, the war in Syria had been mostly dormant for years, but analysts have said violence was bound to flare up as it was never truly resolved.

Spearheading the rebel alliance is HTS, which is rooted in Syria’s Al-Qaeda branch.

“HTS has had a lot of time and space and resources to organise itself and to prepare for this,” said analyst Sam Heller, of the US-based Century Foundation think tank.

How the fighting unfolds now “depends on whether the Syrian government can regain its footing”, Heller said.

“Opposition forces currently pushing south will likely get stuck somewhere in Syria’s centre, when they run into really motivated and intractable loyalist resistance,” he said.

“At that point, it will be a question of whether Damascus has the means to mount the type of scorched-earth counteroffensive I assume it would like to execute.”

With inputs from agencies