43 Facts About Rifaat al-Assad

Rifaat Ali al-Assad is a Syrian former military officer and politician.

Rifaat al-Assad is the younger brother of the late President of Syria, Hafez al-Assad, and Jamil al-Assad, and the uncle of the former President Bashar al-Assad.

Rifaat al-Assad was the commanding officer of the ground operations of the 1982 Hama massacre ordered by his brother.

Rifaat al-Assad was born to an Alawite family in the village of Qardaha, near Lattakia in western Syria on 22 August 1937.

Rifaat al-Assad studied Political Science and Economics at Damascus University and was later given an honorary PhD in Politics from the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Rifaat al-Assad joined the Syrian Arab Army in 1958 as a first lieutenant, and was rapidly promoted after training in various Soviet military academies.

Rifaat al-Assad was allowed to form his own paramilitary group, the Defense Companies, in 1971, which soon transformed into a powerful and regular military force trained and armed by the Soviet Union.

Rifaat al-Assad played a key role in his brother's takeover of executive power in 1970, dubbed the Corrective Revolution, and ran the elite internal security forces and the Defense Companies in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Rifaat al-Assad had a pivotal role throughout the 1970s and, until 1984, many saw him as the likely successor to his elder brother.

In 1983, Rifaat al-Assad met with PLO leader Yasir Arafat in an attempt to appease growing tensions between Syria and Arafat's loyalists.

Ion Mihai Pacepa, a general in the security forces of Communist Romania who defected to the US in 1978, claimed that Rifaat al-Assad was recruited by Romanian intelligence during the Cold War.

Rifaat al-Assad contributed to the release of US politician and educator David S Dodge on 21 July 1983.

Rifaat al-Assad was first held in Lebanon and then kept captive in Iran until his release one year later.

US journalist Thomas Friedman stated in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem that Rifaat al-Assad later said that the total number of victims was 38,000.

Rifaat al-Assad has repeatedly denied playing any role in the Hama massacre.

Rifaat al-Assad presented his version for the Hama massacre during the conference in Paris to form the Syrian National Democratic Council on 15 November 2011.

Rifaat al-Assad was mentioned in a CIA report regarding drug smuggling activities in Syria during the 1980s, along with other Syrian officials such as Ali Haydar, Mustafa Tlass and Shafiq Fayadh.

When Hafez Rifaat al-Assad suffered from heart problems in late 1983, he established a six-member committee to run the country composed of Abdul Halim Khaddam, Abdullah al-Ahmar, Mustafa Tlass, Mustafa al-Shihabi, Abdul Rauf al-Kasm and Zuhair Masharqa.

Rifaat al-Assad was not included, and the council consisted entirely of close Sunni Muslim loyalists to Hafez, who were mostly lightweights in the military-security establishment.

Rifaat al-Assad's forces set up checkpoints and roadblocks, put up posters of him in State buildings, disarmed regular troops and arbitrarily arrested soldiers of the regular Army, occupied and commandeered Police Stations, Intelligence buildings, and State buildings; the Defense Companies rapidly outnumbered and took control over both the Special Forces and the Republican Guard.

In what at first seemed a compromise, Rifaat al-Assad was made vice-president with responsibility for security affairs, but this proved a wholly nominal post.

Rifaat al-Assad was then sent to the Soviet Union on "an open-ended working visit".

Rifaat al-Assad lived lavishly in exile, and secretly used an adviser in Guernsey to manage his vast wealth.

Unhappy at being passed over, Rifaat al-Assad returned to exile, where he established a London-based satellite television in 1997.

Rifaat al-Assad created a political party, led by his son Somar, that criticized Hafez's regime and had contacts with various Syrian opposition figures.

Rifaat al-Assad nominally retained the post of vice president until 8 February 1998, when he was stripped of this title.

In 1999, Rifaat al-Assad's supporters engaged in armed clashes with government forces in Latakia, leading to a crackdown that destroyed much of Rifaat al-Assad's remaining network in Syria.

However, the leading forces in the ruling Ba'ath party, security forces, and military remained loyal to Bashar, and Rifaat al-Assad was blocked from attending Hafez's funeral.

In November 2011, nine months into an uprising against Bashar's regime, Rifaat al-Assad launched a new Paris-based opposition group, the Syrian National Democratic Council; Rifaat al-Assad claimed that the group had popular support in Syria, including among some army defectors, but these assertions were not considered credible.

Rifaat al-Assad has held a meeting with the former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

Yossef Bodansky, the director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, has stated that Rifaat al-Assad enjoys support from both the United States and Saudi Arabia; he has been featured in the Saudi press as visiting the royal family in 2007.

However, in 2022, the Federal Criminal Court ordered the office to issue the warrant, ruling that Rifaat al-Assad's presence at a Geneva hotel in 2013, when the investigation was opened, was a sufficient nexus for Swiss authorities to prosecute them.

The court's ruling was published the next year, but because Rifaat al-Assad had fled to Syria in 2021, it was considered unlikely that the arrest warrant would be implemented.

Since 2014, Rifaat al-Assad was accused of money laundering and aggravated tax fraud by French prosecutors.

In October 2021, Rifaat al-Assad returned to Syria at the age of 84.

President Bashar Rifaat al-Assad allowed his uncle to return to the country after decades in exile in order "to avoid imprisonment in France".

Rifaat al-Assad returned to his former home in the Western Villas neighborhood of Mezzeh in Damascus.

Rifaat al-Assad married four times and his polygamous marriages as well as the marriages of his children have produced strong alliances and ties with prominent families and prestigious clans within Syria and the Arab world.

Rifaat al-Assad firstly married one of his cousins, Amirah, from al-Qurdahah.

Rifaat al-Assad's third spouse is a young woman from the traditional Sunni Muslim establishment, Rajaa Bakrat.

Rifaat al-Assad's son-in-law is a relative of the Syrian activist and poet Kamal Kheir Beik.

Rifaat al-Assad's youngest son, Ribal al-Assad, born 1975, is a businessman and political activist.

Rifaat al-Assad resided in Paris and has spoken frequently on French and international media on the Syrian crisis.