Rifaat al-Assad, who as a paramilitary leader in 1982 put down an uprising against his brother, Syria’s ruler Hafez al-Assad, killing up to 40,000 and earning him the nickname “the butcher of Hama,” died on Monday. He was 88.
His death was reported by his son Siwar al-Assad on social media. Voice of Emirates, a news site in Dubai, where Mr. Assad had been living in exile, reported that he died there.
For more than 50 years, many of them spent in cosseted exile, Rifaat al-Assad was an integral part of the family that ruled Syria with an iron fist — sometimes agitating from the inside for more power, and sometimes from the outside, as the leader of failed movements to gain dominance in his country.
His notorious place in Syria’s history was assured by his command over the large-scale massacre of civilians in Hama in 1982, a model later followed by his nephew Bashar for effectively suppressing dissent.
Mr. Assad was the commander of an elite unit, the paramilitary Defense Forces, when his brother sent him to crush an uprising in the west-central Syrian city of Hama in February 1982. Hama was in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, bitterly opposed to the secularist Ba’ath Party regime of Mr. Assad’s older brother Hafez.
The revolt, the most serious challenge Hafez faced during his harsh 30-year reign, was crushed with merciless brutality in a siege that lasted nearly a month.
Rifaat al-Assad’s forces began an indiscriminate bombardment of residential neighborhoods in Hama on Feb. 2, deploying the Syrian Air Force and ground troops “without distinguishing between civilians and combatants,” according to a report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights on the massacre’s 40th anniversary.
“The regime forces carried out deliberate killings of wounded people, targeting entire families, including women, children and young people,” the report added.
The massacre was covered up by the Hafez al-Assad regime, and no official death toll was ever established. It created the precedent for Bashar, who faced his own civilian uprising in 2011 and who scrupulously followed his uncle’s example.
In 2024, with Rifaat al-Assad long since living a life of luxurious exile in Europe, Swiss prosecutors indicted him for war crimes and crimes against humanity, under their country’s broad remit to pursue international war criminals on the basis of individuals’ residence, however brief, in Switzerland.
As the commander of operations at Hama, Mr. Assad “ordered murders, acts of torture, acts of cruelty, and illegal imprisonments,” the indictment stated.
He never faced a day in prison for commanding the Hama massacre, nor for illicitly accumulating a vast portfolio of sumptuous properties in Europe and the Caribbean with money stolen from the Syrian state, with an estimated value of more than $800 million. In addition to a palatial dwelling on Paris’s ultra-fashionable Avenue Foch, he and members of family owned villas on Spain’s Costa del Sol, a 110-acre estate outside Paris and a $15 million Georgian townhouse in the elegant Mayfair area of London.
In 2020, a French court sentenced Rifaat al-Assad to four years in jail for “crimes of exceptional gravity,” related to his large-scale embezzlement, and ordered his properties to be seized. His nephew Bashar, taking pity on his uncle, allowed him to flee back to Syria.
Mr. Assad’s visits back had been rare ever since his abortive attempt to overthrow his brother Hafez in March 1984, two years after the Hama massacre. Mr. Assad had helped his brother, a military officer, take power in 1970, but relations between the two had always been guarded.
Seizing his chance while his brother was ill in the winter of 1984, Rifaat deployed 55,000 members of his Defense Forces around Damascus, intent on acquiring power. They were confronted by troops loyal to Hafez.
A subsequent meeting of the two brothers, in the presence of their elderly mother, who was flown in from their native village for the occasion, defused the crisis. “Here I am. I am the regime,” Hafez reportedly said to his younger brother.
Rifaat agreed to stand down in exchange for being designated “vice-president,” a title that turned out to be meaningless.
A long period of comfortable exile began, first in Switzerland and then in France. In 1986, President François Mitterrand of France, convinced that Mr. Assad would one day succeed his brother, and wanting to keep him close — Syria had been a French protectorate before World War II — awarded him the Legion of Honor.
When Hafez died in 2000, Rifaat asserted his right to succeed him but was rebuffed by Syria’s ruling Baathist party in favor of his 34-year-old nephew Bashar, who until then had been a relatively unobtrusive ophthalmologist. Rifaat was barred from attending his brother’s funeral.
When Bashar fell with unexpected haste in 2024, Rifaat tried to escape Syria via a Russian air base in the country, but the Russian military there refused to allow him in. He fled to Lebanon, reportedly crossing a river on the back of an associate.
Rifaat al-Assad was born in the village of al-Qardaha, in western Syria, on Aug. 22, 1937, to a family of the Alawite minority.
He studied political science and economics at Damascus University, joined the military after the Ba’ath Party seized power in March 1963, and took command of the Defense Companies, which the publication Middle East Intelligence Bulletin called the “Praetorian Guards of the Assad regime.”
It was as their leader that he first made his name in Syria, directing them in a massacre of Muslim Brotherhood inmates at the Tadmore prison in June 1980, in which 600 to 1,000 of them were killed.
Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Assad was known to have married four times, in polygamous marriages, lastly to Lina al-Khayyir. His children include his daughters Tumadir and Tamadhin and another son, Ribal al-Assad.
His son Siwar, announcing his father’s death, denounced what he called “a flood of lies and calumnies” emanating from “detractors.”
Reham Mourshed contributed reporting.
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the Obituaries desk.
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