1982 Hama massacre

The Hama massacre (Arabic: مجزرة حماة) occurred in February 1982 when the Syrian Arab Army and the Defense Companies paramilitary force, under the orders of President Hafez al-Assad, besieged the town of Hama for 27 days in order to quell an uprising by the Fighting Vanguard of the Muslim Brotherhood against the Ba'athist government. The campaign that had begun in 1976 by Sunni Islamist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, was brutally crushed in an anti-Sunni massacre at Hama, carried out by the Syrian Arab Army and Alawite militias under the command of Major General Rifaat al-Assad.

Prior to the start of operations, Hafez al-Assad issued orders to seal off Hama from the outside world; effectively imposing a media blackout, total shut down of communications, electricity and food supplies to the city for months. Initial diplomatic dispatches released in Western media outlets assessed that 1,000 people were killed. Subsequent estimates vary, with the lower ones reporting that at least 10,000 people were killed and more than 20,000 civilians were forcibly disappeared, while other estimates put the number of deaths at 40,000. The massacre remains the "single deadliest act" of violence perpetrated by an Arab state upon its own population in the modern history of the Middle East. Some suspect the Hafez al-Assad regime of using chemical weapons in the city.

Nearly two-thirds of the city was destroyed in the Ba'athist military operation. Robert Fisk, who was present at Hama during the events of the massacre, reported that indiscriminate bombing had razed much of the city to the ground and that the vast majority of the victims were civilians. Fisk later wrote in 2010 that at least 20,000 civilians were killed by Rifaat al-Assad's paramilitary companies in the "streets and underground tunnels of Hama". Patrick Seale, reporting in The Globe and Mail, described the operation as a "two-week orgy of killing, destruction and looting" which destroyed the city and killed a minimum of 25,000 inhabitants.

The attack has been described as being motivated by sectarian animosities against the Sunni community of Hama. Memory of the massacre remains an important aspect of Syrian culture and as a result, it evokes strong emotions amongst Syrians to the present day. The Hama massacre was invoked by Syrian opposition leaders when Ba'athist government forces were driven out of the city following successful rebel offensives in December 2024 that ultimately ended the rule of the Assad family in Syria, with rebel leaders saying they have "come to cleanse the wound that has persisted in Syria for 40 years".