Defense Companies (Syria) - History and Deployment

History and Deployment

The lessons of the Six-Day War of 1967 pointed to the fact of the weak airborne and heavy armor capabilities of the Syrian Military. There was a perceptible lack of expertise in combined arms operations involving a combined deployment of armoured, artillery and airborne infantry units. Top Syrian military commanders and Hafez al Assad recognized the need to create a powerful and operationally self-sufficient Divisional command that would incorporate all the elements of modern combined arms. Also the political instability of the preceding decade in Syria pointed to the necessity of having a large and well-equipped body of highly loyal soldiers with strategic responsibilities of dealing with threats to the Baathist regime. From 1968 onwards many Alawite officers and soldiers from the regular Army were sent for advanced training to the Soviet Union in order to build up such a unit.

The Defense Companies were founded in 1971 under this plan and were organizationally and operationally independent of the regular armed forces. They were under the command of Rifaat al-Assad, the president's brother. The Defense Companies were garrisoned outside Damascus, with the primary mission of countering attempted coups and challenges to the Assad government. These special forces, however, also had military missions beyond the role of a praetorian guard.

The Defense Companies were initially trained by Soviet Spetsnaz special forces, VDV airborne forces, and the Soviet Army Tank Corps. They had regular Soviet advisors and conducted frequent war games and field exercises with the Soviet Army. Their expertise lay in Soviet-style combined arms operations involving armour, mechanized, artillery, and airborne forces. Defense Companies commanders were known to be personally close to several high-ranking Soviet military officials.

The Defence Companies served in Syria's first armed intervention in the Lebanese Civil War in 1976, and were involved in internal security operations during the nationwide strikes and demonstrations in Aleppo in March 1980 and in June 1980. Lt. Col. Nassif ran a revenge operation after an attempted assassination of the President in 1980, in which a Battalion of Defense Company soldiers killed up to 1,000 Tadmor Prison inmates suspected of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood. In Spring 1982, 2 brigades of the Defence Companies and other elite armoured formations were deployed in Hamah to quell an Islamist uprising, in what became known as the Hama Massacre. Members of the Defense Companies are alleged to have been involved in a February 1981 assassination attempt against the Prime Minister of Jordan Mudar Badran. In Lebanon, Defense Companies units supported pro-Syrian Lebanese militias, and cooperated closely with the Tripoli-based Arab Knights of the Arab Democratic Party (founded in 1981 by Rifaat al Assad and composed largely of Lebanese Alawis), and the Lebanese Baath Party and its militia, the Assad Battalion.