Political/military Career
The Arab defeat in that war was a motivating factor for the military coup of Husni al-Za'im which had taken place soon after in 1949, shattering Syria's weak parliamentary system. Only months after al-Za'im's takeover, he was overthrown by a group of officers connected to the SSNP, including Shishakli and Zaim's old comrade Colonel Sami al-Hinnawi, who led the new military junta.
Za'im had previously delivered the SSNP leader Antun Saadeh to the Lebanese authorities who had him tried and executed for wanting to destroy the modern state of Lebanon. Reportedly, after Za'm was killed, Shishakli ripped off Za'im's bloodstained shirt and took it to Saadeh's widow, who was still in Syria, telling her, "We have avenged his murder!".
Shishakli worked with Sami al-Hinnawi, the new de facto ruler of Syria who refused to assume power on his own and restored Syria's parliamentary system. Hinnawi became chief-of-staff of the Syrian Army and a veteran nationalist, Hashem al-Atassi, who had been president in the 1930s, to become prime minister, and then president of Syria. Atassi wanted to create union with Hashemite Iraq, something which Shishakli greatly opposed, claiming that Hinnawi was the drive behind pro-Hashemite sentiment in Syria.
Read more about this topic: Adib Shishakli
Famous quotes containing the words political, military and/or career:
“Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.”
—Dennis Altman (b. 1943)
“Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations, surely is no special virtue in a military man; while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse, the honest sense of duty, is the first.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)