Hafez al-Assad, the Puppy Killer

That One Footage of the Syrian Army, And Why I Can't Get Over It

In Arabic, 'al-Assad’ literally means the lion. It was quite convenient. The Assad regime, after all, put a lot of efforts in projecting strength, invincibility even. At the various border entries into Syria, you'd be welcomed with the sentence qa’id ila al-abad, al-amin Hafez al-Assad. Our leader forever, Hafez al-Assad. The forever lion. Over half a century of totalitarian rule seemed so permanent that Syrian political culture had to various extent internalised the profound atomization required for such a regime to persist. No one could be trusted. ‘The walls have ears', they would say.

Of all the examples used to explain the level of moral depravity reached by that regime, there is one that, for some reason, always stood out to me. I'm not saying this was ‘worse’ than the ‘human slaughterhouse’ of Saydnaya or the barrel bombs or the chemical massacres, but it is the image that comes to my mind when I try and make sense of it all. I'll try and paint a scene, because I do not want to show you the video.¹

It's 1983.

Hafez al-Assad is sitting surrounded by other high ranking military personnel. They are overseeing an army parade. Female soldiers are seen carrying snakes. They put them around their necks, and then bite their heads off. Assad and co applaud them. Moments later, male soldiers are seen carrying puppies. They throw them on the floor, and stab them repeatedly. They evidently don't do a good job at it, as one of the men is seen holding one of the puppies down before doing another round of stabbings. When they're done, they throw the corpses of the murdered puppies in front of them. Assad and co applaud them. They're all smiling. It's a glorious day.

Hafez Al-Assad (middle) shortly after the snakes scene

A lot has been said about footage² such as this one. It was a way of showing fearlessness (killing the snakes) and such absolute devotion that you're willing to show heartlessness in the face of innocence (killing the puppies). This is true, although it was hardly a rare example by then. The Tel El Zaatar massacre happened in 1976, and the even bloodier Hama massacre just a year before the footage was released, in 1982. The regime was already in the business of mass murder, mass torture and mass enforced disappeareances. Hafez’s reign was 13 years old, and his political influence even older. Killing puppies was not ‘needed’ to prove the troop’s undying loyalty. So why do it?

We can talk of the importance of performativity for an authoritarian regime such as Assad's. The aforementioned footage was meant to perform strength. I guess, in a way, it does. The strength to kill snakes and the strength to kill those famous dangerous beasts, puppies.

I've watched that footage multiple times over the years. I couldn't get over it. I still can't. I'm a dog person and have always lived with dogs. I can promise you that not even morbid curiosity explains it. It's repulsive. Horrifying.

But I’ve since figured it out, I think. Why it kept on playing in my head over the years.

It's pathetic. It's really pathetic. And that's actually very revealing.

Soldiers are seen doing some military manoeuvres, and being really bad at them. It's just not impressive. There are no sounds in the footage besides some shitty music, but I can just imagine them. The men are yelling as they jump from a car and.. that's it. Other men are seen walking in unison, and not even that well.

The women then kill the snakes in the most needlessly cruel way possible (and then roast them, because sure). Oh, I should also mention this: the snakes were not even in the wild, or laying around or something. The soldiers were not on some hunt to prove some wilderness skills. The snakes were just handed to them (from some box, presumably). They just carried them, and then did the thing. That's it. That's the extent of the stunt.

As for the puppies, they didn't kill them quickly. If the goal was to prove that you're a cold blooded killer for the dear leader, how are you doing a better job at it by failing to kill a puppy immediately? I counted them. One of the men stabbed the puppy five times, but the puppy is still seen moving. So he takes it up, throws it on the ground, and then stabs it some more times before the footage cuts to him throwing that puppy's corpse on the floor. The other man, meanwhile? He throws his puppy on the floor, stabs it once, and then bites it in the neck. They don't show what happens after. Maybe he did some more stabbing.

That's what the Syrian military believed projected strength in 1983, which is curious, because so much had already happened since Hafez took power.

Let's take a step back.

There is a reason why I'm spending this much time talking about one horrible footage. I think it shows that Hafez had nothing to boast about.

By the time of that parade, the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights was already 16 years old (1967), and the Syrian intervention in Lebanon was already 7 years old (1976). What had the Assad regime, the one that centered so much of its own mythology on the fight against Israel, achieved by then?

Let's do a quick summary.

Syria had abandoned the occupied Golan Heights to Israel after losing the 1973 war, the second loss by the Syrian Baathists at the hands of the Israelis in 6 years. Hafez was head of the air force until 1966, just a year before the Israelis obliterated it during the 1967 war, most of it in a single day. By 1973, that second war, Syria was already weakened by three coups, all of which involved Hafez: the 1963 one which brought the Baathists to power (Hafez becomes head of the air force), the 1966 one which got rid of Baathist leaders (Hafez becomes defense minister), and finally the 1970 one that brings Hafez to power (he achieves dear leader status).

We're now in 1976. Three years after losing the 1973 war, Hafez decides it's time to mobilize the troops again. Remember, his entire thing was what a net positive his regime was for the Palestinian cause. The great liberator. So clearly the troops are to be mobilized to liberate the Golan Heights, right? After all, they already lost two wars. Surely this would be it.

Instead, Syria invaded Lebanon and crushed the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), the one that was allied with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Five years before the Israelis would do the exact same thing, Hafez's Syria invaded Lebanon to destroy the Palestinian militias and actively facilitated the massacre of Palestinian civilians by the far right Christian Lebanese Forces.³ Five years before the Sabra and Shatila massacre, committed by the same militias with Israeli backing, the Assad regime oversaw the massacre of Tel El Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp. A year later, the Assad regime assassinated the head of the LNM, Kamal Jumblatt.

It was the Assad regime that facilitated the Israeli invasion of my country, a fact that too many to this day remain in denial of. By the time the Israelis decided to do their full-scale invasion of Lebanon, five entire years had passed. The largely leftwing resistance was crushed - by Hafez al-Assad in 1976, and Israel in 1978. The PLO was crushed - by Hafez al-Assad in 1976, and Israel in 1978. By 1982, they were mostly crushed, which made it easier for Israel to invade once more, and this time go deeper into Lebanon.⁴

We're now getting closer to 1983 and that footage, but not quite yet.

In February 1982, just four months before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, another event occured.

This would be Hafez al-Assad's only other military victory besides the 1976 one in Lebanon.

Following an uprising against his regime in the city of Hama, and years of on-and-off rebellions by Muslim Brotherhood supporters and others, Hafez (and his brother Rifaat) decided to solve the problem of the rebellious city of Hama once and for all. They laid siege to the city, combined with mass bombardments from land and skies. It was relentless for weeks on end and, by the end of the month, they had killed tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians.⁵

These were the only two military victories by Hafez al-Assad's regime, the first one against Palestinians and Lebanese, and the second one against Syrians. This was the ‘pro-Palestine’ regime we were sold.

It this context, the 1983 footage of Hafez's puppy killers is not just cruel. It shows how empty he already was by then. The military man who lost against the Israelis and whose only victories were against ‘his’ people was content to have men and women do stunts for him while his subordinates applaud them and/or him.

This is something that I still wrestle with. The emptiness of such men does not make them less dangerous. The Hama massacre was one of the bloodiest massacres since WWII, and it was by a regime against its own people. That same regime's intervention in Lebanon prolonged a two-year war that might have ended then and there into a fifteen-year long one that shaped generations. That intervention facilitated the Israeli occupation that birthed Hezbollah, the party that would come to dominate Lebanese politics and then itself intervene in Syria to help protect that same Assad regime, now Hafez's son, Bashar.

Bashar dealt with the 2011 revolution as his father dealt with the 1982 Hama uprising: massacre after massacre after massacre. Entire cities were annihilated Israel-style by the combined airpower of Russia and the remnants of the Syrian air force, that same air force that failed to liberate the Golan Heights under Hafez (and didn't even bother trying under Bashar). The death toll may have reasonably surpassed the million, overwhelmingly at the hands of the regime. Unlike his father, however, Bashar was not even able to ‘win’. His regime nearly fell multiple times, necessitating the intervention of Hezbollah (and other Iran-backed allies), Iran and even Russia.

And despite having the mighty Russians and Iranians on his side, despite having the most powerful Arab militia on his side, the Assad regime collapsed in just over a week, its leader leaving in such a hurry he forgot intimate photos in the presidential palace.

That was the glorious Assad regime.

What it achieved in five decades is losing Syrian territory to the Israelis, invading Lebanon, destroying Hama - and that was just under the father. The son would then murder even more people and destroy even more cities. He also assassinated prominent Lebanese figures who opposed him, just like daddy did.

What's more? Bashar wasn't even Hafez's first choice. He was the third. Hafez wanted Rifaat, his brother, the butcher of Hama. But Rifaat tried to do his own coup d’etat, against Hafez. It didn't work out, so Rifaat was exiled. So Hafez wanted his eldest son, Bassel, to take over, but Bassel wanted to drive his fancy Mercedes really fast on his way to the airport to get his privately chartered flight to the alps. He crashed it, didn't have his seatbelt on, died instantly. He was 31. It's a very wholesome family, the Assads.

So we got the ophtalmologist living in London as next in line for the throne. That's Bashar. And it's that guy who would become the single greatest killer of Syrians of all time.

It's with all of that in mind that I rewatch that 1983 footage of the puppy killers, because I just can't get over it. All of that, for this? All that death and destruction, all that generational trauma, and it all ended with the mighty lions running away with their tails between their legs? And it took just over a week?

No glorious end for the puppy killer, at least. His mausoleum was looted, set on fire, and burned in December 2024. Bassel's tomb was also in it.⁶ Daddy's shiny tomb burned alongside his favorite son's, while his third option for successor fled to Moscow, or wherever the f- he is now. That was the end of the Assad dynasty. Just like that.

1. They are available online, but they're too horrible to share.

2. Which was initially given by Saddam Hussein to Donald Rumsfeld in 1983. Hussein's Baathist regime was, by the 1980s, in very bad terms with the Assad's Baathist regime, so Hussein had hoped to show the Americans how evil the Syrians were. I'll note here that Rumseld said the video of soldiers stabbing puppies “was hardly convincing,” because Rumself didn't find that to be evidence enough of Assad's cruelty.

3. In fact, just two years after Hafez’s war on the PLO, the Israelis had their ‘first Lebanon war', against the PLO. That was in 1978. I'm focusing on 1982 because it was the full-scale invasion, mirroring the Syrian one of 1976.

4. What's more, the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon coexisted with the Syrian occupation of the rest of Lebanon for the entirety of 1982 to 2000.

The Israeli occupation lasted from 1982 to 2000, and they have been occupying Lebanese lands again since 2024. The Syrian occupation lasted from 1976 to 2005.

5. We don’t know how many, estimates vary from 20 to 40,000 with some 17,000 ‘missing'. The use of all-Alawi brigades to kill the mostly Sunni population of Hama would fuel sectarianism, a problem that continues to exist to this day. I won't get into that as much here because I want to dedicate another article on the phenomenon of sectarianization.

6. Anisa's too - that's Hafez's wife, Bashar's mom.