Damascus: Syria historians have long regarded Dara’a—a sleepy town in the south—as a Ba’ath stronghold, despite the fact that it was considered the cradle of the Syrian revolution when the current conflict erupted in 2011.
Nearly eight years later, the Syrian government is wrapping up an operation aimed at recapturing the city, with major battles currently underway in its western countryside.
Dara’a played a big role in the Ba’ath party takeover of 1963, after suffering from years of neglect at the hands of the nobility in Damascus and Aleppo, where native southerners were kept away from senior government or military posts.
Dara’a natives had flooded Ba’ath ranks in the 1950s, seeing it as a platform to answer their numerous political and economic grievances.
The Ba’ath party heavily relied on Dara’a for recruitment of young cadets, both to the party and the armed forces, promising them a better future if and when they ever came to power.
“The Houran (south western Syria) was an important recruiting ground for the early Ba’ath. Throughout the early decades of Ba’athist rule, Houranis played a key role in tying Damascus to the countryside and pushing socialist reforms that benefitted smaller farmers at the expense of absentee landlords,” Joshua Landis a Syria expert and professor at Oklahoma University told Gulf News.
“The first decades of Ba’ath policy were focused on the benefiting the rural middle class, bringing schools, medicine and state services to rural areas. Under the Ba’ath party, the Houranis became part of the new Sunni rural elites,” he added.
The man who staged the Ba’ath coup was actually a Nasserist officer from Dara’a named Ziad Al Hariri, who hailed from one of the most prominent and powerful clans in the Houran.
He led his brigade from the Israeli border in the Syrian south to Damascus, where he overthrew the civilian government of then-President Nazem Al Qudsi, briefly serving as Defense Minister and Chief-of-Staff in 1963.
He was the first officer from Dara’a to reach such senior positions.
Two years later, Mansour Al Atrash, another native of Houran, became commander of the Revolutionary Command Council in Syria, a political body modeled after its counterpart in Egypt.
In 1966-1968, Syria got its second army commander from Dara’a, being General Ahmad Suwaidani, who led Syrian troops in the 1967 War against Israel.
Mahmoud Al Zoubi, a scion of another prominent Dara’a family, became Prime Minister of Syria from 1987-2000 under the rule of Hafez Al Assad, the father of current president Bashar.
This was a major accomplishment given that the post was traditionally held by Damascenes or Aleppines.
In 2012-2016, under Bashar, the post was held by Wael Al Halaki, another Dara’a native.
Umran Al Zoubi was Syria’s first Information Minister from Dara’a in 2012-2016.
High on the list of Dara’a Ba’athists was Farouk Al Shara, the long-serving Foreign Minister of Hafez Al Assad, who became Vice-President in 2005-2014.
Faisal Al Mekdad, another scion of a prominent family from Busra in the Syrian south, is the present Deputy Foreign Minister.
Despite the list of high ranking officials in Al Assad’s government, the people of Dara’a had felt for a long time that the Ba’ath party failed to deliver on promises made to them to improve their conditions.
To them, the government still fostered corruption and nepotism, the plagues they were trying to address when helping found the Ba’ath party decades earlier.
A corrupted governor only further aggravated the situation, topped with a water shortage that hit the agricultural sector badly.
Senior Dara’a officials failed to heed the complaints of the residents, thinking the region was too loyal to revolt.
At the time, when protests first broke out in 2011, it seemed the government was caught by surprise, Landis explains.
“They realised that old bonds between the Ba’ath and the countryside had broken along with the breakdown of services and subsidy guarantees granted to rural Syrians in exchange for their political acquiescence,” he said.
The revolutionary spirit of Houran dates back to the days of French mandate rule where the people of Dara’a were vehemently anti-colonial.
In the summer of 1920, then-Prime Minister Alaa Al Deen Droubi was killed in Khirbet Ghazaleh, 17-km northeast of Dara’a, accused of being a collaborator with the French Mandate regime.
When occupying Syria earlier that summer, the French had divided the country into city-stages, making Dara’a part of the Druze State, with its capital in Al Suwaida.
It remained an independent political entity until 1936.
In 1925, nationalists from the Druze Mountain staged a military revolt against the French, led by Sultan Pasha Al Atrash.
They fought a guerrilla war for two years and were subsequently defeated and either killed or exiled to neighbouring Jordan, where they were received a red-carpet welcome at the palace of King Abdullah, the great-grandfather of present monarch, Abdullah II.
“While the revolt was brutally stamped out by France, a slew of heroic figures emerged which helped advance emerging Syrian identity,” David Lesch, a professor of history at Trinity University in the US told Gulf News.
Jordan’s relations with Dara’a remained exceptionally close for the next century.
When the French evacuated Syria in 1946, many prominent Houranis (people from southwestern Syria) sought unification with the kingdom of Jordan, pledging loyalty to the king of Jordan. In Amman, they were often courted and praised for their fighting skills, Arab identity, and economic weight, contrary to Syria, where many urban notables treated them as an underclass. The soldiers among them looked toward their counterparts in Jordan, who were better trained, better fed, and treated with high honours by the king and his top officials, making Jordan seem like an attractive home to many.
In 1948, the Arab League Summit was held in Dara’a—a crucial time period given the creation of the state of Israel in the same year on Palestinian land.
In 1954, an insurgency against the Syrian government in Houran was squashed.
Jordan temporarily suspended relations with Damascus after the ensuing battles.
Houran’s relations with the central government in Damascus remained strained throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
During these two decades, the region was largely ignored by the central government despite the fact that the majority of the country’s wheat came from the area.
No head of state visited Houran until 1958, when Egyptian President, Jamal Abdul Nasser visited Al Suwaida, during the brief period of Syrian-Egyptian unification.
Ancient past
The city of Dara’a dates back to the Canaanite Era in the 14th century BC and is mentioned in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in the First Testament—although under different names.
It was built on an ancient lava field that encompassed southwestern Syria including areas currently part of the Occupied Golan Heights and Jabal Druze to the east, along the Jordanian border.
The lava enriched the soil of these lands making them some of the most fertile areas in Syria since the Roman era.
Under Ottoman times it became a major juncture on the Hijaz Railway linking Damascus to Madinah.
