Amin al-Hafiz

Amin al-Hafiz (أمين الحافظ 12 November 1921 – 17 December 2009), also known as Amin Hafez, was a Syrian general, politician, and member of the Ba'ath Party who served as the President of Syria from 27 July 1963 to 23 February 1966.

Amin al-Hafiz was born in 1921 in a Sunni Arab family, the son of a police officer from the city of Aleppo.

When he was young, like other students, he threw stones at the French colonial authorities during the French mandate of Syria.

In 1948, at the age of 27, al-Hafiz volunteered to fight in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.

In 1954, he joined the uprising against Adib Shishakli and was promoted to command the Eastern Front at Deir ez-Zor and then to be commander of the Homs academy, before being posted to Cairo.

When Syria broke with Egypt in September 1961, al-Hafiz was sent home to Damascus.

During his stay in Damascus, he was contacted again by the military committee's leader, Muhammad Umran.

In December 1961, the Qudsi regime exiled Amin to Buenos Aires as military attaché, and it was from there that he was summoned back to Syria by the victorious officers after the 8 March coup.

The coup d'état, led by the military committee, introduced al-Hafiz to public life.

In the aftermath, the National Council of the Revolutionary Command (NCRC) became the country's supreme organ.

It was dominated by the Syrian branch of the radical, pan-Arab Ba'ath Party.

Amin became president, instituted socialist reforms, and oriented his country towards the Eastern Bloc.

On 23 February 1966, al-Hafiz was overthrown by a radical Ba'athist faction headed by Chief of Staff Salah Jadid.

A late warning telegram of the coup d'état was sent from Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to Nasim al-Safarjalani (The General Secretary of Presidential Council), on the early morning of the coup d'état.

The coup sprung out of factional rivalry between Jadid's "regionalist" (qutri) camp of the Ba'ath Party, which promoted ambitions for a Greater Syria, and the more traditionally pan-Arab al-Hafiz faction, called the "nationalist" (qawmi) faction.

Jadid's supporters were also seen as more radically left-wing.

The coup was also supported and led by officers from Syria's religious minorities, especially the Alawites and the Druze, whereas al-Hafiz belonged to the majority Sunni population.

After being wounded in the three-hour shootout that preceded the coup, in which two of his children were seriously injured, al-Hafiz was jailed in Damascus's Mezzeh prison before being sent to Lebanon in June 1967.

A year later, he was relocated to Baghdad.

In 1971, the courts of Damascus sentenced him to death in absentia; however, Saddam Hussein "treated him and his fellow exile, Ba'ath founder Michel Aflaq, like royalty", and the sentence was not carried out.

After the fall of Saddam in the Iraq War of 2003, al-Hafiz was quietly allowed to return to Syria.

He died in Aleppo on 17 December 2009; reports of his age differ, but he was believed to be in his late 80s.

He received a state-sponsored funeral.

Amin al-Hafiz was portrayed by Waleed Zuaiter in the Netflix series The Spy.