Abdul Halim Khaddam

Abdul Halim Khaddam (عبد الحليم خدام; 15 September 1932 – 31 March 2020) was a Syrian politician who served as interim President of Syria in 2000.

Abdul Halim Khaddam was born on 15 September 1932, in Baniyas, Syria.

His family was Sunni Muslim with a middle-class origin, and his father was a respected lawyer.

Khaddam obtained his elementary and secondary education in Baniyas and then studied law at Damascus University.

Khaddam became a member of the Baath Party when he was just 17 years old.

He began his political career as governor of Quneitra after the party came to power in 1963.

Then he was appointed governor of Hama and Damascus.

His first government portfolio was economy and trade minister in the cabinet formed by then head of Syria, Nureddin al Attasi, in 1969, making him the youngest minister in Syrian political history.

Then he was named as an advisor to Hafez Assad.

He later served in the Cabinet of Syria.

From 1970 until 1984 he was Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister under the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad.

In January 1976, Khaddam argued that Lebanon was part of Syria.

Khaddam was slightly injured in an attack in Damascus in December 1976.

In October 1977, Khaddam again survived an assassination attempt at the Abu Dhabi International Airport.

In the course of the attack, Saif Ghobash, the United Arab Emirates' first Minister of State for Foreign Affairs was killed.

The Syrian authorities argued that it had been planned and carried out by Iraq.

Khaddam reported that Rifat Assad also tried to kill him.

During his visit to Tehran in August 1979 following the Iranian Revolution, he publicly stated that the Syrian government backed the revolution before and after the revolutionary process.

He also was Vice President of Syria and "High Commissioner" to Lebanon from 1984 to 2005.

He then served as Vice President from 11 March 1984 to 2005.

He was responsible for political and foreign affairs as vice president.

He accumulated substantial wealth while in office: a Credit Suisse account, opened in 1994, was nearly 90 million Swiss francs in September 2003, per Suisse secrets.

He accumulated substantial wealth while in office: a Credit Suisse account, opened in 1994, was nearly 90 million Swiss francs in September 2003, per Suisse secrets.

Khaddam was chief mediator during the Lebanon Civil War, thus giving him the unofficial titles of "High Commissioner" or "Godfather" of Lebanon.

After the death of Hafez Assad in 2000, a 9-member committee was founded, which was headed by Khaddam, to oversee the transition period.

He was appointed by this committee as interim President of Syria on 10 June and was in consideration to be Assad's permanent successor, but instead helped Assad's son, Bashar al-Assad, who took office in July 2000.

Khaddam was one of the only senior officials in Syria who was close to Lebanese Ministers and members of Parliament, most notorious was his friendship with Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Hariri partnered with Khaddam's sons in many businesses projects in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

As the new president, Bashar Assad strengthened his grip on the Baathist bureaucracy, Khaddam, and other members of the "old guard" of the government, gradually lost influence.

He was long known as a loyalist of Hafez Assad until he resigned from his position and left the country in 2005 in protest against certain policies of Hafez's son and successor, Bashar Assad.

He announced his resignation on 5 June 2005 during the Baath Party conference after publicly criticizing the regime's many blunders, especially in Lebanon, making him the only high ranking Syrian official to publicly resign office while in Syria and at a Ba'ath Party conference, a move which many inside Syria considered extremely brave because of the potential risks involved.

He then went to France with his family in fear for their safety as intelligence reports started coming in of potential assassination plots against him and other members of his family by the Assad regime.

That made him the last influential member of the "old guard" to leave the top tier of the government.

The announcement came at a point when Bashar Al-Assad had been trying to have his political wings clipped.

After resigning, he relocated to Paris ostensibly to write his memoirs.

On 30 December 2005, Khaddam fled Syria.

In an interview with Al Arabiya on the same day, Khaddam denounced Assad's many "political blunders" in dealing with Lebanon.

He especially attacked Rustum Ghazali, former head of Syrian operations in Lebanon, but defended his predecessor, Ghazi Kanaan, Syria's interior minister.

Khaddam also said that former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, to whom Khaddam was considered close, "received many threats" from Syria's President Bashar al-Assad.

The Syrian parliament responded the next day by voting to bring treason charges against him, and the Baath Party expelled him.