Amin al-Hafiz (1921-17 December 2009) was President of Syria from 27 July 1963 to 23 February 1966, succeeding Lu'ay al-Atassi and preceding Nureddin al-Atassi. He seized power from President Nazim al-Kudsi in the 1963 Syrian coup d'etat and brought the Ba'athist movement in power, only to be overthrown by a rival Ba'athist faction under Salah Jadid in the 1966 Syrian coup d'etat.
Biography
Amin al-Hafiz was born in 1921 in Aleppo, Syria to a Sunni Muslim family, and he served in the Syrian Army as a Brigadier. He was posted to Cairo, Egypt under the United Arab Republic, but when the 1961 Syrian coup d'etat occurred, he was sent to Argentina as military attache so that he would be far away from Syria. While he was in Buenos Aires, he met the Israeli Mossad spy Eli Cohen, who was posing as the Syrian expatriate businessman "Kamel Amin Thaabet". Cohen befriended al-Hafiz after flattering him by calling him a patriot and a national hero, and he promised that, when the time came for al-Hafiz to rise to power, he would support him.
Their friendship grew over the years, and al-Hafiz unofficially returned to Syria in 1962 after the Ba'athist leader Michel Aflaq recruited him to lead an Arab nationalist coup against the weak government. Cohen, who had arrived in Syria that same year, was approached by Aflaq and al-Hafiz, who had Cohen host a party on 8 March 1963 to distract the Cabinet and top military officials from al-Hafiz's takeover. The 1963 Syrian coup d'etat saw al-Hafiz and Colonel Salim Hatum lead a faction of Ba'athist soldiers in overthrowing the Syrian government and forcing President Nazim al-Kudsi to resign at gunpoint.
al-Hafiz became the new President of Syria on 27 July 1963, and the Ba'ath Party was established as the ruling party of the country. In 1965, al-Hafiz was forced to have his former friend Cohen executed after discovering that he had been spying for Israel. On 23 February 1966, al-Hafiz himself was overthrown by a radical Ba'ath Party member named Salah Jadid, and he went into exile in Iraq, where the Ba'athist government supported the pre-coup "Aflaqite" faction and opposed Jadid's faction. al-Hafiz and Aflaq were treated like royalty by Saddam Hussein, and al-Hafiz returned to Syria following Saddam's downfall in 2003. He died in Aleppo in 2009.
Gallery
