Ba'athism Once Dominated the Middle East... Now It's Gone

On December 8, 2024, Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus for Russia as rebel forces closed in on the Syrian capital. With that flight, a 54-year dynasty collapsed—and with it, the last Ba’athist government on Earth. When ideologies die, they usually leave echoes behind: nostalgia, apologists, half-remembered myths. Soviet communism still has its devotees. Fascism, nearly a century after its defeat, continues to find admirers in parts of the West. Ba’athism, by contrast, leaves almost nothing behind at all. Today, it holds exactly one elected seat anywhere in the world—a single representative in Lebanon’s parliament, who may well be the last Ba’athist ever chosen by voters.

What Ba’athism did leave behind is devastation.

Iraq under Saddam Hussein and Syria under the Assads did not simply fail; they shattered their societies. Genocide against the Kurds, chemical weapons against civilians, cities reduced to rubble, and regimes so obsessed with power that they preferred annihilation to surrender. And yet, despite the scale of the destruction, Ba’athism itself receives remarkably little attention in history books. That absence is worth correcting, because the story of Ba’athism is also the story of how autocrats seized politically popular ideas—borrowed from socialism, nationalism, and fascism alike—promising Arab unity while systematically tearing the Arab world apart.

To understand how this happened, it helps to start with what was lost.

From Prosperity to Ruin

For centuries, Aleppo was one of the great cities of the Middle East. Under the Ottomans, it was their third-largest city after Istanbul and Cairo, a commercial hub drawing merchants from Europe, Persia, and beyond. Baghdad, meanwhile, stood at the heart of ancient Mesopotamia. Babylon, long before modern borders existed, was once the richest and most powerful city on Earth.

Today, nearly three-quarters of Aleppo lies in ruins. Iraq, though slowly recovering, is doing so only after decades of war, sanctions, dictatorship, and foreign occupation that left deep and lasting scars. Meanwhile, many Gulf states—places that were relative backwaters when Baghdad and Aleppo were at their height—have become the region’s modern power brokers.

So what went wrong?

The answer begins in the aftermath of the First World War.

The Birth of an Idea

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire shattered a political order that had governed much of the Arab world for centuries. Into the vacuum stepped the European victors. Britain and France divided the region under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, with France taking Syria and Lebanon and Britain controlling Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine.

Two young Arab intellectuals came of age under this system: Michel Aflaq and Salah ad-Din al-Bitar. Both were born in Damascus around 1910, and both grew up watching French soldiers patrol their streets while foreign administrators governed their country. When Syria gained independence in 1946, political space finally opened for domestic movements that had been suppressed for decades. The following year, the UN’s partition of Palestine sent shockwaves through the Arab world, reinforcing the sense that independence was fragile and incomplete.

Out of this turmoil emerged a new vision. In 1947, Aflaq, a Greek Orthodox Christian, and al-Bitar, a Sunni Muslim, founded the Ba’ath Party. The name literally meant “resurrection” or “rebirth.”

Their premise was radical. They rejected both the Ottoman system, which organized society along religious lines, and the European mandates, which imposed artificial national borders. Under Ottoman rule, religion defined legal status, taxes, marriage, and even neighborhoods. A Christian in Damascus had more in common with a Christian in Baghdad than with his Muslim neighbor. For the Ottomans, this system was both practical and self-serving, allowing Turkish Muslim rulers to emphasize shared faith over ethnic differences.

Aflaq and al-Bitar wanted to overturn that entirely.

Unity, Liberty, Socialism

At the heart of Ba’athist ideology was Arabness itself. Language, culture, and shared history—not religion—were to be the foundation of society. Religious identity would be respected as a personal matter, but it would no longer organize the state. In that sense, Ba’athism was secular, though not atheistic. Mosque and church would be separate from government, even if faith continued to shape individual lives.

Their slogan captured the vision: Unity, Liberty, Socialism.

Unity was the most ambitious—and most dangerous—component. The Ba’athists did not imagine a loose cultural solidarity. They envisioned a single Arab nation stretching across the Middle East, with colonial borders erased entirely. This set them apart from other Arab nationalists. Muammar Gaddafi, for example, embraced Arab identity but never threatened Libyan sovereignty. Ba’athists, at least early on, were willing to dissolve the state itself in pursuit of unity.

Their socialism also differed from Soviet Marxism. Class struggle was not the defining conflict. Ba’athists rejected the idea that Arab workers and Arab landowners belonged to opposing camps. The true dividing line, they argued, was ethnic—not economic. The state would intervene heavily in the economy, nationalize key industries, redistribute land, and lead development projects. But private property was allowed to exist. Small businesses were not the enemy.

Ba’athism is often remembered as a left-wing, anti-colonial ideology—and it was—but its fascist elements are frequently overlooked. From the beginning, they were present.

Fascist Influences and Dangerous Borrowings

One of the party’s early intellectual influences, Zaki al-Arsuzi, had ties to the Syrian League of National Action, which openly borrowed from European fascism. Nazi literature circulated widely among Ba’athist elites. Sami al-Jundi, a party leader, later recalled, “We were racialists, admiring Nazism… We were the first to think of translating Mein Kampf into Arabic.”

Anti-Semitism, already present in parts of European fascist thought, intensified after the creation of Israel in 1948. Yet the founders faced a practical problem: how do you sell a secular nationalist ideology to societies still deeply shaped by religion?

Aflaq concluded that Islam would have to be treated with special reverence—not as law, but as history. It would be framed as the supreme achievement of Arab civilization. This wasn’t religious endorsement; there would be no Sharia state. It was political necessity.

By the 1950s, the strategy worked. Ba’athist branches spread across Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and Yemen. In Syria, the party became the second-largest force in parliament. What began as coffeehouse philosophy was becoming a serious political movement.

What it lacked was unity in practice.

The United Arab Republic: A Dream That Failed

In 1957, Syrian politics collided with Cold War fears. Communists were gaining ground, Western powers were alarmed, and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser had become a regional hero after the Suez Crisis. Despite the military reality, Nasser symbolized defiance against imperialism.

Caught up in the wave of Nasserism, Ba’athists made a fateful move: they pushed for Syria to merge with Egypt. In February 1958, the United Arab Republic was born.

It was supposed to be Pan-Arab unity realized. Instead, it became a lesson in power.

Rule centralized in Cairo. Egyptians filled key positions. Nasser treated Syrian partners as rivals, not equals. Within two years, Syrian elites were sidelined, and the Ba’ath Party had dissolved itself—handing all leverage to a man with no intention of sharing power.

In 1961, Syrian officers staged a coup and withdrew from the union. The dream collapsed.

The founders blamed betrayal. A younger generation of officers drew a harsher lesson: never surrender power again.

From Ideology to Dictatorship

Among those officers was Hafez al-Assad. Along with others, he formed a clandestine Military Committee. They were not philosophers; they were pragmatists. In 1963, they seized power in Syria. Iraq’s Ba’athists followed in 1968.

Instead of unity, rivalry followed. Within years, the Ba’ath Party split into Syrian and Iraqi factions, each claiming legitimacy and denouncing the other as traitors. Aflaq fled to Iraq. Unity died quietly.

By the 1970s, Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq had consolidated power. Ideology became a tool, not a guide. Personality cults replaced principles. Security services expanded to rival the Stasi. In Syria, informants filled classrooms and taxis. In Iraq, one in five citizens was reportedly tied to the party or intelligence services.

Ba’athist unity meant nothing when Saddam invaded Iran in 1980. Assad sided with Iran—non-Arab Iran—against fellow Ba’athists in Baghdad. Pipelines were cut. Kurdish rebels were armed. And in northern Iraq, Arabization campaigns escalated into genocide.

The Anfal Campaign of 1988 culminated in chemical attacks on Halabja, killing over 5,000 civilians in hours. “Chemical Ali” earned his name.

Sectarian Power Behind Secular Rhetoric

Ba’athism was not Nazism. Minorities often supported it, especially those marginalized under traditional systems. In Syria, Alawites, Christians, and Druze found protection within the regime. In Iraq, Sunnis—though a minority—used Ba’athism to maintain dominance over a Shia majority.

But power concentrated brutally. By the 1990s, Alawites dominated Syria’s military far beyond their population share. In Iraq, Saddam favored Sunnis from his hometown. Ideology became camouflage for sectarian authoritarianism.

Economically, both states stagnated. Iraq’s GDP per capita collapsed from nearly $4,000 in 1979 to under $1,000 by the late 1990s. Syria fell far behind countries like South Korea, once its peer.

Party membership became transactional. Loyalty mattered more than belief.

Dynasties and Collapse

When Hafez al-Assad died in 2000, the farce became explicit. Bashar al-Assad was elevated overnight. The constitution was amended to fit his age. A referendum delivered 97% approval.

Saddam followed a similar path, grooming his sons.

By then, Ba’athism was hollow. Its slogans rang false. When Iraq fell in 2003, the regime collapsed almost instantly. Syria lasted longer—but only through fear, foreign backing, and sectarian survival rhetoric.

In 2024, even that wasn’t enough.

Assad fled. The regime unraveled. What remained was ruin: half a million dead, millions displaced, an economy destroyed, a currency devalued by 99.5%.

The True Legacy of Ba’athism

Ba’athism was not killed by war. It died long before. By the time bombs fell on Aleppo, the ideology had already collapsed under the weight of its contradictions.

It promised unity but delivered division. It claimed liberation but relied on fear. It sought to transcend sectarianism and ultimately retreated into it.

What remains is a warning: grand visions imposed by force do not erase real differences. When ideology fails, only coercion is left—and coercion cannot last forever.

That is the true legacy of Ba’athism.