The Vanguard Fighters Uprising

In 1979, the air in Syria—and Homs in particular—thickened with a new kind of dread. Assassinations had become the city’s background noise, and the "Fighting Vanguard" of the Muslim Brotherhood was quietly swelling its ranks. I was in my final year of high school, a time when my primary enemy wasn t the regime, but Calculus. Our state teachers were incompetent, leaving us stranded in a sea of complex equations we couldn t solve.Word reached me through a friend that a young man was offering free mathematics lessons at the "Between the Two Minarets" mosque. The sessions were held in the hollow, quiet hour between the Maghrib and Isha prayers. I went, desperate to grasp the logic of integration.The teacher was a man in his twenties, unassuming, with a neatly trimmed beard. He stood before us, chalk dust on his fingers, explaining the material in broad strokes. But his mind seemed to occupy two places at once. He would pause mid-formula, staring at the wall as if seeing a different reality. Then, without warning, he would break the silence."As you know," he began, his voice dropping an octave, "Syria has been ruled by the Ba ath Party since the coup they call a ‘Revolution.’ And as you know, its architect was Michel Aflaq—a Christian."The room grew taut. One student, sensing the danger of the tangent, raised his hand. "Sir, could you please repeat the integration problem? If it s possible?"The teacher snapped out of his reverie and returned to the chalkboard. But the "lessons" continued to bleed into one another. He wasn t just solving for -$-x-$--;- he was solving for Syria. "Assad is a tyrant," he muttered later, his eyes hardening. "He has filled the officer corps with men from Qardaha to turn our own army against us."I knew then: this wasn t just a math class. It was a recruitment cell. I leaned over to my friend and whispered, "Did we come here for calculus´-or-a history of coups?" I stopped attending. Three months later, I opened the state newspaper to find his face staring back at me. He had been "liquidated." The headline called him a terrorist caught transporting weapons to a warehouse. To the state, he was a criminal-;- to many in the shadows of Homs, he was a martyr.At the time, we celebrated the Vanguard’s operations in whispers. Hafez al-Assad had stripped the mask of national unity to reveal a blatant sectarianism, staffing the intelligence services with his own kin. These men delighted in humiliating us at "flying checkpoints," hurling insults as they thumbed through our IDs.The violence soon moved from the shadows to the streets. One morning, the crackle of gunfire near the Bab Tadmur cemetery jolted me awake. When the air cleared, I found a military bus overturned at the intersection of Wadi al-Sayeh. It lay on its side like a slaughtered beast, riddled with bullet holes. Five men had executed the ambush with surgical precision—shooting the tires to force a crash before finishing off the twenty officers inside.The cycle of blood accelerated. I remember a Friday, shortly before the call to prayer, when a man in a Suzuki was flagged at a checkpoint. He didn t stop-;- he pulled a pistol, killed the agent, and fled toward the Hamidiya neighborhood. A full battalion gave chase, cornering him inside the Al-Huda Mosque.In those days, the regime still hesitated to storm a house of God. They instead cordoned off two kilometers, a thousand soldiers waiting like wolves at the entrance. As the worshippers emerged, they were met with boots and rifle butts. "Get lost!" the soldiers screamed, kicking men as they checked their papers. Once the mosque was "empty," the agents stormed in, firing blindly.The man was not on the floor. He was in the minaret.He opened fire from above, a final, desperate stand. I don’t know how many he took with him, but eventually, the sheer volume of lead brought him down. He fell, riddled with bullets, onto the stones below.Looking back, that era was a grim paradox. These operations, intended to topple the regime, only served to harden it. When the Vanguard cells were purged from the cities, they retreated to Hama, believing it a fortress. They brought rifles to a fight against T-72 tanks and fighter jets.The regime didn’t just survive-;- it calcified, ensuring a bloody inheritance for the son. It took decades for the Syrian people to find their voice again, rising in the streets against the heir apparent. But the enigma remains: how a coup in 1963 evolved into a machine that could destroy two-thirds of a country and still be standing at the end of 2024.

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