1. Under the rule of the Syrian Ba'ath Party, the Syrian Arab Republic was ruled by the Alawite Hafez al-Assad, his son Bashar al-Assad, and other Shi'ites, giving the 3,000,000 Alawites in Syria rule

2. In Lisa Wedeen's 1999 study of the Syrian regime of Hafez al-Assad, Ambiguities of Domination, she wrote that the Assad regime "can compel people to say the ridiculous and to avow the Absurd." In