Fares Al-Dhahabi
At a time when regional alliances between Gulf states and Western powers, or between the traditional axes of the Middle East, attract widespread attention, relations between Syria and Pakistan—or, more precisely, between the al-Assad family in the past and Islamabad—remain one of the overlooked aspects of Arab diplomacy. They are unconventional relations, deeply rooted in the political backstage of the Middle East, complex in their symbolism, and ambiguous in their objectives, not to mention their contribution to undermining regional harmony and their broader destabilizing role in the Middle East.
Zulfikar Bhutto assumed the Pakistani foreign ministry in 1963 and remained in the post until 1966. Those were decisive years for Syria, particularly with regard to the Military Committee of the Ba’ath Party seizing power in the country. During that period, relations between the two countries developed significantly, with the support of Salah Jadid and under Bhutto’s personal patronage.
In 1971, Pakistan lost the eastern part of its territory, which it had acquired following the partition of the Indian subcontinent after the ill-fated religious conflict between “Muslims and Hindus.” President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto then sought to create a new image for himself and for his newly established, vast country before the world. He did so by supporting selected causes that he had carefully chosen after considerable deliberation.
He focused on the conflict in the Middle East, while his sense of permanent vulnerability due to Pakistan’s ethnic composition and its rivalry with India pushed him to selectively magnify his country’s role—and his own personal role—at the regional level, in order to consolidate support for his position domestically, despite Pakistan’s being overwhelmed by countless problems of development, underdevelopment, extremism, and declining domestic resources.
Bhutto’s government therefore played a decisive role in several troubled countries in the region at the time. Pakistani forces participated in the 1969 fighting in Jordan, while the contribution of Pakistani pilots to the 1973 war in Syria was extraordinary for its time and had a significant impact.
Then came the beginning of a warm relationship, when Hafez al-Assad visited Pakistan in 1974 to attend the Islamic Conference summit in Lahore. There, a political friendship was born between him and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto—one that had been deliberately cultivated by Assad and carried promises that went beyond mere “Arab-Islamic” solidarity.
This protocol-level rapprochement was translated into unusually strong positions, particularly with regard to the formation of an axis awaiting the victory of the Khomeini revolution in Iran. Assad senior’s political strategy relied on building networks of trust based on two principles: theoretical opposition to the pro-Western axis, and control over local societies through force, propaganda, and sectarian agitation.
The alliance suffered a rupture following another coup in Pakistan, but it later crystallized and took a different form after Bhutto was overthrown by General Zia-ul-Haq, who arrested and tried him.
At the time, Bhutto’s allies among regimes that described themselves as revolutionary states—such as the regimes of Muammar Gaddafi, Assad, and Yemen—attempted to save him by planning major security operations to abduct him from prison and transfer him to one of his allied countries. All of these plans, of course, were carried out with the knowledge of Palestinian revolutionary factions that received substantial support from Gaddafi or Assad, such as the Abu Nidal Organization and the faction led by Ahmed Jibril.
In any case, all these attempts failed, until General Zia-ul-Haq finally settled the matter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and executed him in 1979. This triggered a wave of regional anger because of the weakness of the trial, the inadequate representation of the defense, and the fact that the proceedings were essentially political rather than criminal.
Bhutto’s supporters subsequently turned into an armed opposition against Zia-ul-Haq’s government, with support from revolutionary Arab governments. They established an organization known as Al-Zulfikar.
Then came a moment of confusion in 1981, when Damascus received a hijacked aircraft seized by members of Al-Zulfikar, a radical Pakistani opposition group. The hijackers demanded that Damascus secure the release of fifty political prisoners in Pakistan in exchange for six American citizens who were on board the aircraft.
The Zia-ul-Haq government eventually complied and released the prisoners in exchange for the release of the Americans and the Pakistani nationals on board, who were transported from Damascus to Islamabad.
The Syrian regime received the hijackers as state guests. Thus, political intimacy turned into a cold tension.
Nevertheless, relations did not break down. President Zia-ul-Haq visited Damascus in 1987, and stability was restored to relations between the two countries, with an understanding that interference in internal affairs should be avoided.
The relationship continued despite Assad senior’s support for Benazir Bhutto, Zulfikar Bhutto’s daughter, who had major political ambitions that eventually led her to become prime minister of Pakistan in 1993. The relationship subsequently regained its warmth.
Assad senior was adept at engineering a suspicious network of relationships that benefited his regime more than they served Syria’s economic or political interests, particularly with countries outside the traditional American-Soviet axis. Pakistan represented an Asian-Islamic card that could help offset regional isolation and open a gateway to the Muslim world without intermediaries.
The paradox, however, was that the essence of the relationship between the two countries lay in two regimes reflecting deep internal conflicts. Syria was governed by the “Ba’athist doctrine,” while Pakistan was, ostensibly, governed by democracy. Yet both systems relied on security, intelligence, and religious and political pragmatism.
As relations developed during the 1990s under Benazir Bhutto, they were not widely covered by the news media. Pakistan sent experts to modernize sugar, cement, and fertilizer factories in Syria, provided scholarships for Syrian students, and established institutes for teaching information technology and computer sciences.
It was a model of relations built on quiet memoranda of understanding that created deep influence without much publicity—particularly after Benazir Bhutto’s visit to Syria in 1996, accompanied by her husband, who would later become Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, following Benazir’s assassination in 2007. Zardari, in turn, visited Bashar al-Assad in 2010 on a state visit.
Since 2011, Pakistan has adopted a “neutral” position toward the events unfolding in Syria. However, it refrained from voting in favor of sanctions resolutions against the Syrian regime and called for a “peaceful political solution” that would keep Assad in power while including some opposition figures in a reconciliation government.
At its core, this neutrality was driven by pragmatic calculations. Pakistan did not want to sever its bridge with Iran, Assad’s principal supporter, nor did it want to lose Saudi Arabia or involve its army in yet another conflict.
Meanwhile, Iranian intelligence, which was managing the operation and the broader chaos across the region, worked to recruit tens of thousands of Pakistani fighters after subjecting them to extensive ideological indoctrination, with the aim of involving them in an endless sectarian and religious war in Syria and the region.
These operations were initially met with a blind eye from Pakistani intelligence agencies, before they began to recognize the danger of what was happening and attempted to stop it.
These Pakistanis and Afghans fought in Syria under various names, most notably the Zainabiyoun and Fatemiyoun Brigades. Hundreds of them were killed in battles in which thousands of violations and acts of mass killing were documented against them. The regime of the son and heir also attempted to grant hundreds of them Syrian citizenship, but the dramatic fall of his regime caused panic among them, prompting them to flee eastward with Syrian identity documents to an unknown destination outside the country.
Today, the fall of Assad and his party brings Syrian-Pakistani relations back to square one, with hopes of building genuine and equal relations between two states that represent their peoples, rather than serving the interests of regimes and the labyrinths of political and religious axes.
