Ziad al-Hariri

Ziad al-Hariri
Chief of Staff of the Syrian Army
In office 8 March 1963 – 8 July 1963
Prime Minister	Salah al-Din Bitar
Preceded by	Abd al-Karim Zahr al-Din
Succeeded by	Salah Jadid
Minister of Defense
In office 2 May 1963 – 8 July 1963
Preceded by	Muhammad al-Sufi
Succeeded by	Muhammad Umran
Personal details
Born	1930 (age 86–87) Hama, Syria
Nationality	Syrian
Military service
Allegiance	Syria
Rank	Major General

Mohammed Ziad al-Hariri (born 1930) is a former prominent Syrian Army officer. A staunch Arab nationalist, he supported the union between Syria and Egypt in 1958, opposed Syria's secession from it in 1961 and served as the chief leader of the coup d'état that toppled the secessionist government in March 1963. Politically independent from the Nasserists and their Ba'athist rivals, Hariri served as the army's chief of staff following the coup and was briefly defense minister until being dismissed during a wide-scale purge of non-Ba'athists from the military. He retired from political activity soon afterward.

Hariri was born to a Sunni Muslim family from the town of Hama in 1930. His father was a major landowner in nearby Homs, and was sympathetic to the politics of the communist national leader Khalid al-Azm. Hariri's brother was also sympathetic to communism and was a locally known poet in Syria. Hariri's brother-in-law was the prominent Arab socialist politician Akram al-Hawrani, who was also a Hama native.

Hariri entered the Homs Military Academy in the early 1950s and became an officer in the Syrian Army in 1954, during the presidency of Adib al-Shishakli. During this period he became active in the growing pan-Arabist movement led by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Hariri supported the formation of the United Arab Republic (UAR) in February 1958. Along with many other Syrian officers, he was sent to be stationed in Egypt, a post he resented. He would later state that he felt he and his comrades "were in an inferior position and we did not know why." After the union's breakup in 1961, following a secessionist coup in Syria, he became a staunch opponent of the new government of President Nazim al-Qudsi. At the time, Hariri, a staff colonel, had been reassigned to commander of the army on the southern front with Israel. It was both a prestigious title and a strategic post as Hariri headed the largest concentration of Syrian troops in the country.

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