The Hama massacre (Arabic: مجزرة حماة‎) occurred in February 1982, when the Syrian army, under the orders of the country's president, Hafez al-Assad, conducted a scorched earth operation against the town of Hama in order to quell a revolt by the Sunni Muslim community against the regime of al-Assad.^[1] The Hama massacre, carried out by the Syrian Army under commanding General Rifaat al-Assad, President Assad's younger brother, effectively ended the campaign begun in 1976 by Sunni Islamic groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, against Assad's regime, whose leaders were disproportionately from president Assad's own Alawite sect.

Initial diplomatic reports from western countries stated that 1,000 were killed.^[2][3] Subsequent estimates vary, with the lower estimates claiming that at least 10,000 Syrian citizens were killed,^[4] while others put the number at 20,000 (Robert Fisk),^[1] or 40,000 (Syrian Human Rights Committee).^[5][6] About 1,000 Syrian soldiers were killed during the operation and large parts of the old city were destroyed. Alongside such few events as the Black September Massacre in Jordan,^[7] the attack has been described as one of "the single deadliest acts by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East".^[8] The vast majority of the victims were civilians.^[9]

According to Syrian media, anti-government rebels initiated the fighting, who "pounced on our comrades while sleeping in their homes and killed whomever they could kill of women and children, mutilating the bodies of the martyrs in the streets, driven, like mad dogs, by their black hatred." Security forces then "rose to confront these crimes" and "taught the murderers a lesson that has snuffed out their breath"^[10]