Amin al-Hafez

Amin al-Hafiz ( 1921 – 17 December 2009), A late warning telegram of the coup d'état was sent from Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to Nasim al-Safarjalani (The General Secretary of Presidential Council), on the early morning of the coup d'état. The coup sprung out of factional rivalry between Jadid's "regionalist" camp of the Ba'ath Party, which promoted ambitions for a Greater Syria, and the more traditionally pan-Arab al-Hafiz faction, called the "nationalist" (qawmi) faction. Jadid's supporters were also seen as more radically left-wing. The coup was also supported and led by officers from Syria's religious minorities, especially the Alawites and the Druze, whereas al-Hafiz belonged to the majority Sunni population.

Exile and return After being wounded in the three-hour shootout that preceded the coup, in which two of his children were seriously injured, al-Hafiz was jailed in Damascus's Mezzeh prison before being sent to Lebanon in June 1967. A year later, he was relocated to Baghdad. In 1971, the courts of Damascus sentenced him to death in absentia; however, Saddam Hussein "treated him and his fellow exile, Ba'ath founder Michel Aflaq, like royalty", and the sentence was not carried out. After the fall of Saddam in the Iraq War of 2003, al-Hafiz was quietly allowed to return to Syria. He died in Aleppo on 17 December 2009; reports of his age differ, but he was believed to be in his late 80s. He received a state-sponsored funeral.