The Heart Attacks Fueling Suspicion in Syria

When a commander in the Syrian army’s 52nd Division died in March, a Syrian Telegram channel announced the news in the language of an ordinary obituary: Nader Mutlaq, better known as Abu Hatem al-Eis, had suffered a sudden heart attack. There were condolences and prayers for the dead. Then, one minute later, the same channel posted again. “This is the third military commander to die of a heart attack,” it told its more than 38,000 subscribers. “Something isn’t right.” As the deaths accumulated, users increasingly began to notice the pattern of cardiac events. After another Syrian officer died in April, one user stated, “This is the sixth … how does this happen?” Others began calling directly on the government to intervene. “Open an investigation,” one wrote. “Something abnormal is happening.” The Syrian government’s lack of explanation soon fed the suspicion. “What is strange is that all these heart attacks have happened and there is still no move to investigate their causes,” one Syrian wrote. Eventually, suspicion became familiar enough to joke about. When a Defense Ministry commander died in May, one Telegram channel remarked that it had become “impossible for a week to pass without heart attacks.” The author’s survey of major news-oriented social media channels shows that at least 25 Syrian military and security officers have died over the past six months in cases publicly attributed to heart attacks and cardiac arrest. There is no evidence that any of those deaths were connected, much less that the causes were unnatural. The dead fit into a single political category, nor is there a clear demographic pattern. The precise age of the deceased is rarely given, yet their biographies show this is no collection of old men. Some were veteran officers who had served for decades, while others belonged to a younger generation of commanders who rose through opposition ranks after 2011. But the meaning of these deaths has come to lie in what Syrians believe they might mean. Under the Assad family’s 50-year dictatorship, the opacity of official explanations and the unexplained patterns of death taught many Syrians to treat the state’s account of events with suspicion. Some Syrians have interpreted the deaths as a purge of figures from the armed opposition that coalesced in the first years of the civil war, particularly officers who defected from Assad’s military and later served in the Free Syrian Army. After two Assad-era defectors died within 24 hours in June, one channel asked whether “the phenomenon of defected officers dying specifically from heart attacks warrants scrutiny.” But the biographies of the dead resist such a neat explanation. Some were indeed Assad-era defectors, whose loyalty might remain suspect to Syria’s new leaders, who seized power from Assad nearly two years ago. Yet other heart attack victims came from Islamist factions that are much closer to the current leadership. These theories, despite their inconsistency, draw on a real struggle for power within Syria’s new military. Syria’s rulers are undertaking an extraordinarily sensitive restructuring of the armed forces by turning former insurgents, individuals who have defected from Assad’s army, Islamist factions, Kurdish forces, and Turkish-backed militias into a single unified military. They have done this by breaking apart wartime chains of command and separating commanders from forces they once controlled personally. Damascus wants to weaken the factional structures inherited from the war and centralize authority under the new leadership. But the rapid integration of opposition forces that followed the fall of the Assad regime produced an undisciplined force that Damascus struggled to control, and that became a liability during moments of heightened tension, primarily during the violence against Alawites and Druze in 2025. The changes to the Syrian army’s hierarchy produced radically different reactions. When Sayf Boulad, a U.S.-sanctioned militia commander and Turkish-backed officer, was removed from command of the 76th Division in August, some Syrians on social media described the move as part of the continued “exclusion and marginalization” of former rebel commanders. Days after Boulad lost his divisional command, reports circulated that he had suffered a heart attack after traveling to Turkey. The story was false. But by then, months of similar reports had conditioned some Syrians to connect a commander’s political sidelining with the increasingly familiar story of a sudden cardiac death. The term “heart attack” has historically become a plausible shorthand for political removal in Syria. For decades, the term appeared in circumstances in which official accounts of death were difficult or impossible to verify, embedding in many Syrians’ memory. During the civil war, human rights organizations reported accounts from former Assad-era Syrian security officials describing bodies being transferred from intelligence branches to hospitals. There, the paperwork could record cardiac failure even when detainees had died after torture or horrific detention conditions. Families of the disappeared were sometimes given death notifications listing heart attacks or respiratory failure as the cause of death. At the time, Syrians responded with the same dark humor that has resurfaced in response to the latest cardiac events. In 2014, after Assad’s authorities told the family of a 28-year-old detainee that he had died of a heart attack, his father toldUN investigators, “It seems now everyone in Syria has a heart attack.” These “heart attacks” extended to Assad’s own security apparatus. When a senior officer in Air Force Intelligence was found dead at his home, the reported cause of death was a heart attack. Opposition activists immediately alleged that he had been eliminated amid rivalries inside the security establishment. Heart attacks also took the lives of rebel commanders serving under President Ahmad al-Sharaa when he led the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate. In 2015, a prominent Jordanian Nusra Front commander died while being held in the group’s own prison. Nusra claimed that he had suffered a heart attack, but evidence later showed signs of abuse and torture to his body. None of these examples prove that Syrian officers are being eliminated today. However, they do help explain why some Syrians may instinctively view the term “heart attack” with suspicion and perceive connotations far beyond a medical condition. The government has acknowledged some individual deaths but has made no effort to address concerns about the overall pattern. Nor have Syrian media taken much notice, with only one outlet taking an interest. When it asked the Defense Ministry about the recurring deaths, officials said the matter did not require an official clarification. Some former opposition officers have publicly rejected claims of an assassination campaign, pointing to the age and medical histories of some of the dead. False reports have circulated claiming that other officers had died or suffered heart attacks, including, this month, Syria’s defense minister, whose reported death received ample attention before being proven false. The deeper challenge for Damascus is to build institutions whose explanations do not immediately invite conspiratorial alternatives. Until Damascus can narrow the distance between what the state says and what its citizens are prepared to believe, a heart attack may remain a political event no less than it is a medical one. Ahmad Sharawi is a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), focusing on Middle East affairs and the Levant. For more analysis from Ahmad and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.