The leading members of the military committee throughout the planning process and in the immediate aftermath of taking power were Muhammad Umran, Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad, who belonged to the minority Alawite community.

After the coup, the Ba'athist Military committee initiated a series of purges that altered the structure of the Syrian armed forces by replacing 90% of its officer corps with Alawites.

[b] The March 8 coup ended the era of democratic experimentation in the post-colonial Syrian Republic, and transformed Syria towards a one-party state exerting totalitarian domination over daily life.

The coup resulted in the ascendancy of the Ba'athist system, which exerted extensive control over social, economic, political, educational and religious spheres through brutal repression and state terror.

The Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party maintained its grip on power for over 61 years, through its control of the military, security apparatus, political system and the Mukhabarat, with the country being taken over by its Secretary-General Bashar al-Assad in 2000 until his overthrow during the Syrian Civil War in 2024.

Before taking control, the Ba'ath Party gambled that it would be allowed to share power with Gamal Abdel Nasser in the United Arab Republic (UAR).

The revolution was led by an anti-oligarchical alliance of a radicalised lower middle class, strategic members of the officer corps, marginalised minorities and a significant number of peasants who were mobilised for agrarian conflict.

The Alawites, the Druzes and the Isma'ilis for instance, were religious groups with low social class who began to embrace a radical form of Arab nationalism, e.g.

The inequality between urban and rural dwellers, together with capitalist penetration of the agrarian sector and the traditional elites' monopolisation of most large revenue sources, led to the establishment of peasant movements who fought for change or opposed the system.

The Syrian branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party was able to recruit youth from radical peasant movements and thus was able to mobilise large sectors of the population.

While the conspirators of the military committee were all young, the sitting regime had been slowly disintegrating and the traditional elite had lost effective political power.

The collapse of the UAR, coupled with mutinies, purges and transfers left the officer corps in complete disarray and open to anti-government agitation.

[25] The Damascus faction was the enemy of the military committee because of their support for Nazim al-Qudsi's Government and the Hawranist were considered as rivals because of their stance against pan-Arabism.

[26] The military committee ordered a group of junior officers to recruit the leading independent Colonel Ziad al-Hariri, the commander of the front facing Israel, to their cause.

The military committee did not look favourably on the civilian leadership led by Michel Aflaq, objecting to his dissolution of the Ba'ath Party during the UAR years.

[28] On 8 February 1963, the Iraqi Regional Branch, led by Ali Salih al-Sa'di, took power in Iraq by overthrowing Abd al-Karim Qasim.

He was a far more formidable opponent than al-Qudsi, and the Iraqi Regional Branch managed to take power through an alliance not only with military officers, but also with segments of the middle class.

While Aflaq cautioned the plotters because of the party's lack of support, they failed to share his worries, and planned to launch the coup on 7 March.

[30] Assad led a small group of conspirators to capture the al-Dumayr air base, 40 kilometers (25 mi) north-east of Damascus – the only unit that resisted the coup.

"[34][33] The first act of the new rulers of Syria was to establish the twenty-man National Council for the Revolutionary Command (NCRC), composed of twelve Ba'athists and eight Nasserists and independents.

On 17 April a new stage-based unity agreement was reached that would include the three states in a federal union with Nasser as President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.

[38][39] However, between 28 April-2 May, the Ba'athist-dominated Military Committee virtually renounced the agreement when it purged over 50 Nasserist officers from their high-ranking positions in the armed forces, leading to a wide-scale propaganda campaign by Egypt via radio denouncing the Ba'ath (Nasserist-leaning newspapers had been previously shut down.)

This became a source of outcry across Syria and numerous intellectuals began highlighting the new regime's sectarian character through media outlets and publications.

[44] The Nasserists still maintained a relatively high level of strength in the military, despite the purges, and on 18 July, under the leadership of Jassem Alwan and the help of Egyptian intelligence, they attempted to launch a daytime coup against the new government.

[47][48] The Army Headquarters, personally defended by al-Hafiz, and the broadcast station were attacked, and the ensuing battle left hundreds of people dead, including several civilian bystanders.

The executions were a rare punitive action used to deal with the participants of a failed coup in Syria, with the typical punishment being exile, imprisonment or reassignment to a foreign diplomatic post.

[49] After evading the authorities for a short period, Alwan and his chief co-conspirators Raef al-Maarri and Muhammad Nabhan were apprehended and brought to military trial, where they were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death.

But more significant than its ideology was the ethnic makeup of the corps of officers now in control: because of the assiduous French recruitment of minorities—especially Alawites—into the Troupes Speciales du Levant, the Alawites had, without anyone's noticing, gradually taken over the military from within.

[48] Relations with Egypt immediately soured, with Nasser, still popular with the Syrian masses, issuing broadcasts denouncing the Ba'athists as "murderers" and "fascists",[47] and representing the forces of heresy and atheism, a derogatory reference to the party's embrace of strict secularism and the numerous leadership positions held by non-Sunni Muslims, particularly Alawites.

[47][49] One of the crucial outcomes of the coup and subsequent purges was the dominance of Alawite commanders in the neo-Ba'athist officer corps, who assumed control of the Syrian military.