Salah Jadid (Arabic: صلاح جديد, romanized: Ṣalāḥ Jadīd; 1926 – 19 August 1993) was a Syrian military officer and politician who was the leader of the far-left bloc of the Syrian Regional Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and the de facto leader of Ba'athist Syria from 1966 until 1970, when he was ousted by Hafez al-Assad's Corrective Movement.

Nazim al-Kudsi, who led the first post-UAR government, persecuted Jadid and the others for their Nasserite loyalties, and all of them were forced to retire from the Syrian Army.

The coup was due to strong ideological differences between the Military Committee and the National Command of the Ba'ath Party, whose unity had almost collapsed shortly after the seizure of power in 1963.

Under Jadid's rule, Syria aligned itself with the Soviet bloc and pursued hardline policies towards Israel and "reactionary" Arab states especially Saudi Arabia, calling for the mobilization of a "people's war" against Zionism rather than inter-Arab military alliances.

Public support for his government, such as it was, declined sharply following Syria's defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel captured the Golan Heights, and as a result of the troubled internal conditions of the country.

After the war, in particular, tensions began to increase between Jadid's followers and those who argued that the situation called for a more moderate stance on socialism and international relations.

While Jadid retained the allegiance of most of the civilian Ba'ath apparatus, Assad as defense minister gradually asserted control over the military wing of the party.

After the initial military successes of the invasion, King Hussein asked Israel to carry out airstrikes against Syrian troops together with the Jordanian Air Force.

Angered by this, Assad decided to scare the Soviets by sending Mustafa Tlass to Beijing to procure arms and wave Chairman Mao's Little Red Book.