It was a massacre. On June 16, 1979, Capt. Ibrahim Yusuf ordered some 200 cadets at the Aleppo Artillery School to attend an urgent meeting in the mess hall. Once they were assembled, he opened the door to a squad of gunmen who opened fire on the defenseless crowd. At least 32 cadets, most belonging to then President Hafez al-Assad's Alawite sect, were cut down in the hail of gunfire and grenades.
The civil war that raged in Syria from 1976 to 1982 was -- until the past 11 months of unrest -- the most severe threat to the Assads' grip on power. The uprising would be crushed, brutally and infamously, with the Hama massacre in 1982. But even before the bloody assault on Hama, the long guerilla war had claimed the lives of thousands of Syrians, and resulted in the imprisonment of at least 10,000 more. The events leading up to the final confrontation should provide the current generation of protesters with a blueprint for how not to overthrow the Assad regime...
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/22/when_assad_won