Ziad al-Hariri

Hariri accepted the Military Committee's offer and on the night of 7–8 March 1963, he played a prominent role in the toppling of Qudsi and Azm. Hariri led the armored forces from the front line with Israel towards the Syrian capital, Damascus, while pro-government brigades at Qatana and al-Kiswah, on the outskirts of the city, were neutralized by unionist forces. Hariri's troops installed barricades blocking strategic roads in the city, and besieged several government buildings, including the main post office. By the morning of 8 March, the coup was completed with virtually no blood spilled and the chief unionist officers gathered at army headquarters in Damascus to celebrate its quick success. Syria expert Patrick Seale referred to Hariri as the "chief coup maker." Hariri was promoted to Major-General, became a member of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) that governed the country and, as planned, was appointed the army's chief of staff. To Hariri's chagrin, the Military Committee became the underlying power in Syria instead of Hariri serving as the country's strongman. Under the committee's influence, the RCC appointed officer Lu'ay al-Atassi as president and Ba'athist co-founder Salah al-Din Bitar as prime minister.

For two years Hariri actively opposed the secessionist government and worked to restore the union with Egypt, gaining the support of Nasserist and politically independent Arab nationalist officers in the army. Sometime in the middle of 1962, the Military Committee of the Ba'ath Party, which ostensibly favored the restoration of the UAR, offered Hariri the position of army chief of staff if he gave the Ba'athists his support in overthrowing Qudsi's government. Should the coup attempt fail, the committee guaranteed Hariri could "disown" them. Tensions had been rising between Hariri and Prime Minister Khalid al-Azm, and Hariri feared Azm was going to dismiss him as front commander and appoint him as the military attaché in Baghdad, where he could wield little influence over events in Syria. When Azm did nominate him for the position, Hariri refused and was accused of being a "rebel" by the government.

Hariri entered the Homs Military Academy in the early 1950s and became an officer in the Syrian Army in 1954, during the presidency of Adib al-Shishakli. During this period he became active in the growing pan-Arabist movement led by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Hariri supported the formation of the United Arab Republic (UAR) in February 1958. Along with many other Syrian officers, he was sent to be stationed in Egypt, a post he resented. He would later state that he felt he and his comrades "were in an inferior position and we did not know why." After the union's breakup in 1961, following a secessionist coup in Syria, he became a staunch opponent of the new government of President Nazim al-Qudsi. At the time, Hariri, a staff colonel, had been reassigned to commander of the army on the southern front with Israel. It was both a prestigious title and a strategic post as Hariri headed the largest concentration of Syrian troops in the country.

Mohammed Ziad al-Hariri (born 1930) is a former prominent Syrian Army officer. A staunch Arab nationalist, he supported the union between Syria and Egypt in 1958, opposed Syria's secession from it in 1961 and served as the chief leader of the coup d'état that toppled the secessionist government in March 1963. Politically independent from the Nasserists and their Ba'athist rivals, Hariri served as the army's chief of staff following the coup and was briefly defense minister until being dismissed during a wide-scale purge of non-Ba'athists from the military. He retired from political activity soon afterward.

Hariri was born to a Sunni Muslim family from the town of Hama in 1930. His father was a major landowner in nearby Homs, and was sympathetic to the politics of the communist national leader Khalid al-Azm. Hariri's brother was also sympathetic to communism and was a locally known poet in Syria. Hariri's brother-in-law was the prominent Arab socialist politician Akram al-Hawrani, who was also a Hama native.