Syrian President Bashar Assad seems increasingly prepared to slaughter his opponents to hold onto power against a stubborn year-old uprising, just as his even more ruthless father, the late Hafez Assad, did during his 30 years of iron rule.

Like his stern and unyielding father, the younger Assad believes his minority Alawite regime is under attack by a U.S.-Israeli conspiracy, backed by Saudi Arabia and other Arab states that have long distrusted Syria.

Bashar Assad, who was elevated to the presidency in 2000 after his father died, was widely seen as a weaker figure than his strongman parent who seized power in a 1970 coup.

But just as Hafez Assad crushed a rebellion by exterminating up to 30,000 members of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood and their families in the city of Hama in February 1982, his son last month unleashed his military and security services on the city of Homs, killing hundreds of rebels and civilians in some of the worst bloodshed since the uprising began March 15, 2011.

"These two events were remarkably similar," observed Patrick Seale, a British expert on Syria whose widely hailed 1988 biography of Hafez Assad is a seminal work on the subject.

"Both Hafez and Bashar believed they were wrestling not only with internal dissent but with a large-scale American and Israeli conspiracy …

"Both responded with great brutality to these regime-threatening uprisings, as if aware that they and their community would face no mercy if the Islamists were ever to come to power," Seale noted.

Father and son, he observed, both suffered from the dictator's weakness of ignoring -- or being unable to comprehend -- popular and political discontent, particularly where the minority Alawites, a branch of Shiite Islam, ruled roughshod over the Sunni majority.

"Both Hafez and Bashar had been slow to recognize and address the groundswell of complaint and against rising poverty, corruption, and government neglect that would fuel the uprisings.

"Preoccupied with foreign affairs, they failed to pay sufficient attention to the domestic scene, often turning a blind eye to the abuses and profiteering of their close associates, including members of their own family. …

"Focusing on foreign conspiracies blinded both Hafez and Bashar to the legitimate grievances of their angry populations, and caused them to overreact, using excessive force when putting down their domestic opponents," Seale wrote.

When Hafez Assad, known as "the Lion of Damascus," died in June 2000, he had groomed Bashar, his second son -- Basil, the flamboyant heir apparent died when he crashed his Mercedes sports car Jan. 22, 1994 -- to succeed him.

That produced the first republican dynasty in the Arab world.

In its way, that helped trigger the pro-democracy uprisings of 2011 when other dictators -- Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Moammar Gadhafi of Libya and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen -- tried to emulate the austere Hafez Assad's handing over to his offspring.

Bashar, plucked from the obscurity of a London ophthalmology practice, took his father's place.

The tall, gangling Assad was never seen as a strongman, but a leader with muddled ideas about reform who was propped up by his father's old guard, which controlled the military, security and commerce.

Professor James Fallon, an American neuroscientist at the University of California who has studied the dictators, says Bashar enjoys the power but is "an incomplete dictator" because he lacks a sadistic streak.

"He comes across as an adolescent little tyrant, a weak leader … a sorry character," he says.

But he's had no qualms adopting his father's bloody ways in using ferocity and terror to eradicate and intimidate those of his people who want him gone.

In light of the many massacres Hafez Assad perpetrated to crush dissent, Bashar may only be getting started.

Apart from the 30,000 men, women and children Assad Sr. had vaporized in Hama in 1982 in a three-week artillery bombardment, some 15,000 others who were arrested have never been seen since.

On Feb. 2, 1980, as many as 1,000 Muslim Brotherhood inmates in the notorious Tadmor military prison were massacred after a failed attempt to assassinate Hafez Assad.

And there were other atrocities involving hundreds of victims.

"The tragedy of Hama is now happening in slow motion across Syria" while "the young Assad surfs the Net for amusement," observed Roula Khalaf, Middle East editor of the Financial Times.