Syria’s grave sectarian violence exposes battle lines long in the making

Members of Alawite minority community face threat in their heartland after one of the deadliest days in country’s recent history

Fighters loyal to the interim Syrian government of President Ahmad Al Shara look out over the Mediterranean Sea from Latakia on Sunday. AFP

When it became fairly certain that former Syrian president Bashar Al Assad's regime was doomed in the first week of December, cars carrying hundreds of people clogged the main motorway from the centre of the country to the coast. They were fleeing Damascus, Homs and other cities to their home villages and towns in the Alawite mountains, and the plains on the sea below, inhabited by the sect.

The Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, had dominated power in Sunni majority Syria since a 1963 coup. Their rule ended when forces led by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, a group formerly linked with Al Qaeda, removed the regime in December.

However, hundreds of Alawite civilians have been murdered in an HTS-led operation that the new government launched last week. It has been in response to what the authorities described as attacks by Assad regime remnants on security forces in Latakia and other areas on the coast.

The former regime had built outsize government and military compounds on the coast. Many thought they were designed to provide the Alawites with the underpinnings of an alternative state in case Syria broke up.

However, the bloodshed deep into the Alawite heartland, and the near absence of condemnation among Syria’s Sunni majority, has left the sect with little protection.

“God safeguards you,” Anas Ayrout, a prominent Sunni religious figure said as he greeted convoys of militiamen at the outskirts of his home city of Banias. They arrived last week to take part in the attack on districts in the city. Mr Ayrout described the operation as a “cleansing of Assad gangs”.

The Alawite heartland was so crucial to the survival of the former government that a threat of the area being swept by a rebel offensive sparked the Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2015.

The late president Hafez Al Assad, the father of Bashar, appeared to think that the area was so impenetrable that he instructed his family to bury him in his birthplace of Al Qardaha, in the Alawite mountains. Twenty-four years after his death, Sunni rebels reached Al Qardaha, and set Mr Al Assad’s grave on fire. The Alawite sect is seen by many Sunnis as having usurped the state.

HTS soon sent its forces into Alawite coastal area and in the central governorate of Homs, with the declared objective of neutralising regime forces. Dozens of Alawites have been killed in the campaign during January, often in their neighbourhoods and towns. Most the dead were militiamen or ex-members of the former regime security apparatus, it was claimed.

However, victims of the new offensive, which started last week after two members of the HTS-led security forces were killed in an Alawite district of Latakia, have been civilians.

Ahmad Aba Zeid, an independent Syrian researcher, said that the new authorities had no choice except to sweep into the coast, otherwise regime holdout forces would take more ground or become entrenched. He added that the campaign has lacked organisation, with foreign fighters and local militiamen fighting along HTS.

Regardless of who massacred the Alawite civilians, the HTS led authorities were supposed to protect them and “take responsibility” for the operations launched in the name of the new government, he said.