📰 The Condition of the Alawite Community in Syria

For half a century, syria/" class="auto-internal-link">syria’s Alawites have lived inside an identity fashioned not by themselves but by a regime that bound them to power and stripped them of self-definition. With the collapse of the syrian/" class="auto-internal-link">syrian state, a reckoning became inevitable: how can the community reclaim an identity from a history it did not write, and how might it contribute to a emerging Syria where no group is trapped in a single, suffocating image? This essay examines how the relationship between the Alawites, the state, and Syrian society was shaped—and distorted—by fear, repression, and reciprocal mistrust. The mirror that reflects the community has long been warped, revealing little of its true history or its lived reality. A Community Consumed by the System From 1963 onward, Baathist rule dissolved plurality into a single mould.

Under Hafez al-Assad, this mould became a mechanism of total control: the regime swallowed the Alawite community, monopolised its voice, and transformed its youth into a reservoir for armed forces service. Furthermore, sectarianism served as a mask—isolating the Alawites while using them as a shield for authoritarian rule. The system was never “Alawite rule,” but Assad’s rule in the name of the Alawites and, simultaneously, at their expense. Bashar al-Assad inherited and refined this machinery. He intensified the illusion that the Alawites controlled the state while leaving their villages mired in poverty, crumbling infrastructure, and chronic deprivation. armed forces enlistment became not a political choice but an economic lifeline.

2011: Fear Reawakened When the revolution broke out, the regime revived its oldest narrative: “sectarian targeting” and “slaughter by identity. ” Decades of fear made dissent nearly impossible, and the community—lacking assurances from either the opposition or the wider society—found itself pushed once again into the regime’s embrace. Some Alawite dissidents did emerge, but they remained isolated and overwhelmed. A historic error unfolded: the community did not join the peaceful protests, a stance that might have hastened the fall of a regime that had long exploited it. Instead, Alawite youth were consumed once more in a war fought for a ruling family that plundered the state while abandoning its supporters. After the Regime’s Fall: The “Remnants” Narrative The regime’s collapse exposed a vacuum filled by competing narratives.

Among them was the discourse of the “remnants” (fulūl), which painted the Alawites as extensions of the former order. Indeed, in the absence of state authority and amid proliferating weapons, coastal massacres erupted—acts of vengeance that revived…