Syria's Alawite community: Once feared, now living in fear?

Thousands of locals took to the streets in recent days to protest attacks on a shrine in Syria's second-largest city, Aleppo. The shrine is important to the Alawite religious minority, a group to which Syria's ousted dictator Bashar Assad also belongs.

The protests began after a video showing an attack on the Alawite shrine was circulated online. The video has been disputed — apparently it is not current — but protesters said those who had damaged the shrine must be held to account. Others demanded that Syria's newly appointed authorities act in a non-sectarian way, without prejudice against the country's Alawites.

"No to burning holy places and religious discrimination. No to sectarianism. Yes, to a free Syria," Doha-based media outlet Al Jazeera reported signs at the protests saying.

The conflagration is another aspect of the difficult path ahead for the evolving Syrian transition.

Members of Syria's Alawite minority fear they will be punished or persecuted because of their community's long-standing connections to the Assad family, who ruled Syria brutally for 54 years.

The Alawite minority is often described as having benefited from the Assad family's rule. But they have also paid dearly for that connection.

Who are Syria's Alawites?

Estimates suggest that, before the civil war started in 2011, Alawites made up somewhere between 10% and 13% of Syria's total population.

As a religious sect, the Alawites are often referred to as an offshoot of Shia Islam. But their background is more complex than that.

Alawi Islam emerged in the ninth century in northeastern Syria, a rich mixture of belief systems at the time, according to religious experts. The sect is notoriously secretive, but those who have been able to study it say Alawites have a differing interpretation of several pillars of Islam, which are considered foundational by orthodox Muslims.

That includes the regular call to public prayer and the physical pilgrimage to Mecca. Alawites prefer to worship in private, at home or outdoors, believe the pilgrimage could be symbolic, don't think females needed to wear headscarves, use wine in their rituals and incorporate more nature worship, including the sun, moon and stars, into their belief system.

The Alawites do also have commonalities with Shiite Muslims. For example, they believe in the divinity of Ali ibn Abu Talib, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, a caliph in the seventh century and considered the first leader of Shia Islam.

Still, as a result of the mixture of beliefs, they were regularly accused of heresy and discriminated against by everyone from the Christian Crusaders to the Ottomans from Turkey. 

Emancipation through colonialism

That changed in the early 20th century during the French colonial period in Syria. As part of their "divide and conquer" policy, the French split local Alawite and Druze minorities from the Muslim majority and, in 1922, established a legally autonomous state for Alawites.

While the country's Sunni majority resisted joining French-controlled armed forces, the Alawites — who, for the first time, were part of a state that did not persecute them for their beliefs — had no such apprehensions.

By 1946, after France pulled out and Syria became an independent nation, "the Alawites had gained a political presence," researchers at US think tank,the Foreign Policy Research Institute, wrote. "By 1955, about 65% of the non-commissioned officers were Alawites."

After Syrian independence, Alawites continued to climb the military's ranks and, in 1963, when five officers launched a coup — one of several during Syria's tumultuous postcolonial period — three of them were Alawites. And one of those was Hafez Assad, who would go on to take power for himself in 1971.

"Hafez would emerge as his sect's sole representative and champion of a new Alawite identity," Alawite author Adnan Younes wrote in a 2021 text for New Lines Magazine. "This contrasted dramatically with the previous Alawite identity: opaque and recalcitrant, which has always been misunderstood," Younes explained. "Alawites now had to […] support the 'founder of modern Syria' [...] and be worthy of his trust."

Hafez Assad surrounded himself with loyal Alawites for his own protection. Members of the minority who were not loyal, such as communists, were imprisoned.

Assad also tried to downplay the differences between the Alawite minority and the Muslim majority. "He built mosques in Alawite towns, prayed publicly and fasted, and encouraged his people to do the same," Joshua Landis, a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, who married into a Syrian Alawite family, has previously pointed out. Assad also tried to stop Alawites from celebrating holidays they previously had, like the Persian new year, Nowruz, and the Christian holiday, Christmas.

Dominating military and politics

Now when the Alawite minority was attacked, the state retaliated. Hundreds of Alawi soldiers and other members of the community were deliberately targeted for sectarian reasons between 1979 and 1981 by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Muslim group with an Islamist ideology, during uprisings against the Assad regime. 

After killing around 2,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Assad government laid siege to the city of Hama in February 1982. An estimated 10,000 to 25,000 civilians were killed as a result.

The Alawites saw the Islamists as a threat and generally preferred a secular government in Syria. Over ensuing decades, Assad and his son used that fear to manipulate the community, saying they were the only ones who would protect them. The community's concerns persist to this day.

Disillusionment with Assad

During the 13-year-long civil war, the Alawite community in Syria has been heavily affected by its military involvement. According to the EU's Agency for Asylum, in some Alawite-majority towns and villages between 60% and 70% of young men were either killed or wounded during the war. Many young Alawi males have also hidden or fled from conscription.

Recent surveys show how, over the past few years, many Alawis had become increasingly disillusioned with the Assad regime, researchers at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation wrote, after conducting surveysof the Alawite community in Syria in early 2024. 

Unless they were members of a small Syrian elite, Alawites dealt with the same economic hardships as other Syrians. However, given the authoritarian nature of the Assad regime, many did not feel they could speak out either, the researchers said.

That is why a binary portrayal of the Alawites as either pro- or anti-Assad "fails to capture the nuanced spectrum of views within the Alawite population, ranging from staunch regime loyalists to discreet dissenters," the researchers concluded.

"Nor does it adequately account for the socioeconomic hardships that have affected them similarly to other Syrian communities," or the "disproportionate losses" the community has suffered, they noted.

Edited by: Martin Kuebler