Desperation among the Alawite community in the city of Latakia, Syria — fueled by poverty, neglect and humiliation under the country’s new authorities — had left the ground fertile for a rebellion. In late February, most shops in the coastal city were shuttered, replaced by streetside vendors who sold an assortment of random items: canned goods, perfumes, underwear and meats.
A middle-aged man stood along the road, beside three gallon containers of gasoline. “The situation is very bad, I don’t have a salary, I can’t afford a home,” he told me, looking down at his shoes. He had served in the Syrian army for nine years, until the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and affiliated militants overthrew President Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8, 2024. He was one of many former soldiers in Latakia left jobless after Assad’s fall, who then had no option but to collect what they could find and sell it on the streets. The man was timid, peering around as he spoke. He requested that I mention no identifying details before beginning his story.
The night he received word that rebels had reached Damascus, he was stationed at the Jdaidet Yabous border crossing station, by Lebanon’s border with Syria. He and his comrades dropped their arms and proceeded on foot to Damascus — a walk of nearly 25 miles. Exhausted, cold and with blistered feet, they were confronted at each checkpoint with an “incredible” amount of harassment, he said. “Armed men from Idlib wearing masks” cursed at him, he said, chanting sectarian slurs against Alawites, a religious minority in Syria, to which he and the deposed Assad belong. The harassment didn’t stop that night. When he returned to Latakia and lined up outside one of the “reconciliation centers” for former soldiers, he said dozens of people were “cursing out loud” at him.
Now, he is near-destitute, another humiliation. On a good day, he said, he makes a mere $3. As we finished our conversation, I asked if I could take a photo of the gasoline he was selling. Shyly, he declined. “Why? It’s nothing, there’s no need,” he said, avoiding my eye contact, ashamed of his situation.
Whispers of an uprising were brewing in Latakia when I visited the city from Feb. 17-20. Frustration with the new authorities was mounting for multiple Alawites I spoke to, their feelings stoked by the mass government layoffs and high rates of joblessness.
Stuck in traffic outside the municipality building, my taxi driver, Hashem, who was also an Alawite, turned to the building and said: “I wish they [the new authorities] would change, if they did, maybe we could accept them. … But the people in Latakia, we don’t want them now.”
He continued to tell me how the Assad regime had warned of the problems that would erupt if the “Islamists” came. “In 2011, they chanted, ‘Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave,’” he said — though many who took part in peaceful demonstrations in 2011 dispute whether this happened and claim the slogan was a rumor spread by Assad’s propagandists, aimed at stoking sectarianism and sowing fear among religious minorities.
A car parked outside the municipality had a license plate from Idlib, the northwestern Syrian province where HTS governed before Assad’s overthrow. Many of Latakia’s old municipality employees had been replaced by HTS members from Idlib, including the city’s mayor.
“In most coastal areas, they viewed the caretaker government as a threat, they never trusted what the future holds for them,” Karam Shaar, a Syrian political economist, told me. “They refused to hand over their weapons, they believed they would need to use them,” he added.
The coastal region is home to the country’s largest concentration of Alawites, whom Assad and his father, President Hafez al-Assad, handed preferential military and security positions to solidify their support base. Latakia, like other coastal cities, was a stronghold of regime support, where many residents served in Assad’s army or worked in one of the city’s multiple government institutions. However, many were dismissed by the new authorities after the regime fell.
Meanwhile, the region emerged as one of the main security challenges for the new government. Violence erupted on the evening of March 6, when Assad loyalists ambushed a local patrol of security forces in the town of Jableh, near Latakia, killing at least 13. It quickly descended into sectarian attacks, with reports of pro-government forces killing entire Alawite families and civilians throughout the coastal province, as well as in the governorates of Tartus and Hama.
Videos and images circulated on social media show gruesome beheadings and brutal massacres of women and children. The Syrian Network for Human Rights has documented the extrajudicial killing of at least 803 people by both pro-Assad militants and forces loyal to the new government between March 6 and 10. Those killed included 39 children and 49 women.
Ghiath Dalla, an influential Alawite former brigadier general in Assad’s elite 4th Division (led by the ousted president’s brother, Maher al-Assad), has taken a large part in mobilizing the rebellion against the current government, announcing the establishment of a “Military Council for the Liberation of Syria.” The former general is complicit in mass war crimes against Syrian civilians, perpetrated by the 4th Division.
Jobless soldiers — fed by years of regime propaganda against “Islamists” — were easy to attract. Shaar, the political economist, drew a parallel to the chaotically executed de-Baathification of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, which ultimately contributed to widespread social and political conflict and instability in the country, as outlined by the International Center for Transitional Justice in a 2013 report. In an effort to prevent a return of the former ruling Baath Party in Iraq, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority carried out a sweeping and indiscriminate dismissal of thousands of individuals working in the party, fueling “dynamics of sectarian grievance and fear,” the report said — similar to what we are seeing in Syria today.
“By dismissing all the military fighters and members of the army and security apparatus, [the Syrian caretaker government] basically pushed all of these people into the abyss,” Shaar said. “They lost their only source of income, which is not only their salary, but access to public authority,” he added.
“He called me at 3 a.m. yesterday, hallucinating, telling me that Assad had returned,” 37-year-old Ali told me from the security of his living room in Latakia on Feb. 18. Ali is a pseudonym — he requested that I not use his real name in this report. He was speaking about his brother, a 30-year-old former member of Maher al-Assad’s notorious 4th Division.
“Now, he stays in the house, he doesn’t have work. He hopes life will return to how it was before,” Ali said. “He wants the [Assad] regime to return, because then, all the rights he had will come back to him. … He doesn’t want to be humiliated anymore.”
Ali, like most of his family members, was also in Assad’s army. He said he was forcibly conscripted for nine years until 2023. After finishing his service, he opened a boxing gym in Latakia, his tall, built frame evidence of his frequent practice. He said most of his clientele had been those benefiting from Assad’s inner circle, who fled the country when the regime fell. Now, he said, business had tanked.
Nearly 50 of Ali’s relatives (all Alawites) were army officers. “None have jobs now,” he said. “People are struggling psychologically,” Ali added, mentioning his brother-in-law, a former officer, who has four children and was struggling to provide for them. He said they didn’t necessarily want to be soldiers. “They are farmers, there wasn’t any other work than to be in the military.”
But he knows others who “follow Bashar al-Assad blindly.” “They don’t see Assad as someone unjust, or oppressive,” Ali said. “They see him as the only person who can ease their situation. The only sanctuary.”
Ahmad Yousef, a 37-year-old former regime soldier, suspected the uprising weeks before it erupted. He was among the many ex-soldiers unable to find work, attempting a stint at streetside sock vending, though he stopped after a few days with zero profits. “You saw the view outside,” he said, pointing his hand toward the street. “So many people, they’re just putting their stuff in the streets and they’re trying to sell them. That’s what most of us are doing right now, but it won’t work, because we still don’t have money.”
He had a kind face, rectangular glasses, and spoke calmly, like an academic. If things don’t improve, “they’ll start a revolution against the new regime,” he said. “You can’t just take over the country, take the old regime, and then when you have power, act just like those before you. That’s not a revolution.”
Our conversation was interrupted periodically by Yousef’s 3-year-old daughter, Talya, running into the room to attract her father’s attention. At some points she would grab hold of his arm and he would pick her up, cradling her on his lap.
Yousef had spent five years drafted under compulsory military service, which he described as “the worst days” of his life. “You starve, you have to pay if you want to go home for a few days,” he said, explaining that only expensive bribes would allow him to see his daughter. However, from his perspective, the days after the fall of Assad have still been far from ideal.
“Now, we are outcasts,” said Yousef, who is also an Alawite. “The jihadists who took over Syria, they hate people who are not from the same sect. They are Sunni, we are Alawite, and they hate us. They hate us too much.”
Yousef was among the former soldiers I spoke to whose IDs were confiscated during the reconciliation process. Yousef said he went to the reconciliation office on Dec. 13 and was told to return in two weeks to pick up his new ID. Three months later, Yousef was still paperless.
This has prevented him from traveling outside of Latakia, fearful he would be stopped and “they would recognize I was a former soldier, which might cause trouble,” he said. He told me about an incident where a man was stopped at a checkpoint in January and, when he couldn’t show his ID, was dragged out of the car and beaten “for being a soldier.”
“Everything they have done since they took over Syria is to kick us out of our jobs,” Yousef continued. “They’re firing people left and right,” he said, adding that he felt it was happening along religious lines — against Alawites.
After meeting Yousef, I headed to the government-run Electricity Directorate in Latakia, to check on the status of its employees. On the top floor, an engineer, Mohammad Hakeem, sat at his new desk, decorated by the green-topped flag of Syria’s first postindependence republic, later repurposed by Assad’s opponents in 2011 and now officially the flag of the republic once more.
Hakeem had previously been working in electricity management in Idlib under HTS’s self-styled Syrian Salvation Government. After the overthrow of Assad, he was appointed as manager of the directorate in Latakia. He said the former manager had “found another job” and was now staying in his village.
“The situation here is dire, financially, technically, administratively, with a significant amount of corruption present,” Hakeem told me. “The materials in the centers were neglected and are barely operational. We urgently need support to recover raw materials so that we can improve the networks of these centers and start making progress.”
Hakeem said that, under the Assad regime, the directorate had roughly 3,200 employees, but they have since had to cut back to 2,200. “The other 1,000, we didn’t need them,” he said. “We let go those who were absent and not working.” He added that some of those dismissed were provided with a three-month compensation of roughly $40 per month.
“The directorate had too many employees with a low salary,” he elaborated. He said they had increased the salaries from the equivalent of $20 a month under the regime to $120 dollars, and aimed to eventually pay $400. “This is crucial,” he stated. “We are working to address our needs for staffing and increase salaries, as our current situation is quite challenging.”
Shaar, the political economist, said the government layoffs have been “arbitrary” and “generally messy,” and that it normally requires years to determine “ghost employees” (that is, who is actually working and who is not).
“If the economic conditions continue to worsen” in Syria, Shaar added, it would “definitely fuel more conflict and more instability.” “Countries afraid of what might happen in Syria should support the government, to help them build state institutions to deliver on the promise of raising salaries, so that the current situation doesn’t breed more conflict,” he said. “It’s almost always the case that poor economic conditions bring out the ugliest in human beings,” he added.
I was able to get back in touch with Yousef on March 10. At least one of his relatives, his cousin’s husband, was killed in Jableh, a town on the Syrian coast, about 18 miles south of Latakia. Yousef said he was an agriculture engineer. “Many houses were burned to the ground and sometimes [with] people inside them,” he told me over WhatsApp. At the time we spoke, he was deciding whether to stay or flee with his wife and daughter.
Since March 6, nearly 9,000 individuals — the vast majority Alawites — have fled Syria to Lebanon as a result of the ongoing violence, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency in Lebanon. “Most Alawite people now — including me — need asylum,” Yousef stated, unsure of where he would go, or what the future would hold.
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