The week of March 6-12, 2025, will live in infamy in the Alawite psyche. Over those days, Alawite communities across 56 villages along Syria’s Mediterranean coast came under a brutal assault, leaving thousands of civilians dead or missing. Attackers looted everything they could carry — phones, jewelry, cash, water pumps, cars, livestock — and set homes ablaze. Vast swaths of the Alawite mountains were scorched either by incendiary artillery shells or deliberate fires.
The perpetrators were primarily Islamist factions — al-Hamzat, al-Amshat and foreign fighters, some under the command of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which seized power after the collapse of former President Bashar al-Assad’s regime on Dec. 8. Armed Syrian civilians appear to have joined them.
This latest devastation adds to the long ledger of losses Syrians have endured over the course of the civil war. For the Alawite community, it deepens an already bleeding wound: a decade that has claimed thousands of its members — mostly young men — who fought on behalf of the “state” (the former regime) against what they were told were invading terrorists. Alawite civilians also fell in massacres near Damascus, al-Qutayfah, the Latakia countryside, Aleppo and beyond.
The list of civilian massacres in Syria numbers in the hundreds. Each stands as proof that war claims its most brutal victories against the weakest; against those tethered most tightly to the fate of the conflict.
Yet this latest catastrophe cuts deeper. It threatens the very core of the Alawite community: its existence, its collective memory, its relationship with itself and with the country it once tried to call home. This trauma will not fade with the present — it will bleed into the future. As in past eras of persecution and upheaval, the Alawites will be forced once again to reimagine who they are, and what their relationship is to the idea of the “state” — as power, as governance, as land. These massacres mark not merely another tragedy, but a turning point in the community’s modern history.
Framing groups solely through the lens of religious affiliation is, in my view, an incomplete approach and one that demands careful caveats. Within any community, religious, secular and other currents coexist, often pulling in different directions, shaped by diverging ideas, activities and values. Economic and social forces further complicate any attempt to neatly classify groups in an era when modernity erodes and reshapes both individual and collective identities.
My approach, instead, begins with two main pillars: geography and Alawite religiosity. The community is largely concentrated along Syria’s coast and its mountainous hinterlands, with smaller pockets in Homs, Hama and Damascus. It shares distinct religious rituals rooted in the Khasibi tradition, named after al-Husayn ibn Hamdan al-Khasibi, who lived in the ninth and 10th centuries.
The historical isolation of these mountain enclaves turned the landscape into a sanctuary and enabled the emergence of an imagined identity, yet one too fractured and intricate, too diffuse to anchor a unified political project, especially amid the social and political upheavals of modern Syria.
Unlike other regions, the Alawite mountains never saw the rise of major urban centers, economically or culturally. Their towns — Dreikish, al-Haffa, Slinfah and even coastal cities like Tartus and Baniyas — still resemble sprawling villages where life winds down with the setting sun.
Agriculture has long served as the backbone of these communities, preserving their traditional social structures from the 13th century to the present day. The absence of a feudal landowning class allowed broad ownership among small farmers, reinforcing the continuity of these traditional patterns.
What defines the Alawite community within the frames of geography and faith is a distinct social fabric: the life forged by generations of farmers who tamed the rugged mountains and remained steadfastly loyal to the land. In the modern era, they stepped into the wider world, joining schools, universities and the machinery of the modern state. Yet their identity remains a tapestry woven from centuries of historical accretion, shaped by waves of peoples and migrant groups from neighboring regions, Iraq and Yemen.
Debates have long raged over whether Syria was ruled by the “Alawite sect” or by the narrower “Assad sect” — a small circle close to the Assad family, responsible for the devastation wrought upon Syria within regional and international dynamics that were quickly ignored once HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa seized power.
Terms like “sect” and “minority” demand caution. As the Syrian thinker Ahmad Nazir Atassi notes, more precise terms such as “elite minority” or “authoritarian elite” better capture the reality — not only of Assad’s Syria, but now of al-Sharaa’s rule as well, under which a narrow elite governs without real participation from the broader society.
Atassi argues that reducing Assad’s rule to “Alawite control” oversimplifies the complexities of authoritarian governance. What matters is not the sectarian identity of the community, but the concentration of power in the hands of an elite. Speaking of an “Alawite regime” or “rule of Alawites” is, in this sense, deeply misleading.
Yet despite this crucial distinction, much of Syrian public opinion — over decades — came to see the regime as simply Alawite. Two successive presidents belonged to the Alawite tradition and rose to power through means widely regarded as lacking legitimacy. That the presidency, along with key security institutions, became associated with the Alawite identity created an authoritarian dynamic that elevated sectarian belonging over a broader, national (and largely Sunni) identity, despite the regime’s efforts to veil this reality through Baath Party slogans of Arab nationalism and socialism, and the “institutional camouflage” of the army and the civil service.
After the regime collapsed, media outlets openly celebrated the return of Sunni and even “Umayyad” rule in Syria, evoking the memory of the second Islamic caliphate, revered for its influence, civilization-building and prestige. This historical analogy was deeply flawed: More than 12 centuries separate the Umayyad era from the present, and today’s Syria is riven by regional powers indifferent to these nostalgic fantasies. Still, the invocation of the Umayyad past reflected a deeper political hunger: a demagogic yearning for a bygone Syrian centrality that, whether real or fictive, continues to haunt the national imagination.
Thus, in the aftermath of Assad’s toppling, the Alawite community faced its first real test of its relationship with the rest of Syrian society. The brutal attacks carried out by various Islamist factions laid bare a grim reality: Syrian society, at least in this volatile transitional phase, had fractured into sectarian identities, each clinging to its own ambiguous loyalties at the expense of any modern, citizenship-based sense of belonging.
Attempts by Syrian civil society actors and prominent political figures to deliver aid, both material and symbolic, to the devastated Alawite communities failed to uproot the deepening sectarian divides. On the contrary, the political exploitation of the coastal massacres only further confirmed the entrenchment of sectarian identities — Alawite, Druze, Ismaili, Kurdish — and their often ambivalent relations with the Sunni majority, itself far from unified in its response to the massacres.
Once again, one must stress the dangerous ambiguity embedded in the concepts of “majority” and “minority” as labels that often obscure more than they reveal, and which risk dragging analysis into shallow and misleading terrain.
After decades of close association with the Assad regime, the Alawite community found itself thrust into a radical confrontation. It was not only armed factions like HTS — rooted in Salafist-jihadist ideology, internationally classified as a terrorist group and long considered among the community’s “natural enemies” — that now saw the Alawites as an organic part of a system that had suffocated Syrian life for decades, but also broad segments of Syrian society: communities scarred by the old regime’s brutality and others shaped by sectarian thinking.
The social and economic grievances that had simmered for decades now exploded, and sectarianism, once suppressed, became a blunt instrument of political and social warfare.
Over the years, individual Alawites within the security apparatus had been complicit in arrests, torture and killings targeting Syrians of every sect, including fellow Alawites. During the war years (2011-2024), the Assad regime showed no hesitation in annihilating towns and cities associated with the revolution, using the army, barrel bombs and international alliances to grind the country into ruin. The extent of the Alawite community’s perceived “membership” of the former regime was made painfully visible when remnants of the old Syrian army launched attacks against General Security headquarters and the newly formed Syrian army under al-Sharaa’s rule.
With the fall of Assad — a man seen widely, albeit simplistically, as a symbol of “Alawite rule” — openly anti-Alawite rhetoric surged across Syrian society, long conditioned by Baathist ideology to suppress sectarian discourse in public.
Social media, combined with deliberate provocations from forces aligned with the new regime in Damascus, fanned the flames. Alawite detainees were forced to “bark like a dog” and crawl on all fours in public acts of humiliation — acts that often ended with field executions, captured in video clips from places like Fahil, Maryamin and Homs.
These atrocities buried any hopes for transitional justice in the post-Assad era. They did not spark widespread outrage among Syrians.
The same patterns appeared in the targeted disarmament of mountain communities — disarmament that conspicuously excluded supporters of the new regime, even civilians, laying bare a brutal double standard.
The mountain communities did not resist the disarmament efforts, unlike in other areas of Syria. Yet after loyalist attacks on security installations of the al-Sharaa government in Latakia, Jableh, Baniyas and Tartus — attacks that resulted in civilian and security casualties — a new wave of hatred erupted. Alawites were branded “traitors” collaborating with “terrorists.”
The irony was bitter: Only months earlier, many Syrians had themselves described al-Sharaa as a terrorist, echoing the old regime’s narrative.
Today, al-Sharaa stands, however uneasily, as a symbol of Syria’s shift from “Alawite” to “Sunni” rule, a narrative as regressive as it is historically loaded, its roots entwined with the failures of Assad’s rule.
Fighters recorded over 800 videos showing the targeted killings of Alawite civilians, acts carried out intentionally and publicly. The death toll: at least 1,662 in total, of whom 1,217 were killed by forces linked to the new government and 445 by remnants of the Assad regime, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, which estimates the number of slain General Security personnel at 214. Other reports of the Alawite death toll are higher still.
This grim archive, supplemented by satellite imagery, has formed the basis for reports documenting war crimes and atrocious acts of mass killing in places like Brabshbu, where all the males were executed, and in villages like Snobar and Jableh, where similar massacres unfolded.
Within the Alawite oral tradition, echoes of past persecutions were invoked. But never before had the violence reached such levels of cruelty.
This sectarian vision forced the Alawite community into an existential impasse.
The stakes were only sharpened when the foreign minister of the transitional government in Damascus, Asaad al-Shaibani, gave a chilling speech, linking the Alawites explicitly to the concept of “the minority” against “the majority,” pitting Alawites against Sunnis, and blaming them wholesale for the past decade’s devastation, without any nod toward the principles of transitional justice.
Perhaps the most terrifying moment came hours after an alleged “coup attempt,” when hundreds of imams across the “new Syria” issued calls for jihad and general mobilization, not against remnants of the old regime, but explicitly against the Alawites as such.
Such a call, unprecedented even during the darkest eras of Mamluk or Ottoman rule, marked a historic rupture. Syria had never before witnessed organized calls for the extermination of one of its own communities, nor mass mobilization to uproot an entire people from their lands.
And all of it unfolded while Israel, the perennial adversary, continued its annexation of the Syrian south.
These radical shifts in Syrian identity can no longer be explained by political analysis alone; they demand a reckoning far deeper than psychology, touching the very roots of a shattered national soul.
Marginalized groups are often at their most vulnerable during transitions between old and new orders, especially once the fragile protection of the previous state collapses. The Alawite community, shielded for decades by the illusion of security under the Assad regime, proved no exception. In some ways, their predicament mirrors that of Armenians and Assyrians following the fall of the Ottoman Empire: groups suddenly stripped of protection, thrust into existential peril as new maps of control and conflict were violently redrawn.
The central challenge, then and now, remains the same: profound weakness, lack of cohesion and a devastating loss of any sense of political direction.
This was not a sudden collapse. It was the long-delayed consequence of decades of dependency, of relying on a centralized authoritarian system to provide symbolic protection, mediated through the brute force of state institutions, rather than building any organic, independent strength.
The Assad regime never allowed the emergence of robust Alawite institutions capable of withstanding political shocks. When the regime fell, the community found itself exposed, with no organized structures or unified leadership, unable to resist systematic attacks or navigate the brutal new landscape.
Internal fractures only deepened the crisis. The community split between supporters and opponents of both the former and current regimes, unable to find common ground even in the face of an existential threat. Instead of closing ranks and adapting intelligently, Alawite elites became consumed by factional struggles over representation and legitimacy.
These divisions were laid bare during the failed attempts to form an “Alawite Islamic Council,” a project that splintered into multiple rival councils and nearly ignited armed conflict among competing factions.
Even during critical moments, such as the attempt to send a delegation to meet al-Sharaa, the community failed to rally behind a unified group of representatives, exposing the depth of its internal rifts.
Disagreements over representation were only one symptom of a broader paralysis. No coherent political position toward the new regime emerged in the scattered statements issued in the community’s name. Civil parties and community organizations, meanwhile, seemed to operate in a parallel reality, woefully unprepared for the scale of the coming danger and vulnerable to outside manipulation.
Since the fall of Assad, the depth of the community’s isolation has only grown more stark. Turkish Alawite clerics arrived in coastal Syria, attempting to build last-minute bridges with their Syrian counterparts, but the effort yielded little.
Elsewhere, other Syrian groups succeeded in securing international backers, as they had in previous eras. The Kurds found American support, while the Druze received Israel’s backing. The Alawites, however, after being tethered for decades to the Syrian state, found themselves alone, abandoned even by Iran, despite a shared Shiite affiliation.
In the shifting post-Assad landscape, where alliances are currency, the Alawite community’s lack of external support has only deepened its isolation and magnified its vulnerability.
One outcome of this new reality is already clear: The Alawites are poised to lose their once-central role in Syria’s political life.
After decades at the heart of the state’s machinery, channeled through the Baath Party and the security services, the community is now marginalized, excluded from the political and economic calculations of the new authorities.
Worse still, it has become a target for revenge, a scapegoat whose erasure from Syria’s future is no longer unthinkable, but a growing and terrifying possibility.
The latest massacres targeting the Alawite community were not merely brutal; they were existential.
The “invasion” struck at the heart of the Alawite mountains, at lands long imagined as a final refuge against the ravages of time and the hostility of enemies. That illusion was shattered by technology, modernity and the new roads that sliced through the once-secluded highlands, making even the most remote villages accessible.
Drones hunted down fleeing civilians. Four-wheel drive vehicles barreled across rugged terrain. Modern weapons claimed lives indiscriminately.
And guerrilla fighters — hardened by years of war — set homes ablaze along every axis leading into the mountains: Dreikish, Baniyas, Jableh, Qardaha, al-Muzayraa, al-Haffa.
On the coast, in farming villages long thought untouchable, homes were torched to conceal bodies, to erase identities. Killings were carried out purely on sectarian lines, with no distinction between fighters linked to Assad and civilians who raised white flags.
It happened during Ramadan, the month when it is said that the gates of paradise open and the gates of hell close.
In the past, massacres against Alawites were more contained, striking smaller villages and urban centers, targeting specific populations. At the dawn of the 20th century, the community’s numbers likely did not exceed 300,000. Today, it stretches across a wide landscape, home to no fewer than 2 million people.
In the past, when violence came, many could flee to the forests and scrubland, finding temporary sanctuary until the battles subsided. But the recent massacres obliterated even that last refuge. Modern technologies such as drones, satellite surveillance and precision weaponry rendered flight impossible. Forests, once protective, had been thinned by years of war, reckless logging and deliberate fires.
In some villages, like Brabsho and Snobar, not a single male was left alive. Fifty villages were swept up in the devastation, leaving the community gasping for survival across a landscape of ashes.
This brutal shift in the nature of violence is not unique to Syria — it reflects the global transformation of warfare. Where ancient conflicts depended on brute force and direct confrontation, modern war weaponizes technology to make escape itself a fleeting fantasy.
Nor was the devastation accidental: Factions aligned with the new regime shelled forests and groves across the countryside of Baniyas, Qardaha, Latakia and Jableh, using the repeated pretext of flushing out remnants of the old regime. The forests burned and, with them, the last bastions that had once shielded vulnerable communities.
But the failure was not only external. It was internal. The Alawite community had no collective strategy to face annihilation. There was no planning, no shared vision — only fatalism.
This weakness was not merely the result of drone warfare or scorched forests. It was embedded in the group’s very structure: Decades of dependency on a centralized state had left it hollow, unable to adapt, unable even to think collectively when the storm came. When other vulnerable groups in the Middle East — Assyrians, Yazidis, Armenians — faced existential threats, they built new associations and institutions to safeguard their future.
Among the Alawites, no such response has taken root. The divide between the poor and the wealthy within the community, very few as the latter are, was not bridged during the crisis. No significant relief efforts emerged from the Alawite elite, whether those who had profited under the old regime or the few prominent businessmen, all of whose names are well known.
The devastation of recent months forced the Alawite community, rooted in its mountain homeland for at least a millennium, to once again reconsider its relationship with the world beyond. Amid the massacres around Hmeimim (near Jableh), some 9,000 Alawites fled to the nearby Russian military base, pleading for international protection. The urgency of the demand only grew after five individuals were assassinated while returning home from the base.
Yet even this desperate appeal met with internal resistance: Another current within the Alawite community insisted that their only legitimate tie remained to Damascus. It is almost certain that the Alawites of Hmeimim had little grasp of what “international protection” truly meant — the conditions it would impose and the risks it would entail.
The new authorities in Damascus were quick to condemn the move, framing it as a violation of Syria’s territorial unity. Strangely, however, this rhetoric about preserving the unity of Syria — and the parallel push for disarmament — was applied almost exclusively to the Alawites, even as de facto divisions across Syria deepened.
For now, there is little sign these fractures will heal. The Druze and Kurdish communities, too, eye Damascus’ new, monochromatic government with growing fear, wary of administrative chaos and sectarian consolidation.
The Alawite plea for international protection in 2025 echoed a moment nearly a century earlier. In 1936, when France proposed reuniting Syria’s fragmented ministates (Damascus, the Druze state and the Alawite state), some Alawite notables, drawn largely from the feudal elite, petitioned the French government to preserve a separate Alawite entity, rejecting the leadership of Hashim al-Atassi. Against them stood another current of Alawite elites, advocating unity with Damascus while seeking a form of administrative and financial decentralization.
The second vision prevailed. After Syrian independence, however, any semblance of coastal autonomy was quickly swept away.
In his book “Le Pays des Alaouites” (“The Country of the Alawites”), the French geographer and historian Jacques Weulersse observed two reasons why France ultimately abandoned the idea of an independent Alawite state. First, the popular classes had not yet reached a position of “understanding the historical opportunity” before them. Second, the sheer poverty of the region made true autonomy untenable.
Nearly two-thirds of a century later, and after half a century of Alawite experience running the centralized Syrian state through the Baath Party, one might imagine that “understanding the historical opportunity” would now be more feasible.
Yet reality tells a different story. The Baathist political order that ruled Syria from 1963 to 2024 suppressed natural political and social development across the country — including in Alawite regions. Instead of nurturing healthy growth, it only entrenched exclusion, hollowed out institutions and sowed the seeds of revived prestate fanaticism among Sunnis, Alawites and others alike.
The economic development that should have transformed the Syrian coast never materialized. What emerged instead was an economy of destitution, which destroyed the little that had existed and built nothing lasting in its place.
Against this backdrop, the notion of international protection for the Alawites seems unlikely to materialize, at least in the foreseeable future. This is not merely because the community itself struggles to grasp its demands and dangers, but because the regional landscape is inhospitable and no real international political will exists to support such an endeavor.
For now, international protection remains a distant dream, beyond reach. The Alawite community remains trapped, caught between the hammer of the new regime in Damascus and the anvil of deepening regional tensions, with no radical solutions yet visible on the horizon.
The recent massacres that swept the Alawite community along the Syrian coast mark a painful end to a long chapter in its history, a chapter in which the community had found illusory protection within a centralized state, at the cost of building resilient internal institutions. Today, with the collapse of that regime, the Alawites face severe existential challenges: internal divisions, the absence of external allies, organizational fragility and the loss of any meaningful political role.
These challenges reveal more than weakness of the Alawite community. They expose a broader collapse: the erosion of the state itself and, with it, the idea of equal citizenship. National identity has given way to sectarian and ethnic allegiances, becoming the primary framework through which groups relate to one another.
This is the bitter legacy of Syria’s modern history: the abject failure of the old regime to build a state rooted in shared citizenship, and the failure of the new authorities to offer a genuine alternative capable of stitching back together the torn social fabric.
But perhaps the most urgent question raised by these events goes beyond any single community: Can Syria still hope to build a modern state grounded in citizenship, transcending sectarian lines? Or is it fated to continue its descent into fragmentation, conflict and the slow death of a national idea? The answer to that question will determine not only the future of the Alawite community but the fate of all Syrians.
It is said that the prominent Alawite sheikh, Shaaban Mansour, who was assassinated alongside his son during the recent massacres, once uttered a bitter truth about the fall of Assad’s “Alawite” regime: “Welcome to the wages of our own deeds.” Those wages have arrived faster — and more brutally — than anyone, even he, could have foreseen.
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