While Alawites constitute but a small religious community in Syria, perhaps 10 per cent of the country’s 15 million resident population, they suffer from a unique prominence and vulnerability.
Through a millennium, they stood out as Syria’s most isolated, impoverished, despised and oppressed ethnicity. Only when generals from their community seized power in Damascus in 1966 did the power balance change.
But the ruthless domination of Syria by Alawites for the next 58 years caused the country’s majority Sunni Muslim population in 2011 to rebel, leading to a full-scale civil war that ended in December 2024 when Sunnis overthrew Alawite rule and returned to power.
Recent events point to an ominous Sunni desire for retribution. To understand its sources and implications requires a look at the past.
As is well known, Islam claims to be the final religion; accordingly, Sunnis and Shi’ites alike historically reviled Alawism, a new and distinct religion that emerged from Shia Islam in the ninth century. They looked upon Alawites as apostates. A 19th-century Sunni sheik, Ibrahim al-Maghribi, decreed that Muslims might freely take Alawite property and lives, and a British traveller records being told: “These Ansayrii, it is better to kill one than to pray a whole day.”
Frequently persecuted and sometimes massacred during the past two centuries, Alawites insulated themselves geographically from the outside world by staying within their highlands. A leading Alawite sheik called his people “among the poorest of the East”. Anglican missionary Samuel Lyde found the state of their society “a perfect hell upon earth”.
After Syria’s independence from French rule in 1946, Alawites initially resisted central government control but reconciled to Syrian citizenship by 1954 and, taking advantage of their over-representation in the army, began their political ascent.
Alawites had a major role in the Baath coup of 1963 and took many key positions while purging Sunni competitors. These developments culminated in a group of mainly Alawite Baathist military officers seizing power in 1966. In the final drama, two Alawite generals, Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad, battled for supremacy, a rivalry that ended when Assad prevailed in 1970.
Confessional affiliation remained vitally important during the 58 years of Alawite rule, mostly under Hafez al-Assad (1970-2000) and his son Bashar (2000-24). Hafez built a brutal police state and imposed Alawite control by placing his co-religionists throughout the government.
Until the outbreak of civil war in 2011, Sunnis made up about 70 per cent of Syria’s population; beyond numbers, they historically ruled the region, which translated into an easy assumption that they should enjoy the perquisites of power. After 1970, however, they served mostly as window-dressing; in the pithy words of an army veteran, “An Alawite captain has more say than a Sunni general.”
The psychological impact of this turnaround on Sunnis can hardly be exaggerated. For them, an Alawite ruling in Damascus compares to an “untouchable” becoming maharaja or a Jew becoming tsar – an unprecedented and shocking development. Michael Van Dusen of the Wilson Center rightly calls this shift “the most significant political fact of 20th-century Syrian history and politics”.
This power reversal caused Sunni Muslims to perceive Assad’s totalitarian repression in sectarian terms. The Assads endeavored to present themselves as Muslims but few if any Syrian Sunnis accepted them as such.
The assertion of Alawite power in 1966 provoked the Sunnis’ religious apprehensions. Their grievances festered as they suffered domination by a people they considered inferior, as they perceived discrimination in aspects of life (such as Sunni households paying four times more than Alawites for electricity), as they lived with the memory of the 1982 Hama massacre and other brutal assaults, and as they resented the socialism that reduced their wealth, the indignities against Islam, and a perceived co-operation with Maronites and Israelis.
A vicious circle set in. As Sunnis became increasingly alienated, Alawites depended ever more on Alawite rule. As the regime took on an increasingly Alawite cast, Sunni discontent deepened.
When the regional Islamist rebellion of 2011 reached Syria, it began a hideous 14-year, mainly Sunni insurrection against Bashar al-Assad’s government that generated an estimated 7.5 million internally displaced people and 5.2 million external refugees, and led to some 620,000 deaths.
Domestically, the regime relied increasingly on its Alawite base. News service Reuters recounts how Bashar “sent army and secret police units dominated by [Alawite] officers … into mainly Sunni urban centers to crush demonstrations calling for his removal”.
Some quotations capture the intensity of Sunni hostility:
- Adnan al-Arour, a Sunni religious leader, referring to Alawites opposed to the Sunni uprising, declared: “I swear by God we will mince them in grinders and feed their flesh to the dogs.”
- Syrian Sunni leader Mamoun al-Homsi told “you despicable Alawites” that “From this day on, we will not remain silent. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth … I swear that if you do not renounce that gang and those killings, we will teach you a lesson that you will never forget. We will wipe you out from the land of Syria.”
- Ibtisam, 11, a Sunni refugee living in Jordan: “I hate the Alawites and the Shi’ites. We are going to kill them with our knives, just like they killed us.”
- Heza, 13: “After the revolution, we want to kill them.” Even a child his own age? “I will kill him. It doesn’t matter.”
Such statements, not surprisingly, scared the small Alawite community. Wild rumors spread, such as the apocryphal female butcher in Homs who asked the shabiha, the armed civilian militia, “to bring her the bodies of Alawites they capture so that she can cut them up and market the meat”.
The New York Times reported: “Many Alawites are terrified; they are often the victims of the most vulgar stereotypes and, in popular conversation, uniformly associated with the leadership.”
Worse, many Alawites suffered from the Assad government. Wafa Sultan, an exiled physician, tells about the many injustices, including intentional impoverishment (to ensure their sons would serve the government to earn a living), the persecution of intellectuals and imprisonment of dissidents’ relatives. Accordingly, many Alawites rejoiced at Assad’s fall.
Then came the stunning events of early December 2024, when the Sunni Islamist forces of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham under the leadership of Ahmed al-Sharaa (Al-Julani), along with allies, swept rapidly through Syria and seized Damascus, and Assad fled to Russia.
During the first three months of the new regime there was some Sunni retribution against Alawites, but it was limited and not organised: firings from jobs, vigilantism and small-scale violence. In late January 2025, Syrian journalist Ammar Dayoub documented acts “from directing sectarian curses at Alawites and Shi’ites to gathering the men in the squares and flogging them, smashing furniture in people’s homes, stealing gold and silver and acts of violence against women”.
In response, Dayoub explains, the regime “did not acknowledge these violations [but] blamed individuals or small local factions”. Further, the Middle East Media Research Institute reports, “It also refrained from publishing the names of those responsible, thus preventing the families of the victims from taking legal action against them.” This led to the establishment of Alawite “resistance groups” that the regime promptly vilified as “Assad loyalists”.
Then, on March 6, came the large-scale assaults, mostly in the Alawites’ coastal home region, Latakia, a province in the northwest of Syria. Sunni forces, including the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army and foreign jihadists, rampaged, torching homes and killing indiscriminately. The HTS government presented itself as defending itself from an insurgency of “Assad loyalists”.
But Alawites suffered greatly in the Assad era and even more during the civil war, so they had widely abandoned Bashar in his hour of need when they could have saved him. As Assad languished in Russia, Iranian support had collapsed and Israeli forces had demolished all the old regime’s arsenals, they did not fight a rearguard action for him. Rather, attacks by those “resistance groups” on governmental forces reflected fears of persecution.
Unlike the civil war period, when Sunnis freely expressed their rage at Alawites, in 2025 they came under pressure to be on best behaviour so Sharaa could convince foreign NGOs and governments to aid his regime. Dig down below the surface, however, and it became very clear that the March attacks served as vengeance for what one Sunni religious scholar, Abdallah Khalil al-Tamimi, termed the two million Sunnis killed by “the Alawite regime … on sectarian grounds”.
In Damascus, one radio host “encouraged his listeners to cast the Alawites into the sea”. An HTS-affiliated commander called out, “Oh warriors of jihad, do not leave any Alawite, male or female, alive. Slaughter the most respected men among them. Slaughter the most respected women among them. Slaughter them all, including children in their beds. They are pigs. Seize them and throw them into the sea.”
Proud of their actions, many perpetrators videoed their actions, such as killing two sons in front of their mother. “This is revenge,” cries a man looting and burning Alawite homes. Sunnis humiliated Alawites, the Economist reports, forcing them “to bark like dogs, sitting on their backs, riding them, and then shooting them dead”.
To this carnage, Sharaa responded serenely. “What is currently happening in Syria is within the expected challenges. We must preserve national unity and civil peace,” he said. “We call on Syrians to be reassured because the country has the fundamentals for survival.” Plus he set up a commission of inquiry.
That HTS leaders emerged out of al-Qa’ida and the Islamic State lends an air of theater to their donning blazers or suits and ties.
That HTS leaders emerged out of al-Qa’ida and the Islamic State lends an air of theater to their donning blazers or suits and ties, then embracing happy talk about human rights while blaming the violence on Alawites. Western acceptance brings so many financial and other benefits.
Some already refer to genocide. Kurdish Syrian writer Mousa Basrawi decried “an organized campaign of genocide … aimed at exterminating the Alawites”. Christian Solidarity International issued a “genocide warning” because of the “orgy of targeted killings accompanied by dehumanising hate speech”.
The public response to this danger? Virtual silence. No marches in the Western capitals, no encampments at universities. And Western governments? Canberra “condemns the recent horrific violence in Syria’s coastal region” and is “deeply concerned by UN reports that many civilians from the Alawite community were summarily executed”. Washington “condemns the radical Islamist terrorists, including foreign jihadis, that murdered people in western Syria in recent days”. The U.N. denounces “harrowing violations and abuses”.
Condemnations are necessary but not sufficient. Repulsing Islamist aggression represents a core Western interest, plus moral responsibility requires urgent action to avoid a possible genocide.
U.S. inaction during the 1994 Rwandan genocide led to subsequent apologies (Bill Clinton: “I express regret for my personal failure”), as did Dutch failures in Bosnia (Defence Minister Kajsa Ollongren: “We offer our deepest apologies”). This time, will politicians act so as to avoid having later to apologise?
Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is founder of the Middle East Forum. This article draws on his three books about Syria, plus a 1987 analysis titled “Syria After Assad.” First posted in the Australian.
A more detailed version of this analysis will appear in the Summer 2025 issue of the Middle East Quarterly.
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