The regime’s heavy reliance on Alawis in the army units and militias dispatched to the front-lines, coupled with the community’s relatively small size, have resulted in disproportionate losses of the sect’s young men. At the same time, this predominance of the sect in the military—combined with the atrocities that some fighters perpetrated, at times in front of cameras—have, in the eyes of many Sunni Syrians, tainted all Alawis with guilt by association. In addition, the corruption and war-profiteering, mainly benefitting high-ranking regime officers and mukhabarat (secret police) agents, who are largely Alawi, reinforced the image of Alawis as corrupt, privileged and rich, in the eyes of Sunnis. The Alawis are fully aware of this image and are quick to reject it. [...]
After Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, seized power in 1970, after decades of political instability in Syria and frequent coups, he worked to stabilize the regime and ouster-proof it. One step he took was to purge anyone who appeared disloyal, creating a core of the regime largely made up of Alawi officers and Assad relatives. That system prevailed for the next forty years. Over the decade preceding the 2011 uprising, about 87 percent of high-ranking Syrian Army officers, such as division commanders, were Alawi. The various branches of the Mukhabarat are dominated and commanded by Alawis, as are all the elite military and militia units, including the 4th Mechanized Division, the Tiger Forces, the Republican Guard, and the Air Force. According to the US researcher Hicham Bou Nasif, who interviewed dozens of Sunni officers in the Syrian military in 2014, “since the early 1980s, Alawis have made up 80–85 percent of every new cohort graduating from the military academy.”
Facing a grave challenge to its monopoly of power from 2011 onward, the Assad regime sought to ensure the loyalty or neutrality of Syria’s minorities. Before the war and the demographic changes it wrought, about 65 percent of Syria’s population of 21 million were Sunni Arabs, 10 percent were Sunni Kurds, another 10 percent were Alawis, and about 5 percent were Christian. To ensure the allegiance of Assad’s base, the Alawi community, the regime employed several tactics. First, in speeches during the early days of the uprising, he portrayed the protesters as Sunni extremists and armed terrorists. Second, in a move apparently designed to ensure a radicalization of the opposition and to weaken its secular-democratic elements, in the first months of the uprising, the regime released hundreds of jihadists from prison, while jailing peaceful activists. Third, the regime staged provocations such as sending men to shoot into the air or cut tires of cars in Alawi neighborhoods to instill fear, and then went about distributing guns and sandbags to Alawi inhabitants to reinforce a sense of their being a community under threat from the opposition—even though, at that stage, there were no armed rebels. [...]
The militarization and religious radicalization of the opposition, and the division of the country’s territory between the warring sides, soon hardened sectarian divisions. Members of non-Sunni, minority communities mostly fled opposition-controlled areas. In areas under regime control, where about 70 percent of Syria’s population now resides, members of different sects do live side by side, but relations are strained. Samira adopted the regime’s narrative, blaming the opposition for the rise in sectarian hatred: “They played the sectarianism card on purpose, to make the different components of society hate each other, and killings were based on that to augment the hatred and sectarianism.”
No comments:
Post a Comment