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Syria’s Alawite Minority, Favored by the Assads, Looks Nervously to the Future
Amid an outcry for justice and accountability and threats online, a once-dominant group is feeling deep anxiety after the ouster of Syria’s dictator.
The walls of the mausoleum for late President Hafez al-Assad are scrawled with graffiti now — things that Syrians have long felt but could never say aloud during his family’s five-decade dictatorship.
The cavernous building sits high on a hilltop overlooking al-Qardaha, the Assad family’s ancestral village. For the past few weeks, Syrians have converged there to curse, spit and even urinate on the memorial, its high arched ceilings charred from when rebels set the tomb on fire.
“Curse your soul, Hafez” and “Didn’t I tell you we were coming for you?” read some of the messages they left behind.
Al-Qardaha sits in the middle of Latakia province on Syria’s western Mediterranean coast — a region that is the heartland of the country’s Alawite minority, which includes the Assads. About 10 percent of Syrians belong to the sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and Alawites dominated the ruling class and upper ranks of the military under the Assad dynasty.
As the country emerges from the long dictatorship, Syrians are demanding accountability for crimes committed under the brutal rule that began with Hafez al-Assad and was passed down to his recently ousted son, Bashar al-Assad. This cry for justice has left the Alawite community with a deep sense of anxiety.
“When they come in and curse and ransack, it doesn’t matter who he was,” Dr. Fidaa Deeb, a gynecologist and an Alawite, said of the desecration of the mausoleum. “This is the grave of someone dead,” he said at a recent meeting at the al-Qardaha village hall. “It needs to be protected.”
But it is not only the dead who need protecting, according to Alawite residents of Latakia.
During a recent visit to the province, Alawites there spoke of their fears of retribution and, like a mantra, virtually all repeated that they need the same things: safety and security. Their fears have been stoked by threatening posts on social media, with some Syrians saying the Alawites should pay for supporting the Assad government.
Some Alawites have called on their fellow Syrians to welcome and protect them instead of prosecuting them.
“We don’t want them to scare us,” said Dr. Deeb. “We shouldn’t have to prove our loyalty. The country should embrace us.”
Ahmed al-Shara, the Islamist leader of the rebels who overthrew Bashar al-Assad earlier this month, has sought to reassure Syria’s many minorities including Alawites, Christians and Druse. The day after Mr. al-Assad’s Dec. 8 downfall, Mr. al-Shara’s group sent a representative to al-Qardaha to meet with village leaders, residents said.
The meeting was a good start, according to local leaders. But in the days that followed, they said, armed men believed to be members of other rebel factions came into the village, stole vehicles and looted homes.
Alawites protested this week in several provinces in response to a video showing an alleged attack on a shrine holy to the sect, according to the British-based war monitoring group, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. But officials in the transitional government have said it was an old video that was republished.
Some Alawites have said ominously that if the new government cannot guarantee their safety, they will take matters into their own hands to protect themselves.
Many members of the sect contend that they, too, were oppressed under the dictatorship, just like other Syrians. They deny that they were a favored class and point to ramshackle homes and low salaries as proof that they suffered from poverty.
Some of them said that economic desperation is what pushed many Alawites to join the military, rather than ideological reasons.
Early in Syria’s 13-year civil war, which began in 2011, explosions hit parts of the western coastal region where much of the Alawite population lives. Rebels were rising up against Mr. al-Assad and his government responded by distributing weapons to some members of the minority, residents of al-Qardaha said.
Some of the Alawites who were armed around this time have handed over their weapons to the interim government. But many are refusing to disarm without some sort of guarantees that they will be protected from attacks.
Following the looting in al-Qardaha, the new Syrian interim government sent forces to guard a checkpoint outside the village.
But beyond the immediate fears for their safety, Alawites are also calling on the newly empowered leaders not to single them out in the quest for justice and accountability.
“Either there should be amnesty for all the war criminals and not just certain individuals, or prosecution for all the war criminals from all the sides,” Dr. Awas Uthman, a member of the al-Qardaha village council and an Alawite, said at the recent council meeting there.
But such a blanket amnesty would be unacceptable to many in a country where hundreds of thousands have been killed, imprisoned and tortured under the Assads. The new government has said it will give amnesty to military conscripts, but hold accountable those responsible for deaths or torture of fellow Syrians.
Officials with the new interim government say it is too early for the Alawite community to be dictating any terms, accusing them of being a direct party to the Assad regime’s crimes against fellow Syrians.
“They need to stay silent for at least a year and not make any demands,” said Ahmad Hilal, a lawyer who now heads the Palace of Justice, a court in the northwestern city of Aleppo. “They killed the prisoners in the prisons. They showed us no mercy. Now they are talking about nationalism and being part of a nation? Why didn’t they speak up before this?”
Mr. Hilal, part of Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, said that when he was in the military as a young conscript, he saw for himself how Alawite soldiers and officers were treated differently.
“They burned the entire country,” he said. At the entrance of his office lay a torn down photo of the ousted Mr. Assad as a makeshift door mat. “You are living in palaces and reaped millions of dollars. Should you be allowed to keep all of this?”
In al-Qardaha, a stone mansion with blue shutters that belonged to Rifaat al-Assad, the uncle of the ousted president, has been ransacked and looted. On a recent visit, a man and his nephew — both dressed in tattered clothing — were scouring the rooms looking for metal they could strip and sell for scraps.
Near the front door, a green safe had been pried open, its contents long gone. The pair left with a space heater and a bag overfilled with scrap metal.
Next door is the former home of Hafez al-Assad, a three-story stone and brick structure with a guard post at the gate. In the backyard, boys and men chopped down trees to cart away for firewood.
Across the street, the homes of residents were ramshackle and missing windows. The walls were peeling and water stained. Electricity comes only a few hours a day. Clothes were hung to dry on clotheslines.
Yusra al-Ajouria, a 50-year-old mother of four from al-Qardaha, said she is married to a career military officer who served under Bashar al-Assad’s rule, a brigadier general in the engineering unit. Her family of six lived for decades in military officers’ housing near the presidential palace in the capital, Damascus.
When Mr. al-Assad fled Damascus, so did Ms. al-Ajouria and her family, fearing retribution. They headed back to al-Qardaha.
She said they are now living with her in-laws in the village, along with four other families, all crammed into one dilapidated home.
She insisted that her husband had never been on a front line and did not have any blood on his hands.
On the day that Mr. al-Assad fell, the family was driving in a military vehicle along the highway from Damascus to al-Qardaha. They were stopped at a rebel checkpoint and forced to get out, Ms. al-Ajouria said.
“‘Get out, Alawite dogs,’” one of the rebels spat at them, according to Ms. al-Ajouria. She said she begged them to let her family keep their bags of clothes and the 7 million in Syrian pounds, less than $100, that they had with them.
Her 26-year-old daughter, Batool al-Ajouria, said the rebel had threatened to shoot them if they did not walk away.
“We are innocent,” the daughter said, a long cardigan wrapped tightly around her against the cold. “We didn’t gain any benefit from the regime.”
Muhammad Haj Kadour contributed reporting.
Raja Abdulrahim reports on the Middle East and is based in Jerusalem. More about Raja Abdulrahim
Ivor Prickett is a photographer based in Istanbul. He covered the rise and fall of ISIS in Iraq and Syria while on assignment for The Times. More recently he has been working on stories related to the war in Ukraine. More about Ivor Prickett
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