Moscow can search to protect its most essential property in Syria by cooperation with an Alawite autonomous zone—if that neighborhood strikes rapidly to ascertain one.
The gorgeous downfall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad leaves not merely a vacuum of energy in that nation however a virtually infinite listing of unanswered questions. One of the vital important considerations the destiny and way forward for the minority Alawite neighborhood, from which Assad and his interior circle hailed. The Assad dictatorship started when Bashar’s father, Hafez, seized management of the nation in 1970. The federal government that Bashar inherited upon his father’s loss of life in 2000 was nominally Baathist, a socialist and pan-Arab ideology, however the coronary heart of the regime has at all times been—and, extra essential, perceived as—a communal Alawite venture on the expense of the Syrian Sunni majority. What occurs to that neighborhood now will say an important deal about whether or not post-Assad Syria coheres right into a steady, pluralistic nation—or descends into additional sectarian chaos.
Alawism is an offshoot of Shiite Islam, however the religion has been thought-about heretical virtually unanimously by each Sunni and Shiite clerical authorities because it emerged within the ninth century. The Alawites accordingly grew to become an insular, tightly knit, and sometimes secretive group struggling to outlive of their northeastern Syrian coastal and mountain homelands. Throughout French colonial rule following World Battle I, Paris toyed with creating an impartial Alawite state in japanese Syria, simply north of the world that may grow to be Lebanon, however the venture failed.
Nonetheless, Alawites grew to become one thing of a popular minority beneath the French. They have been strongly inspired to hitch, and closely promoted inside, the creating Syrian army. In 1970, Hafez al-Assad, an air-force basic, seized energy and imposed the extremely repressive political system that lasted till this weekend.
The Assad dictatorship didn’t rely solely on Alawite help. Many Syrian minority teams, together with Christians, Druze, and Jews, genuinely got here to view Assad as a defender of communal minorities. The truth that even Alawites declined to battle for him over the previous week means that this rationalization of help has lastly crumbled.
Nonetheless, Alawites are certainly afraid of a future with out the regime that purported to guard them. The coalition poised to take over the nation is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni Islamist group that was as soon as an affiliate of ISIS and, later, al-Qaeda. This can be a nightmarish state of affairs for a neighborhood that has lengthy been thought to be heretics and apostates by even “reasonable” radical Muslim fundamentalists. HTS claims to have moderated, and its chief, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, has promised to be tolerant of Shiites, Christians, Druze, and Alawites. However skepticism is inevitable.
One puzzling side of Assad’s downfall is the truth that he didn’t even attempt to retreat to an Alawite redoubt in northeastern Syria. He nonetheless retained important elite army forces in and round Damascus which can be deeply implicated within the regime’s report of atrocities and, in lots of instances, have all the things to worry from a Sunni Islamist new order. These teams even have an curiosity in defending and controlling their remaining constituencies, and preserving as a lot of their authentic and illicit enterprise actions as doable. They might have misplaced their chief, in different phrases, however they haven’t misplaced their incentive to ascertain self-controlled territory.
Even with Assad out of the image, the brand new coalition may not be capable of cease the additional fragmentation of Syria. There’s already a Kurdish self-ruled space within the north. HTS and its Turkish-backed allies burst out of Idlib Province, in Syria’s northwest, the place that they had been quietly sustaining an Islamist statelet of their very own. Israel is shifting rapidly to manage a zone of affect across the occupied Golan Heights, which it purports to have annexed. Until Syria can rapidly unify round a consensus authorities blessed, however not dominated, by HTS and Turkey, and that doesn’t threaten spiritual minorities, the Alawite neighborhood and remnants of the previous regime might effectively search to ascertain their very own de facto regional autonomous zone.
Probably the most believable central location is the coastal city of Tartus. It has an awesome 80 p.c Alawite majority. The encircling inhabitants can be primarily Alawite, and most others are Christians. Equally essential, Russia—the Assad regime’s most essential backer—maintains its all-important warm-water naval port in Tartus, an asset that Russian leaders have prioritized for hundreds of years and can be loath to lose now. The port is essential for Russian provide strains into Africa, amongst different essential capabilities. Russia has additionally been working to rebuild a former Soviet submarine base close by. A continued Russian presence in western Syria would even be leveraged to keep up present alerts intelligence facilities.
Even when Moscow can not keep energy and affect in Damascus, it could possibly search to protect its most essential property in Syria by cooperation with an Alawite autonomous zone, if that neighborhood and remnants of the previous regime transfer rapidly to ascertain one. It could be an ironic echo of the failed French Alawite-state venture of the Twenties. Largely due to their very own disunity, the Alawites by no means received their impartial state. However beneath the Assads, they led a coalition that dominated Syria for greater than half a century. They may quickly try and return to the de facto independence inside Syria that they as soon as inadvertently exchanged for management over your complete nation. What is evident is that the lengthy period of Alawite dominance in Syria is lastly over.
