Moscow can search to protect its most necessary property in Syria by means of cooperation with an Alawite autonomous zone—if that neighborhood strikes shortly to determine one.
The beautiful downfall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad leaves not merely a vacuum of energy in that nation however a virtually infinite checklist of unanswered questions. Probably the most important issues the destiny and way forward for the minority Alawite neighborhood, from which Assad and his inside 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 all the time been—and, extra necessary, perceived as—a communal Alawite mission 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 secure, pluralistic nation—or descends into additional sectarian chaos.
Alawism is an offshoot of Shiite Islam, however the religion has been thought of heretical nearly 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 infrequently secretive group struggling to outlive of their northeastern Syrian coastal and mountain homelands. Throughout French colonial rule following World Warfare I, Paris toyed with creating an unbiased Alawite state in japanese Syria, simply north of the realm that might grow to be Lebanon, however the mission failed.
Nonetheless, Alawites grew to become one thing of a popular minority beneath the French. They have been strongly inspired to affix, and closely promoted inside, the creating Syrian navy. 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 assist. 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 combat for him over the previous week means that this rationalization of assist has lastly crumbled.
Nonetheless, Alawites are absolutely terrified 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 situation for a neighborhood that has lengthy been considered 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 navy forces in and round Damascus which might be deeply implicated within the regime’s document of atrocities and, in lots of circumstances, have every thing to concern 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 respectable and illicit enterprise actions as potential. They could have misplaced their chief, in different phrases, however they haven’t misplaced their incentive to determine self-controlled territory.
Even with Assad out of the image, the brand new coalition won’t be capable of cease the additional fragmentation of Syria. There may be 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 they’d been quietly sustaining an Islamist statelet of their very own. Israel is transferring shortly to manage a zone of affect across the occupied Golan Heights, which it purports to have annexed. Until Syria can shortly unify round a consensus authorities blessed, however not dominated, by HTS and Turkey, and that doesn’t threaten non secular minorities, the Alawite neighborhood and remnants of the previous regime might nicely search to determine their very own de facto regional autonomous zone.
Probably the most believable central location is the coastal city of Tartus. It has an amazing 80 p.c Alawite majority. The encompassing inhabitants can also be primarily Alawite, and most others are Christians. Equally necessary, Russia—the Assad regime’s most necessary 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 necessary 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 take care of current alerts intelligence facilities.
Even when Moscow can not keep energy and affect in Damascus, it could possibly search to protect its most necessary property in Syria by means of cooperation with an Alawite autonomous zone, if that neighborhood and remnants of the previous regime transfer shortly to determine one. It will be an ironic echo of the failed French Alawite-state mission of the Nineteen Twenties. Largely due to their very own disunity, the Alawites by no means received their unbiased 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 the complete nation. What is obvious is that the lengthy period of Alawite dominance in Syria is lastly over.
