It's important to note that Syria was a much bigger piece of territory before the French got their hands on it. The new radical Sunni rulers of Syria won't end their march in Damascus, should they get that far. They have their sights set on Lebanon, and the surrounding region.
If a deal with Israel has been struck, and all signs point to it, then they will attack Hezbollah from the rear in the coming months. Lebanese Christians will also be in their crosshairs.
Israel emboldened Hamas in its early days to counteract the PLO, and it was successful in doing so until Hamas got too big for its role and outlived its usefulness.
They're just repeating that same strategy on a regional scale. They're uber confident right now and they believe they can handle a radical Sunni Greater Syria backed by the Ottomans on their doorstep.
And maybe they can since their principal way of fighting is carpet bombing cities and committing massacres on every street. With the West behind them, it seems they can commit any crime and get away with it. Israel is just copying what the Romans did, "they create a desert and call it peace." They are great students of history.
As for Syria itself, new inqusitions are being planned. The people taking over have a thousand year grudge against the Shiites, which they believe to be the main source of their ills in the present day. Without a doubt the Alawites will be hunted, as well as other minorities in the area like the Christians, Armenians, Druze and Kurds in the North of the country.
Turkey would like nothing more than to see a Syria devoid of its ethnic and religious minorities so it can accomplish its aims quicker and rule without worrying about potential revolts in the future.
A unified, monolithic, theocratic, expansionist, Sunni Syria would be a big prize for the Turks. And they have a history of committing genocides to get what they want so it shouldn't be out of the realm of possibility. They're still busy trying to destroy whatever is left of Armenia a century after the original crime. And since Israel is helping them with that little side project it only stands to reason it is aiding its criminal takeover in Syria too.
The names, values and tribal organization of the 'Alawis derive both from their distant nomadic background and from the experience of life in the mountains over the last few centuries. Today's 'Alawi tribal structures reflect what is left of this heritage. Most 'Alawis belong to one of four main tribal confederations, the Haddadin, the Matawira, the Khaiyatin, and the Kalbiya and it is to the Kalbiya that Asad's grandfather Sulayman belonged. Originally each of the four big groupings was probably concentrated in a distinct part of the mountains, but over time the tribes intermingled so that even a hamlet of a hundred people might have Haddadin and Khaiyatin living side by side, if not in harmony. In addition, three smaller tribes, the Darawisa, the Mahaliba and the 'Amamira, settled at the northern end of the mountain range while several thousand 'Alawis lived, largely detribalized, on the plains outside the mountain areas. As a result tribal maps of the 'Alawi district are not neat affairs but show inextricable overlappings. Sulayman's village of Qurdaha, however, was less of a tribal mosaic than others. Overwhelmingly Kalbiya and the seat of the principal religious dignitary of the tribe, it was sometimes called Qurdaha al-Kalbiya.
Alawis today are not always comfortable with the subject of tribal affiliations as the Ba'thist state has striven to replace such categories with the modern notion of citizenship, but if pressed every village boy could tell you to which tribe his family belongs. Asked to name the leading tribes and families of Qurdaha, the head of the municipality replied, 'We have no tribes or families here. We are all members of the Ba'th family under the leadership of Hafiz al-Asad. Only then, after some coaxing, did he mention the Kalbiya clans which trace their lineage back hundreds of years.
The name of the 'Alawi community is of recent coinage dating only from the French Mandate. Before the First World War the community was known either as the Nusayriya after its alleged founder Muhammad ibn Nusayr, a ninth-century religious propagandist, or, in a variant of the same word, as the Ansariya, the traditional name of the mountain range which they inhabited. Only in recent decades has a member of the community become known as an 'Alawi or Alawite, strictly speaking a follower of 'Ali, the fountainhead of Shi'ism, a name which places the 'Alawis within the family of Shi'i sects.
The history of 'Alawi or Nusayri beliefs is misty indeed. The earliest references come from Druze polemics against them in the eleventh century when, to the outrage of Druze theologians, Nusayri missionaries started proselytizing among the newly arrived Druzes in southern Lebanon. The Nusayris make a fleeting appearance in Crusader chronicles and later in a few travellers' tales and reports by European consuls, but it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that a determined attempt to throw light on them was made by the Reverend Samuel Lyde in The Asian Mystery, published in London in 1860. He based his work on the first Nusayri text to come to the attention of Western scholars, a book called The Manual of Shaykhs which he bought from a Christian merchant of Latakia into whose hands it had fallen during the Egyptian conquest of Syria in the 1830s. The next breakthrough came with the publication in 1900 of René Dussaud's Histoire et Religion des Nosairis, itself based on a book published in Beirut in 1863 by Sulayman al-Adhana, a Nusayri turned Christian who was later killed for his apostasy. Adhana's book contained the Nusayris' principal prayers and instructions and an account of their fundamental beliefs. On these rather shaky foundations, more recent scholars have built a fuller picture of the sect, although most readily admit that it remains, in Philip Hitti's words, a 'partially unsolved religious riddle'."
There seems little doubt, however, that the Nusayris are a schismatic offshoot from mainstream 'Twelver' Shi'ism whose history for the last thousand years has been one of stubborn survival in the face of invasion and repression. The Franks of the First Crusade (1098) seized their strongpoints in the mountains and built castles on them. In the early twelfth century the then powerful Isma'ilis stormed up from their base in the plain at Salamiya and also built fortresses in Nusayri country, where pockets of them remain to this day still at odds with their neighbours. Saladin conquered the area in 1188 and demanded tribute. The Mamluk Sultans who followed him over the next century routed the Isma'ilis, drove out the last Crusaders, and tried forcibly to convert the Nusayri sectarians to orthodox Islam. When the fourteenth century traveller Ibn Battuta passed through the mountains he recorded that the Nusayris were compelled to build mosques. The Syrian theologian Ibn Taymiya (1263-1328), a champion of Sunni orthodoxy, condemned the Nusayris as more dangerous than the Christians and urged Muslims to make holy war on them---a text which still provides ammunition for their twentieth-century opponents.
Their next oppressors were the Ottoman Turks who conquered Syria at the beginning of the sixteenth century and made a new attempt to force orthodoxy on the Nusayris. Ottoman government, lasting until 1918, was interrupted briefly by a decade of Egyptian rule from 1832, which far from bringing relief meant better organized and still more severe repression. By this time the highlanders were widely despised as heretics and outcasts and it was only with the coming of the French Mandate after the First World War that the Nusayris felt free from persecution. (Pg. 9 - 11).
. . .Asad grew up in one of the strangest political societies of modern times: an 'Alawi 'state' of some 300,000 people which France carved out of a backward corner of the Ottoman empire after the defeat of the Turks in the First World War. This unusual background was to have an enduring effect on him. The central paradox of his career was that as a man who was to claim to embody militant Arab nationalism he should have started life in an obscure backwater - separatist, Western- sponsored, and by definition sectarian, which held itself aloof from the Arab world in general and from the rest of Syria in particular. Separatism and unity, minority and majority, margin and mainstream, the part and the whole these opposites still lie just below the surface of politics and society in the Arab world. Is that world a mosaic, a bewildering babble of ancient communities each at odds with the other? Or is it a unit, essentially one in way of life, language and aspirations? Most Arabs believe the second to be true and blame their fragmentation on the malevolent interference of foreigners. In Syria this feeling is particularly acute.
Every Syrian schoolchild is brought up to hate the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the two instruments which in Arab eyes carved up and disposed of 'natural Syria'. Although natural Syria was almost never politically united, this vast area bounded by the Taurus mountains to the north, the Mediterranean to the west, the Euphrates to the east, and the Arabian desert to the south was in the minds of its inhabitants a whole, homogeneous in culture, threaded with economic ties and known for centuries as bilad al-Sham, 'the lands of Damascus'. Each of the main cities of the region had its own character and jealous particularity, and its constellation of leading families, but there was a sense in which Jerusalem and Jaffa, Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Tripoli, Damascus, Homs and Hama, Latakia, Aleppo and Alexandretta were all kin, and of all these Damascus was acknowledged to be the most important.
For ten years in the 1830s natural Syria was ruled by Egypt from Damascus as a single unit for the first time since the reign of the Umayyad caliphs twelve hundred years earlier. When Egyptian occupation ended, bilad al-Sham reverted to Ottoman rule and was again subdivided into provinces, but these divisions were no more than local authority demarcations offering no obstacle to trade or settlement or family ties. (The real division at the time was between this 'natural Syria' and the Arab frontier provinces facing Persia that is to say, present-day Iraq.) When the First World War finished off the 400-year- old Ottoman empire, its Arab provinces were left to the mercies of Britain and France, the victorious superpowers of the time, who had secretly arranged to share out natural Syria between them. France took the northern part which was to become the republics of Syria and Lebanon, while further south Britain seized what were to be Palestine and Transjordan.
The inhabitants of the whole region made it clear that they wanted natural Syria to be independent and undivided: in July 1919 an elected body calling itself the Syrian National Congress repudiated the Sykes- Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration and demanded sovereign status for a united Syria-Palestine. Overwhelming popular support for this demand was confirmed by the King-Crane commission, an American fact-finding team which visited scores of towns and villages and received nearly two thousand petitions. But in 1920, to the despair of the Syrians, the European powers were given Mandates over the new states carved out of the former Ottoman provinces. These Mandates were conceived as a form of guardianship of young nations, but France ousted the Arab administration which the Amir Faysal had established in Damascus and proceeded to set up a colonial regime, before reordering the region to suit itself and its local friends.
First, in August 1920, it detached large areas from Syria - the ports of Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Tripoli, the Biqa' valley, and the Shi'i region north of Palestine and attached them to Mount Lebanon, the fief of its Maronite protégés, so as to create the State of Greater Lebanon. At a stroke Damascus lost its outlets to the sea and saw its horizons violently contract.
A second amputation occurred in October 1921 when France surrendered to Turkey large parts of the former province of Aleppo, bringing the Turks within fifty kilometres of the city. Aleppo's domain was further whittled away when France granted a special status to the Alexandretta-Antioch enclave of northern Syria because it contained a sizeable Turkish minority. (Less than twenty years later, the whole region was handed over to Turkey.) France then divided into four what remained of the country entrusted to it. In September 1920 Damascus and Aleppo were made the capitals of separate mini-states and in March 1922 the 'Alawi mountains and the Druze mountains were severed from Damascus and proclaimed 'independent'. In addition, the essentially tribal north-eastern part of Syria was brought under direct French rule and separatist sentiment encouraged by the settlement of Christians and Kurds.
These internal and wholly artificial frontiers were eventually swept away but Syria never regained its lost territories. When the French finally withdrew in 1946, the country had shrunk to 185,190 square kilometres from the 300,000 square kilometres which had been the extent of the Ottoman empire's Syrian provinces. The Syrians did not easily recover from the shock of this surgery, and the feeling that their country was made smaller than it was meant to be became a continued source of frustration.
When France arrived as a mandatory power, it perceived itself as the protector of minorities and especially of the Maronites on whose behalf it had joined with other European powers in sponsoring a semi- autonomous Mount Lebanon after the 1860 massacres. It therefore proceeded to create a 'Greater Lebanon' in the 1920s. The benefits bestowed on the Maronites over the years could surely be extended to the backward 'Alawis just a step further up the Mediterranean coast. In French minds, the 'Alawis seemed to be crying out for the protector's touch. Thus a sort of political map took shape in French official thinking: the flatlands of Syria were largely Sunni and unfriendly, but skirting them were the mountain havens of the minorities, not only the 'Alawis but the Isma'ilis of the same area and the Druzes in their basalt hills in the south.
A French advance guard entered Latakia, the Mediterranean port which lies at the foot of the 'Alawi mountains, on 6 November 1918, a bare month after the defeated Turks had packed their bags. The interior of Syria was not occupied for another two years, a clear pointer to France's greater interest in the mountain minorities. In the 'Alawi area it set about trying to pacify the mountains, something the Turks had never managed, but faced immediate resistance which soon spread to the scattered villages of the uplands, finding a leader in an 'Alawi headman, the young Shaykh Salih al-'Ali. An old photograph shows this early nationalist wearing a curved sabre in his belt and a breastplate of beaten metal strapped over his 'abaya. Terrain well suited to maquisards enabled him to defy France for over two years. Among his supporters was Asad's father, 'Ali Sulayman, who is remembered in local legend as riding off on horseback to raid a French position.
Eventually the French lost patience: in May 1921, three mobile columns were sent into the mountains to disarm one village after another, and by October it was all over. Shaykh Salih surrendered and was jailed in a Crusader castle on the small island of Arwad, just off the Syrian coast near Tartus, where a barracks still bears his name. Having imposed order on the 'Alawi district, the French could not make up their minds about its political destiny, an uncertainty reflected in frequent changes of name. In 1920 the area was called the 'Autonomous Territory of the 'Alawis', in 1922 it was renamed the 'State of the 'Alawis' and federated with the other Syrian statelets the French had created, only to be detached in 1924. In May 1930 it was named the 'Government of Latakia', in 1936 it was re-attached to the rest of Syria, but in 1939 had its autonomy largely restored. In 1942 it was brought yet again under the authority of Damascus in a last arrangement of the jigsaw before Syria won full independence from France in 1946. So the pendulum swung back and forth from separatism to unity, from part to whole.
The French put a stop to 'Alawi brigandage, introduced the rudiments of public administration, issued identity cards, and corralled the scattered and mistrustful mountain people into the statistics of a population census. They even gave them a postage stamp and a flag - a yellow sun on a white ground, a symbol which the local people must have found puzzling.
In Turkish times Sunni Muslims had been the privileged community, growing rich on 'Alawi labour. An 'Alawi highlander who ventured into the plains to look for work or to sell a basket of vegetables to buy the necessities of life could expect to be ground down by the Sunni or Christian merchant, money-lender or landowner with whom he had to deal. But once the territory was pacified in the early 1920s the French gave the 'Alawis privileges to the chagrin of both Sunnis and Christians, the latter in particular expecting better treatment at French hands. Perhaps with their missionary schools the French hoped to convert the 'Alawis to Christianity or at any rate turn them into clients. Be that as it may, the 'Alawis on the whole seized on the opportunity for self-improvement.
The port of Latakia acquired a traditional hold over the 'Alawi mountains through tobacco, the one export crop to find a market in Europe where it was especially favoured as pipe tobacco when the American Civil War cut off supplies of Virginia leaf. In the last years of the Ottoman empire, France took over the Syrian tobacco trade and established a monopoly, the Régie des Tabacs, in a mansion built over a fourteenth century caravanserai in Latakia. When the empire collapsed and France inherited Syria, the French governor commandeered the handsome mansion as his residence. For decades the Régie remained the growers' only customer and banker, and therefore the real master of the mountains whatever the political system at the time.
Another major instrument of French influence was the recruitment of young 'Alawis into the Troupes spéciales du Levant, a local force raised in 1921, in which they served under French officers together with Circassians, Armenians and other 'reliable' minorities. The auxiliaries totalled 7,000 in 1924 and double that number by the mid- 1930s. Like the Circassians and Druzes, 'Alawis joined the Troupes spéciales because there was often no other employment and because the French deliberately sought them out, using the minorities as a fire brigade to suppress disorders elsewhere in the country. For the first time in their lives 'Alawi youths enjoyed some small but steady income, were disciplined, trained and exposed to new ideas. Service with the French established the beginnings of an 'Alawi military tradition central to the community's later ascent. Needless to say, the French made every effort to keep the Troupes immune from the Syrian nationalist ferment of the towns. When in 1925-7 the Druze revolt inflamed the whole south and beyond, even reaching the orchards of the Ghuta oasis around Damascus where the bloodiest battles were fought, most 'Alawi tribal leaders did not stir. And the community as a whole grew more separatist still in the 1930s when France faced a rising tide of opposition to its rule from a National Bloc of Syrian city notables campaigning for independence. (Pg. 14 - 18).
The French connection may not have radically improved the 'Alawis' lot, but it made them feel different, and this in the long run may have been a more valuable bequest than prosperity. Yet when the French left there was a price to be paid. 'Alawis had always been disdained for their poverty and heretical beliefs; now they were condemned as disloyal to the political ideas of Syrian unity and Arab nationalism. Their service in the Troupes spéciales, the fact that they owed their first step up in the world to French colonial patronage, and their separatist sentiments all bred suspicion of them in other Syrians, widening even further the breach between 'Alawis and Sunnis. For a few years after the Second World War they found it necessary to lie low. It was not until the 1950s that a new 'Alawi generation, that of Hafiz al-Asad, began to elbow its way into the mainstream of Syrian life.
For their part the 'Alawis suffered from an acute sense of grievance, nourished over centuries, which explained the formidable energy, even the frenzy, with which this unfavoured community snatched at education, wealth and power once the wheel of fortune turned. With their history of oppression and exploitation, it was to be expected that 'Alawis should seek redress for the injustices of the past and should be utterly determined never to be subdued again.
No doubt the young Asad shared the feelings of his co-religionaries, resenting the past and suffering embarrassment on account of the ambiguous and unavowable French connection. But from his teens on he rebelled against this background, threw off his sectarian grudges and joined the most pan-Arab of parties, the Ba'th, eventually coming to rule Syria under its banner. Nevertheless despite his later nationalist credentials, the inescapable 'Alawi label was to be his burden. He had to work hard to convince his sceptical compatriots that he had left minority complexes behind him, had committed himself body and soul to the nationalist mainstream, and was indeed fit to lead them. (Pg. 23).
