Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Monday, the Levant Liberation Council (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham/ HTS) guerrilla forces extended their rule to Latakia, Syria’s major port, in the northwest of the country.
One Syrian source maintained that there was an uprising of anti-Assad Alawites in Latakia, and that HTS rebels had not entered the city. Other reports suggested that Alawites who had for years been oppressed and bilked by Alawite Baath officers were staging reprisals on them. Informed Comment cannot independently verify these allegations.
The fall of Latakia is significant for several reasons. Latakia is Syria’s major port and the new government cannot hope to run Syria without it. It is near to Tartus, the site of a Russian naval base. Apparently several thousand Russian troops are still stuck in Syria and will have to negotiate safe passage out.
Latakia’s naval and military significance led Israel to bomb some of its facilities on Monday, as well as to damage some of the war ships in the harbor. These strikes on Latakia came as part of a flurry of 250 such air attacks by Israel on Syrian military storehouses and facilities, in an attempt by the Netanyahu government to cripple the new government’s military capabilities during this transitional phase, when it is weak.
Then, the majority of the region’s inhabitants are Alawite Shiites, whereas the HTS is hard line Sunni fundamentalists. The heads of the Baath Party in Syria from 1970 had been the al-Assads, who hailed from an Alawite background, and they engaged in a great deal of nepotism. The best jobs went to Alawites, even though they were only 14% of the population. During the civil war in the past nearly 14 years, Alawite officers, infantry and militias (the Shabiha) put down the rebellion, with great loss of life.
In short, there are all the ingredients for sectarian reprisals and massacres. On Arabic social media, there are many calls for revenge on the Alawites now that the al-Assad regime has fallen. We saw this phenomenon in Iraq, which was a mirror image of Syria demographically and politically. There, the Shiites are a majority but were repressed by a Sunni-led Baath Party. When George W. Bush invaded and occupied Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein, the Shiites came to power in elections that they forced on Bush. In 2006-2007, and again in 2014-2018, there were numerous Sunni-Shiite sectarian clashes. The ISIL terrorist group, from which elements of the Syrian HTS hived off, committed numerous massacres of Shiites.
I can only imagine that the Alawite officers in the now-defunct Syrian Arab Army have disguised themselves and are trying to get out of the country any way they can. Some reports suggest they have fled to Lebanon.
On the other hand, I wonder if the threat of Israeli aggression will cause Syrians to pull together?
Al-Quds al-`Arabi reports that the elders (sheikhs) of the Alawite community called for “turning over a new page.” They met with representatives of the HTS at the former provincial residence of al-Assad, in a town called Qardaha in the hills overlooking Latakia. The elders issued a statement in which they called for a “general amnesty” and the safe return of everyone who had fled their homes “in the recent period,” and for an end to the carrying of guns except in accordance with the law.
The Alawite branch of Shiite Islam is an esoteric folk religion in which many of the verities are cultivated by the sheikhs, and the laity may not be steeped in them. They do not have formal seminary-trained clergymen or mosque worship. They are very different from the Twelver Shiites in Iraq and Iran.
After the meeting, the military operations HQ of the HTS issued a “general amnesty” for all conscripted troops of the former Syrian Arab Army, granting them security of property and person and forbidding attacks on them.
Since most people in the army had been conscripts, this amnesty would affect a lot of people. But it excludes those who volunteered for the military or who entered the officer corps through a military academy.
HTS-controlled state television broadcast images of captured Syrian soldiers in Damascus, Homs and Hama being pardoned. Of the 300,000 men in the Syrian Arab Army, probably 200,000 or more had gone AWOL or defected during the civil war. The remaining 50,000 to 100,000 were disproportionately drawn from the Alawite population. So, implicitly, this pardon of the grunts in the army has a sectarian dimension, and is an attempt to avoid sectarian tensions.
On the other hand, the military operations HQ said that military figures guilty of atrocities against civilians in recent years would be tried in the courts. If they can get hold of the officer corps, it appears that the HTS will execute large numbers of them.
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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:
Israel Conducts Air and Ground Offensive In Syria As Assad Regime Falls | India Today
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