After Bashar al-Assad was overthrown in December last year, there was great concern that the ethnic group the former dictator belonged to – the Alawites – would be subjected to violent persecution. But until last week, it had gone relatively peacefully in Syria.
It went surprisingly well at the beginning, many thought it would be a massacre right away. But it has been relatively calm, but very tense and many have lost their jobs, said Aron Lund, Middle East analyst at the Total Defense Research Institute, to TT earlier in March.
Syria has, however, been described as a powder keg that could explode at any time. Something that has now happened.
Families were murdered
After 14 years of bloody civil war between different ethnic, religious, and political groups under Assad's harsh regime, Syria is now ruled by a transitional government, led by Islamist leader Ahmed al-Sharaa. A week ago, the situation escalated when security forces in the coastal city of Jableh were killed in an ambush by what is claimed to be supporters of al-Assad.
The attack prompted the security forces to retaliate. In just a few days, around 1,300 people were killed, mainly Alawites and Christians, according to the British-based Syrian Human Rights Observatory (SOHR). The figure has not been confirmed by other organizations.
Whole families are said to have been killed, and the murders "appear to have been committed on religious grounds," according to Thameen al-Kheetan, spokesperson for the UN Office for Human Rights.
Foreign actors?
The world's attention is now turned to Ahmed al-Sharaa, whose transitional government wants to try to establish control and gain international recognition. At the same time, he has supporters who would rather see revenge for all the years of war and the atrocities committed during Assad's rule.
al-Sharaa has control over some of the forces that helped him to power, but some armed groups are outside his control. These militias also include foreign fighters with a radical Islamist agenda, according to BBC.
Al-Sharaa himself has blamed the violence on remnants of the former regime's forces and foreign parties trying to draw the country into a new civil war.
The transitional government in the country announced on Sunday that a committee had been formed to investigate the violence in the coastal provinces and punish those responsible. But question marks remain, and many from the country's minority groups are now living in fear and have fled to Lebanon.
The majority of Syrians are Arabs and most are Sunni Muslims.
But the country is also inhabited by a number of other ethnic groups, including Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians/Syrians, Kurds, and Turks. Religious groups include, among others, Sunnis, Christians, Druze, Shiites, Yazidis, Jews, and Alawites.
The Alawites are an Arab minority that practices a unique version of Shia Islam. The deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad belonged to the Alawites and often placed his co-religionists in key positions in the state apparatus.
Before the outbreak of war in 2011, the Alawites made up around 10-12 percent of the population.
Source: The Foreign Policy Institute
Until December, the Syrian state had been ruled with an iron fist by the al-Assad family since the 1970s.
Syria's political system was formed by Hafiz al-Assad, president from 1970 to 2000. Son Bashar al-Assad inherited power after his father's death in 2000 and made some changes. But the underlying system remained the same: with the president as both head of state, supreme commander, and holding the highest executive power.
The uprising against Bashar al-Assad's regime that started in connection with the Arab Spring in 2011 soon took the form of a civil war with significant involvement of foreign powers, resulting in many deaths and a massive refugee wave.
In December 2024, the regime was overthrown by a coalition of rebel forces with Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) at the forefront.
Source: Landguiden/UI
