In July 2025, clashes between the Druze non secular minority and Sunni Arabs backed by government-affiliated forces led to a whole lot of deaths in Sweida province in southern Syria. Israel later launched dozens of airstrikes in assist of the Druze.
This eruption of violence was an eerie reminder of what had unfolded in March 2025 when supporters of the fallen regime led by Bashar Assad, an Alawite, focused safety models. In retaliation, militias affiliated with the newly shaped authorities in Damascus carried out indiscriminate killings of Alawites.
Whereas precise figures stay troublesome to confirm, greater than 1,300 people, most of them Alawites, misplaced their lives. In some instances, complete households had been summarily executed.
Though the Syrian authorities promised an investigation into the atrocities, house invasions, kidnappings of Alawite ladies and extrajudicial executions of Alawite males proceed.
The violence in Sweida additionally bore a sectarian dimension, pitting members of a non secular minority in opposition to armed teams aligned with the nation’s Sunni majority.
A key distinction, nevertheless, concerned the lively Israeli assist for the Druze and the U.S. efforts to dealer a ceasefire.
Publish-Assad Syria has seen promising developments, together with the lifting of worldwide sanctions, a resurgence of civil society and the top of diplomatic isolation. There was even a restricted rapprochement with the principle Kurdish political get together controlling northeastern Syria.
The persistent violence concentrating on the Alawites and, to a extra restricted extent, the Druze, starkly contrasts with these developments. As a scholar of spiritual minorities and the Center East, I argue that the present political scenario displays their historic persecution and marginalization.
Historical past of the Alawites
The Alawites emerged as a definite non secular neighborhood within the tenth century within the area of the Latakia coastal mountains, which at the moment make up northwestern Syria.
Though their beliefs have some commonalities with Shiite Islam, the Alawites preserve their very own distinctive non secular management and rituals. Below the Ottoman regime within the late nineteenth century, they benefited from reforms such because the enlargement of academic alternatives and financial modernization, whereas gaining geographical and social mobility.
After Hafez Assad, the daddy of Bashar, got here to energy in a coup in 1970, he drew upon his Alawite base to bolster his regime. Consequently, Alawites turned disproportionately represented within the officer corps and intelligence companies.
Previous to the civil warfare, which started in 2011, their inhabitants was estimated at round 2 million, constituting roughly 10% of Syria’s inhabitants. In the course of the civil warfare, Alawite younger males combating for the regime suffered heavy casualties. Nonetheless, most Alawites remained in Syria, whereas Sunni Arabs and Kurds had been disproportionately displaced or turned refugees.
Members of the Alawite minority collect exterior the Russian air base in Hmeimim, close to Latakia in Syria’s coastal area, on March 11, 2025, as they search refuge there after violence and retaliatory killings within the space.
AP Photograph/Omar Albam
Amongst Syria’s minorities, two key components make the Alawites most susceptible to mass violence in post-Assad Syria. The primary issue is that, just like the Druze, Alawites have their very own distinct beliefs that deviate from Sunni Islam. Their non secular practices and teachings are sometimes described as “esoteric” and stay principally inaccessible to outsiders.
In my 2024 e book “Liminal Minorities: Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies,” I categorize the Alawites and Druze in Syria alongside Yezidis in Iraq, Alevis in Turkey and Baha’is in Iran as “liminal minorities” – non secular teams topic to deep-seated stigmas transmitted throughout generations.
These teams are sometimes handled as heretics who cut up from Islam and whose beliefs and rituals are deemed past the pale of acceptance. For example, in response to Alawite beliefs, Ali, the son-in-law of Prophet Muhammad, is a divine manifestation of God, which challenges the thought of strict monotheism central to Sunni Islam.
From the angle of Sunni orthodoxy, these teams’ beliefs have been a supply of suspicion and disdain. A sequence of fatwas by distinguished Sunni clerics from the 14th to the nineteenth century declared Alawites heretics.
Resentment in opposition to the Alawites
The second issue contributing to the Alawites’ vulnerability is the widespread notion that they had been the principle beneficiaries of the Assad regime, which engaged in mass homicide in opposition to its personal residents. Though energy remained narrowly concentrated underneath Assad, many Alawites occupied key positions within the safety equipment in addition to the federal government.
In at the moment’s political panorama the place the central authorities stays weak and its management over varied armed teams is restricted, non secular stigmatization and political resentment create fertile floor for mass violence concentrating on the Alawites.
The massacres of March 2025 had been accompanied by sectarian hate speech, together with open requires the extermination of the Alawites, each within the streets and on social media.
Whereas many Sunni Muslims in Syria additionally understand the Druze as heretics, they maintained a better diploma of distance from the Assad regime and had been much less built-in into its safety equipment.
Nonetheless, in latest months the scenario deteriorated quickly within the Druze heartland. The Druze militias and native Bedouin tribes engaged in heavy combating in July 2025. In contrast to the Alawites, the Druze acquired direct navy help from Israel, which has its small however influential Druze inhabitants. This additional complicates peaceable coexistence amongst non secular teams in post-Assad Syria.
A sober future
Sunni Arab identification is central to the newly shaped authorities in Damascus, which may come on the expense of spiritual and ethnic pluralism. Nonetheless, it has incentives to rein in arbitrary violence in opposition to the Alawites and Druze. Projecting itself as a supply of order and nationwide unity helps the federal government internationally, each diplomatically and economically.
Internally, nevertheless, the brand new authorities stays fractured and lacks efficient management over huge swaths of territory. Whereas it pays lip service to transitional justice, it’s also cautious about being perceived as overly lenient towards people related to the Assad regime and its crimes. In the meantime, Alawite and Druze calls for for regional autonomy proceed to stoke widespread Sunni resentments and danger triggering additional cycles of instability and violence.
I consider that in a post-Assad Syria outlined by fractured governance and episodic retribution, the Alawites in addition to Druze are prone to face deepening marginalization.
