(Reuters) – Confusion and fear have swept through Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect and other loyalist communities since his fall, with many questioning how the collapse was so rapid after so many of their members had died to keep him in power.
Loyalists spoke with a sense of resignation about the implosion of his 24-year rule and with it, the end of decades of rule by minority Alawites – an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam – in majority Sunni Syria.
Assad’s hometown of Qardaha – home to a mausoleum to his father, Hafez – for many years hosted continuous funerals due to the numbers of loyalist fighters who were dying to defend him, locals say.
Reuters spoke to four people in the Alawite heartland between the coastal city of Tartous and Latakia hours after Assad was toppled. One, Mohsen, said he was bewildered by how the Syrian army had given up without even calling up extra reserves from Assad’s core support base.
“I know for a fact that there were many men who would have been willing to fight if they were called upon by the president, but that did not happen. Instead, we see withdrawals everywhere. It’s strange.”
He said that inhabitants of Alawite villages near the coast had set up informal security measures, with checkpoints at villages to monitor who came in and out.
Protests have broken out in mainly-Alawite Latakia and in Tartous, with residents knocking down statues of Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria from 1971 until his death in 2000, and chanting anti-Assad slogans.
An Alawite resident of the coast who witnessed the protests, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that they had been struck by the peaceful nature of the protests and said so far there were few sectarian tensions around the issue.
RELIEF AT LACK OF VIOLENCE SO FAR
“If it keeps going like this, there is little reason to have concerns,” he said. “it would mean we are not going for the Libya model and that all we were told to be scared about was not true.”
After taking over Homs, rebels searched government offices and security branches in the city but did not ransack them or destroy property, residents said, adding the inhabitants reacted with a sense of relief.
Residents of Homs’ Alawite Zahraa neighborhood published a statement saying they would stay in their homes and were against any kind of violence, calling on rebels to act responsibly as they had in other areas where they had encountered minorities. They also said anyone resisting rebels was acting on his own.
Rebels had barely entered the Alawite neighborhood, residents said.
Alawites, the sect to which Assad and most high-ranking military officers belong, were largely supportive of Assad’s campaign to crush the Sunni-led revolt against his rule during the civil war.
The fiercest enforcers of the crackdown were often so-called Shabbiha, brutal sectarian militias drawn from the Alawite community.
On Sunday, a third Alawite Syrian who spoke to Reuters said the way the rebels had so far acted, notably in Homs, a city with a large Alawite population, had eased the concerns of many in the region that they would face massacres as the regime had long maintained.
“It’s clear now that there is a decision not to fight. The army has essentially laid down its weapons and withdrawn and you have some local defence committees in villages,” the third Alawite Syrian said.
“I think we will only see problems if there are attacks on the community – you know there are foreign fighters and some hardliners who are scary in their views. But if they keep going like this, if the new government is responsible, we will be able to avoid bloodshed.”
Early in Syria’s war, many Alawites say they felt they have no choice but to back Assad, fearing retaliatory slaughter for religious affiliation with the president as the revolt became increasingly sectarian.
Alawites are believed to make up about about 10 percent of the 23 million population, Sunni Muslims about 70 percent, and there are substantial communities of Christians, Kurds, Druze and other religious or ethnic minorities.
(Writing by Timour Azhari, Editing by William Maclean)
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