IDF Alpinists at Syria-Israel border

While Alawites constitute but a small religious community in Syria, perhaps 10 per cent of the country's 15 million resident population, they suffer from a unique prominence and vulnerability.

Through a millennium, they stood out as Syria's most isolated, impoverished, despised and oppressed ethnicity. Only when generals from their community seized power in Damascus in 1966 did the power balance change.

But the ruthless domination of Syria by Alawites for the next 58 years caused the country's majority Sunni Muslim population in 2011 to rebel, leading to a full-scale civil war that ended in December 2024 when Sunnis overthrew Alawite rule and returned to power.

Solid green indicates an Alawite majority and partial green a significant Alawite minority.

Recent events point to an ominous Sunni desire for retribution. To understand its sources and implications requires a look at the past.

As is well known, Islam claims to be the final religion; accordingly, Sunnis and Shi'ites alike historically reviled Alawism, a new and distinct religion that emerged from Shia Islam in the ninth century. They looked upon Alawites as apostates. A 19th-century Sunni sheik, Ibrahim al-Maghribi, decreed that Muslims might freely take Alawite property and lives, and a British traveller records being told: "These Ansayrii, it is better to kill one than to pray a whole day."

Frequently persecuted and sometimes massacred during the past two centuries, Alawites insulated themselves geographically from the outside world by staying within their highlands. A leading Alawite sheik called his people "among the poorest of the East". Anglican missionary Samuel Lyde found the state of their society "a perfect hell upon earth".

After Syria's independence from French rule in 1946, Alawites initially resisted central government control but reconciled to Syrian citizenship by 1954 and, taking advantage of their over-representation in the army, began their political ascent.