My article "'Are you Alawite?': A Call to Prevent Genocide in Syria" covers the experience of Alawites under the Sunni regime that came to power in December 2024. This blog continues coverage of that topic.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, members of security checkpoint for sectarian reasons executed eight civilians and injured five others — all Alawite, traveling in bus in the Hama countryside. (June 4, 2025)
June 5, 2025 update: A BBC podcast, "The Future of the Alawites," contains much interesting information, especially on the Alawite practice of taqiya, or religious dissimulation. The interviewer quotes "a local Alawite cleric" named Ali Asi:
The local Alawite cleric, Ali Asi, tells me he feels the international community is not supporting these Syrians because they are accused of being remnants of the Assad regime. I am also struck by how often Alawites have emphasized to me that they are Muslims. I asked cleric Asi how their practices differ from Sunni and Shia Islam.
He said there is no difference with any other religious Islamic sects in general but there is a bit of differences in how we apply it. "It is the same. The Qur'an is one, the Bible is one book, but the problem is how people see it, or how read it, or how you explain it."
And this is the problem. Alawites who have fled Syria have told us that Sunnis have accused them of being kuffar, unbelievers. Why are they being told this? "They consider that we believe a lot in human beings. They say that because we love Ali bin Abi Talib so much, they think that we obey him and believe in him, and which is not good."
He said that because of this, "They accuse us of being unbelievers because they said, 'You believe in a human being. not in God'."
Ali ibn Abi Talib was the first Shia imam and the cousin and son-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. To Alawites, Ali holds a uniquely central and divine role that goes far beyond his status in Sunni or even Shia Islam. And due to centuries of persecution and misunderstanding, many Alawites view the Islamic practice of taqiya as a religious duty. "It's about concealing one's beliefs. Taqiya is a religion by itself. It's based on respecting all the religions, sects and groups around you. So I don't do things that the other religious groups wouldn't appreciate it and wouldn't like it. So I don't make him upset or angry."
He said from here it all starts. "Because if I would keep my religion, I can keep my taqiya." He said maybe this would help us to be able to live with these crazy people.
So, taqiya is going to keep the community safe. The answer now is very hard, especially we are dealing with people, they cannot, they don't believe you, even if you put the carpet and pray in front of them, they will never believe you. So, it's a very hard answer now on your question.
There are a lot of Chechens and a lot of Uyghurs [who came to Syria to fight jihad], and all those people were brainwashed by their people, by their leaders. Sheikh Ali or others are not able to convince them to change their mind, because there's a lot of hate and a lot of anger in them. He said, "They are drinking the hate every day."
For Alawites, there's a strong focus on esoteric and mystical teachings. How does this shape your faith?
We are Muslim. We believe in La illaha ila Allah, and we believe in the basic rules of Islam. This secretive stuff that they are accusing us of, it doesn't exist and it's not real. They accuse us of faith in or worshipping human being, but it's not true. They accuse us of a brother marrying his sister. All of that is a lot of lies and misinformation just to kill us. ...
Do you feel misunderstood as a community?
Yes, actually. The misconceptions are, first of all, that we are represented as the Assad sect. And now this regime has fallen. So we represent ourselves. We are secular in how we treat others. We live around the world. And I think anyone who interacts with us will say the same thing, that we are easygoing people. Another misconception is that we worship Imam Ali. Of course we don't. He's a beloved figure. We follow Imam Ali, but because he is the cousin of al-Nabi Muhammad, the Messenger Muhammad. So we mainly follow al-Nabi Muhammad and we love Imam Ali because he loved him. And we follow the family of Messenger Muhammad and we express our faith through the five pillars of Islam.
The Alawite religion has often been shrouded in mystery and secrecy and that there are secret and sacred books that describe your beliefs. Have you been able to access much of that side of your faith?
I think this mystery that is around the Alawite sect is that in a certain period of history, the Alawite were killed because they are Alawite. They had to mask their practices in order not to be killed. ... It doesn't matter where we are. We can just open the Quran, and the Quran is our safe space. So we don't need mosques that are decorated."
This BBC video brings to mind the PBS video by Simona Foltyn from Dec. 28, 2024, that points to HTS persecution of Alawites already in 2024.
June 10, 2025 update: Kubayla Koontz and Gregory Waters report from Syria that the new regime initiated something it calls the taswiya (settlement), a process that it "began applying to ex-regime security forces in December to register them with temporary ID cards. Although authorities explicitly stated that taswiya was not a form of amnesty, many Alawites viewed it as a return to civilian status." But "ongoing confusion over the ... unresolved taswiya issue is particularly troublesome—Alawites who still hold the temporary IDs granted under that process now worry that they are a "mark of death" at any government checkpoint."
June 27, 2025 update: Reuters counts "at least 33 women and girls from Syria's Alawite sect - aged between 16 and 39 - who have been abducted or gone missing this year in the turmoil following the fall of Bashar al-Assad."
June 30, 2025 update: A Reuters special report by Maggie Michael finds that "Syrian forces massacred 1,500 Alawites: The chain of command led to Damascus." As the summary explains:
A Reuters investigation has pieced together how the massacres unfolded, identifying a chain of command leading from the attackers directly to men who serve alongside Syria's new leaders in Damascus. Reuters found nearly 1,500 Syrian Alawites were killed and dozens were missing. The investigation revealed 40 distinct sites of revenge killings, rampages and looting against the religious minority, long associated with the fallen Assad government.
The report includes a map of the killing sites:
Some details:
Among the units Reuters found to be involved were the government's General Security Service, its main law-enforcement body back in the days when HTS ran Idlib and now part of the Interior Ministry; and ex-HTS units like the elite Unit 400 fighting force and the Othman Brigade. Also involved were Sunni militias that had just joined the government's ranks, including the Sultan Suleiman Shah Brigade and Hamza division. ...
The fighters, many of them masked, mustered in the new government's heartland of Idlib, Homs, Aleppo and Damascus. And when armored convoys rolled out to western Syria, the militias' cries of "Sunnis, Sunnis" rose in the night along with rhyming slogans calling for people to "slaughter the Alawites," according to videos verified by Reuters. ...
Among the dead were entire families, including women, children, the elderly and disabled people in dozens of predominantly Alawite villages and neighborhoods. In one neighborhood, 45 women were among the 253 dead. In another village, 10 of 30 killed were children. In at least one case, an entire Alawite town was emptied almost overnight, its hundreds of residents replaced by Sunnis.
The first question arriving fighters asked residents was telling, according to more than 200 witnesses and survivors: "Are you Sunni or Alawite?" ...
The villages with the most bloodshed were those whose residents belonged to a subset of Alawites called al-Klazyia, according to Ali Mulhem, founder of the Syrian Civil Peace Group, an organization that documents abuses and mediates disputes. The Assad family were al-Klazyia Alawites, as were many of the dictator's ranking security officials. ...
Many Alawite villages and neighborhoods throughout the Latakia, Tartous and Hama regions emptied out after the attacks, and their residents camped by the thousands at a nearby Russian base for fear of new massacres.
The targeting of Alawites continues to this day. Between May 10 and June 4, 20 Alawites were gunned down in the Latakia and Hama regions, according to the Syria Observatory for Human Rights. The perpetrators have not been identified. ...
The most recent count from the Syrian Network for Human Rights, an independent monitoring group, shows 1,662 people killed. Of that total, 1,217 were killed by government forces and armed groups while 445 were killed by pro-Assad fighters. ...
On his Facebook page, a militiaman affiliated with the Sultan Suleiman Shah division posted: "Turn off cameras. Kill every male. Their blood is as dirty as pigs."
July 1, 2025 update: Christian Solidarity International sponsored an event with Joshua Landis and Fabrice Balanche to discuss "Human Rights in the Syrian Arab Republic" as a United Nations Human Rights Council side event. It included discussion of Alawite persecution. From the press release about the event:
The violence on the coast started with an attack by government forces on Alawites in Datour in Latakia on March 4, Balanche said, not with an Alawite uprising on March 6, as the government and much of the media reported. Already on March 5, the village of Dalyeh, an Alawite holy place, "was targeted by helicopter," Balanche said. "This was a direct targeting of the Alawite religion. Of course, the Alawites resisted, and their resistance became the justification for this horrible massacre."
The violence carried out by the new Islamist authorities was "indiscriminate," Balanche said. "They killed women, children, elderly. Young men were the main targets." While the exact reported number of casualties varies by source, between 1,500 and 5,000 Alawites are estimated to have been killed during the March massacres.
Landis cited an investigative report by Reuters published this week, which demonstrated that the massacres were authorized by "very top government officials." The report noted that a spokesperson for the ministry of defense said, "May God reward you," when informed of the attacks.
Landis pointed out that the fatwas of the 14th century Syrian cleric Ibn Taymiyya, which explicitly permit the blood of Alawites to be shed, have been republished and distributed by the new al-Sharaa government, after being banned under Asad.
Landis, who is married to a Syrian Alawite women, shared stories of how his wife's family experienced the massacres. One of her young cousins was shot dead in front of his mother. Another relative was forced to hide in the forest for two days after government troops armed with drones attacked his village.
Landis highlighted another recent Reuters report on how Alawite girls have been kidnapped and trafficked, but their parents are threatened that the girls will be killed if someone talks to the press.
Some of Landis' relatives are among the over 100,000 Syrians who have fled the country in the last six months, he said.
July 12, 2025 update: Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi interviewed the Alawite militia leader of the Coastal Shield Forces to understand better the anti-regime goals. He asserts that the Coastal Shield
will remain so we can protect the remaining portion of the sect and ensure a safe life, security and stability for the remainder of the sect and the coming generations. And after we secure our life, the Coastal Shield will remain the foundational component in the land to protect the noble ones.
July 18, 2025 update: Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi reports from "The Former Alawite Village of Arza in Hama Countryside" that, violations against Alawites went beyond Syria's coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartous.
Recently, I was able to visit Arza, a village located just northwest of Hama city. Its population formerly consisted of Alawites, until they were subjected to a massacre and expelled in the same month that the events on the coast took place. But far from being devoid of inhabitants, Arza is now populated by Sunnis from a nearby town called Khattab (located northwest of it).
Tamimi then provides pictures from Azra.
Aug. 3, 2025 update: Christina Lamb reports in the Times of London about Hala, a young Alawite woman:
Last month Hala was crossing the road from her house to her parents' home when three men bundled her into a van. They drove for three hours through checkpoint after checkpoint, without being stopped, until they came to an abandoned industrial facility where they left her in a room. "I begged for my mobile but they said we don't want to hear from you," she said. They held her there for seven days, raping her three times. When she protested, they laughed, "let Bashar al-Assad help you!"
Finally, they put her back in the van and dumped her on the roadside 50 miles inland. "They told me if I say anything, we will kill your son," she said.
Hala is one of dozens of Alawite women who have been abducted in recent months, following four days of violence in March that swept the coastal areas leaving more than 1,400 dead, most of them unarmed civilians. Among those killed were her younger brother and his friend, shot dead as they rode home on a motorbike.
Though the violence has abated, thousands of families remain in hiding, some of them in a nearby Russian airbase. Many more have fled the country to neighbouring Lebanon.
Ibrahim and Surad Suleiman, both in their sixties, and their son Somar, 35, have been moving from place to place for five months and now cower behind closed curtains in a borrowed apartment in Latakia.
Surad only ventures out wearing the hijab — a garment she had never previously worn. Somar, like many young Alawite men, had been hiding in the mountains but came back last week as his father needs open-heart surgery. ...
"We might be Alawites but we are very poor, we got nothing from Assad. In fact Assad's tourism minister seized some of our land so we were happy when he fell. But ten days later these gunmen started showing up, saying sectarian things."
"They came to our homes, harassing people and preventing us harvesting our lemons and oranges, shouting 'if our superiors don't stop us we will slay you'," said Somar. ...
The extended Suleiman family — 11 people in all — found themselves trapped in orchards between the road and the sea, hiding under trees for five days, eating leaves and shivering in the cold as shooting continued all around them.
From their hiding place they saw their neighbour killed and a woman shot in the face, among other atrocities.
When they were finally able to return home they found "everything looted and burnt, our cows killed, our farm tools and fishing equipment all stolen".
"Fifty years' work all gone," he added, tears falling. "It was my son's inheritance."
The family now have nowhere to go. The security forces are still hunting young men and "arresting anyone suspected of being an Assad soldier", Somar said. As an only son, he was exempt from military service — but now has no papers to prove this because everything in their house was burnt.
Young women are also living in fear. A report by Amnesty International last week stated that the organisation has received "credible reports of at least 36 Alawite women and girls, aged between three and 40, abducted and kidnapped across Latakia and the coastal regions by unidentified individuals". Some were picked up travelling to school or to visit relatives in broad daylight, or taken from their homes and drugged, then physically or sexually abused. They were allowed to return only after a ransom was paid.
Local activists put the number far higher. In Bustan al-Basha, a small Alawite town south of Latakia, from where Hala was snatched, three girls were abducted in just seven days last month.
The town is mostly empty. Some residents are still sheltering on the nearby airbase of Hmeimim where the Russian flag flies and Putin's portrait hangs, though it is now guarded by troops from the very forces in Idlib that the Russians used to bomb. It was from here that Assad and his family were flown out to Moscow.
Among those who previously hid on the base was a young pharmacist called Reema, who has on her phone a photograph she knows she should not look at.
On the first day of the violence, she was on that phone to her fiancé Mohammed, a former soldier in the Assad forces who was walking in the woods with his cousin. "I was talking to him when I heard a shot and the call ended," she said. A few minutes later she received a WhatsApp — a photo of her fiancé and his cousin lying dead.
Lamb also reports that
An official fact-finding inquiry released last week found that 1,426 people were killed after about 200,000 fighters from all over Syria went to the coast to "avenge" the ambushed forces. Many were from unidentified groups including foreign jihadists who regard the Alawites as heretics. ... [It] concluded that the bloodshed was "not organised" and that military leaders did not directly order the attacks against Alawites.
