Syria 1st-Hand: Life with Assad's Alawites (Rosen)

A Pro-Assad Demonstration in AleppoNir Rosen, who toured Syria for seven weeks this summer, writes for Al Jazeera English:

Driving near the high-altitude resort of Slonfeh in the Alawite mountains of the Latakia region, I passed a funeral tent for a Syrian soldier killed in the region the previous week, one of two military "martyrs" Slonfeh had lost to armed opposition activists. When my driver entered the village of Mazar al-Qatriyeh, he asked to be directed towards Sheikh Khalil Khatib, a respected Alawite elder. "Ask the rocks and they will tell you," said one man. "Everybody knows him."

The sheikh was an intense old man who lectured me while a television behind him screened the Hezbollah-affiliated al-Manar satellite channel.

"You can be called a sheikh for being old or for being educated," he explained to me. He blamed religious sheikhs for the crisis in Syria. "They aren't sheikhs of thought," he said. "They are sheikhs of air, that's why Syria has all these problems. I am a sheikh of logic."

I told him that the opposition said Alawites controlled the regime. "This is rejected," he said. "It's for justifying the attack against the regime." He listed ministers, governors, and director-generals and insisted very few were Alawites and most were Sunni.

"Our president is Alawite and we suffer from this," he said. "There are four million Alawites," he claimed with some exaggeration. "We don't have even one per cent of the positions in the government." He and his guests said they believed Syria was being pressured so it would make a deal with Israel. "If Bashar signs a humiliating peace we are against him," said Ali Janud, a professor of civil engineering. "I am not with Hezbollah because they are Shia," he said, "only because they are resistance."

The sheikh agreed. "We are with the devil if he fights Israel," he said. If outside powers intervened in Syria it would lead to armageddon, the sheikh said. "If they want to destroy us," he said, "they are welcome."

The 'ignorant' opposition

The sheikh conflated the protesters with the armed opposition. "The armed people are ignorant and don't have any education," he said. "In the mountains we are all educated," said one of his guests. "Our orientation is education." Janud agreed: "This is a conflict between ignorance and knowledge," he said. Bayda and Baniyas, two coastal towns that had seen demonstrations, had nobody educated in them, the sheikh said, and they were majority Sunni. "And the Alawite villages around [those towns] are all educated."

He recommended that I read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous anti-semitic book about a fabricated Jewish conspiracy written in Russia a century ago - but still sometimes believed to be true. This would help me understand how Saudi Arabia was a chess piece in the hands of world Zionism, he said. "Jews are the cause of corruption in the world," he told me.

The Syrian Sunni opposition sheikhs were tied to Zionism by association, he said. "The uprising today is based on the same principles as the one of 1980," he said, referring the armed uprising of the Muslim Brotherhood in which many Alawites were killed. Protesters today were merely "tools executing policy on behalf of someone else," he said. "They do not have their own ideology." Their gamble to provoke a sectarian war would not succeed because Alawites would not kill anybody for sectarianism, he said, they would only defend themselves.

Alawites had an ideology which prevented them from pursuing a sectarian war, he told me. "We Alawites don’t hate anybody," said the aging sheikh. Janud added: "The other side is sectarian."  The sheikh concluded: "[Even] if 11 million people die in Syria there wont be a sectarian war."

Ideological entrenchment

These views were not uncommon. In Damascus I met with a general and a veteran sergeant of State Security. The general was an Alawite from Masyaf in Hama, his office decorated with large pictures of Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez. The sergeant, also Alawite, hailed from a Latakia mountain village. They rejected the idea that the regime's crackdown on protesters made the situation worse, stating that the president’s announced reforms should have been enough to placate the opposition. The regime’s response was warranted as the opposition was armed, they told me. They emphasised the armed element of the uprising and blamed it all on "a foreign conspiracy". Syria was being attacked from outside because it supported resistance against Israel and the US, they told me. The general stressed there was a media war against Syria. "Outside media is only showing five per cent of the reality," he said.

The sergeant insisted that the US invaded Iraq because the Mahdi, a messianic figure awaited by Shia, was expected to return from his centuries-old occultation. It was a theory many Iraqi Shia had earlier illuminated to me. I told him most Americans had never heard of the Mahdi. The Americans were forging an alliance with Islamists, the sergeant said. They wanted to prevent China from controlling the Middle East. "They are using Muslim groups against China - they know that the Quran talks about the threat from 'a yellow race'," he said.

In late August I drove with an Alawite friend connected to Syrian security up to the village of Laqbee in the mountainous Masyaf area of Hama. That morning two State Security officers had been killed in an ambush on the road.

We drove past Alawite and Christian villages, avoiding Sunni dominated areas. Entrances to Alawite villages were blocked by stones and sandbags with armed civilians or security officers standing guard. We passed many children on the road, playing with toy guns. We saw few minarets as we entered Masyaf. "They don't sell land to Muslims," my friend said. "They don't want them to come and build mosques."

We wound up narrow roads past green mountain villages before coming to a one-room concrete structure where many officers and government officials had gathered to pay their respects to the family of Lieutenant Colonel Ahmad Shawkat Ahmad. He had been attending a military staff college in Algeria when a suicide bomber attacked the Algerian military and killed him and another Syrian officer. Outside, the structure was adorned with so many pictures of the Assads that it looked more like a shrine to the ruling family.

Laqbee had produced many officers including some of the most powerful in the country, such as Muhamad Nasif Kharbeg, the deputy vice president for security affairs. His son, and many other Nasifs, are also senior in internal security.

Conspiracy theories

After the funeral, I had dinner with Kharbeg's nephew --- a captain. We sat with other Alawites, including an officer in the feared airforce intelligence service. Over grilled meat and beer, they discussed the opposition --- "extremists", the captain said. "They don't have a mind." He seemed baffled and frustrated by his mental image of the protesters: "How do you talk to somebody who wants to get seventy virgins and go to paradise and have rivers of wine? It's not reasonable that people are going forward and we are going backwards, and growing long beards."

One of the security men present blamed the crisis on Bashar's reforms. Mandatory paramilitary training for school children had been cancelled under Bashar, further weakening Baathist influence and the martial spirit that had once dominated the country, with children in uniform shouting "al-Assad for ever!"

They looked for explanations to discredit protesters, with one claiming they were descendants of Turkmen mercenaries brought to Syria by the Ottoman empire. The men held simplistic and conspiratorial views of international affairs, such as theorising that Egyptian Google executive and activist Wael Ghonim was a Mason. One asked why the United States would allow a US company such as Google to undermine Egypt's Mubarak, the closest ally of Israel and the United States.

The captain believed the United States controlled the world, giving orders other countries had to obey, and that they would order Turkey to attack Syria on their behalf. "The West only respects force," the airforce intelligence officer said. With the fall of Tripoli to the NATO-assisted Libyan rebels, the men were concerned about the possibility of a NATO war against Syria.

They asked me why the United States was "allying with Islamist parties in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria". To them, all these conservative religious groups were the same and sought to establish an emirate. The captain saw the regime's current struggle with the opposition as a continuation of an older conspiracy. In the 1960s, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser had cooperated with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, the captain told me. Nasser had a radio program on Voice of the Arabs that targeted Syria's Baathists, he said. "It's just like Al Jazeera and Arur today," he said, referring to Sheikh Adnan al-Arur, an incendiary sectarian Sunni cleric broadcasting in support of the opposition from exile.

"The regime will never fall," the airforce intelligence officer said confidently. "Going after the security forces means the end of the state," the captain said, "which will lead to civil war." The captain denied that the security forces were dominated by Alawites. "60 per cent of officers are Sunni," he said, taking my notebook and writing the words "60 per cent" with an arrow to the word "officers".

Read full article....