Assad’s Syrian stronghold prepares for life after the regime

On a recent morning in Syria’s Latakia province, hundreds of former soldiers stood quietly, their eyes wide and alert as they waited to register with the country’s new rebel rulers. A depressed man walks around with a poster of ousted President Bashar al-Assad’s face on a stick, asking men to spit on it. All are required.

Since taking power this month, the new interim government – led by the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – has set up several of these so-called settlement centers across the country, calling for ex-soldiers to visit, undocumented. – Military ID and their weapons in hand.

They say such initiatives will help ensure security and begin the process of reconciliation after 13 years of brutal civil war that has left the country ravaged by weapons and armed groups.

“The most important thing is to disarm the people,” said Abdel Rahman Trifi, the former rebel now in charge of the center. “That’s the only way you can guarantee safety.”

Yet in Latakia, the Assad dynasty’s home province and one-time stronghold, many fear the takeover will herald something more sinister: A cycle of powerlessness and revenge that will make them lose anew Syria.

Despite the widespread jubilation across the country, coastal Latakia is home to many of Assad’s minority Alawite community and others – by choice or desperation – made up of soldiers and loyalists who supported the family’s brutal minority rule.

In the weeks since Assad’s fall, some have closed shops, stayed at home or hid in security vacuums and stories of reprisal killings and attacks on minorities.

“I didn’t dare go because I was worried about the roads,” an Alawite former security official said of the settlements. “They will either kill us on the way, or in our village.”

So far there has been little documentation of retaliatory violence, with the new powers-that-be dismissing the reports as “isolated cases”. Trifi, asked about rumored instances of men harassing Alawites at checkpoints and urging them to curse the former president, said such harassment did not represent the new government.

“But there are people who are manning checkpoints who have lost children, wives, family members to bombings and fighting, whose friends have disappeared in prisons. They have heartache,” he said. “We have endured them for 14 years. They can stay with us for some time.”

Some soldiers lined up at the Latakia settlement center appeared to be cautiously welcoming the prospect of a fresh start, a sign of how disillusioned even nominal loyalists have become.

A 29-year-old ex-soldier said he had been repeatedly barred from taking leave to visit his home over the past year as Assad’s hold on the country weakened and fears grew that soldiers would desert due to its deteriorating economy.

“Our life was the army, we didn’t learn how to do anything else,” he said, adding that he wasn’t worried about security. “We wanted this for a long time. In this new episode, they just want us to live.

Yet Traife said that perhaps only 30 percent of those arriving at the settlement centers are handing in weapons, adding that an intelligence unit that seized those weapons is still working to identify and prosecute them. Even the former state security official admitted that both sides still have weapons and that without mass disarmament, “we’re going to have genocide in two months”.

Before Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez came to power in 1970, the Alawites were one of the poorest groups in Syrian society: families sent their daughters to clean houses in major cities and their sons to the army to ensure they were fed and supplied. A fixed income.

But during his rule, the Assad family promoted a select group of Alawite loyalists to positions of high authority, offering them preferential treatment over all others. Dissatisfaction with the brutal enforcement of the practice to ensure they keep wealth, power and political status commensurate with their numbers was one of the main drivers of the 2011 protests that led to the civil war.

But on the eve of Assad’s fall, many of those Alawites now face an uncertain future, with thousands fleeing the capital Damascus to their ancestral homes.

The former state security employee said he received a call in the middle of the night from his superior, who told him to pack his things and go home. He described the apocalyptic scene: civilians and men exhausted on foot and in cars filled the streets, their abandoned weapons littering the roadside. “I parked on the right side of the road on the way to Holmes and threw my gun into a waterway,” he said.

The two-hour trip to his village on the Lebanese border took about eight hours on chaotic roads. He then takes refuge at home, aware that men from his village who went into exile in Lebanon after joining the rebels are now returning. He feared that these men were now preparing to take revenge against those they blamed for killing their friends and family.

“There is no supervision or security, so there is no one to stop the revenge killings,” he said. “There’s just no one here.”

A tense silence has hung in the air in Alawite villages and towns since Assad’s fall. Schools are open but empty. When asked if anyone was working, a groundskeeper said: “Yes, what’s missing is the students.”

In Qardaha, the birthplace of the Assad clan, unlike in major cities, the green rebel flag was almost nowhere to be found. The interior of Hafez al-Assad’s mausoleum was covered in soot from the fire burning at his resting place, while curses outside were spray-painted against him and his wife.

Such attacks on tombs have become “a kind of pilgrimage” for rebel supporters, a resident said.

But the Alawite elites who benefited from Assad’s rule were a minority among minorities. Others within the larger Alawite community remain some of the poorest in Syrian society, many terrorized by the same people who were perpetrating crimes against the rest of the country.

A 40-year-old Alawite resident of Kardahar, who asked to be identified only by his nickname Nana to avoid reprisals, described how townspeople lived their entire lives in fear of their masters, who mistreated and treated people from their own community with contempt. did .

“They wanted us to stay [poor] So that people keep joining the army,” said Nana.

Nana and her sister taught in schools where children could not afford the meager cost of public school books, while her brother-in-law spent the last 14 years avoiding military service.

Yet despite their disillusionment with Assad, minorities such as the Alawites and Christians fear not only for their safety but that the new rulers will impose a new and unfamiliar social order.

Nana’s family makes and sells alcoholic beverages, including arrack and wine, which were off limits under Assad, and like many others they borrowed money to stock up before December, the busiest time of the year. But when they woke up to news that the Assad regime had fallen to the Islamist HTS, the family went to pack their supplies and take down the store’s sign as a warning.

When Nana’s husband later asked an armed man patrolling the town if he could reopen, he was told that selling alcohol was forbidden in Islam. The family, like others, is awaiting clarity from the new government on what is legal and what is not.

“We bought stock like crazy and now it’s going to sit in our store,” said her brother-in-law, adding that her niece was told by another patrolman to put on her pajamas.

Although they suffered “humiliation” under Assad, he said, they at least knew how to maneuver under the regime. “Now, we don’t know what [kind of regime] We have,” Nana said.

Cartography by Aditi Bhandari