From Syria's ashes: A new Alawite state in the Middle East?

The noxious ideology of Assad’s Alawite regime has nothing to do with Alawism as a religion; it is strictly practical. Its Baathist variety of secular Arab nationalism papers over the deep divisions in Syrian society by subordinating religion and sectarian identity to ethnicity: being an Arab trumps being a Sunni, an Alawite, a Christian, or a Druze. (The Kurds in the northeast are the losers in this equation, and they’re treated accordingly.) Assad’s hostility toward Israel and his alliance with Iran likewise make strategic sense. By championing the Sunni community’s anti-Zionist cause, he has been able to purchase some legitimacy from his cowering subjects. Also, Assad’s sponsorship of terrorism and his status as Iran’s sidekick give Syria much more geopolitical clout than it would otherwise have as a ramshackle, Soviet-style, resource-poor backwater.

Now that the Sunnis have turned against Assad, however, it’s all crashing down, as it was doomed to do sooner or later. At this point, the Syrian national army is little more than a well-armed Russian- and Iranian-backed Alawite militia. If the government falls, the Alawites—and especially the Assad clan—may well try to carve out an enclave where they can be safe, just as many wished to do during the French imperial period between the two world wars. Back then, Alawite leaders asked French authorities for their own Lebanon-sized state along the Mediterranean, with Latakia as its capital. “The Alawites refuse to be annexed to Muslim Syria,” Suleiman al-Assad, grandfather of the current Syrian president, wrote in a letter. “In Syria, the official religion of the state is Islam, and according to Islam, the Alawites are considered infidels. . . . The spirit of hatred and fanaticism imbedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non-Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion. There is no hope that the situation will ever change. Therefore, the abolition of the [French] mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to the dangers of death and annihilation.”