How Russia Could Maintain a Foothold in Syria
4 min read
The stunning downfall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad leaves not merely a vacuum of power in that country but a nearly endless list of unanswered questions. One of the most significant concerns the fate and future of the minority Alawite community from which Assad and his inner circle hailed. The Assad dictatorship began when Bashar’s father, Hafez, seized control of the country in 1970. The government that Bashar inherited upon his father’s death in 2000 was nominally Baathist, a socialist and pan-Arab ideology, but the heart of the regime has always been—and, more important, perceived as—a communal Alawite project at the expense of the Syrian Sunni majority. What happens to that community now will say a great deal about whether post-Assad Syria coheres into a stable, pluralistic nation—or descends into further sectarian chaos.
Alawism is an offshoot of Shiite Islam, but the faith has been considered heretical almost unanimously by both Sunni and Shiite clerical authorities since it emerged in the ninth century. The Alawites accordingly became an insular, tightly knit, and often secretive group struggling to survive in their northeastern Syrian coastal and mountain homelands. During French colonial rule following World War I, Paris toyed with creating an independent Alawite state in eastern Syria, just north of the area that would become Lebanon, but the project failed.
Still, Alawites became something of a favored minority under the French. They were strongly encouraged to join, and heavily promoted within, the developing Syrian military. In 1970, Hafez al-Assad, an air force general, seized power and imposed the highly repressive political system that lasted until this weekend.
The Assad dictatorship did not rely solely on Alawite support. Many Syrian minority groups, including Christians, Druze, and Jews, genuinely came to view Assad as a defender of communal minorities. The fact that even Alawites declined to fight for him over the past week suggests that this rationalization of support has finally crumbled.
Still, Alawites are surely fearful of a future without the regime that purported to protect them. The coalition poised to take over the country is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni Islamist organization that was once an affiliate of ISIS and, later, al-Qaeda. This is a nightmarish scenario for a community that has long been regarded as heretics and apostates by even “moderate” radical Muslim fundamentalists. HTS claims to have moderated, and its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, has promised to be tolerant of Shiites, Christians, Druze, and Alawites. But skepticism is inevitable.
One puzzling aspect of Assad’s downfall is the fact that he didn’t even try to retreat to an Alawite redoubt in northeastern Syria. He still retained significant elite military forces in and around Damascus that are deeply implicated in the regime’s record of atrocities and, in many cases, have everything to fear from a Sunni Islamist new order. These groups also have an interest in protecting and controlling their remaining constituencies, and preserving as much of their legitimate and illicit business activities as possible. They may have lost their leader, in other words, but they haven’t lost their incentive to establish self-controlled territory.
Even with Assad out of the picture, the new coalition might not be able to stop the further fragmentation of Syria. There is already a Kurdish self-ruled area in the north. HTS and its Turkish-backed allies burst out of Idlib Province, in Syria’s northwest, where they had been quietly maintaining an Islamist statelet of their own. Israel is moving quickly to control a zone of influence around the occupied Golan Heights, which it purports to have annexed. Unless Syria can quickly unify around a consensus government blessed, but not dominated, by HTS and Turkey, and that does not threaten religious minorities, the Alawite community and remnants of the former regime could well seek to establish their own de facto regional autonomous zone.
The most plausible central location is the coastal town of Tartus. It has an overwhelming 80 percent Alawite majority. The surrounding population is also mainly Alawite, and most others are Christians. Equally important, Russia—the Assad regime’s most important backer—maintains its all-important warm-water naval port in Tartus, an asset that Russian leaders have prioritized for centuries and would be loath to lose now. The port is crucial for Russian supply lines into Africa, among other important functions. Russia has also been working to rebuild a former Soviet submarine base nearby. A continued Russian presence in western Syria would also be leveraged to maintain existing signals intelligence centers.
Even if Moscow can no longer maintain power and influence in Damascus, it can seek to preserve its most important assets in Syria through cooperation with an Alawite autonomous zone, if that community and remnants of the former regime move quickly to establish one. It would be an ironic echo of the failed French Alawite-state project of the 1920s. In large part because of their own disunity, the Alawites never got their independent state. But under the Assads, they led a coalition that ruled Syria for more than half a century. They might soon attempt to return to the de facto independence within Syria that they once inadvertently exchanged for control over the entire nation. What is clear is that the long era of Alawite dominance in Syria is finally over.
