In Tartous [Alawite Heartland], Syria, Women Wear Black, Youth Are in Hiding, and Bitterness Grows

[gegiroor]

[gegiroor]

 In Tartous [Alawite Heartland], Syria, Women Wear Black, Youth Are in Hiding, and Bitterness Grows: https://www.thenation.com/article/in-ta ... ess-grows/

[gegiroor]

[gegiroor]

 Tartous—When Syria’s national uprising began six years ago, and young people everywhere else in the country were calling for the overthrow of the regime, up to a thousand loyalists would march in the streets of Tartous in support of President Bashar al-Assad.

“Al-Assad! Or we burn the down the country,” chanted the regime elements among them.

Tartous has the biggest concentration of Syria’s Alawite minority and is the heartland for Assad’s Alawite-dominated government. So when the regime summoned the sons of our sect as backup forces against what it called a terrorist threat, Alawite families willingly sent their men and boys.

Today Tartous is in mourning, with as many as 100,000 dead from the fighting and well over 50,000 wounded, out of a population of 2 million in the province. Women in black fill the streets of this city of 800,000, grieving for their sons and husbands, and a dozen or more coffins arrive every day from the front. Many of the young men of Tartous are now in hiding—by some estimate 50,000 of them—and the government has to conduct house-to-house raids to find recruits.

This is no longer a city of fools. A small minority still believe that Assad is fighting terrorism, but most people I know think Assad has cheated his own people by sending them into an endless, pointless war.

The Alawite pagans should ask themselves where has the statement, “Al-Assad! Or we burn the down the country,” taken them down.

[gegiroor]

 The call to patriotism lost its impact years ago, so the regime tried to replace it by putting the economic squeeze on Alawites. Economic pressures were easily brought to bear, because a great many Alawites are on the state payroll, either in the security forces or as government employees. I know many who enlisted in the military reserves only after they were threatened with the loss of their jobs and income.

The privileges that Alawites enjoy are deceptive, for the regime’s motivation in granting them is to secure control. Even the Alawite faith, a Shiite offshoot that borrows from other religions, has been corrupted by regime appointments of retired army officers as sheikhs in the faith. Of the five clerical sheikhs in my village, three are former army sergeants. This has added to the loss of a moral compass among so many Alawites.

 The drive to stir sectarian hatred is a different story. The stereotype is that Alawites have a great animosity toward Sunnis and vice-versa, but from my perspective, that of an Alawite dissident, that is not the case. When the revolution began, Alawite opponents of the regime took to the streets in Baniyas, a predominantly Sunni town just north of Tartous, and formed a Sunni-Alawite Local Coordination Committee. During the height of the revolution, there were never any hostile communal acts against Sunnis. We’ve received Sunni IDPs by the hundreds of thousands without problems.

It was the regime that stirred sectarian hatred. Its propaganda machine constantly told Alawites that the Sunni majority wanted to topple the regime and take out revenge against them, and the Baath party apparatus constantly referred to “Sunni terrorist jihadis.” The rhetoric began in June 2011, when Sunni rebels attacked offices of the Alawite-dominated security headquarters in Jisr al-Shughur; the government circulated videos showing the violence. This sowed anger among young Alawites and helped the regime in its recruitment.

[gegiroor]

With Iran’s backing, the regime gave the Shabiha a green light to attack Sunnis, leading to a massacre in Bayda and Baniyas in May 2013. The regime ignited the killing spree when it turned over the body of a young Sunni man who died in prison to his family. When they saw the body and all the signs of torture, they got out weapons and fired in the air. This was the pretext for the regime’s order to Alawite militias to kill the Sunnis of Bayda and Baniyas and to burn down their houses. Regime intelligence members penetrated the militias and egged them on. Hundreds of Sunnis were summarily executed. But Sunnis did not exact revenge, and the sectarian propaganda slowly lost its effect. Still, the regime continued to demonize “Sunni jihadis.”

This reached a high point in May 2016 with a wave of explosions that killed about 180 civilians. Four were in Tartous and five in Jabla, a city in the Latakia mountains—all occurring within a 15-minute time span. ISIS claimed responsibility on its website, but the regime blamed the Islamist Ahrar al-Sham rebel force. Many analysts suspect the regime sponsored the bombings in order to intimidate the population.

Checkpoints surround both cities, and police patrol them day and night and raid suspected houses, so it would seem nearly impossible for anyone to carry out the attacks simultaneously and precisely unless it was the regime itself. And we all know the regime had staged incidents before this that it blamed on terrorists [high-level security officials who defected to the opposition say the regime staged a series of bombings of security installations from late 2011 to mid-2012 and blamed them on Al Qaeda, before the militants had set up a presence in Syria].

[gegiroor]

The essence of the story.

Alawite society, which once bought into the regime’s sectarian propaganda, now protects young men trying to evade military service. An acquaintance of mine named Ammar from the Qadmous area northeast of Tartous was arrested at a checkpoint in Damascus in May 2014. After his deployment to the frontline in Zabadani, a mountain town near Damascus, where he saw half his comrades die, he deserted his unit and is now hiding in a small village in the Tartous mountains.

“I can’t work or travel. I can’t leave my village. But this is better than being in the army,” he told me. “I cannot choose death. For whom shall I die? And for what?”

[TheGrumpyGeeljire]

And there are still some people who claim the SAA is majority Sunni. Well, if that was the case, there'd be no need for foreign Shia militias to support Assad.

The Alawites are fucked. The fate of the Ottoman Armenians await them.

[paperino]

gerigoor, is it true that Shias from Afghanistan, Pakistan and few other countries are fighting for the Assad regime?

[TheGrumpyGeeljire]

gerigoor, is it true that Shias from Afghanistan, Pakistan and few other countries are fighting for the Assad regime?

[gegiroor]

gerigoor, is it true that Shias from Afghanistan, Pakistan and few other countries are fighting for the Assad regime?

Paperino, yes. The Fatemiyon army in Syria is fully made by the Afghan Hazaras Shia: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/i ... 55206.html

You can see the Afghan Shia division in Syria in this video as well.


Here is Pakistani Zainabiyoun division in Syria under the IRGC
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-midea ... 2S20151210

You also have the Hezbollah from Lebanon, Iraqi Shia battlions who make the up the vast majority of Shia forces in Syria, IRGC, and other Shia from India and other places.

[paperino]

Paperino, yes. The Fatemiyon army in Syria is fully made by the Afghan Hazaras Shia: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/i ... 55206.html

You can see the Afghan Shia division in Syria in this video as well.


Here is Pakistani Zainabiyoun division in Syria under the IRGC
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-midea ... 2S20151210

You also have the Hezbollah from Lebanon, Iraqi Shia battlions who make the up the vast majority of Shia forces in Syria, IRGC, and other Shia from India and other places.

gerigoor, what's with people like LeJusticier, Ben Dover, Xildiid, gurey, Strategic, Fah and others who side with the Shia?

[gegiroor]

Paperino, yes. The Fatemiyon army in Syria is fully made by the Afghan Hazaras Shia: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/i ... 55206.html

You can see the Afghan Shia division in Syria in this video as well.


Here is Pakistani Zainabiyoun division in Syria under the IRGC
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-midea ... 2S20151210

You also have the Hezbollah from Lebanon, Iraqi Shia battlions who make the up the vast majority of Shia forces in Syria, IRGC, and other Shia from India and other places.

gerigoor, what's with people like LeJusticier, Ben Dover, Xildiid, gurey, Strategic, Fah and others who side with the Shia?

I think Gurey and FAH are Sufis, who think every opposition group in Syria is backed by the west. They hardly see the treachery of Rafida Iran and basically oblivion to the alliance between Rafida and the West in their effort to subdue the Ahlul-Sunna forces in Shaam and Iraq.

The rest of the gang have no clue what they're talking about. Some of them are pork-eating Zionists who basically hate every Sunni Muslim group out there.

GrumpyGeeljire and GrandpaKhalif are familiar with is happening there. Lo'Doon is also good. There are other who I don't remember. You can ignore the rest.

[gegiroor]

And there are still some people who claim the SAA is majority Sunni. Well, if that was the case, there'd be no need for foreign Shia militias to support Assad.

The Alawites are fucked. The fate of the Ottoman Armenians await them.

Insha'Allah they'll reap what they saw!

[paperino]

I think Gurey and FAH are Sufis, who think every opposition group in Syria is backed by the west. They hardly see the treachery of Rafida Iran and basically oblivion to the alliance between Rafida and the West in their effort to subdue the Ahlul-Sunna forces in Shaam and Iraq.

The rest of the gang have no clue what they're talking about. Some of them are pork-eating Zionists who basically hate every Sunni Muslim group out there.

GrumpyGeeljire and GrandpaKhalif are familiar with is happening there. Lo'Doon is also good. There are other who I don't remember. You can ignore the rest.

Thanks for the clarification.