Assad’s Syrian stronghold prepares for life after the regime

On a recent morning in the Syrian province of Latakia, more than a hundred former soldiers stood quietly, their eyes wide and cautious as they waited to register with the country’s new rebel rulers. A man in fatigues walked around with a poster of ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s face on a stick, asking the men to spit on it. All obliged.

Since taking power this month, the new interim government — led by Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — has set up several of these so-called settlement centres across the country, putting out a call for former soldiers to visit, register for non-military IDs and hand in their weapons.

They say initiatives such as these will help ensure security and begin the process of reconciliation after 13 years of brutal civil war that has left the country awash with weapons and armed factions.

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

Yet in Latakia, the Assad dynasty’s home province and one-time stronghold, many fear the takeover marks the beginning of something more sinister: a cycle of disempowerment and retribution that will leave them as losers in the new Syria.

Despite widespread joy across the country, coastal Latakia is home to many from the Assads’ minority Alawite sect and others who — whether through choice or desperation — made up the soldiers and loyalists who helped prop up the family’s ruthless minority rule.

In the weeks since Assad’s fall, some have closed shops, stayed home or gone into hiding amid a security vacuum and tales of revenge killings and attacks on minorities.

“I didn’t dare go because I was worried about the roads,” one Alawite former security official said of the settlement centres. “They’re either going to kill us on the way there, or in our villages.”

There has so far been scant documentation of retributory violence, with the new powers-that-be dismissing the reports as “isolated cases”. Traifi, asked about rumoured instances of men at checkpoints bullying Alawites and requesting they curse the former president, said those kinds of nuisance did not represent the new government.

“But there’s people manning the checkpoints who have lost children, wives, family members to bombardment and fighting, whose friends disappeared into jail. They have pain in their hearts,” he said. “We put up with them for 14 years. They can put up with us for a while.”

Some soldiers queueing at the Latakia settlement centre appeared to cautiously welcome the prospect of a fresh start, a sign of how disillusioned even nominal loyalists had become.

One 29-year-old former soldier said he was repeatedly forbidden from taking leave to visit his home over the past year as Assad’s weakening grip on the country and its withering economy led to growing fears that soldiers would desert.

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

Yet Traifi said that perhaps only 30 per cent of those arriving at settlement centres were handing over weapons, adding that an intelligence unit was working to identify and raid those still holding on to their arms. Even the former state security employee acknowledged that both sides still had arms and that, without comprehensive disarmament, “we’re going to have massacres within two months”.

Before the rise of Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez to power in 1970, Alawites were one of the poorest groups in Syrian society: families dispatched their daughters to clean houses in big cities and their sons to the military to ensure they were provided with food and a steady income.

But during its rule, the Assad family elevated a select group of Alawite loyalists into positions of high authority, offering them preferential treatment above all others. Resentment towards the brutal enforcement of practices to ensure they held wealth, power and political status disproportionate to 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, with many of those Alawites now facing an uncertain future, thousands fled the capital Damascus to their ancestral homes.

The former state security employee said he got a call from his superior around midnight, who told him to pack his belongings and go home. He described apocalyptic scenes: civilians and men in fatigues filled the streets on foot and in cars, their abandoned weapons littering the side of the road. “I parked on the right side of the road on the way to Homs, and threw my gun in a waterway,” he said.

The two-hour trip to his village on the border with Lebanon took about eight hours on the chaotic roads. He then sheltered at home, aware that men from his village who had gone into exile in Lebanon after joining the rebels were now returning. He feared those men were now preparing for vengeance against those they blamed for massacring their friends and family.

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

A tense quiet has hung thick in the air of Alawite villages and towns since Assad’s fall. Schools have been open but empty. When asked if one was operating, a groundskeeper said: “Yes, what’s missing is students.”

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

Such attacks on the mausoleum have become “a sort of pilgrimage” for rebel supporters, said one resident.

But the Alawite elite who benefited from the Assads’ rule were a minority within a minority. Others within the broader Alawite community remained some of the poorest in Syrian society, many terrorised by the same people who were carrying out crimes against the rest of the country.

One 40-year-old Alawite resident of Qardaha, who asked to be identified only by her nickname Nana to avoid retaliation, described how townspeople lived their whole lives in fear of their overlords, who abused people from their own sect and treated them with disdain.

“They wanted us to stay [poor] so that people would keep having to enlist in the army,” Nana said.

Nana and her sister taught in schools where children could not afford the meagre price of government schoolbooks, while her brother-in-law had spent the past 14 years evading military service.

Yet despite their disillusionment with the Assads, 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 make and sell alcoholic drinks including arak and wine, which were not restricted under the Assads, and like many others they had borrowed money to stock up ahead of December, the busiest time of year. But when they awoke to the news that the Assad regime had fallen to the Islamist HTS, the family went to pack up their supplies and take down the shop sign as a precaution.

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 shops,” her brother-in-law said, adding that his niece was told off by another patrolman for wearing pyjamas outside.

While they had suffered “humiliation” under the Assads, he said, they at least knew to how manoeuvre under the regime. “Now, we don’t know what [kind of regime] we have,” Nana said.

Cartography by Aditi Bhandari