It was only a matter of time before the realities of Syria pierced the mostly optimistic and encouraging recent accounts of the country’s transition from the Assad dynasty. On March 7, figures loyal to former President Bashar al-Assad staged an uprising against Ahmed al-Sharaa’s new Syrian order, clashing with authorities around Latakia, Tartus, and Jableh. After the Assadists scored some initial success, forces loyal to Sharaa mobilized and put down the uprising.
The details of these events are rather hazy given the deluge of rumors, misinformation, and disinformation that overwhelmed social media channels as well as the dearth of actual journalists in the area. Depending on who observers chose to believe, there were either massacres of Syrian Alawites, Kurds, and Christians, or there were not; Sharaa was either aware of these massacres, or he was not; Syria’s president is either an unreconstructed jihadi, or he has broken from his past and is trying to stitch together a new Syria after five decades of the Assad family’s rule.
What credible reports there are indicate that government forces and those aligned with Sharaa overwhelmed the Assad loyalists with a shocking ferocity that left about 1,000 people dead, most of whom were civilians.
The details of the uprising—such as they are and to the extent that analysts can discern what happened—are in ways less complicated than the challenges and obstacles to building a society in which everyone agrees on what it means to be “Syrian.” No doubt, the vast majority of Syrians would say that everyone in the country—Alawites, Kurds, Druze, Muslims, Ismailis, Christians, and the few Jews left—is Syrian. That is a positive sentiment, but it is a fragile one. As we’ve just seen, at a moment of crisis, this pluralist idea can be easily, and violently, contested. That does not bode well for the country’s immediate future.
Syria’s present conditions offer an almost perfect opportunity for political entrepreneurs and external powers bent on undermining Sharaa and his former al Qaeda affiliate, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). When France was a colonial power in the Levant, it built up the Alawite and the Druze communities as favored minorities, going so far as to establish mini-states for both.
These mini-states were eventually incorporated into Syria, but that was not the case for the Christian state that the French sheared off from what nationalists who have an expansive view of their country called “natural Syria” to create a Maronite-dominated state named Lebanon. All of this was done at the expense of the Sunni population, which was large and generally not well-disposed toward the European project in the region.
The colonial manipulation of sects and ethnic groups created a set of path dependencies that has proved difficult for Syrians to escape over the past 100 years. Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria from 1971 until his death in 2000, was a card-carrying member of the Ba’ath—an Arab nationalist party par excellence. It, like Arab nationalist parties and factions all over the region, maintained the fiction that the Middle East was distinctly Arab, erasing the rich assortment of ethnic and religious groups that were indigenous to the area.
Hafez’s commitment to Ba’athism did not matter much in practical or political terms. He may have been Syria’s longtime strongman, but he could never shed the fact that he was an Alawite—a member of a traditionally poor community that practices a heterodox religion and whose leaders collaborated with the French colonial authorities. And although there were Syrians of varied backgrounds in the Syrian power structure during the elder Assad’s long rule, he relied on Alawites as his power base, thereby recreating and reinforcing sectarian and ethnic differences among Syrians.
During his time in power, Christians were said to be protected, Kurds were repressed unless they were being used against the Turks, and many Sunnis were unhappy. Some—specifically the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters—rebelled, most famously in Hama in 1982. For their part, the Druze engaged in taqiyya (dissimulation under political pressure).
These are generalizations, of course. Not every Alawite supported the Assad regime, and not every Sunni opposed the regime. There were Christians who did, and there were Druze who were Syrian nationalists. Most Syrians just wanted what everyone everywhere wants: to live a decent life and see their children grow up and prosper. These nuances do not diminish the sectarian aspect of Syrian politics, however, which is ripe for exploitation.
It’s not impossible for Syrians to overcome the social and political institutions that divide and categorize them by sect and ethnicity, but it will be extremely hard. It is too early to know whether the new politics in Syria will undermine these patterns, which have been baked into the country’s politics and society for the last century or strengthen them. This “baked-in” quality explains why once the Assadists, whose grievances are ostensibly about power and politics, made their move, the ensuing violence seemed to take on a sectarian and ethnic cast. That is because power and politics in Syria are so intertwined with these differences.
There is no doubt that people, groups, and countries—Iran? Russia? Israel?—both within Syria and outside the country sought to amplify these differences and reinforce the idea that what was transpiring was a full-on jihadi assault on Syrian minorities. It seems—from the sketchy reports that emerged from Western Syria—that there was some truth to these accounts. There is no denying the fact that al-Sharaa’s followers killed large numbers of Alawites (with some outside the country going so far as to suggest that they had it coming). Social media activists and personalities rejected accusations that supporters of the new regime killed Christians, but it seems that they were targeted. That should hardly surprise anyone. Islamist extremists have been menacing Christian clergymen and their churches since Assad fell.
This is not to advocate for the Assadists. Syria was a profoundly repressive and murderous place in the decades between Hafez al-Assad’s ascendance in 1971 and Bashar al-Assad’s fall in late 2024. The son’s determination to kill his way out of the uprising against his rule in 2011 was the lesson that he learned from his father, who murdered tens of thousands in response to the Hama uprising of 1982.
Rather, my point is to observe that like their neighbors in Lebanon and Iraq, Syrians are likely to struggle with the social structures that history bequeathed to them. There are few models for the Syrians to follow. Lebanon’s confessional political system contributes to fragmentation, and Iraq’s to a circus of spoils and dysfunction. Sharaa has said the right things about Syria being for all Syrians.
It is a positive vision of Syria’s future, to which so many of his fellow citizens no doubt agree. But beyond giving voice to the sentiment, the Syrian leader has not offered an actual way forward. For now, Syrians can fairly ask, “To which Syrians is he referring?”