“Confessional sects only come about through the state. It is the state that oversees the continuity of movement in the reproduction of confessional sects as political entities that, through the state alone, become institutions. But the logic of sectarian thought turns things upside down, making the sectarian state appear as if it were the result of the plurality of confessional sects. Whereas it is through it – through the state – that confessional sects multiply, and it is through it that they are reproduced as political entities. Isn’t it funny that confessional sects require to be recognized by the state to have the merit of existing? For if they were not recognized, their presence would be kept clandestine, secret, going against the law and thus, going out of existence”.
Mahdi Amel, the Sectarian State 1
On 5 March 2025, organized officers and troops from what used to be the Syrian Arab Army set up a series of ambushes targeting members of the Syrian general security in the governates of Tartous and Lattakia, which, according to the Syrian Ministry of Defence, led to hundreds of deaths among the armed forces. What then followed was an unprecedented wave of systemic sectarian killings across the Syrian coast and even extending to the governorates of Homs and Hama, targeting Alawites in particular. With the sectarian onslaught still ongoing, ‘The Civil Peace Group – Seen’ has estimated 9372 civilian deaths by March 10, whereas the ‘Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’, in an estimate dated to March 13, talk of 14763 deaths of ‘defenseless civilians’. This is nothing short of an ethnic cleansing campaign being carried out against the Alawites of Syria. All of this is occuring under the pretext of defeating the ‘remnants of the Assad regime’, which now includes anyone who engages in any criticism of the de-facto regime ruling over Syria.
As a result of the indiscriminate massacres carried out by the Syrian authorities and other takfiri factions in predominantly Alawite towns and cities, over 9000 Syrians4 from the coast have sought refuge in the Russian Hmeimim air base in Lattakia, while many others deserted their towns to seek shelter in nearby woods. Imad al Labaki, the governor of Akkar in Northern Lebanon, has mentioned that some 1476 Alawite5 families, which amounts to 6078 people, have sought refuge in the governate, and are scattered across 15 towns and villages. Thousands have also sought refuge in ‘Jabal Mohsen’, the predominantly Alawite area of Tripoli in Northern Lebanon. According to locals, there are now reportedly more than 12000 Syrian Alawite refugees in Akkar and around 8000 in Jabal Mohsen. This is the second massive wave of migration that Syria has witnessed since the collapse of the Assad regime, as around 90000 Syrian Shiites6 reportedly fled into Lebanon during the first week after the fall of the regime, particularly after majority-Shia towns such as Nubl and Zahraa in Northern Aleppo Governate were targeted by sectarian groups.
Media Coverage
De-facto Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa has since issued multiple threats against the ‘remnants of the regime’, whilst also blaming ‘foreign meddling’ for the unrest. Al-Sharaa urged his troops to stay disciplined and refrain from committing what he called ‘individual violations’7. This falls in line with the media rhetoric propagated by the Syrian authorities and adopted by many local and international media outlets; Qatari state-media Al Jazeera initially framed the massacres as military operations with the objective of eliminating ‘regime remnants.’ An article dated to March 8 was deceivingly titled: ‘Hundreds killed as Syria security forces battle al-Assad loyalists.’8 The article made no mention of the sectarian character of these killings, instead adopting an ambiguous passive tone without mentioning the culprits, not unlike western media’s coverage of the Zionist aggressions against Palestinians. Al Jazeera also made unfounded claims that the ‘remnants of the Assad regime’ were being supported and abetted by a nebula of foreign actors that included Iran and Hezbollah, but also Israel and the ‘Syrian Democratic Forces’ (SDF).
But when the scale of the massacres became too wide to be ignored, these same outlets resorted to attributing these actions to undisciplined individuals to deny their systemic nature, sometimes even absolving the Syrian authorities of all responsibility by attributing the massacres to fringe armed factions.
While there undoubtedly are foreign takfiri fighters, mostly hailing from Central Asia, these massacres were mainly perpetrated by Syrians against other Syrians for belonging to the ‘wrong’ confessional sect. This is supported by videos that the fighters themselves have posted, with some showing soldiers and state agents in General Security uniforms summarily executing unarmed civilians. Others show them looting homes and small businesses owned by Alawite individuals.
There are several factors, which confirm that these massacres are being enabled with the direct participation, or at the very least, with the tacit approval of the Syrian authorities:
The general mobilization of military and security personnel from across the country to the Syrian coast, supplied with heavy weapons and military equipment. This also came amid efforts to rally Sunnis across the country, including calls from mosques to wage Jihad against the ‘remnants of the Assad regime.’
The set-up of military volunteering centers, such as the SNA-controlled military volunteering center in Homs’ Baba Amro neighborhood, where a teenage soldier has admitted to undercover journalists that on March 5, volunteers were instantly conscripted into the military, armed, and sent to the Syrian Coast without prior training.
Under the pretext of safety, the Syrian authorities have banned foreign journalists from going to the coast to cover the massacres. Instead, they are only allowing in journalists loyal to the de-facto regime, such as Al Jazeera or Jamil al Hassan, who denied that any sectarian massacres had taken place. This is not the first time Syrian authorities restrict access to foreign journalists, as they had previously prevented them from covering the sectarian massacres taking place in Fahel, in the countryside of Homs more than a month ago. Already at that time, these massacres were depicted as ‘individual acts of revenge.’
Sectarian Demonization
Alarmingly, we are witnessing high rates of approval to these massacres among the Syrian populace, which is becoming increasingly divided along sectarian identitarian lines.
Lebanese Marxist-Leninist intellectual Mahdi Amel said back in 1987:
“The sectarian ideology has as its main political function the display of horizontal class divisions in society as a vertical division between confessional sects, and not between classes. The role of this sectarian, vertical division of society is, precisely, to guarantee the division of the working class and the division of its allies, to the advantage of the ruling bourgeoisie, thus guaranteeing the sectarian fragmentation of the popular masses suffering from class exploitation by the bourgeoisie.”
As the new Syrian authorities consistently fail in addressing the long-standing issues faced by the Syrian people, such as extreme poverty, inequality, the lack of electricity, and above all, the threat of Israeli incursion into its territory in Southern Syria, they are instead trying to consolidate their shaky rule by launching a wide-scale crusade against an imaginary enemy.
After 54 years of Assad rule in Syria, takfiris are adamant on portraying Syrian Alawites as complicit with the Assad family, who are Alawites themselves. Ironically, this depiction falls in line with the Assads’ narrative, as they were keen on portraying themselves as protectors of Syria’s “sectarian minorities”, including Alawites, from Sunni extremists. Today, takfiri propagandists are presenting a deceitful interpretation of the Syrian civil war along sectarian lines, depicting the regime’s crackdown as a war against Sunnis. This view is increasingly espoused by everyday Syrians, many of whom have fallen to the manufactured narrative that attempts to justify these sectarian killings and make them acceptable to public opinion.
Simply condemning sectarian killings could have an individual, regardless of their background, accused of being a ‘remnant of the Assad regime’, or at the very least be exposed to whataboutist arguments about the killings of Sunnis under the rule of Assad. This rhetoric mistakenly supposes that Alawites and other “sectarian minorities” were spared from the tyranny of the Assad regime. It also ignores the fact that most of the high-ranking officials in Assad’s inner circle were Sunnis. Sunni soldiers also constituted a majority of the Syrian Arab Army.
However, it is important to note that this ethnic cleansing campaign does help us understand the reasons that drove many individual minorities to at least nominally support Assad, as they feared what would happen should the takfiris come to power.
There are widespread misconceptions about the living standards of Alawites in Syria, as many falsely believe they were reaping economic advantages from the Assad rule, and that those that were not directly involved in violence against dissenters were at least beneficiaries on economic terms. This could not be further from the truth, especially when it comes to the victims of the ongoing sectarian massacres. Most Alawite victims were living in remote towns and villages that were poorly serviced, many of which barely had access to electricity or clean water. Meanwhile, most Alawites in Damascus, live in slums and informal settlements in the impoverished Mazzeh 86 area west of the city-center. Moreover, there are instances where Alawite activists who opposed Assad’s rule and who took part in the Syrian revolution are today saying that they lost immediate relatives in the sectarian massacres, further refuting the claims of ‘revenge killings’.
Perhaps the most fitting illustration of the lack of awareness and detachment from reality of many of the de-facto Syrian regime supporters, appeared on March 9th; a silent protest in Damascus’ Martyr’s Square called for by a wide array of liberal and left-leaning Syrian groups to “mourn the martyrdoms of general security agents as well as all the civilian martyrs in the Syrian coast” was subsequently attacked by counter protestors shouting sectarian chants and slogans against Alawites. Most strikingly, one of the counter protestors begrudgingly questioned an aging man, asking him where he was all these years (under Assad rule), accusing him of hypocrisy. As revealed by one of the activists who took part in the protest, this aging man turned out to be Ragheed al-Tatari10, a former military aviator who spent 43 years of incarceration in multiple prisons, including Sednaya prison, for refusing to take part in a bombing campaign against the City of Hama in 1980. Today, he is among those taking a stand against sectarian massacres.
An analysis of Sectarianism in Syria
Historical roots
It should be noted that sectarian conflicts in the Levant are far from unprecedented. In their current form, these sectarian tensions can be traced back to more than a century earlier, when French and British colonial powers used a ‘divide and rule strategy’; they sought to exacerbate sectarian contradictions in the region in order to impose their colonial hegemony over the local populations and prevent any united national resistance from emerging.
This is best evidenced by the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement11, and then later, the 1920 San Remo conference12 which carved up the region into smaller entities under the mandate of either French or British colonial powers. Syria itself was divided into 6 entities by the French colonists along identitarian lines in 1920 after the defeat of the Syrian uprising against colonial rule: the State of Damascus, the State of Aleppo, the Alawite State in Lattakia and Tartous, the Druze State in the south, the Autonomous Sanjak of Alexandretta (modern-day Hatay, which was then annexed by Turkey), and Greater Lebanon (modern-day Lebanon).
For decades, Lebanon was a hotbed of sectarian contradictions exacerbated both by international and regional powers and by the ruling bourgeoisie seeking to preserve its privileges and hegemony. The Lebanese sectarian model was later exported to Iraq, after the 2003 US-International invasion of the country, turning confessional sects and ethnic identities into political entities. This process is well underway in Syria as well, which is on the course of becoming a Sunni State through deep institutional changes, with the military and security apparatus at its forefront, as thousands of Syrian Sunnis flock to join the security forces and the newly formed military, which is made up of dozens of militias and armed factions.
Imperialism, Zionist Settler-colonialism and Sectarianism
In 1980, a former Israeli Foreign Ministry senior official and former advisor to Ariel Sharon by the name of Oded Yinon wrote an article titled ‘A Strategy for Israel in the 1980’s’13, which was published in ‘Kivunim’, a quarterly periodical “dedicated to the study of Judaism and Zionism”, which is overseen by the World Zionist Organization’s department of information.
In this article, Yinon stresses the importance for Israel to capitalize on the identitarian contradictions among the populations of Arab countries, giving detailed accounts of each country’s sectarian and ethnic composition and the eventual conflicts that may arise. In the case of Syria, Yinon writes:14
“Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi'ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today.”
In this same vein, Wikileaks had revealed in 2018 an email written by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying:
“The fall of the House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of Israeli commanders would not be a bad thing for Israel and its western allies.”
As Israeli ground incursions into Syria continue unabated, with its air raids having completely decimated the military capabilities of the Syrian Army, sectarian conflict in the country will undoubtedly serve the interests of the Zionist entity. In fact, Israel has repeatedly tried to intervene and present itself as a protector of Sectarian minorities in Syria, first with the Syrian Druze community, and now with the Alawite community, as a pretext for the partitioning of Syria.
As for the current Syrian authorities, who continue to ignore Israeli violations of the country’s sovereignty, these sectarian massacres are used to galvanize the Sunni majority as Syria’s future becomes more and more uncertain. As Mahdi Amel said:
“A state founded on a sectarian basis creates sectarian crises to guarantee its continuity.”15
Conclusion
At a time when US imperialism, Zionist expansionism and global reaction are intensifying, there is an existential risk particularly threatening countries in the Levant such as Lebanon and Syria. The Syrian de-facto president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s agreement with SDF commander-in-chief Mazloum Abdi to merge the SDF into the Syrian State is a positive step for countering attempts at partitioning Syria. However, the current Syrian authorities are at the very least complicit with the sectarian massacres that are still ongoing in the Syrian Coast, while imposing a strict media blackout as well. These events confirm the fears expressed by individuals among ‘religious and ethnic minorities’ who are increasingly alienated by the Sunni-majority, as Ahmad al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Joulani has appointed notorious militiamen to key military positions in the newly formed Syrian army in exchange for their loyalty (SNA commander Mohammad al-Jassem, better known as Abu Amsha, is a stark example). Al-Sharaa also keeps nominating close associates to key institutional positions, such as the Syrian National Dialogue Conference charged with overseeing the transitional period and which many Syrians claimed it did not represent the Syrian population. The same can be said of the fact-finding committee that was formed to investigate the massacres in the Syrian coast, which was considered by many to be biased. As for Israeli encroachment into Syria, the IDF continues to advance into the country without having to face any organized resistance, while Syrian officials including al-Sharaa consistently shy away from giving a clear response when questioned about the Israeli occupation of Syria.
In the face of ongoing massacres and purges, we in AFMN express our solidarity with the victims of sectarian violence in Syria and all those affected by it.
Footnotes
1 في الدولة الطائفية، مهدي عامل، 1986
3 Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 2025
6 The New Arab, 2024, 90,000 Syrians may have entered Lebanon since Assad regime fell: report
8 Al Jazeera, 2025, Hundreds killed as Syria security forces battle al-Assad loyalists
9 مناقشات وأحاديث: في قضايا حركة التحرر الوطني وتميز المفاهيم الماركسية عربيا، 1987، مهدي عامل
10https://www.admsp.org/en/ragheed/
11https://www.britannica.com/event/Sykes-Picot-Agreement
12https://www.britannica.com/event/Conference-of-San-Remo
13https://archive.org/details/astrategyforisraelinthenineteeneighties
14 Ibid.
15 في الدولة الطائفية، مهدي عامل، 1986
