Ten years after the start of the war in Syria, the Alawites still harbor a deep bitterness in a country that is destroyed and in crisis.
Taken hostage by President Bashar al-Assad's struggle for the survival of his regime, they have paid, like other faith groups, a heavy price throughout these years of conflict.
"The Alawites fear for their future in a destroyed country in crisis, explains to France 24 Fabrice Balanche, lecturer at the University of Lyon 2, geographer and specialist in Syria. They are very bitter because their population has been decimated, especially in mountain villages where men aged between 20 and 30 were called to the front and paid for it with their lives ".
A common destiny with Bashar al-Assad?
Historically despised and ostracized by the majority Sunnis in Syria, this community of Shiite Islam, from which Bashar al-Assad came, also subjected to the authoritarianism of the regime, is not however homogeneous.
Its members, although very present in all levels of the state and the army, favored by the regime's patronage system, are not all attached to a Syrian president whose power has been weakened.
As early as March 2011, moreover, the Alawites had chosen to distance themselves from Bashar al-Assad, adored by his supporters who perceive him as the only one capable of bringing security back to the country.
But by siding with the revolutionaries, they quickly suffered the wrath of repression.
In 2014, a campaign, launched on social media by a pro-Assad Alawite activist, demanding that light be shed on the deaths of hundreds of loyalist soldiers, sparked an unprecedented wave of criticism from the ranks of the Syrian president's fans. .
Extremely rare fact indicating that some Alawites are tired of serving as "cannon fodder" for the diet.
>> Infographic: a conflict in ten dates
"From the start of the events in Syria there had been a certain unease among the Alawites, while one of the regime's great fears is that the image of unity of this community behind it is cracking", recalls Fabrice Balanche, who published in 2006 a book on contemporary Syria: "The Alawite region and the Syrian power".
But the confessionalization of the conflict and the phenomenon of automatic association of the entire community with the Damascus regime by Islamist rebels and jihadists, who consider it heretical, places the Alawites with their backs to the wall.
They are forced to line up behind the Assad clan.
"Let us not forget that the Alawis are viscerally afraid of the revenge of the Sunnis, and they know perfectly well that the ancestral resentment between the two communities was awakened by the war", indicates Fabrice Balanche.
During the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in the 1980s, a sort of Alawite hunt took place, mainly in Aleppo and in the province of Idleb.
Many members of this community had been killed, and Alawite villages in the Idlib region were emptied of their inhabitants.
"Since then, the Alawites have never forgotten these events and this memory pushes them not to completely dissociate themselves from the regime".
A feeling of having a common destiny with the Syrian president.
A perception maintained by Damascus, illustrated at a time when Bashar al-Assad seemed to be losing ground, before the military intervention of his Russian ally in 2015. At the time, some experts had put forward the idea that his community could withdraw with him in "the Alawite country", which extends over the entire Mediterranean coast of Syria, to create his own confessional state, like the ephemeral Alawite state (1920-1936) created during the mandate French in Syria.
Bashar al-Assad does not have much to offer
A perspective since forgotten, thanks to the victory of Bashar al-Assad on the military ground, thanks to the support of his Russian and Iranian allies, who seem to have removed the jihadist threat and saved the Syrian regime.
"But despite the victory over the jihadists, there is a stubborn bitterness within this community, because in addition to having been in mourning, a large part of the Alawites live in poverty, in a country plagued by crisis. economic crisis, explains Fabrice Balanche. Normally, the wives of combatants fallen on the battlefield automatically get a civil servant position to help them live, except that the wages paid in devalued Syrian pounds are so low that they are 'a poor consolation which offers no prospect of the future ".
Still, the master of Damascus, who is sure to win the presidential election scheduled for this summer, cannot hope to consolidate his power without relying on the support and loyalty of the Alawites.
"However, we cannot affirm, today, that Bashar al-Assad is popular within his community, which does not feel as a whole in solidarity with the regime, underlines Fabrice Balance. But the Alawites do not express openly rejection against him for fear of the intelligence services, surely, but also because they do not want to see the jihadists or Islamists arrive on their doorstep.
This is why, despite the economic crisis and the exploding cost of living, the regime's objective is to rebuild a stable power system and to reweave a social pact with the population who remained in the country, continues Fabrice. Balanche.
And to add: "In reality, because of the economic crisis, Bashar al-Assad does not have much more to offer to his community apart from the security and a redistribution of the goods belonging to those who left the country. , since there is little hope that the 7 million refugees will return to Syria ".
"A spoliation conceived by the regime, he specifies, and intended to make the beneficiaries even more loyal so that the Syrians themselves, do not want the refugees to return to recover their property and their fields ".
A way of linking even more the fate of a community to that of the Assad clan, and of a regime accused by the international community of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
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