After this report was written, fighting broke out between the provisional government forces and loyalists of the ousted regime who managed to take over several military positions. To deal with this escalation, the authorities rushed in thousands of fighters from the former rebel factions and jihadist groups in the north. By 7 March, the coast had become a battlefield. There followed the two bloodiest days the country has known since Ahmad al-Sharaa became interim president. Provisional casualty figures estimated more than 1000 dead, including at least 700 civilians, mainly from the Alawite community.
In the empty streets of Tartus, a Mediterranean port city on the west coast of Syria nearly 200 kilometres to the north of Damascus, midnight strikes and Kalashnikov fire can be heard. Rami (not his real name) is startled by the sudden noise, then goes back to the dozens of notifications on his cell phone. “It’s HTS... they want to terrorise us”, he observes, convinced that the gunfire comes from the Islamist rebel group which led the uprising that overthrew Bashar al-Assad on 8 December. He calls them “terrorists”.
This 28-year-old cybersecurity expert, trained in Russia, never takes his eyes off his screen, whether in his office or holed up at home. Two days after the fall of Assad’s regime, he set up a channel on the Telegram messaging app for the five blocks in his immediate neighbourhood. “At first there were only about twenty of us, now we are over six hundred,” he says. It was a way of “protecting the city” by monitoring every movement in the vicinity.
A community on the alert
Dressed all in black, a smartwatch on his wrist, Rami receives requests every day to join his group, from neighbours keen to be warned of any “imminent danger.”
“We Alawites aren’t safe anymore”, he says. The Alawite minority, to which the Assad clan belongs, is estimated at 10 % of the Syrian population. For 54 years it was the backbone of the regime, holding the lion’s share of key positions in the intelligence and security services, and in the army, elite units included. However, since 2011, young Alawite recruits were sent in large numbers to the front lines as cannon fodder, often less well-equipped than the more specialised units. This strategy exposed these soldiers to great risks. In the Alawite mountain villages, the population in their twenties and thirties was decimated. In Tartus, one often encounters seriously injured veterans, the regime’s war wounded.
On his Telegram feed, messages keep coming in. Warnings, videos, violent scenes of atrocities perpetrated against Alawites. Impossible to tell rumour from fact. Rami also sends information to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) about violence against Alawites. Since 8 December, this controversial organization - its reliability is challenged by some experts observing the Syrian conflict because of the lack of detail in its reports and inadequate fact-checking - claims to have counted 250 extrajudicial executions, targeting mainly that community.
While the exact number of such crimes is difficult to ascertain, two isolated villages near Homs, 90 kilometres east of Tartus, surrounded by Sunni areas, were the scene of massacres perpetrated by Salafi groups at the end of January. This violence has made the Alawites fear a witch-hunt. Several nearby villages have been abandoned by their inhabitants.
The mark of Russia
Tattooed on Rami’s wrist, the word “slava” – “glory” in Russian - stands out in the dim light, a reminder of his four years studying in Voronej, where life was “like a black and white movie”. He liked the humility of the Russian people and sees Vladimir Putin as a leader who restored his people’s dignity after the fall of the USSR. “Until two months ago, I spoke Russian every day,” he tells me. After his return to Syria in 2022, he went on practising the language with Russian soldiers stationed at the local naval base until their sudden departure on 9 December, after the fall of the regime. “They all left that morning, there was nobody there any more”, he says with a touch of nostalgia. The day before that, when dawn was barely lighting the sky and in the greatest secrecy, Bashar al-Assad had fled the country by jet from the Russian air-base at Hmeimim in Latakia, north of Tartus.
Each year, on the Russian navy’s feast-day, 31 July, the city’s seafront esplanade was cordoned off for a military parade. Civilians were not admitted. Russian and Syrian flags were flown side by side along with huge portraits of Putin and Assad. “I can still remember those scenes,” the young man tells me as we walk by the sea. Today he is reminded of those years by Snow, his Siberian husky with different-coloured eyes, acquired eight years ago. He is also in touch with a community of Russian-speaking Syrians who, like himself, learned the language in Russia.
Hafez’s statue toppled
Opposite his place, a huge Syrian revolution flag, hung there by the new authorities, is fluttering in the wind. It symbolises the seizure of power, the break with the old order. Yet in this city, where Alawites represent 90 % of the population in certain neighbourhoods, it is rare to see one of these flags hanging from a window, unlike other parts of the country. Here the flag seems out of place. Rami contemplates the three stars on the new flag: “They’re supposed to represent Aleppo, Damascus and Deir ez-Zor. But where are the other cities in Syria and on the coast? That flag doesn’t represent all the Syrians”.
In his street, unlike the rest of Syria where they have been systematically torn down, a few portraits of Bashar al-Assad still hold pride of place on the lamp-posts, dark glasses on his nose and in the foreground some “martyrs”, soldiers of the regime’s loyalist army, killed in action. “That’s nothing compared to what it was like before, he took Syria for his own personal Instagram feed,” Rami remarks.
He never liked Bashar al-Assad, considered him a criminal, corrupt and responsible for his country’s poverty. Since 2012, there has been a rumour in the city that Bashar al-Assad is not of Alawite descent. Rami subscribes to it without a second thought. So when he learned, a few days before 8 December, that an offensive was under way to overthrow him, he was elated. “I couldn’t believe it,” he tells me, still incredulous.
In Tartus, which remained under the regime’s control to the very end, the two days of celebration that followed its fall, when a huge statue of Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad was toppled before a cheering crowd, already seem far away. The slogan “One, one, one, the Syrian people are one”, chanted in unison during the first demonstrations as a sign of national unity, also seems to have faded with the passing days.
As the only male member of his family, Rami was exempted from military service. “I’m relieved not to have blood on my hands from the civil war”. Among his friends, some paid $10,000 to avoid service, others laid low in their villages to dodge the draft. Many, often the poorest, had no choice but to go off and fight in the ranks of the Syrian Arab Army, depleted by mass desertions after 2012.
But his elation soon turned to fear in December 2024 when he saw that HTS, once the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, had taken power. “I said to myself we had to organise because as Alawites we were in great danger. I soon saw our community become the target of assassinations.”
A high cost for security
Among his group of young Alawites, the anxiety is tangible. Clea (not her real name), 25, with curly hair and a hoody, belongs to a neighbourhood watch group. Between sips of maté she voices her dismay : “They can’t just come and kill us like dogs without our fighting back!”
Unlike Rami, who calls Bashar al-Assad “a criminal”, “a rat” and “a dog”, Clea adopts a disillusioned tone when she speaks of the fall of the regime.
“I don’t give a damn about Assad. After thirteen years of war, I just don’t want them to come and kill us all. Under Assad we didn’t have any political freedom, but we could live, drink and dance. Now my mother won’t let me go out after dark.”
She points up to her snow-covered village, where her family’s house is located. It’s empty now. “Too dangerous for me to go there, too isolated,” she says.
While some Alawites, like Clea, miss the measure of stability afforded by the regime, others haven’t forgotten that it came with a price. Living in a bubble, far from the din of battle and the blast of bombs, many Turtus Alawites followed the conflict from afar without suffering the violent consequences which laid waste to other regions. But this apparent security was inseparable from another reality, one of tight control and a permanent atmosphere of suspicion. A simple like under an anti-Assad post on Facebook could earn you a brutal interrogation by the mukhabarat, the Syrian intelligence service.
“Some Sunnis were big supporters of the regime”
A 30-year-old physician sits sipping his maté with Rami in a café where they are almost the only customers. He’s an anaesthetist at the al-Bassel hospital, which was named after Hafez al-Assad’s eldest son, slated to succeed him but killed in a traffic accident in 1994. Now it’s been renamed Tartus National Hospital)
“We have to justify our silence under the Bashar regime but it wasn’t just because we’re Alawites that we had to keep quiet. No government can stay in office, backed by only 10 % of the population. There were also Sunnis who were big supporters of the regime.”
Many people share the feeling that they are being unfairly targeted because they are Alawites, perceived as responsible for Bashar’s crimes. The fault lies, he believes, with the narrative of the Bashar clan who exploited the minorities to consolidate their legitimacy. “Bashar al-Assad tried to turn the uprising against his regime into a sectarian war and he wasn’t the only one. Among the Sunnis there were people who fuelled that rhetoric as well,” he assures me. It was in 2011, he remembers, that he first heard the slogan “To the graveyard with the Alawites, to Beirut with the Christians”, in a demonstration at Homs. Actually the demonstrator chanting it was taken to task by the rest of the crowd, but the doctor doesn’t remember that.
He recalls another chant he claims to have heard in 2014: “We’ll come and get the Alawites, and put a knife to their throats”. He claims that the slogan was coined by the iconic figure of the Syrian revolution, Abdul Baset Sarout, a footballer and singer from Homs who later joined the armed struggle and was killed in 2019. These chants were later widely exploited by government propaganda, posted repeatedly on Facebook and the regime’s official channels. That narrative, hammered home during the thirteen years of war, made a deep impression on Alawite society.
Smoke screens
The doctor gives his friend Rami the latest news of his hospital. Since 8 December 2024 he has seen the wholesale firing of people accused of “receiving a salary without doing any work”. Half the non-medical personnel are thought to have been dismissed. Whence an even stronger feeling that they are being persecuted. “We regard this as an anti-Alawite campaign”, he explains.
After this coffee break, Rami goes back to his office in a tower-block overlooking the city. Working freelance, in normal times he develops applications and web-sites for various companies, but these days he has been preoccupied with his neighbourhood watch group. Seated in front of a battery of screens, he explains: “We don’t trust HTS and we love our city so much that we manage to protect it by ourselves.” To that end, with the help of cyber bots, Rami has generated a mass of Twitter accounts. He proudly shows me a tweet that has gone viral, viewed a million times. It shows a soldier in Tartus early last December carrying the black flag of the Islamic State organisation (ISIS).
Rami scrolls through the Telegram conversations on a screen. Some people post alerts while others share security tips, videos, photos taken from life. There are rumours, facts and exaggerations. The video clips run non-stop.
In a climate of rumours, fears and uncertainty, every incident fuels a sense of threat. On the evening of 10 February, Rami received an alert on his group feed: “There are two men robbing us, they belong to HTS.” Quickly a crowd rushes to the scene, alerted by the Telegram network. The locals grab the guys and question them: they say they come from Idlib and belong to HTS, assertions which the new authorities, contacted by the group, deny. The two are imposters, they claim. Rami has his doubts, but there is no way of checking.
Assad, that “traitor”
While surfing on X, Rami is interrupted by a familiar silhouette standing in his office doorway. Two months ago, this man was still an officer in Bashar al-Assad’s air force, in which he served for ten years. Today he stands there, looking grim-faced but well turned-out : his beard is trimmed, his hair styled with gel. In his hand he holds a crumpled sheet of paper. ’“It is my amnesty appeal.” His name is scribbled in black, followed by a number. “I never leave the neighbourhood, I don’t go through the checkpoints,” he explains. “It’s too dangerous. My military status is still unresolved, I am neither a civilian nor a soldier.”
He says he gave himself up in order to begin the process of his taswiya, the amnesty announced by HTS for former soldiers of the regime. It’s a procedure borrowed from Assad, who in 2018 dealt the same way with former opposition fighters. But since making the application, no news : his file is on hold. He’s waiting. “There are dozens of us in this situation,” he asserts. For him, 8 December marked a brutal break. A hangover followed by a heavy silence. He seems not to have digested the fall of Bashar yet. “He dropped us just like that. He was up in the sky while we were down on the ground.” The man shakes his head. “He didn’t even bother to make a statement. Nothing.” The man calls him “a traitor” for having selfishly run away, leaving Syria in “chaos”.
And indeed, while the rebels of HTS and their allies were surrounding Damascus, Bashar al-Assad pretended to be supervising military operations, reassuring his general staff and his relatives. He promised his generals and security services that troops from Russia were on their way - which was a lie. On the night of 8 December, he showed up at Hmeimim, the Russian air-base in Latakia, and flew to Moscow where he joined his wife who was already there, abandoning his relatives and his staff.
When he speaks of his ten years in the military and what it has left him, the air force veteran points to a waste basket in the corner of the office: “I’ve lost everything”. And another abandonment - by the Russians. He knew they were “pragmatic” but he didn’t expect such an enormous let-down.
Talking about what he did in the army, he remains evasive. “I fought Daesh (ISIS),” is all he says, and mentions Homs and Aleppo. He insists he never signed up for the front lines but was sent there by force. An engineer by training, he tried to escape the front, which earned him a week’s detention, then a desert assignment where he was in charge of protecting a military dam. Twenty men. A booby-trapped car. Ten dead.
On 7 December he was still on duty. When he saw twelve HTS tanks entering Homs, the last obstacle before Damascus, he surrendered. The city was taken with almost no opposition. But today he claims “in some ways, I regret.”
He wants to go away, to leave Syria. He’s thinking of selling his apartment and going into exile in Russia. He tells us several times what he wants: “To sleep easy at night”. But in order to leave, he needs a visa, a magic pass unattainable without civilian papers. He speaks of men on motorbikes said to have burned posters of loyalist “martyrs”. He finds that “unacceptable.” A rumour is going around: the families of those martyrs will no longer get their pensions. As for former officers being arrested, he shakes his head. “It’s not right. The arrests are being done cowboy-style. Their families don’t even know where they’re being detained, it’s totally arbitrary. There’s no communication.”
The rise of armed militias
Sixty kilometres north of Tartus, on the coast at Jableh, a local militia which calls itself the Syrian Resistance Force has appeared. Its members fly the former Syrian flag and claim responsibility for acts of violence, such as the assassination of two officers belonging to the General Security Directorate. Impossible to determine how many they are or to evaluate how many of their claims are merely meant to impress. “A lot of them used to be real criminals,” Rami assures me. “But they know that sooner or later, HTS will arrest them. So they are trying to start a new round of civil war.”
Another militia, an anti-Alawite one, has recently emerged under the name of Saraya al-Sunna (Sunni Brigades). This ultra-radical group opposes any coexistence with the Alawites and claims responsibility for a half-dozen attacks on them. HTS has promised to arrest them. In particular, they are behind an attack in Arza in cantral Syria on 31 January, in which some ten people were killed. This group, whose actual size is hard to ascertain, has called for an escalation of attacks against Alawites across the country.
The atmosphere is heavy. This morning, 1 February, a message appears on Rami’s phone: “Alawites killed in what is described as a sectarian massacre”. Rami and his friends call this atrocity, like those committed in the villages of Arza and Fahel, “the Homs genocide”.
On the empty coast road
In Tartus, the days go by in dull succession. The winter weather, and the fear, mean there are no festivities, no evenings out. To clear his mind, Rami is walking on the seafront, a few steps away from his home in the alleyways of a modest quarter. In the distance, the sea rumbles under a dramatic sky. “The sea is angry”, he remarks. He can feel the salty sea-spray carried by the wind. Only a few Syrian tourists, oblivious of the turmoil gnawing at the city, pose before the seascape, trying to immortalise a light moment on this beach which they haven’t seen for many a year.
Otherwise, few people are hanging out on the seafront. Most of them are workers who have to be here, but who admit they’ll leave as soon as night falls. A man selling roasted corn-cobs speaks of “the lack of security”, a grandfather is afraid of “kidnappings”. Among them, Ali, 40, a disabled veteran, selling stale chocolates. After six years in the army at Homs, where he manned checkpoints, he was wounded. On this windy day, he is here just to survive.
Nearby, a member of HTS, in civilian clothes, is smoking a cigarette and gazing out to sea. He assures us he feels safe and at peace, enjoying the seaside without the need of his gun or his uniform. He is from Idlib, says he belongs to the Free Syrian Army (FSA). This dissident faction of Bashar al-Assad’s army rallied to Turkey, took part in the offensive that led to the fall of the despot and joined HTS. “There’s no problem in Tartus, everyone is safe here,” he assures us.
Only Syrians
On 17 February, Ahmed al-Sharaa, the country’s new strongman, paid a surprise visit to a number of cities including Tartus, his first public trip out of Damascus since he became Syria’s interim president. On X, he appears being applauded by the crowd until nightfall. On Rami’s Telegram group, comments come in from all sides: “The Alawites follow any old leader. We see the same people in the crowd who supported Assad”; “In the pictures, it looks like a big crowd, but actually it’s just a roundabout with a handful of people”; “We want action, not words...”
“You have a port, you have fields, why is there so much poverty in Tartus?” Al-Sharaa insists on national unity, claims there are neither Sunnis nor Alawites in Syria, only Syrians, all subject to the same laws. Rami appreciates his speech. “He’s a good politician,” he says. He also thinks it’s important that he came to the coast.
Rami and most of his young friends are thinking of leaving. For the moment, visas are not available; some are considering illegal ways, but they are afraid. Rami’s sister Soraya (not her real name), a 26-year-old architect, is among those who hope to leave the city. She designs houses for customers in Amman, but here, she doesn’t go out after dark.. “Under Bashar, I could go anywhere, I wasn’t afraid to step out,” she says, thinking back on those days that were safer for her; she shows me her freshly manicured nails, the product of her day’s only outing. She’s not interested in politics. All she wants is to get her life back as it was before, her peace of mind. “It depresses me staying at home all the time,” she confides.
Soraya is engaged to a Sunni from Aleppo, settled in Norway. “Alawites, Sunnis, it’s not an issue at all,” she assures me. For Valentine’s Day, she had him sent a huge bouquet of roses.
Translated from French by Noël Burch