Following the massacre of more than 1,000 civilians in Syria by forces allied with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)-led government, Middle East expert Fabrice Balanche questions whether new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has really put his radical Islamist past behind him. The victims came primarily from the Alawite Muslim minority but also included Christians.
Syrian expert Fabrice Balanche says al-Sharaa is trying to unify Islamist forces in Syria. photo provided
Forces allied to the government began large-scale massacres of Alawite civilians in the coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus on Friday March 7. By the evening of March 9, the civilian death toll was over 1,000. In response, on March 10, Christian Solidarity International issued a formal Genocide Warning for Syria.
The violence has shaken Syria’s religious minorities, which include Alawites and Christians, and cast doubt on the possibility of religious freedom in post-Assad Syria. While primarily targeting Alawites, the violence has also claimed Christian lives, particularly in mixed neighborhoods.
Fabrice Balanche, professor and research director at the University of Lyon 2 in France, explains that the interim Syrian government has made a scapegoat of the Alawites in particular as it attempts to hold together the different Islamist factions in the country.
Al Sharaa – a former al-Qaeda leader – rose to power last December at the head of a coalition of Sunni Muslim rebel groups that overthrew the dictatorial regime of President Bashar al-Assad, himself an Alawite. The Alawites, a brutal but secular dictatorship, had ruled Syria for 50 years.
“For the new regime, an internal enemy is needed to unify the Syrian population,” Balanche said in an interview in French with Les Clés du Moyen-Orient published on March 13. “The Alawite community is the perfect scapegoat. They will be blamed for all Syria’s problems.”
Balanche argues that while the government claimed to be quelling an uprising by the Alawites, “a multitude of provocations targeting the Alawite community” had preceded the massacre.
The analyst explains that the new Syrian army comprises various Islamist forces, some of which are “thirsty for revenge,” against the Alawites because of their links to the previous regime. “There is also a religious hatred towards a community that is considered heretical and must be eradicated,” he added.
Christians, although also caught up in the violence, were “not necessarily targeted” by it, in Balanche’s view.
“In Baniyas, a coastal town of 60,000 inhabitants, half Alawite, half Sunni, with a Christian minority living on the Alawite side, no officials of the regime were in hiding,” he told Les Clés du Moyen-Orient. “However, al-Sharaa forces surrounded the al-Qusour district and carried out massacres, including against the Christian families living there.” Those killed included the father of the Greek Orthodox priest in Baniyas.
Balanche expresses deep skepticism about al-Sharaa’s supposed transformation from extremist to mainstream political leader: “One can wonder how someone who spent 20 years in a terrorist group, who has certainly broken with al-Qaeda tactically but not really ideologically, can deradicalize overnight and become a democrat?”
This assessment challenges the narrative that al-Sharaa has genuinely moderated his views and suggests instead that his break with al-Qaeda was probably a merely strategic rather than reflecting a true ideological shift.
Balanche says the massacres may not have been carried out by the Syrian security forces, but they are nevertheless harmful to the image of the Syrian government abroad. The perpetrators – Syrian Islamists – are part of the coalition that brought al-Sharaa to power, and on which he relies.
“The European Union has just lifted sanctions against Syria, and France is preparing to reopen its embassy. In mid-February, Member of the European Parliament Nathalie Loiseau said that the sanctions had to be lifted, but that if the new government did not take the right path, the sanctions could be reinstated,” Balanche cautioned.
“The massacres of recent days have broken the momentum of rapprochement between Europe and Syria,” he concluded.
“For the United States, however, this does not change much. The Americans had no intention of lifting the sanctions, and they still seem to regard al-Sharaa as a terrorist.”
