In Syria, the Alawites Are Being Made to Pay for the Crimes of Others

In Syria, there is an enrich, at the Alawites’ expense, the very people who have made them abandon their property: “Held at gunpoint, with minutes to leave: How Syria evicts Alawites from their homes,” by Amina Ismail, Jerusalem Post, May 3, 2025:

In the Alawite neighborhood of Dahyet al-Assad, civil servant and mother of four Um Hussein said two armed masked men came to her privately owned home on January 16 and identified themselves as GSS members.

The newly created GSS deployed by Sharaa seems to be an extension of the security force that ruled Idlib province, said Syria expert Joshua Landis, head of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. The GSS now seems to be the police, FBI, CIA, and National Guard, all rolled into one, he said….

The GSS now fulfills every security and intelligence function for the new regime . It’s become, according to Joshua Landis, a scholar of Syrian affairs, the country’s police, FBI, CIA and National Guard. And it is run by former rebels who fought Assad as part of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group that was then led by Ahmed al-Sharaa. As President, he has final authority over the GSS.

Reuters spoke with two members of the security forces at the private homes they had occupied. One had seized two houses, including Um Hussein’s, after evicting the owners. The other, Hamid Mohamed, meanwhile, said his unit had taken over four empty homes belonging to Shabiha, a notorious pro-Assad militia.

Perhaps those four houses were indeed the property of the Shabiha, the feared enforcers for the previous regime, or perhaps they were the property of perfectly innocent Alawites who had fled their houses because they saw what had happened to Alawites in Latakia and decided they did not want to stick around in Damascus and suffer the same fate. Perhaps they belonged to Druze who when the Sunnis took over Syria, knowing that the Sunnis regarded them as Infidels, thought it prudent to move to one of the Druze villages in the southern suburbs of Damascus. We have no way of knowing who the owners of the four houses were.

He said the security forces had not seized anything that wasn’t theirs and recalled angrily that his home in a Damascus suburb was destroyed during the civil war. Mohamed said he moved to the capital after Assad’s fall and had nowhere else to stay.

But those security forces have apparently seized hundreds of houses, evicting thousands of people.. How can Hamid Mohamed, with a straight face, claim that those forces “had not seized anything that wasn’t theirs”? And notice how furious he is about how his own home in a Damascus suburb had been destroyed during the civil war; he had left the city after that, but returned after Assad had fled to Russia. He still needs a place to stay — and the empty houses that belonged, he assumes, to Alawites now come in handy. Why should Sunnis respect the property of Alawites, considering what the Alawite regime did to them?

These Alawites were humble people, not those who had prospered under Assad, and yet they are paying for the crimes of others — with all that they possessed — for only one reason: they are Alawites.

With all the killing of more than a thousand Alawites in March, and the evictions of many thousands of Alawites in Damascus in an operation that is still going on, no Alawites will ever trust this new regime. And the other minorities, too, have taken note of how the Alawites have been mistreated. The Kurds will not surrender their weapons, nor agree to have their militia folded within the Syrian National Army, as they have been asked to do. They look with horror at how Erdogan, who backed the HTS rebel group, has managed to set up bases inside Turkey from which he hopes to keep the Syrian Kurds under control. The Druze will also hold onto their militias. Having had several of their villages attacked by Sunnis, they were relieved when the IDF, as a way to protect them, bombed several groups of Sunnis that threatened the Druze villages. The Israelis also used airstrikes around the grounds of the Presidential Palace, to make sure al-Sharaa got the message: protect the Druze from attack. Last December six Druze villages asked to be annexed by Israel. If they ask again, this time the Israelis just might agree.