The Economist provide an account that is rarely read in the Western press: "Perhaps more importantly, Mr Assad still enjoys at least tacit backing from a fair proportion of Syrians. The very brutality of his crackdown has, ironically but perhaps deliberately, bolstered loyalty among minorities that together make up a third of Syria’s 23m people. The Assad clan, which has ruled since 1970, are Alawites, an esoteric branch of Shiism that dominates Syria’s coastal mountains as well as the armed forces. Poor Alawites also make up much of the rank and file of more shadowy government militias, such as the plainclothes thugs known as the shabiha. Vicious government tactics have served to implicate the Alawites as a whole, raising fears of retribution should the regime fall.
Sectarian quicksands
Other minority sects, including half a dozen Christian groups as well as Shias and Druze, are less privileged by or attached to the state. Yet they have benefited from the regime’s secularist doctrine, which has maintained a degree of religious freedom unique in the region. Although Syria’s opposition leadership is cross-sectarian, on the streets it is the country’s Sunni Arab majority that has suffered the brunt of the oppression. It is no accident that the areas which have fallen under rebel control are almost entirely Sunni. In line with much of the region, Syria’s Sunnis have grown religiously conservative in recent decades, and increasingly influenced by the harsh anti-Shia rhetoric propounded by Saudi Arabia. As in Iraq, the Sunnis’ predicament has pushed many into outright radicalism. Comments posted below a YouTube video of an Alawite tank commander captured by the Free Syrian Army, for instance, proposed that he should be sodomised before being ritually slaughtered as an “infidel animal”. Many of the rebel army’s local brigades carry names associated with Sunni triumphalism. Mosque sermons in rebel areas habitually describe government forces as satanic hordes."
