NO EVENT LOOMS LARGER IN MODERN Syrian history than the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925. Syrians recall it as a nationalist revolution against foreign occupation, while to French Général Andréa, in his memoir of its suppression, “C’est du banditisme tout pur.” That insurrection erupted unexpectedly, like the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, during a drought in the Hauran, a plateau rich in wheat and vines beside a rugged basalt mountain south of Damascus. Similarities between the rebellions of 1925 and 2011 are many. Both started with petitions and non-violent demonstrations over discontent with local governors. Both caught the authorities unawares. Both spread to Homs before engulfing the rest of the country. Both received weapons from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Both comprised rival factions of secularists and Islamists, democrats and theocrats, tribesmen and city sophisticates, Syrians and outsiders. Both, despite provoking bombardment from airplanes and heavy artillery, enjoyed initial success. The first was defeated, and the second—despite the gains made by the fundamentalist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—is losing as well.
Every Syrian government since the final departure of the French Army on April 17, 1946, has claimed to incarnate the spirit of the Great Revolt. Yet each Syrian government found itself in the position of the French, governing and modernizing a country that tended to resist both projects. France’s High Commissioners, like their indigenous successors, failed to absorb the greatest lesson of four centuries of Ottoman trial and error in Syria: to govern well, govern little. The Turks, while introducing haphazard and occasional reforms and hanging fomenters of sectarian warfare, barely tampered with the structure of governance they inherited from Rome, Byzantium and the Omayyads. That is to say, they left the tribes and sects to their local chiefs. The French, as well as the assorted civilian and military regimes that followed in their wake, were more ambitious.
Governing Syria has never been easy, as the commanders of punitive expeditions from Titus to the Ottomans’ last general could attest. Two years into the French League of Nations Mandate over Syria and Lebanon, a Scottish traveler, Helen Cameron Gordon, toured the country and later described conditions that would daunt any sovereign, foreign or local. She wrote:
Her inhabitants are made up of at least a dozen different races, mainly Asiatic; and worse still, of about thirty religious sects, all suspicious and jealous of each other.
Amongst Christians alone, there are seventeen high dignitaries with the title of Patriarch, and other leaders politically minded and steeped in intrigue: Moslems, Druses, Ismaelites, Nosairis [Alawites], Yessides and various sub-sects too numerous to mention. Influence, that is pernicious, is brought to bear upon them from outside, which they are themselves unequal to combat, and sometimes prone to pay too much attention. Is it to be wondered that amongst officers of the Army of the Levant, it has become proverbial that peace is only in the shadow of their bayonets and within the radius of their machine-guns?
Sir Mark Sykes, in his Dar Ul-Islam: A Record of a Journey through Ten of the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey (1904), similarly observed:
The population of Syria is so inharmonious a gathering of widely different races in blood, in creed, and in custom, that government is both difficult and dangerous.
Yet the history of Syria’s fragile mosaic is one of surprising coexistence and tolerance. Take Ahmad Badreddine Hassoun, who recounted with fondness a drive he made with his wife from Montreal via Toronto to New York in 1994. Somewhere past Niagara Falls, the couple stopped at a McDonald’s. All the seats were taken. “I was dressed like this,” Hassoun said, pulling at the lapel of his robes, “and my wife was in hijab.” An American man, aged about 65, got up and offered them his table. When Hassoun declined, the man insisted, “I’m an American, and I can go home and eat. You are my guest.”
The gesture impressed Hassoun, who became grand mufti, or chief Sunni Muslim religious scholar, of Syria 11 years later: “A good human being is a good human being. I don’t know if that man was Jewish, Christian or Muslim.” Mufti Hassoun belies the stereotype of the Muslim clergyman. He has preached in the Christian churches of Aleppo, Syria’s second city, and he has invited bishops to speak in his mosque. His official interpreter is an Armenian Christian. “I am the mufti for all of Syria, for Muslims, Christians and non-believers,” he says, an ecumenical sentiment placing him at odds with more fundamentalist colleagues among the religious scholars known as the ulema.
The contrast with many other Sunni Muslim clergymen is stark. Another Syrian mullah, Sheikh Adnan al-Arour, broadcasts regularly from Saudi Arabia with a different message: “The problem is actually with some minorities and sects that support the regime … and I mention in particular the Alawite sect. We will never harm any one of them who stood neutral, but those who stood against us, I swear by Allah, we will grind them and feed them to the dogs.” Another Sunni preacher, the Egyptian Sheikh Mohammad al-Zughbey, went further: “Allah! Kill that dirty small sect [the Alawites]. Allah! Destroy them. Allah! They are the Jews’ agents. Kill them all … It is a holy jihad.”
“I don’t believe in holy or sacred wars or places,” Hassoun said. “The human being is sacred, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish or non-believer. Defend his rights as if you are defending the holy books.” His tolerance and acceptance of the secular state in Syria have earned the mufti condemnation as a mouthpiece for a repressive regime and threats from Salafist Muslims, whose interpretation of Islam excludes tolerance of atheists, Christians and Shiites. Yet the mufti’s views are not atypical in Syria, where Islam and Christianity have coexisted for 15 centuries, and which the Greek poet Meleager of Gadara called, in the first century BC, “one country which is the whole world.”
The world of communities dwelling in Syria includes its Sunni Muslim Arab majority alongside a multitude of minorities: Sunni Kurds; Armenian and Arab Christians of Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant denominations; Assyrians; Circassians; Kurdish Yazidis, with their roots in the teachings of Zoroaster; and the quasi-Shiite Muslim sects of Druze, Ismailis and Alawites. The Syrian population included a few thousand Jews, descendants of ancient communities, until 1992. The country is one of the few places where Aramaic, the regional lingua franca at the time of Christ, is still spoken. In one Aramaic-speaking village, Maalula, it was not unusual for Muslim women to pray with Christians for the births of healthy children at the convent of Saint Takla.
During centuries of productive coexistence, there were only two outbreaks of sectarian conflict that resulted in massacres. Both took place in the mid-19th century, when Christians were accumulating wealth thanks to their association with Christian businessmen from Europe. In the first, a minor incident in Aleppo in 1850 sparked a Muslim massacre of Christians and the burning of several churches. No more than a dozen Christians were killed, but many more lost property to looters and vandals. Ten years later, a similar incident in Damascus led to the massacre of 11,000 Christians. Nineteenth-century Christians were close to the Europeans who came to dominate the country’s economic life, and today’s Christians and Alawites are seen as too close to a regime that many Sunni Muslims detest as much as their ancestors did the Europeans. Those who have done well out of 42 years of Assad family rule now fear the revolution may end with that bloody history repeating itself.
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France’s Armée du Levant engaged in nearly continuous counterinsurgency from the moment it invaded Syria. The Alawite minority under Salih al-Ali fought the French for a year in the northwest, as did a largely Sunni force led by a Kurdish former Ottoman officer, Ibrahim Hananu, around Aleppo. In the Hauran and its mountain, alternately called Jabal Hauran and Jabal Druze, the French skirmished often with King Feisal’s former partisans, who made cross-border raids from his brother Abdallah’s new principality of Transjordan. Many Druze fought them until 1922, when France granted a “Druze Charter of Independence” with local autonomy and an elected Druze Majlis or Council. By the time Général Maurice Sarrail, France’s third High Commissioner in four years, disembarked in Beirut on January 2, 1925, Syria had been subdued.
Nowhere appeared quieter than the formerly turbulent Druze region in the highlands of the Hauran. The Majlis had even chosen a French officer, Captain Gabriel Carbillet, as governor in July 1923, when they could not agree on a Druze candidate. Carbillet was a man of the Left, anti-clerical and a Freemason, who determined to bring égalité to the Druze by enfeebling their aristocracy. Joyce Laverty Miller wrote in the International Journal of Middle East Studies in 1977:
Carbillet proved to be an ambitious and zealous reformer. In the course of a year, he opened twenty-three new schools, equalized the civil laws, opened a court of appeals at al-Suwaida (the capital city of Jabal-Druze), constructed an extensive system of irrigation, built roads, disarmed the population, and used the forced labor of prisoners and peasants.
Among his achievements was to bring running water for the first time to Suwaida. He also built five museums, but his use of conscripted corvée labor caused resentment. So too did his collective punishment of Druze peasants and sheikhs alike, whom he forced to break rocks under the Syrian sun. Like George W. Bush’s neoconservative true believers in occupied Iraq, Carbillet had a vision. He asked, “Should I leave these chiefs to continue their oppression of a people who dream of liberty?”
France introduced something new into Syrian life, something that lingers to this day. In his book Syria and Lebanon Under French Mandate, Stephen Hemsley Longrigg writes, “Rigid control of personal movement was established. The use of schoolmasters as informers was everywhere practiced. Punishments, for offenses sometimes trivial, were arbitrary and even capricious. The sensitiveness of Druze pride was repeatedly offended.”
Like the Trojan War, the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925 resulted from breaches of hospitality. As Paris stole his host’s wife, functionaries from Third Republic Paris made a gross faux pas in the village of Qraya on July 7, 1922. Armed soldiers broke into the house of Sultan Pasha al-Atrash, who was away, to arrest a Shiite named Adham Kanjar on charges of attempting to assassinate the High Commissioner, Général Henri Gouraud. Al-Atrash, a 31-year-old hotspur with penetrating azure eyes and formidable moustaches, a visual embodiment of the noble Druze warrior, had served in the Ottoman Army before defecting in 1918 to Sherif Feisal and the British. When the absent al-Atrash discovered the French had desecrated his house, he demanded Kanjar’s return. The French refused. Al-Atrash, as a notable whose prestige depended on his power to protect others, attacked a train he mistakenly believed to be carrying the prisoner to Damascus. The French retaliated by demolishing his house and ordering his capture. He fled, returning a year later under an amnesty.
The Observer, in an article on August 9, 1925, sub-headed “Quarrel with a Young Governor,” traced the revolt’s spark to a subsequent violation of the Druze code of hospitality. The “young governor,” Captain Carbillet, had overseen the construction of the first hotel in the Druze capital at Suwaida and required travelers to lodge there rather than as guests in private houses. The Observer wrote:
[Nesib] al-Atrash Bey pleaded that the century-old traditions of hospitality could not thus be broken, and finally roundly suggested that the Governor was financially interested in the fortunes of the hotel, and refused to yield, whereupon the notables guilty of having opened their houses to travelers were seized and sent to break stones on the roads.
The al-Atrash family appealed to the senior French official in Syria, newly arrived High Commissioner Sarrail, in February 1925. Sarrail, like Carbillet in a minority among French officers as a staunch republican and progressive, declined to receive the 40-man delegation. When they persisted, he arrested their leaders. Nesib Bey al-Atrash was reported to have told the French, “Very well. Rifles will speak.” The arrested Druze were sent to France’s new prison in the desert at Palmyra, where Sarrail’s secretary, Paul Coblentz, admitted that treatment “was certainly not always comparable with the methods used in similar cases in Europe.”
In March 1925, Captain Carbillet went to France on leave. A more conservative officer, Captain Antoine Raynaud, filled in for him. Raynaud’s light-handed governance made him popular, especially among the landlords. When a French parliamentarian, Auguste Brunet of the Radical Party, came to Beirut on what a later era would call a fact-finding mission, Druze delegates presented him with a petition calling on France to make Raynaud’s appointment permanent. Brunet ignored the petition, and Sarrail once again rebuffed their deputation.
The Druze graduated from polite petitions to public protest. Their newly formed Patriotic Club staged a demonstration on the morning of July 3 in front of the Majlis in Suwaida, where Captain Raynaud was presiding over a council session. About 400 Druze horsemen shouted demands, chanted war songs and carried weapons, while refraining from violence. When French-officered gendarmes dispersed them, though, shots were exchanged between one Druze leader, Hussein Murshid, and French Lieutenant Maurel. Neither man was hit, and the Druze offered an immediate apology. Captain Raynaud, despite the fact that the demonstrators’ goal was to retain him as governor, commanded the Druze to pay a large fine and turn over 20 young men for detention. He also ordered the immediate demolition of the house of Hussein Murshid. The Druze religious sheikhs intervened to prevent bloodshed, agreeing that the community would pay the fine and turn over the young men. But destruction of a Druze house was not acceptable.
French troops appeared at Murshid’s house to tear it down, but Sultan al-Atrash, hundreds of mounted men and neighbors with rifles forced them to withdraw. Raynaud sent a warning to High Commissioner Sarrail that discontent was leading inevitably to revolution. Sarrail dismissed Raynaud and assigned an officer from the Intelligence Corps, Major Tommy Martin, to fill his post pending Carbillet’s return. Sarrail summoned five Druze chiefs, including Sultan al-Atrash, to Damascus. Fearing a trap, Sultan declined. He was not surprised when Sarrail arrested the others at their Damascus hotel and sent them to Palmyra.
Up to that time, the Druze had not demanded an end to the French Mandate, any more than Dera’a’s demonstrators in early March 2011 initially sought to depose Bashar al-Assad. Their request for one French officer to replace another implied recognition of the Mandate. Similarly, the Dera’a protesters’ call in 2011 for the dismissal of a governor who had crossed a line by torturing children acknowledged the president’s authority to replace local officials who violated the law and trampled on their dignity. When the rulers refused to listen, the people’s horizons expanded to a future in which they would choose new rulers.
Captain Carbillet returned from leave on July 19, but Sarrail did not restore him as governor. The governorship had ceased to be the issue, just as Bashar al-Assad’s belated dismissal of Dera’a’s governor, his cousin Faisal Kalthum, came too late to pacify the rebellion against his rule. The Druze and their allies, including many Sunni Muslims and a few Christians, demanded nothing less than France’s expulsion and self-determination in a unified Syria.
On the day of Carbillet’s return, two French reconnaissance planes spotted Sultan al-Atrash’s growing insurgent band in the village of Urman. The Druze fired at the planes, downing one and capturing its two pilots. This became the date on which the Great Syrian Revolt is said to have begun. Michael Provence writes in his excellent history, The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism, “Neither rebel leaders nor the mandate authorities had a clear conception of the direction and seriousness of the uprising at this early point.” Nonetheless, both sides escalated the violence.
The next day, Major Martin sent a force of about 200 French and colonial troops under a Captain Normand to retrieve the two pilots and crush what appeared to be a local disturbance. Normand bivouacked on July 21 beside a village halfway between Salkhad and Suwaida, where Sultan al-Atrash’s envoys asked him to return to Suwaida for negotiations to end the fighting. Normand declined. During the battle that followed, Sultan al-Atrash’s Druze and bedouin warriors destroyed Normand’s force in about 30 minutes. A few stragglers made their way back to the garrison at Suwaida, which al-Atrash attacked the next day, laying siege to the French in the old citadel.
The destruction of the Normand column galvanized latent opposition to the French in Syria. Young men from Damascus joined the colors, as did Arab patriots from the recently created neighboring countries. Abdel-Aziz ibn Saud, who with his Wahhabi followers ruled the Nejd desert and had recently conquered Mecca and Medina from Britain’s Hashemite allies, sent arms and men. Mustapha Kemal Pasha, the Turkish leader who had his own dispute with France over Turkey’s border with Syria, supported the rebels in the north. The French in turn armed Armenian refugees, barely recovered from massacres by Muslim Turks, as well as minority Circassians and Arab Christians. The rebels cut French communications, severing rail and telegraph lines at different times to Lebanon, Iraq and Transjordan.
To quell the uprising, Sarrail dispatched Général Roger Michaud, the Armée du Levant’s commander, from Beirut to Damascus. Michaud led a large force south toward the Druze capital to relieve his besieged countrymen. On August 2, when his force rested about 12 kilometers short of Suwaida, Sultan al-Atrash attacked with 500 Druze and bedouin horsemen. The French drove them back, but, running short of water, began a withdrawal north the next day. Al-Atrash attacked again with greater force, annihilating the French column. Michaud’s second-in-command, Major Jean Aujac, committed suicide in the field. Al-Atrash’s men collected more than 2,000 rifles, as well as machine guns and artillery pieces, from the dead Frenchmen. Reuters reported, “The French have evacuated Southern Hauran.”
French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand nonetheless declared that the situation in Syria was not dangerous. France faced a greater threat in its Morocco Protectorate, where insurgents from the Rif Mountain were humiliating the armies of both France and Spain. Moroccan success inspired the Syrians, much as the downfall of the dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya would 90 years later. But the rebellions in Morocco and Syria had far to go.
Unrest spread immediately to Homs, where so-called “bandits” attacked outlying French positions and closed roads. The nationalist elite in Damascus, who had remained quiet, were forced to support the rebellion or stand accused of treason. On August 23, al-Atrash requested negotiations with Sarrail through his old friend Captain Raynaud. Just as Sarrail had invited Druze leaders to Damascus as a ruse to arrest them, al-Atrash’s offer was a cover for an assault on Damascus. On August 24, more than a thousand men from Jabal Druze, the Hauran and the desert mustered on the city outskirts. Arguments among their leaders over strategy delayed their advance, giving French planes time to locate and strafe them. North African cavalry then drove them south.
Muslim soldiers from Algeria and Senegal began deserting the French army to join the rebels. So did local levies in France’s Syrian Legion, including the Legion’s commander in Hama, Fawzi al-Qawuqji, with all his men. The mutineers held Hama for two days, until ferocious French bombardment of the ancient souqs and residential quarters forced the town’s notables to beg Qawuqji to spare the city by withdrawing.
As over the past four years, some rebel leaders claimed to speak for all Syrians—Arab Sunni Muslims, the various Shia sects and Christians. But not all the participants shared that universal vision. In 1925, some raised the flag of jihad and attacked the Christian town of Maalula. One of the revolt’s more able leaders, Said al ’As, wrote:
This work was not legitimate and the revolt was exposed to doubt by their attack and their hostility against Maalula which alienated the hearts of the Christian sons of the one nation, our brothers in nationalism and the homeland.
As the nationalists regretted the assault on Maalula in 1925, their descendants condemned the jihadist assault on the same Christian town in 2013. Yet the effect of both was the same: to drive Christians out of a country where they have lived since the time of Christ or to force them into the arms of the regime, French then and Baathist now.
By early October, the rebels had the initiative, forcing the French to confront them at times and places of their choosing. Their next target was Damascus, which they entered on October 18. Typical of the disorganization within rebel ranks, the local commander, Hassan al-Kharrat, invaded the city before Fawzi al-Qawuqji’s mutineers and Sultan al-Atrash’s Druze-bedouin cavalry arrived. Entering the Shaghur quarter, Kharrat shouted, “Rise up, your brothers the Druze are here!” Most Damascenes, like their descendants in this century, did not rise up.
As his forces lost control of Damascus, High Commissioner Sarrail declared martial law and commanded the summary execution of Syrians found with weapons. French tanks raced through the souqs, wrote the Times, “at terrifying speed, firing to the right and left without ceasing.” At noon on the eighteenth, as Sarrail departed for Beirut, he ordered warplanes and heavy caliber cannon to bombard the city day and night.
The Manchester Guardian correspondent interviewed a traveler from Damascus who “describes days and nights of unforgettable terror.” The shelling destroyed the famous Souq Hamadiyeh bazaar, the biblical “Street Called Straight,” the magnificent Azem Palace and the districts of Shaghur and Meidan. French troops executed insurgents and those who protected them. The Times reported that French troops, having murdered two dozen young men in villages southeast of Damascus, brought their corpses to Marjeh Square near the city center. The paper’s correspondent wrote:
Instead of merely exposing the bodies for a space on the spot as an example to other malefactors, in accordance with Eastern custom, and then handing them over to their relatives for decent burial, the French authorities brought them to Damascus. There they attached them to camels and paraded them through the streets. The ghastly spectacle presented by the swaying corpses naturally infuriated the excitable Damascenes, as indeed the news of the official adoption of such deterrents will inevitably arouse the natural indignation of many Frenchmen.
The Times reported that the rebels then killed 12 Circassians serving with the French and left their bodies outside the city’s Eastern Gate. “This was the reply, typical of the spirit of those whom it was intended to humiliate,” The Times correspondent in Damascus wrote. Forty-eight hours of steady bombardment, as in Hama, saw the city’s leaders begging the rebels to leave. The Manchester Guardian wrote, “The rebels remained in Damascus until October 20, and only retired because their presence was given as the cause of the bombardment.”
By the time Sultan al-Atrash’s forces arrived, Damascus was lost. He and his allies, however, took control of nearby villages and orchards in the fertile Ghoutha, isolating the capital from the rest of Syria. Animosity between Damascene civilians and rebels grew. The Times reported that one Druze leader threatened “the residents of the Meidan quarter that as they had betrayed the Druses on Sunday by refusing to fight they would be the first to suffer from the next attack, which would be made very soon.” The French also antagonized the population, devastating villages, machine gunning unarmed civilians and looting houses.
As France gained ground, a Maronite Christian supporter of the rebellion accused them of a crime against humanity. He wrote, “The French army has employed poison gas against the Druze, which affirms French will to exterminate an entire people.” No inspectors, as at the end of summer 2013 in Damascus, came to investigate the charge. But pressure on France grew to end the war or to abandon its Mandate.
As with the rebellion against Assad, rival leaderships emerged inside and outside Syria. Fighters, then as now, ignored the external leaders, but they attempted operational coordination under Ramadan Pasha Shallash. Shallash, a bedouin prince, had served as an officer in both the Ottoman and Feisal’s armies. Genuine rebel unity, however, proved as elusive as it remains today. Stephen Henry Longrigg described the rebel leadership in terms that could apply to the present uprising:
No statesman with a truly national appeal, no considerable military leader appeared, no central organization controlled events, little correlation of effort or timing was visible. The Government of Syria [Syrians appointed by the French]—ministers, officials, departments—gave no countenance to the rebellion, those of Great Lebanon and the ’Alawis still less; and the greatest part of the public abstained, if it could, from overt help to a movement which damaged and alarmed it.
French military setbacks were causing severe repercussions at home. Pierre La Mazière, a senator of the Democratic Left, wrote in Partant pour la Syrie that “we have lost so much money, so many lives, so much prestige that—Ah, if only we could get out of Syria without any of the rest of the world noticing it!” Much of the world demanded that the League of Nations end the French Mandate. To hang on, the French government changed leadership in Syria. Général Maurice Gamelin replaced Général Michaud. A disgraced Sarrail was recalled to Paris, and Senator Henry de Jouvenel became the Mandate’s first civilian High Commissioner. He immediately put out feelers to Sultan al-Atrash, paid subsidies to village elders to support the French, offered amnesties to rebels who gave up their arms and traveled to Ankara to bargain with Mustapha Kemal Pasha, the future Atatürk. In exchange for a small parcel of Syrian territory, Turkey cut the arms flow to the rebels.
Disputes among rival rebel leaders crippled their movement, and foreign backers pulled them in different directions. Rebel chiefs deposed and arrested their military commander, Ramadan Shallash. He escaped, surrendered to the French and helped to suppress the rebellion he had led. France escalated its military campaign with aerial bombardment in and around Aleppo and a ground campaign under newly promoted Général Andréa that routed Druze and Sunni forces in the Hauran by the late spring of 1926. Andréa later wrote, “The French flag flew over Suwaida, but there wasn’t a single inhabitant left in the town.” As with the Americans in Vietnam, destroying villages counted as saving them.
In 1927, Sultan Pasha al-Atrash took refuge in Transjordan and then with Ibn Saud in what would eventually be the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Druze warrior was permitted home 10 years later, and he lived peacefully until 1947, when he launched another doomed revolt against Syria’s newly independent government. In the current rebellion, the Druze have remained neutral.
The parallels between then and now are as instructive as the differences, which are many. In the 1920s, fighting did not spread across the region like the current war. While there were Wahhabis from Arabia, there was no equivalent to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The French, like the Assads today, held on. The French finally left, as I suspect the Assads will, but that took France another 20 years.
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It took less than a year for the armed militias that coalesced into the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Islamic Front to displace the pro-democracy demonstrators of 2011. The FSA predicated the success of its rebellion on a repetition of the western air campaign that deposed Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. “When that failed to materialize,” Patrick Cockburn wrote in his enlightening The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising, “they had no plan B.” Without the air support they demanded, the FSA–Islamic Front offensive ground to a stalemate. ISIS came along to supersede the FSA, as the FSA had replaced the protesters. ISIS was more combative, more ruthless, better financed and more effective, using mobility across the desert in Syria and Iraq to launch surprise attacks. It used suicide teams in bomb-laden trucks to open the way into regime strongholds that its rebel adversaries had merely besieged. Moreover, it has achieved the one objective that eluded the FSA: it brought American airpower into the war, but not in the way the FSA wanted. Instead, the Syria war has produced an opposition to Assad so repellent and so antagonistic to western allies in the region that when the air intervention came, it arrived in the guise of the regime’s ally in all but name.
The unwillingness of both the regime and the armed opposition to compromise has plunged the country ever deeper into war. The increasingly militarized and sectarian character of the opposition, meanwhile, has pushed both sides toward the killing of unarmed civilians—effectively, the Lebanization of the conflict. When I visited Syria in September 2014, a young woman in Damascus produced a smartphone from her handbag and asked, “May I show you something?” The phone’s screen displayed a sequence of images. The first was a family photograph of a sparsely bearded young man in his 20s. Beside him were two boys, who appeared to be five and six, in T-shirts. The young man and his sons were smiling. Pointing at the father, the woman said, “This is my cousin.” The next picture, unlike the first, came from the Internet. It was the same young man, but his head was severed. Beside him lay five other men in their 20s whose bloody heads were similarly stacked on their chests. I looked away.
Her finger skimmed the screen, revealing another photo of her cousin that she insisted I see. His once happy face had been impaled on a metal spike. The spike was one of many in a fence enclosing a public park in Raqqa, a remote provincial capital on the Euphrates River in central Syria. Along the fence were other decapitated heads that children had to pass on their way to the playground. The woman’s cousin and his five comrades were soldiers in the Syrian army’s 17th Reserve Division. ISIS had captured them when it overran the Tabqa military airfield, about 25 miles from ISIS headquarters in Raqqa, on August 24. The family’s sole hope was that the young man was already dead when they cut off his head. There was no question of returning the body or holding a funeral. The woman explained that her cousin had recently turned down a chance to leave his unit for a safer post near his home. It would not be right, he reasoned, for him, as a member of Syrian President Assad’s minority Alawite sect, to desert his fellow soldiers who were Sunni. He stayed with them, and he died with them.
The first victims of a war in Syria were always going to be the religious minorities. The Alawites and the Christians, who each make up about 10 percent of the population, have found security under the Assad regime. The Alawites—whose doctrines are related to those of Shia Islam, and whose rule is opposed on principle by many Sunnis—are concentrated in the west near the Mediterranean. The Syrian government does not publish casualty figures by sect, but martyrs’ notices pasted on the walls in Jabal Alawia, the Alawite heartland in the hills east of the port of Latakia, indicate that the Alawites have suffered a disproportionate share of deaths in the war to preserve the Alawite president. A myth promulgated by the Sunni Islamist opposition is that the Alawites have been the main beneficiaries of 44 years of Assad family rule over Syria, but evidence of Alawite wealth outside the presidential clan and entourage is hard to find. The meager peasant landholdings that marked the pre-Assad era are still the rule in Jabal Alawia, where most families live on the fruits of a few acres. Some Alawite merchants have done better in the seaside cities of Latakia and Tartous, but so have Sunni, Druze and Christian businessmen. This may explain in part why, from my own observations, a considerable proportion of Syrian Sunnis, who comprise about 75 percent of the population, have not taken up arms against the regime. If they had, the regime would not have survived.
The Alawite monopoly of the armed forces is, like much of Syria, a legacy of foreign intervention. As Dr. Hafiz Jemalli, the Baath Party founding member, told me in 1987, “When we resisted the French, we had to act as a unified people. Now we are divided. We are Muslim. We are Alawi. We are Druze. We are Christian. How did it happen? Syria in the 1940s was liberated from sectarianism, but now we are divided into sects. The army is now composed of Alawi officers. A majority of our army is a minority of our people. It comes only by chance?”
The rising number of Alawite young men killed or severely wounded while serving in the army and in regime-backed militias has led to resentment among people who have no choice other than to fight for President Assad and to keep their state’s institutions intact. Their survival, as long as Sunni jihadists kill them wherever they find them, requires them to support a regime that many of them oppose and blame for forcing them into this predicament. After my friend’s cousin and his comrades were decapitated at Tabqa and their corpses left on the streets of Raqqa, ISIS publicly executed another 200 captured soldiers. It was then that someone, said to be an Alawite dissident, declared on Facebook, “Assad is in his palace and our sons are in their graves.”
Alawite frustration is matched by that of the now-marginalized nonviolent opponents of Assad’s rule. But like the Alawites who grumble off the record, they are powerless. As difficult as the Alawites’ position now is, their geographic concentration at least means they have a territorial base from which to negotiate their survival no matter who takes power. (In Beirut, just before I crossed the border to Syria, Walid Jumblatt, Lebanon’s Druze leader, told me he had advised his fellow Druze in Syria to join the rebellion. “They swim in a Sunni sea, not an Alawite sea,” he said. He referred to the Algerians, the Harkis, who sided with the French during the war of independence: some were killed, and the remainder found refuge in France.) The Christians, by contrast, are thinly dispersed among Aleppo, Damascus, Wadi Nasara, Qamishli and other parts of the country. Shia-Sunni fighting in Iraq after 2003 had precipitated the flight of nearly two million Iraqi Christians to Syria; there was always a risk of a similar exodus from Syria should the anti-regime rebellion descend into a tribal and sectarian war. Where are they and Syria’s indigenous Christians supposed to find refuge? Do the West’s holy warriors want them to leave and for Syria to be as purely Sunni as their favorite Mideast statelet, Saudi Arabia?
Many Christians view the opposition’s driving force as Sunni fundamentalism battling a powerful Alawite minority. The fundamentalists would deprive them, as well as secular Sunnis, of social freedoms. Gregory III Laham, the Melkite Catholic Patriarch of Antioch, warned early in the rebellion against the “criminals and even fundamentalist Muslims who cry for jihad. This is why we fear that giving way to violence will only lead to chaos.” An Armenian high school teacher, whom I have known for many years, became uncharacteristically loquacious when explaining her support for the Assad regime. She told me in Aleppo in 2012, barely a year into the rebellion:
I’m free. I am safe. … “You’re a kafir [unbeliever]”: I have not heard that phrase for 30 years. At the school, some of my friends are Muslim Brothers. They respect me, and I respect them. Who is responsible for that? … Look at this terror. Is this what Obama wants? Is this what Sarkozy wants? Let them leave us alone. If we don’t like our president, we won’t elect him. From a woman who is 60 years old, and I’ve been free for 30 years. I should be afraid to go out? I should cover myself? Women should live like donkeys? … We are citizens. We are equal.
She, along with many other residents of Aleppo, has installed a steel-reinforced front door to her house. Tales of the rape, kidnapping and murder of Christians in Homs, the city halfway between Aleppo and Damascus that became the bastion of the revolution, created unease among their coreligionists throughout Syria. At the same time, cameras have recorded civilian deaths there from attacks by government forces. In Aleppo, bombs that damaged buildings occupied by the security forces took with them nearby Christian apartments, schools and churches. The chaos has already led to large-scale emigration of the Christian communities who have lived in Syria for two millennia. “Many Christians have left,” Dr. Samir Katerji, a 58-year-old architect and member of the Syrian Orthodox Church, told me in mid-2012. “Many Armenians have bought houses in Armenia. Even the Muslims are leaving.” Katerji, who designed the amphitheater for outdoor films in the Aleppo Citadel, had “visited my aunt’s house,” a local euphemism for going to prison, several times. The security services arrested him for his outspoken criticism of the Assad regime and the Baath Party. A year after we spoke, Katerji migrated to the United States. Indeed, many opposition members of minority communities insist that their security is part of the historical nature of Syria rather than the gift of the regime that came to power with Hafez al-Assad’s bloodless coup. A Christian woman, who spent several months in prison for unspecified political crimes a few years ago, told me, “It’s wrong to say the government was helping the minorities. They are using the minorities.”
Fear forces people into the ostensible safety of sectarian or ethnic enclaves, repeating a pattern established during the civil war in Lebanon and the American occupation of Iraq. Mixed neighborhoods, so prominent a feature of Syrian life now and in the past, are making way for segregated ghettos where people feel safe among their own. Nabil al-Samman, an engineering professor in Damascus, wrote ominously in Syria Today, “The current crisis proves that you cannot depend on the government, but only on your immediate family, your tribe, and others’ charity.” Some Christians who fled from Homs following vicious fighting there between the army and the dissident Free Syrian Army blamed Muslim fundamentalists for seizing their houses to use as firing positions, while others left because of the violence or the threat of kidnapping, rape and murder. Alawites loyal to the regime in and around Homs stand accused of killing Sunni men and raping Sunni women, while the rebels are blamed for committing the same crimes against Alawites. The effect has been the same: to drive each out of the other’s areas and into tribal laagers that further divide the country into armed and hostile camps.
Mufti Hassoun’s criticism of the opposition has been stronger than his criticism of the state. He has received death threats. “When I refused to leave Syria,” he says, “they threatened me on my cell phone,” referring to callers whose numbers were in Saudi Arabia. “They left messages.” When he did not answer, his enemies took their revenge. On October 2, 2011, his 22-year-old son, Sariya, was driving with one of his university professors from the countryside to Aleppo when armed men fired on their car and killed them both. The mufti recalled the murder in our conversation, wiping tears from his cheeks: “He was 22 years old, a student at the university. What did he do to be killed? At his funeral, I said I forgive you all. I expected them to show remorse. They said we don’t need your forgiveness. We are going to kill you. They say this on television in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Britain. They say the mufti of Syria speaks of Christianity in a positive way. He believes in dialogue, even with Israelis and non-believers. He goes to churches. They say I do not represent Islam. When you say a mufti does not represent Islam, it’s a fatwa to kill him. This is the Arab revolution.”
While lamenting Syria’s lack of basic political freedoms, including free speech and assembly, Samir Katerji acknowledged that “we have social freedom. We are free to declare our thoughts and beliefs and to practice our Christianity.” He condemned murderers within the regime, but had no faith in its armed opponents: “Inside the opposition are also murderers who will not allow stability.”
One Christian said to me in a whisper, “I shit on this revolution, because it is forcing me into the arms of the regime.”