Anatomy of a Massacre
Syria’s new regime dreams of slaughtering one of the country’s minorities. I should know.
Many of the videos that have been emerging from the Syrian coastal mountains over the past days and weeks are unwatchable. Those that can be looked at for a moment or two show bodies littering the roadside, a parade of men being clubbed as they are made to crawl along a village street, and families slaughtered as they watch TV.
One video depicts a zealot inside a truck at the scene of a massacre as he broadcasts instructions to his colleagues: “To the Mujahideen, and those who stand guard: you must not leave so much as a single Alawite alive, male or female. The most respected among them will be slaughtered. The most respected Alawite woman will be slaughtered. Slaughter them all, including the children in the bed. These are pigs. Take them and throw them into the sea.”
A feeling of delectation pervades some of these crimes, as if the perpetrators want it to be known that they are smacking their lips. The person in this video has just received news of 9,000 people killed in the regions traditionally inhabited by Alawites. “This is a real number for sure,” he says, clapping his hands in delight. “Nine thousand of those fine tasting [people] from the coast are … finished, done. Happiness. Now even the fish in the sea, and the sharks are thanking us.”
Another video-maker has prepared a platterful of Masareen, the Syrian dish in which sheep’s intestines, and sometimes the heads of sheep, are stuffed with rice and herbs, then boiled. In this video, a man speaking with an accent from the eastern Deir ez-Zor province addresses a boiled head he has pulled from his platter as if it is a person: “Didn’t I tell you to give up your weapons? Look what you’ve gone and done to yourself!” Now he turns to his friends: “Well, he’s given up his weapons now. Today, our dinner is heads. Good, because everyone here loves meat.” His fellow diners double over in laughter.
This video may well be a put on but it was sent to me by an Alawite friend in the city of Safita, in the coastal mountains, who has not left his house in several weeks. “Is it real?” he wanted to know. I don’t know. But I do know that the point of such videos is to deepen the terror that has lately set in on the Syrian coast.
What has been happening in this region, where most but not all of the nation’s 3 million Alawites live?
The relevant facts are in dispute, predictably enough. How many have died to date? What exactly provoked this most recent round of killings? To what degree is the new Syrian government responsible? I’m sure nobody knows the answers to these questions at the moment. It does, however, seem clear that on the night of March 6th, somewhere in the heart of the so-called Alawite Mountains, gunmen ambushed a column of trucks whose occupants were loyal to the new government. This report shows the remains of that line. Allegedly, 16 people were killed. In revenge, as videos like this one show, thousands of trucks bearing armed men descended on the Alawite Mountains. Over the following days, villages were burned to the ground, apartment blocks in Alawite neighborhoods in the coastal cities of Jebleh and Tartous were sprayed with gunfire, and cars and shops were torched. Untold numbers of civilians have fled across the waist-deep river that separates Syria from Lebanon and at least 1,300 Alawite civilians in Syria have been killed.
In Syria, the Sunni majority outnumbers the Alawite minority by about 6 to 1. In the distant past, whenever sectarian violence of this sort flared up, the Alawites retreated to their native hills—and into the thickness of the undergrowth which covers them. But modern military equipment, even the diminished kind possessed by the current Syrian government, has rendered that geographic defense meaningless. In the more recent past, everyone in Syria understood that the nation’s chief Alawite, Bashar al-Assad, would protect his own. That government fell on December 8 of last year.
Recent events have awoken a medieval appetite for slaughter among some portion of the general public. The slaughter has descended on the Alawite sect itself, rather than on any individual or class within it. Officials have been killed, but so have children, and whoever is in possession of cash or a working car, as the testimony of this massacre survivor makes clear. It is also clear that the government of Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is being helped by bands of Chechens, Tajiks, North African and European Muslims who have been filtering into Syria since the unrest there took a dark turn in the summer of 2012. These pilgrims to the jihad, to use the term for foreign fighters in Syria which they use themselves, often burn their passports on arrival. Nobody knows their real names, how many of them there are, who they take their orders from, or what weapons are in their possession now.
The most recent spate of killings appears to have died down for the time being. But as there is nothing to prevent the columns of pickup trucks from returning, Syria’s 3 million Alawites currently face some version of the dilemma European Jews faced in the wake of the collapse of the Polish and Czech governments at the outset of WWII. Should they flee? But with what money? In the time of the Assads, many of these citizens relied on government jobs for their income. Now, the breadwinners have been put out of work. In any case, they can no longer leave their houses in safety. Meanwhile, the government has set up checkpoints on the highways within and surrounding the coastal mountains. Thus, it is altogether possible that for this community, the dangers of movement will turn out to be greater than those of staying put.
One of the reasons the Alawites of Syria are in such danger at the moment is that the phenomenon that is currently spreading through the coastal mountains is a quixotic thing that can strut and sing on the avenues one moment, then vanish into the night the next. Neighbors are turning against neighbors. Which one has it in for you? When ancient religious suspicions are on the march, it’s not so easy to tell.
Though I am neither Syrian nor Alawite, I have lived within this phenomenon as many of the locals have not, and know its leaders personally. I fell into this experience by accident, during the course of an ill-fated reporting trip in Aleppo in the fall of 2012. I wandered into a trap set for me by a band of amateur terrorists. I escaped from these young men but when I went to the local police, they meditated on the situation for a little while, offered me tea, then turned me over to the Syrian al-Qaeda franchise, Jabhat al-Nusra. This is the organization which, under the name Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is now in control of the country.
One afternoon after I had been in prison for about six months, the current minister of justice, a certain Shadi al-Waisi, came to a cell I was sharing with 29 other inmates in order to deliver a speech roughly in the vein of the man who exhorts his brethren to kill even the Alawite children in their beds in the video mentioned above. There were 18 Alawite prisoners in this room, among them a member of parliament, a general, and a half dozen senior officers in the Syrian Arab Army.
Mr. al-Waisi’s speech was long on verbiage. On and on he went. He was of the opinion that the Alawites of Syria, who did indeed fill out the ranks of Bashar al-Assad’s secret police, and whose religion is thought to be a variant of Shia Islam but whose actual doctrines are not known because the Alawite religion is a secret thing, might possibly be secret Jews. Or maybe they were magicians. One thing they were not was Muslims. They were rather the enemies of Islam, according to the justice minister-to-be, but because it was in the nature of this sect to deceive, its members had persuaded the world that they practiced roughly the same faith as 75 percent of Syrians—namely mainstream Sunni Islam.
Mr. al-Waisi is a milder, more self-consciously religious figure than the zealot in the slaughter-them-all video. It turned out that the meaning of his speech was that God had condemned all 30 of us to hell at the beginning of time. Also, the Alawites of Syria were a plague and a national affliction. But he spent so much time summoning lengthy verses from the Koran—murmuring them at us, then woolgathering, as the officials in Damascus woolgather now, about the beautiful way in which the Jabhat al-Nusra magistrates of the future would administer justice—that at least for a little while that afternoon, I, for one, was willing to believe that somehow, some day, we might be given a chance to plead our cases. Mr. al-Waisi later turned up on video at a traffic roundabout in the village of Maarrat Misreen, as he and his fellow Jebhat al-Nusra magistrates pronounced their sentence on a woman they had in handcuffs. Her crime was prostitution. The relevant Koranic verse, which prescribes killing for those who bring corruption into the land, was adduced. The magistrates made her kneel, then shot her in the head.
When he was giving his speech to us, however, imminent death was not in the air. Mr. al-Waisi’s mood was professorial. We hung on his every word. Most of the other commanders screamed at us. This man was our only hope.
I spent my first six months in prison in the basement of the Aleppo eye hospital. Down there, the violence that is today spreading through the coastal mountains was more like a feeling in the air than an actual killing campaign. “O you Alawite policemen, o be patient, Alawites all, for we are coming to slaughter you.” So began one of the war anthems I memorized within my first week as a prisoner. At the time, the warren of rooms beneath the eye hospital functioned as a dormitory for foreign fighters, a staging ground for attacks against the regime, and a kind of central repository in which the commanders who would go on to lead ISIS (among them, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, the architect of the November 2015 attacks in Paris) and those who would go on to lead the nation (among them, Ahmed al-Sharaa, the current president) housed their prisoners.
Probably, the real reason the terrorists kept me and about 80 other prisoners locked away down there was that they needed us to play our part in the story ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra liked to tell about themselves. According to their myth, the origin of all the problems in Syria came wandering into the nation in the ninth century, in the person of a certain Ibn Nusayr, a false prophet. Perhaps he had wandered in from Iran. Perhaps he was a Jew in disguise. Who could say? What mattered was he dealt in illusions. Soon, high in the mountains along the Syrian coast, he built up a cult around himself. The purpose of the cult was to advance a three-part program, to unfold through the centuries. Step One: divorce the people of Syria from the source of their strength, Islam. Step Two: bring on as many of these weakened ex-Muslims to work as guards for the mountain cult as possible. Step Three: rape the women, plunder the land.
Naturally, this program was a secret thing, neither spoken of nor seen, and all the more powerful for that. Now, according to the myth, a great coming out into the light was at hand. “Whoever has done an atom’s weight worth of evil will see it; whoever has done an atom’s weight worth of good will see it.” So says the Surah of the Earthquake. The men of Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS imagined that some such revelatory power flowed in their blood. In their view, the wicked powers of the Alawites lay like a fog over every aspect of contemporary life in Syria, including the lessons taught in schools, the sermons preached in the mosques, and even the conversations one had with one’s neighbors.
The document the Alawites most wished to suppress, which was also music, a poem, and a way of life, was the Koran. During the past 50 years, the Alawite fog—that is to say, its lies, particularly about Islam, its love of the West, its love of drinking, its habit of worshipping tin-pot dictators, and its infernal secret police—had done its best to suffocate the word of God. Now, however, Jabhat al-Nusra, and their brethren in ISIS were going to put an end to all of that. The Koran itself could not possibly be extinguished, naturally, and the fire still burned in people’s hearts. Now the fire was to burn in the streets. It would be a terrifying time, but such is the power of God. As the fire was laying waste to the land, the God-given way of life, with its music, its poetry, and its stern justice, would come out automatically, as the sun emerges after a storm. Soon, everything would be as it had been in the golden time, when Muslims in Syria lived in harmony with one another, with the land, and with God.
Evidently, the prisoners’ part in this saga was to confess—in scenes we really did act out before audiences—that we had devoted our lives to stamping out Islam. We were supposed to beg God for forgiveness, as many of us really did. We were supposed to wail and thrash around on the ground and drink in the agony that comes to people who set their hearts against God. I certainly did this.
And a great coming out was at hand: every one of the fighters I met in the eye hospital basement—and I must have met hundreds—had come out somehow, and wanted this to be known. They used the expression “I’ve come out” or “we came out” when describing their path into terrorism. These fighters had come to the jihad out of exile in the Gulf or in Beirut, or out of the government’s underground prisons, or out of the spiritual deadness of life in a European housing development. Others came out of the beardlessness in which they had disguised themselves in Damascus, where the Assads reigned. The topmost leaders had come out of the darkness of the American prison, Camp Bucca, in Iraq.
In the eye hospital basement, it was taken for granted that the Assad government had foisted the revolution’s leaders away in cells beneath the surface of the Earth in order to distance them from God. Everyone understood that the punishment had had the opposite effect, and that, while the Alawite officers who ran the prisons sipped their glasses of Yerba Maté upstairs, downstairs, in the underground depths, a race of seers was coming to life.
In those underground prisons, the darker things got, the more perfectly did the leaders of the future see.
Theo Padnos is a journalist and the author of Blindfold, a memoir about his two years in terrorist prisons in Syria.
Editor’s note: Persuasion did not independently verify the videos linked in this article.
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Yup, atrocious. Well said.
I am not sure what to say. What can one say when one reads this? It is atrocious.