Gary Gambill: Bashar Assad can always find refuge with the Alawites
Gary Gambill, National Post Jul 6, 2012 – 7:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Jul 6, 2012 9:29 AM ET
President Bashar al-Assad waving upon his arrival in parliament in Damascus to give a speech on June 3, 2012. Assad paid tribute to civilian and military "martyrs" of the violence in Syria, saying their blood was not shed in vain.
Comments Email Twitter Sixteen months into the Syrian uprising, Obama administration officials are still hopeful that President Bashar Assad (or an ambitious subordinate) can be pressured to peacefully surrender power, if only the Russians would read him the riot act. Don’t hold your breath.
The belief that leaders of the Syrian regime can be persuaded to yield power peacefully is plausible at first glance, as they clearly can’t win the looming civil war. The country’s disenfranchised Sunni Arab majority has a fivefold demographic advantage over Assad’s Alawite sect, which controls the commanding heights of government and mans the elite security forces charged with its defense. Surrounded by sympathetic Sunni states, porous borders and an international community gunning for Assad’s ouster (literally, if some have their way), the rebels are steadily growing stronger and will eventually gain the upper hand. Faced with the bleak prospect of fighting to the bitter end, the reasoning goes, key regime stakeholders should be willing to peacefully opt out in return for security guarantees, immunity from prosecution and other material inducements.
In practice, however, it’s impossible to provide credible promises of protection to those with the means and will to obstruct a peaceful transition. Everyone in a position of authority to deliver regime concessions now has too much blood on their hands to live safely in Syria after relinquishing power, whatever formal guarantees they might receive.
Thousands of others who played more modest roles in government or profited unfairly from it will also face considerable dangers when the walls come crashing down. The fall of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led minoritarian regime led to several hundred extrajudicial executions by Iraqi Shiites within a year, many of them lone wolf acts of vengeance against relatively low-ranking officers and civil servants — all of this despite the presence of U.S.-led coalition forces (a firewall that Syria presumably will not have).
While lower echelon officials can disappear abroad, there are few places of exile where Assad and his henchmen would be safe from extradition or assassination once they have nothing to offer their hosts in return. Syrian Alawites have no natural outside ally bound by historical and cultural ties to provide aid and refuge in times of trouble. Whatever accommodations the Russians may offer Assad to facilitate his departure, they will surely seek to rebuild bridges with the Sunni Arab world once the smoke clears. Years from now, even Tehran may prove to be an unreliable sanctuary.
For Assad, staying and fighting to the bitter end doesn’t mean going down with the ship. When the day comes that he can no longer stave off the fall of Damascus, his minions can easily fall back to Alawite areas in the mountains and coastal plains of northwestern Syria. Tehran, preferring a fragmented Syria to a unified hostile Syria, will happily continue providing them with arms and financing. Even with Turkey and the Arab Gulf states supporting opposing proxies, former regime forces and affiliated Alawite paramilitaries (shabiha) can hold out for years. Having intervened extensively in Lebanon for decades, they have the perfect skill set for surviving the Lebanonization of Syria.
The Syrian dictator may not have abandoned all hope of avoiding this scenario, but he is surely preparing for it. The shabiha, led by his relatives and clansmen, are steadily proliferating and assuming an ever-greater role in combating the rebels, particularly in Sunni villages and urban neighbourhoods that abut Alawite communities.
When the time comes, Assad won’t have much difficulty rallying Alawites (and many other non-Sunnis) behind the de facto cantonization of Syria. Given centuries of pre-existing Sunni hostility to heterodox Muslims and the scale of regime atrocities during the past four decades, Alawite fears of violent retribution are well-grounded and ripe for exploitation. Because the regime has heavily suppressed independent Alawite religious and social institutions over the years, the community has little capacity to mobilize around alternative leaders. By hook or by crook, Assad will lead it into the abyss
