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Syria's Plan B: An Alawite State?
(GlobalPost) Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand - Last Thursday's massacre of rebel fighters and residents in the Sunni village of Tremseh, 20 miles northwest of Hama, fit a geographic pattern of attacks by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad that are attempting to carve out a breakaway Alawite state. Regime insiders said policy in Damascus is shifting from crushing the rebellion to Plan B: drive Sunnis away from Alawite land. Alawite militiamen known as shabiha have in recent months conducted a series of massacres on Sunnis living in the traditional Alawite heartlands of the mountainous west coast of Syria, home to the ports of Latakia and Tartous. The regime increasingly sees the Orontes River plain as a buffer zone between the Alawite-dominated region to the west and the two big Sunni cities of Homs and Hama. "The massacres in the Sunni villages are to clean the west bank of the Orontes from Sunnis and the military operations in the area are to drive Sunnis eastward," said Haider, 30, an Alawite whose father is a senior security official.