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Assad's Sectarian Strategy

(Now Lebanon) Tony Badran - Few fully appreciate the cold-blooded calculus of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad that gives rise to recent sectarian murders in Sunni villages such as Qubair and Houla. Both are adjacent to Alawite villages, from which the attacks were launched. Those who have lived through or studied Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war will immediately recognize what's going on. The early stages of the war witnessed mass killings as the rival camps began fortifying their sectarian cantons, clearing out enemy outposts and securing strategic routes and points of access - a sign that they were in it for the long haul. As noted by Michael Young, the Assad regime has been pursuing something "suspiciously similar" to ethnic cleansing along the northern and southern tips of the Alawite ancestral stronghold (and within it). It's clear that Assad is pursuing a policy of Alawite inner consolidation. By arming Alawite villages and using them as launching pads for attacks against Sunnis, as he did in Houla and Qubair, Assad is hardening the sectarian boundaries and implicating the entire Alawite community in the murder of Sunnis, seeking to irredeemably tie the fate of the Alawites to his own. The writer is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
2012-06-08 00:00:00
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