Insight - Village cafe shootout spells trouble for Assad
Tue Oct 23, 2012 1:38pm GMT
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
AMMAN (Reuters) - A warm autumn day in the Syrian village of Qardaha and a
man walks in to a cafe where two customers are arguing. He pulls a gun;
shots are fired. The newcomer is wounded and one of the other men killed.
But this is no obscure local feud; it reveals frictions among President
Bashar al-Assad's core supporters. For Qardaha is the ancestral home of the
ruling dynasty. And the man who strode in with a pistol was the beleaguered
president's cousin.
Accounts vary of what happened next. But the cafe gunfight and subsequent
bloodshed in the village involved only Alawites, the religious minority on
which Assad has depended in his civil war against mainly Sunni rebels. The
violence shows that fear and anger over his policies may be eroding that
support.
Some locals say Mohammed al-Assad, known as the "Mountain Sheikh" for his
powerful family ties, argued in the cafe about smuggling and other rackets
that underpin the economy of the Alawite hill towns around the port of
Latakia; others believe he took exception to complaints about his cousin's
conduct of the war and about the rising death toll the community is
suffering.
President Assad's father Hafez, who led Syria from 1970 until his death in
2000, lies in a grandiose mausoleum at Qardaha, a town of 5,000 nestled amid
pine-clad hilltops.
His rule brought wealth and advantage, not least jobs in the army and
police, to the long disadvantaged Alawite community, which makes up about 10
percent of Syria's population. But tribal and other internal tensions have
been exacerbated by a war that his son portrays as a battle for survival,
not just for himself but for all fellow Alawites against sectarian enemies.
LOYALTY IN QUESTION?
Recent events around Qardaha, however, suggest to some observers, including
Western diplomats, that clan rivalries, thousands of deaths among Alawite
fighters and economic crisis could break the loyalty of leading Alawite
commanders, even as the community finds itself increasingly a target of
rebel anger.
With the government severely restricting media access, there is a lack of
independent information within Syria but several residents of Latakia region
gave similar accounts of events.
One Alawite who has joined the opposition to Assad, Majd Arafat, said there
was growing resentment at the suffering of the local population while elite
families remained aloof: "The talk all over the mountains is that Alawites
are being killed in droves, but none of them are called Assad, Makhlouf or
Shalish."
The latter two families are closely related to the Assads.
A Western diplomat, noting the failure of defections by Sunni generals to
sap the strength of Assad's forces, speculated that were even a less senior
Alawite to break ranks, it might raise expectations of a more damaging
split: "The defection of one, even a colonel, would be significant," he
said.
Estimates of casualties are hard to establish in Syria. One activist group
which compiles reports has said some 7,300 Assad loyalists have been killed,
out of a total of 30,000 war dead.
But many believe the overall toll is higher. One who thinks so is a Syrian
businessman, not himself an Alawite, who says he funds units of the mostly
Alawite "shabbiha" militia, partly to protect his businesses in the area.
Speaking to Reuters anonymously, he reckoned the Alawite community in the
coastal mountains alone might have lost 15,000 fighters since last year.
In the immediate area of Qardaha, residents estimated that as many as 300
men may have died in the past year, either in battles with rebels or in
sectarian ambushes and assassinations.
UNEQUAL DIVISIONS
But the burden, as the riches of the past 40 years, has not been shared
equally among the Alawite clans.
The likes of the Makhlouf and Shalish families are cousins of the Assads,
and rose from humble beginnings to make fortunes by virtue of winning
government tenders - much to the chagrin of more established Alawites
sidelined by Assad and his father.
Now those divisions seem to be resurfacing in an environment where the
wealth some Alawite mountain leaders have built up through officially
sanctioned smuggling and other illicit trades is being threatened by the
anti-Assad uprising - and now that many Alawites fear collective retribution
from Assad's enemies.
"Qardaha and its mountains used to be an incubator for regime support. But
Assad's relatives may now have to think twice before walking in the
streets," said the Alawite opposition activist Arafat. "The Alawites are
starting to ask themselves 'why we should back the Assads?'."
The non-Alawite businessman who funds some loyalist militia said abuses in
the clandestine economy run by shabbiha chiefs was turning other Alawites
against their rulers: "The regime has been turning a blind eye to the
criminality of the shabbiha," the businessman said. "And it is beginning to
hurt it."
Nonetheless, many Alawites, whose religion is an offshoot of the Shi'ite
Islam practised in Assad's ally Iran, still support the armed forces and the
militia units blamed for sectarian atrocities. Many see them as a bulwark
for self-preservation:
"They are afraid of the other side, which has also proved capable of
massacres," Arafat said. "They still see the Assad regime as providing them
with a sort of immunity."
Details of the cafe shootout at Qardaha on September 29, show internal
strains are surfacing as the community suffers losses.
The man killed in the gunfight was Sakher Othman. Among prominent members of
his family was Isper Othman, a cleric killed in a crackdown by the elder
Assad in the 1970s. At Sakher Othman's funeral, a mourner shouted a demand
that Assad quit, prompting loyalist gunmen to open fire, killing four
people.
Alawite opposition activists said several pro-Assad fighters were also
killed and wounded as fighting spread.
Since then thousands of shabbiha loyal to the president and commanded by
Assad relatives have imposed their order on Qardaha and surrounding
villages, but anger and disputes have continued.
Activists list members of a number of prominent families which now oppose
Assad, including from the Othman, Qouzi, Muhalla, Iskandar, Issa, Khayyer
and al-Jadid clans. Homes have been ransacked and several shops owned by
anti-Assad Alawites in Qardaha were torched this month, local residents
said.
Among notable clan hostilities is that opposing the Khayyers to the Assads.
Abdelaziz al-Khayyer, a doctor from Qardaha, spent 12 years as a political
prisoner under Hafez al-Assad. He was detained again in September and has
not been heard of since.
A delegation arrived from Damascus to try calm passions. It was headed by
another prominent Alawite, Walid Othman, father-in-law of Assad's cousin and
Syria's richest man Rami Makhlouf.
Yet within days there was further trouble, with local people saying youths
from rival Alawite families clashed in Qardaha.
RECRUITMENT PROBLEMS?
These tensions may spell problems ahead for the unity of the Alawite officer
corps. And Assad's forces may also be finding difficulties recruiting in
their Alawite heartland - opposition activists say more young Alawites are
evading conscription.
"They are seeing that the rebels are getting stronger and that their friends
are getting killed," said activist Lubna Merei, from the coastal town of
Jableh, south of Latakia.
However, for all that Alawite communal cohesion may face problems, some
believe that the way the civil war has taken on such a bitter sectarian
dimension - helped in part by the way Assad himself treated his opponents -
may mean the moment has passed when many Alawites might side with the
rebels.
Munther Bakhos, a veteran Alawite member of the exile Syrian opposition in
France, said the rebels lost an opportunity to make allies in the Alawite
heartlands in the early stages of the conflict and he believed that it would
now be harder for the mainly Sunni opposition to benefit from the
in-fighting there.
"It is naive to think the regime is protecting the Alawites. They are
hostage. The regime is using them to defend itself," Bakhos said. But the
sectarian bitterness of the war had made it harder to persuade Alawites to
ditch Assad:
"There was an opportunity to pull the rug from under its feet in the first
few months of the revolution," he said. "But now the picture has gotten
complicated."
(Editing by Alastair Macdonald)
C Thomson Reuters 2012 All rights reserved
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Received on Tue Oct 23 2012 - 10:02:52 EDT
