Fitzgerald: The Alawites and Hizballah
JIHAD WATCH
By Hugh
The Alawite despotism may seem to be calling the shots in Lebanon, but it is Hizballah that, by enraging the Sunnis in Lebanon, may cause all kinds of problems for the Alawites of Syria.
The Alawites who rule Syria constitute 12% of the population. Though they make up the officer corps, still -- there are those pesky non-Alawites among the men to worry about. Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood started to attack the Alawites in force. They murdered 82 Alawite cadets -- the entire graduating class -- of Syria's military academy, as part of an anti-regime, anti-Alawite campaign. They attacked police and other symbols of government authority.
Finally, Hafez al-Assad took the Alawite-officered army right to Hama, surrounded the city, and then systematically moved in, with the soldiers having been given orders to kill anyone who cried "Allahu Akbar." At least 20,000 people were killed. And then corpses of Ikhwan members were brought to other cities, and were dragged through the streets of those cities, and everyone was ordered to stand outside, or on their balconies, and clap at the sight. And anyone who did not clap and cheer was in danger of being noted by the army, and dealt with on the spot in a similar way.
Tales pater, tales filius? Not quite. Bashir the son is a most myopic ophthalmologist. The passage of time has dimmed the memory of that terror. And the Alawites, knowing that their worship of Mary prevents them from being regarded as full-fledged Muslims, sought several years ago to obtain from Shi'ite clerics in Iran a fatwa that entitled them to be considered as orthodox, albeit Shi'a, Muslims. Such a fatwa was issued. And now Syria supports Hizballah, by helping Iran transfer weaponry to that group in Lebanon, for two reasons.
The first reason is that the Syrians need Iran. Every Alawite house has a picture of Mary. Every Alawite village is known. The Alawites need the legitimacy that Iran's clerics can, so the Alawites think, confer on them, so as to allow them to present themselves as real Muslims, rather than heretical syncretists.
The second reason is that Syria, virtually without resources, has always regarded Lebanon as its private source of funds -- funds in particular for Syrian generals and others in the Alawite elite. And a united Lebanon, a Lebanon run by those who deplore the Syrian influence and meddling, would threaten that source of wealth for Syria's rulers. So they have a stake in a Lebanese government incapable of standing up to Syria -- a paralyzed government, or a weakened government, or a government that cannot function because Hizballah stands in the way.
So far Bashir al-Assad's eagerness to assuage Muslims, both Sunni and Shi'a, outside Syria, appears to have worked. He is still in power. Alawite generals still strut about. But there is a way to get Syrian cooperation. It would require that American policymakers understood the weakness of the Alawites, and how fearful they are of internal opposition from the Ikhwan. If the American government were to explain to the Alawites that it knows how worrisome such a charge can be, and knows just how dangerous it could be for every Alawite village if Sunni regimes -- say that of Saudi Arabia -- were suddenly to turn up the volume on its coverage of the "Alawites" and to depict them as Infidels, working with the "Rafidite dogs" of Iraq and the "Persians," that would get the attention of Bashir al-Assad and his military henchmen in a way that nothing else could do.
Hizballah has won a major victory, but there is no victory that cannot be reversed. It is certainly worth trying, in order not to eliminate the Hizballah threat but at least to make it harder for Hizballah to obtain arms, in the hope that the Sunnis, and the Druze, and the Christians are now arming themselves, having learned a lesson, and will, if the Syrian-Iranian support for Hizballah can be stopped, and arms shipments ended or interdicted more successfully, be ready to take on a weakened Hizballah and to teach it a lesson that will take a long time to unlearn. |
