By Owen Schalk
Since the beginning of March, hundreds of Syrian Alawites have been massacred in ethnic pogroms perpetrated by the forces of the new government under the Sunni Islamist rule of Hay’atTahrir al-Sham (HTS). The leader of HTS, ISIS veteran Ahmed al-Sharaa (al-Julani), has governed Syria as an unelected dictator since riding Turkish military support to power in December 2024.
Israel immediately took advantage of the Ba’ath Party’s demisethree months ago, invading and bombing Syria and vowing to “demilitarize” territory south of Damascus. Al-Sharaa has not fought back. While allowing Israel free rein in southern Syria, the new president repealed the constitution and dissolved left-wing political parties that could have served as an opposition to his reactionary agenda. In the meantime, HTS forces are rampaging through the country, targeting ethnic and religious minorities and anyone else who runs afoul of their violently discriminatory beliefs.
Most recently, HTS launched pogroms against the Alawite minority in Syria’s coastal region. These sectarian killings have left over 1000 people dead. Al-Sharaa’s forces have massacred hundreds of Alawites, looting and burning their homes and leaving corpses piled in the streets. The government has blamed this mass ethnic violence on “individual actions” of HTS members, but the scale of the pogroms invalidates the “bad egg” claims emanating from Damascus.
According to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, government forces have killed at least 745 Alawite civilians in “executions” carried out in the coastal region and the Latakia mountains. Witnesses speak of HTS militants shooting Alawites in the streets and at the gates of their homes.
France 24 reports: “Residents of Baniyas, one of the towns worst hit by the violence, said bodies were strewn on the streets or left unburied in homes and on the roofs of buildings, and nobody was able to collect them. One resident said that the gunmen prevented residents for hours from removing the bodies of five of their neighbours killed Friday at close range.”
Hundreds of Alawite Syrians fleeing HTS massacres have sought refuge at Russia’s Hmeimim Airbase in Latakia. Rami Abdurrahman, chief of the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, said, “This was one of the biggest massacres during the Syrian conflict.”
The ethnic violence perpetrated by al-Sharaa’s forces is horrificto behold, but it is not surprising. Hatred of Alawites runs deep among anti-Assad forces. In 2014, Islamist rebels massacred dozens in the Alawite village of Maan. In 2015, Syrian rebels locked Alawites in cages and paraded them through the streetsof a rebel-controlled suburb of Damascus. The next year, anti-Assad forces committed another massacre of Alawites in Zara’a.
One can draw a grim parallel between the HTS government’s anti-Alawite pogroms and the vicious ethnic cleansing of black Libyans unleashed by the 2011 NATO intervention against the Qadhafi government. Like Syria, Western powers falsified an image of the anti-government forces as mere liberal democrats yearning for freedom from an oppressive regime. And like Syria, it didn’t take much time after the fall of the targeted government for the rebels’ true nature to show itself.
Under Qadhafi, black Africans were prominently represented in the government and military, and hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans came to Libya for work in the comparatively prosperous country. Anti-Qadhafi forces deliberately targeted black Libyans for violence because they associated these Libyans with the state they wanted to destroy. Their racist violence was justified with reference to “African mercenaries,” just as massacres of Alawites has been justified by invoking “Assad loyalists.”
Shortly after the anti-Qadhafi uprising began, rebels in the city of Derna took over an airbase and began executing black Africans they accused of being mercenaries. 50 so-called “mercenaries” from sub-Saharan Africa were killed.
In September 2011, anti-Qadhafi forces from Misrata captured the mostly black city of Tawergha and unleashed a flood of racist violence on its inhabitants. The city of 25,000 was depopulated by the NATO-backed forces. Amnesty International reported the imprisonment and torture of people from the city “simply for being Tawargas.” A journalist for The Telegraphnoted that the rebels from Misrata had painted a slogan on the road into Tawergha proclaiming that the Misrata brigade was “the brigade for purging slaves [and] black skin.” One survivor of the ethnic cleansing lamented, “If we go back…we will be at the mercy of the Misratah brigade.” A rebel soldier proudly stated, “Tawergha no longer exists.”
Canada, a major participant in the anti-Qadhafi bombing campaign, is on record defending the ethnic cleansing. Canadian General Charles Bouchard, who commanded the NATO force in Libya, defended the Misratan brigade’s actions by regurgitating the “African mercenary” accusation. Bouchard said: “Many of these individuals [in Tawergha] are still remnants of mercenaries who need to move out of the country and need to go home because there is no value in keeping them.”
In both Libya and Syria, Western imperialism aligned itself with violent racists and sectarians who proved themselves useful in destabilizing targeted governments, namely, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya under the General People’s Congress and the Syrian Arab Republic under the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. Since NATO’s destruction of Libya in 2011, the country is no longer an obstacle to US-led imperialist initiatives on the African continent, and since al-Sharaa’s seizure of power in December 2024, any Syrian contribution to the Axis of Resistance has been neutralized.
As long as imperialism gets its way, Western governments and media do not care about the ethnic cleansing and pogroms that these forces unleash on their own people.
