Sectarian violence has plagued Syria long before Ahmed al-Sharaa’s Al-Qaeda affiliate, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, took control of the country last year. The Alawites, an Abrahamic faith that draws its ideology from the quran, faced centuries of persecution and discrimination, a reality that intensified after 14th century Sunni scholar Ibn Taymiyyah issued a fatwa against the religious minority, declaring them infidels.
Taymiyyah declared the religious group “greater infidels than Christians, Jews, or idolaters,” as the ideology and practices of the faith were viewed as contradicting core tenets of Islam. Some Alawite religious rituals include traditions not embraced in conservative Islam. Women are not expected to cover their hair and do not fast during Ramadan.
After centuries of marginalization, the Alawite minority found new opportunities under French colonial rule. When French forces withdrew from Syria in 1946, Alawites were trained and came to hold a majority of positions within the military’s noncommissioned officer corps. In 1971, when Hafez al-Assad took power, he placed Alawite family members in senior roles, further elevating the status of the once persecuted sect.
While Alawites later served in the Syrian military and lived with relative protection under the former regime, those roles did not reflect ideological support for Bashar al-Assad or his predecessor, according to Dr. Tamim Khromachou, president of the Levant Council of the United States (LCUS) and Americans for Levant Foundation (ALF), who spoke to The Jerusalem Post. Religious practice was tightly controlled and kept largely out of public view, but Khromachou said the community was still afforded a level of personal freedom that has since disappeared under the Sharaa regime.
Khromachou explained that historical abuses remained embedded in the fabric of Alawite society and that “all what mattered to the Alawite is [that] nobody would come to kill us.”
“We did not like the system. We knew it was dictatorship. There was no political freedom, but there was a social freedom,” he said, describing circumstances in which violent dissent felt unnecessary, even though daily life remained constrained.
“We endured the pain and suffering of having political oppression,” he continued.
Repression an accepted norm in Syria
True political freedom, Khromachou said, has long been rare in the region. Syrians, some sects more than others, have lived under oppressive leadership for generations, making repression an accepted norm.
Referring to the current regime, he argued that many objections to Assad-era brutality stemmed less from opposition to torture and violence than from outrage that a sect deemed infidel held power.
Pointing to Sharaa’s attacks against Alawites, Kurds, Christians, moderate Sunnis, and Druze, Khromachou said extrajudicial killings, religious discrimination, and torture have persisted, even as many voices that once condemned Assad for the same actions remain silent.
Khromachou, who was already practicing family medicine in the United States when the Free Syrian Army was formed in 2011, recalled witnessing widespread support for Syria’s destruction rather than acceptance of an Alawite president.
On one side, he “saw a brutal regime, ignorant president, and corrupted government.” On the other, he heard opposition chants from crowds storming minority neighborhoods and shouting “Alawites to grave, Christian to Beirut.”
Faced with the choice between continued persecution and death, Alawites distanced themselves from opposition groups, Khromachou said, and support for the former regime became the cost of survival. The Alawites are educated and open-minded. They want to be like Europe, like America,” he said, emphasizing that the dictatorship did not reflect the values or ideology of his community.
The actions of Sharaa’s regime were predictable. Israeli politicians have warned for the past decade that Sharaa’s Al-Nusra Front was trying to eliminate the Druze and other minorities in Islamist-motivated attacks. Less predictable, Khromachou continued, is the global acceptance of this violence and the widespread support for removing sanctions from Damascus without securing the safety of all the Syrian people.
“They were against detaining people based on their political views, but today, they're okay detaining people based on their ethno-religious identity. Yesterday, they were against torture. People are tortured today,” he highlighted. “There is an inhumane atrocity that we see, but also there is a lack of morality of the people who are supporting or pushing towards what Syria looks like today. It is both hypocritical and illogical.
“Not only did they (Sharaa’s government and his supporters) go against their principles they impressed before the fall of Assad, they actually are going against day-to-day American principles and values, and that makes it dangerous to the American society.”
While Sharaa has spoken at length about his support for a unified Syria governed by a single authority, in opposition to groups like the Syrian Democratic Forces operating independently, Khromachou said the regime was seeking to isolate minorities and exclude them from Syria so they could be more easily destroyed.
The Sunni majority in Syria speaking in support of the violence or remaining silent is a tool to make the minorities feel isolated to “give the sense we don’t belong,” he continued. “They want us to be in a small area, contained, [so] maybe another day in the future, they can launch a jihadist attack against us, as they do against Israel.”
Following the March attack on the Alawite-majority province of Latakia, where nearly 1500 people were massacred, he said, “the response was disappointing.” Doctors Without Borders still does not operate there, and NGOs did not respond the way they had to conflicts only 300 miles away in Gaza.
After the “unexpected and violent” shift of power, Khromachou said he thought “all the eyes of the whole international community would be focusing there. But at the moment the massacre took place, they all closed their eyes. All the sudden, they did not want to see the atrocity.”
How the massacre in Latakia led a Syrian Alawite to Israel
Traumatic and devastating, the attacks led Khromachou to reassess his perspective on Israel and the war in Gaza.
While he accused the international community of closing its eyes to the violence, Israel remained vigilant and was quick to condemn the murders, he said. Less than two years after October 7, Israel continued to prioritize vigilance along its borders as a matter of domestic security.
Surprised by Jerusalem’s singular voice against the attacks, Khromachou said his perspective continued to evolve when he saw coverage of the Latakia attacks in his own country.
Much the same way Syrian media denied the atrocities committed by Hamas and Palestinian groups on October 7, including the systematic use of sexual violence, reports quickly attempted to rewrite the rapes, torture, and state-sanctioned killings against his community.
“It’s the same people that were behind the media, behind the scenes, trying to cover up,” October 7 that tried to cover up March 7, he continued. “Unfortunately, the international community bent to that, and they bowed for that financial power.”
“Isn't it interesting? The regime, the Syrian regime, and even the Alawite were brainwashed that Israel is your enemy. But when this happened to the Alawite, only the Israeli people said something,” he said. “This is was like a moral wake up for us to look back what propaganda we were fed.”
Khromachou has visited Israel twice over the past year, visiting both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
In October, he accepted an invitation from Israeli journalist Eddie Cohen to speak at the ‘Minorities Conference’ alongside Israeli politicians, Druze Sheikh Marwan Kiwan, and other senior figures.
After “discovering what Israel really is,” Khromachou described calling his wife in the US to tell them he found a country just like the home he thought they had lost.
“I did not feel different, some streets in Tel Aviv were exactly like where I lived in Latakia, the people, how they present themselves, how decent, how nice, kind it was amazing. It's against everything that you hear,” he shared.
More revealing than his interactions with the Israeli people was his first encounter with a Palestinian living in east Jerusalem. The taxi driver who picked him up from the airport, knowing only that he was Syrian and not that he was Alawite, said it was difficult for him to accept being around Jews and that he “did not want to deal with them.” After Khromachou told the driver he didn’t understand how he could complain when life is worse in Arab countries, the driver shifted to discussing Syrian politics and specifically his distaste for Alawites and Druze.
“He started cussing Alawites and Druze. I said, ‘Wow, I thought your problem was Israel, that you say Israel is occupying you, so you're giving yourself the moral stance to go against that. But what about the Alawite and Druze? They're not occupying you.’ So the problem is not the land or occupation, it's the ideology and the mentality…,” he recounted.
“I feel like I wish everybody else could see and feel what I feel toward the people and the people of Israel,” he concluded, while thanking the state for its generosity in hosting him and continuing to work to build bridges between moderate Syrians and the people of Israel.