How to See the Current Sectarianism in Syria
A year after Assad, Syria lives between relief and fear, old wounds and new uncertainties. How was sectarianism was made, why it persists and what it means for the country trying to build itself again
The way we explain a situation usually shapes it, and when that situation is a conflict that demands resolution, our explanatory frame often predetermines the kind of solution we deem possible.
With that in mind, I look at the past year, the first after Assad’s fall following more than a decade of civil war and many more decades of dynastic oppression. It is not a brilliant year. Communal strife persists, nearly fifteen hundred people were killed in a massacre, and there is still no concrete prospect of building democratic institutions anchored in an inclusive constitution.
Yet this is expected. Transitional periods rarely deliver instant progress. The chances of last year being better than it was were always slim, and it could easily have been much worse. Far worse.
The pragmatism and evolution of Ahmad al-Sharaa and the circle around him, their attempts to legitimise themselves and the new Syria in the international arena and to mend ties with key countries needed for reconstruction, went unexpectedly well. Without knowing what he and his governorate built in Idlib province over the past six years, he would still look like a commander with a jihadi background, an implausible candidate to govern and consolidate a heterogeneous and complex country. Yet he managed to come this far, and how he did so rests on several dynamics.
Not as Fragile as It Seems
According to the Syrian journalist and editor-in-chief of New Lines Magazine, Hassan Hassan:
‘What began as a local project in Idlib has now become a national strategy. Not understanding this ability to capture the national energy can create illusions of fragility around the current order in Syria. Such illusions already inform strategies, including those of countries like Israel and Iran, to keep the country weak or to exploit its divisions. Internally, many Syrians, whether minorities or other critics, refuse to integrate or support the current formation because they think it will collapse when the world inevitably turns against it. They think they are confronting a narrow faction or a single leader. In reality, they are pushing against a much broader reservoir of revolutionary energy that has already been absorbed and reorganized by those in power today.’
I find Hassan’s framing persuasive. The experience in Idlib demonstrated to many Syrians that HTS under al-Sharaa could, in fact, produce a capable political actor. By last year his group had become, in Hassan’s words, “a network of forces whose genealogy runs through earlier insurgencies.” Hassan believes that Al-Sharaa did not invent this project alone but aligned himself and his circle with forces that had been gathering for decades, and that he recognised how to act when an opening finally appeared: ‘The revolutionary energy that once animated protests and armed groups now flowed into a structure that became the core of the new regime in Damascus.’
I also agree that analyses, policies and strategies built on the assumption of a fragile regime may be misleading and end up reinforcing the very fragilities they assume.
This is not to say that the massacres of the last year on the coast, where more than 1,600 people were killed in the Alawite district of Latakia in March 2025, or the killings in Suwayda in July 2025, are minor missteps. They are anything but. Yet even these atrocious events can be read in multiple ways.
When Narratives Become Traps
Public celebrations of Assad’s fall sat uneasily beside a quieter sense of dread because the Druze, the Alawites and the Kurds entered this anniversary acutely aware of their continued vulnerability. A Sunni-majority country under Sharaa’s administration may still perceive the transition as an opening for revenge. In the northeast, the Rojava administration issued a congratulatory note to the public but nevertheless prohibited all large gatherings. Along the western seaboard, unease deepened when Sheikh Ghazal Ghazal of the Supreme Islamic Alawite Council urged his followers to avoid the festivities, describing the new order as oppressive. Druze areas saw protests instead of celebrations. None of this is surprising. In the absence of mechanisms for truth-seeking or legal justice, wounds do not close.
To make sense of the tension running through this first post-Assad year we need a framework that neither romanticises coexistence nor accepts the determinism that often colours discussions of identity in the region. Three broad interpretive traditions continue to shape how many explain such conflicts.
The first sees communal attachments through a primordial, quasi-biological lens in which sect or ethnicity appears natural, ancient and irresistible, producing a logic that views separation, partition or other forms of demographic engineering as the only path to stability. The second locates the source of rupture in culture and treats multi-communal societies as inherently unstable, generating prescriptions for breaking up such states or endorsing power-sharing arrangements that formalise difference as the organising principle of political life.1 The third focuses on leaders who manipulate fluid identities to consolidate their own authority and points toward integrationist strategies, stronger civic institutions and the removal of elites who profit from polarisation. This final one is often described as ‘the evil dictator explanation’. Tempting to hold on to. But… None of these perspectives is sufficient on its own.
This is why the literature increasingly leans toward a constructivist realist view, an approach that recognises that identities are shaped by history and social context yet remain open to change, while accepting that political actors operate within constraints but still make consequential choices. This view avoids the reductionism of the grand narratives and instead asks for clarity about power and about the formation of collective attachments.
The Long Arc of Sectarianization
Sectarianization can be defined as ‘the process through which a religious identity is politicized as part of a struggle for power’, and sectarianism ‘is the outcome where sectarian identities come to “shape—even dominate—notions of political interests, conflicts and alignments.’2
In Syria there is a multiplicity of historical religious and ethnic identities including a Sunni majority, various Christian groups, and heterodox Muslim minorities like Alawites and Druze but we need to remember that the uprising in 2011 did not begin as a sectarian revolt. The protests happened as grievances that transcended communal boundaries and rooted in the Assad family’s rule converged.
The atmosphere then shifted because the regime had spent five decades embedding sectarian cues into daily life, cultivating expectations of danger and retribution within a dispersed authoritarian system that balanced groups through fear and patronage rather than through any meaningful institutional equilibrium.
The violent conflict with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s had already conditioned the population to anticipate sect-marked reprisals. In 2011 the leadership activated these fears by portraying the uprising as a defence of pluralism against Sunni extremism, a message that resonated with minorities who feared exposure. The architecture of the security sector reinforced this by relying on kinship networks that placed Alawites and allied clans in key positions, creating a perception of arbitrary privilege anchored in corruption and coercion. At the same time the state relied on a lattice of localised power centres governed by subnational identities, where loyalty rather than doctrinal belonging determined access to resources. This structure allowed grievances to be contained vertically but made it difficult for the non-sectarian opposition to build alliances horizontally.
As casualties mounted and protestors turned to mosques as organising hubs, the movement’s language took on a religious cadence. This allowed the regime to depict opponents as sectarian militants, pushing minorities away from a civic narrative that had struggled to take root. None of this should be understood as the product of a single strategy. The foundations had been laid over decades. The main lesson of the Assad era is that stability purchased through coercion in divided societies is rarely stable at all. Regimes that manage cleavages for their own survival eventually weaponise those same cleavages when threatened.
Political Community Unmade
The fear circulating now among minorities in Latakia or Jableh, or within the Kurdish-held northeast, is not simply a reaction to Sharaa or his past. It is the consequence of a political landscape shaped by decades of authoritarian engineering in which sect-coded advantage, selective coercion and asymmetrical patronage produced a system too brittle to reform yet too entrenched to dismantle cleanly. In a society where identities are neither frozen nor freely chosen but shaped by inherited fears, uneven access to power and the cumulative weight of political memory, we see how ordinary people, local notables, military commanders and national leaders navigate the aftermath of a shattered order while drawing on repertoires the former regime itself refined.
This is why demands issued along the coast for fair treatment, release of detainees and some degree of federal distance resonate beyond their immediate constituencies. They are attempts to renegotiate belonging in a context where trust remains narrow and the institutions required for a genuine civic compact have not yet appeared. They also signal the risks ahead. If the new authorities respond with the same repertoire of coercive balancing that characterised the Assad era, Syria may drift toward a patchwork of guarded enclaves even though the current state is stronger than it appears. If, however, the transition moves toward a model that recognises the constructed nature of collective identities while taking their political force seriously, there may be a path toward a settlement that does not reproduce the fractures of the old regime.
The first year after Assad’s fall therefore marks a moment in which the struggle to define the political community has returned to the surface. The fears of minorities, the assertiveness of the Sunni majority, the stalled integration of the northeast and the unresolved trauma of the coast all point to a society searching for a grammar that can hold its contradictions without collapsing under them. Whether Syria moves toward accommodation or slides into a quieter, more segmented authoritarianism will depend on how these early signals are read.
Dixon, Paul. “Beyond Sectarianism in the Middle East? Comparative Perspectives on Group Conflict.” In Beyond Sunni and Shia: The Roots of Sectarianism in a Changing Middle East, edited by Frederic Wehrey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, 14.
Hinnebusch, Raymond, and Morten Valbjørn. Sectarianism and Civil War in Syria. London: Routledge, 2025, 32.