They’re Emptying Alawite Villages. This Is Ethnic Cleansing.

Just north of Israel, ethnic cleansing is unfolding in real time. Alawite Syrians are being expelled from their homes in Hama, Homs, Latakia and Tartus, and some of the people I’ve been interviewing have already lost relatives, homes or entire villages. This article introduces the crisis and the community whose stories I will be sharing in the coming weeks.

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Ethnic cleansing is happening right now in our northern neighbor, Syria. Over the past weeks, I have been put in touch with several Alawite individuals who want their stories told. I sent the first article to one of them yesterday morning so he could check that nothing in it would endanger him or his family. He has not yet opened it. I can only hope nothing has happened.

Another contact sent me a message that explains why I should be worried. He wrote that the new Syrian government is carrying out systematic expulsion of Alawites from the north Hama countryside, as well as Latakia and Homs. Twelve Alawite villages have already been emptied. HTS, Hay’at Tahrir al‑Sham, is offering the land to investors, with profits split between investors and the state. Alawites who tried to return were told the authorities could not guarantee their safety.

His own family is terrified to leave their homes. His mother lives in a Druze area near Damascus and feels safer, but his father’s relatives are trapped on the coast. His uncle’s wife was kidnapped and put up for sale on Facebook as a sex slave. The family managed to buy her back. Some Alawites have fled to Lebanon. Others are waiting on the coast, fearing they will be next.

Latakia and Tartus are the two Alawite provinces. Hama and Homs, outside these governates, once had large Alawite populations. Those communities have now been mostly emptied.

This article is only a brief introduction to what is happening. I will be bringing more stories as I speak with my contacts.

I was introduced to members of the Syrian Alawite sect by a university professor I know. Like my interviewees, he will remain anonymous to protect his contacts. Without the trust he built with them, they would not have spoken with me so openly. And without that trust, I would not have believed them so quickly. I am a cynical Israeli. After years of watching how our enemies manipulate naïve Jews who want to believe that not all our neighbors want us dead, and after seeing photos from Assad’s war recycled online as if they were Gazans killed by Israel, I do not trust easily.

But the stories I am hearing are consistent, detailed and heartbreaking. These are not political operatives. They are ordinary people whose lives have been upended.

In the coming articles, I will share their accounts. I will explore who the Alawites are, their religion, their social structure and their place within Syria. I will examine what it meant for them that the last two Syrian presidents were Alawites, and why that did not protect them from poverty or from the revenge now being taken against them.

For now, what matters is this: ethnic cleansing is happening in our neighborhood. Entire villages have been emptied. Families are fleeing. People are being kidnapped, murdered or forced to abandon their homes. And almost nobody is talking about it.

You can read the full indepth Substack version of this article here.

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