Alawite versus Sunni: Spillover into Turkey?

Alawite and Christian Iconography
Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times
New York Times

When I lived in Germany, I became friends with a Turkish Kurd named Memo who belonged to the Alawite minority, about 15 to 20 million (sic. see update below) of the Turkish population. I noticed from the start that he was a very liberal Muslim, but I eventually came to see that most Muslims -- or most Sunnis, anyway -- wouldn't consider him Muslim at all. At one point, he confided that the Alawites considered the Christian "Sermon on the Mount" as sacred scripture. Note the above photo, which shows an Alawite combining Christian and Alawite iconography.

Despite their moderate religious character (courtesy of their syncretism), Turkish Alawites are feeling spillover from the conflict in Syria between Alawites and Sunnis, as Jeffrey Gettleman explains in his article "As Syria War Roils, Unrest Among Sects Hits Turkey" (NYT, August 4, 2012):

As Syria's civil war degenerates into a bloody sectarian showdown between the government's Alawite-dominated troops and the Sunni Muslim majority, tensions are increasing across the border between Turkey's Alawite minority and the Sunni Muslim majority here.

Many Turkish Alawites, estimated at 15 million to 20 million strong and one of the biggest minorities in this country, seem to be solidly behind Syria's embattled strongman, Bashar al-Assad, while Turkey's government, and many Sunnis, supports the Syrian rebels.

The Alawites fear the sectarian violence spilling across the border. Already, the sweltering, teeming refugee camps along the frontier are fast becoming caldrons of anti-Alawite feelings.

And the Turkish Alawites worry about their own Sunni government and its increasingly Islamist policies, which could be designated "creeping sharia":

The Turkish government is led by an Islamist-rooted party that is slowly but clearly trying to bring more religion, particularly Sunni Islam, into the public sphere, eschewing decades of purposefully secular rule. Alawites here find it deeply unsettling, and a bit hypocritical, that Turkey has teamed up with Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive countries in the world, and Qatar, a religious monarchy, both Sunni, to bring democracy to Syria.

The Alawites point to the surge of foreign jihadists streaming into Turkey, en route to fight a holy war on Syria's battlefields. Many jihadists are fixated on turning Syria, which under the Assad family's rule has been one of the most secular countries in the Middle East, into a pure Islamist state.

Sunni jihadists would certainly not take kindly to Alawites, either in Syria or Turkey, for orthodox Muslims consider them bad Muslims or not even Muslims at all, making them subject to 'legitimate' attack:

The Alawites here [in Turkey] are worried they could become easy targets. Historically, they have been viewed with suspicion across the Middle East by mainstream Muslims and often scorned as infidels. The Alawite sect was born in the ninth century and braids together religious beliefs, including reincarnation, from different faiths.

Many Alawites do not ever go to a mosque; they tend to worship at home or in Alawite temples that have been denied the same state support in Turkey that Sunni mosques get. Many Alawite women do not veil their faces or even cover their heads. The towns they dominate in eastern Turkey, where young women sport tank tops and tight jeans, feel totally different than religious Sunni towns just a few hours away, where it can be difficult even to find a woman in public.

Refik Eryilmaz,an Alawite member of the Turkish parliament, meets Mr. Gettleman to explain why they are different:

He was sitting in a cafe in Antakya, a border town with a large Alawite population, and digging into a plate of baklava during the bright, sunny hours of the afternoon, when Muslims observing Ramadan usually fast.

"Look at my people," he smiled, spreading his hands wide and encompassing families eating ice cream and one young couple nuzzling on a couch. "My people are free."

He means free from sharia, and he's right . . . for now.

UPDATE: Long-time reader Erdal points out that Mr. Gettleman has conflated Alawites with Alevis, and I was careless enough to neglect fact-checking. The Alevis number 10 to 20 million, mostly in Turkey. The Alawites (or Alawi) number about 2.5 million, mostly in Syria. I knew of the two different groups, but not of the relative numbers.

Islamist Threat to Minorities in Syria

Shattered Church in Syria

Reuters/NYT

Last Wednesday, August 1 (2012), I posted on the rise of jihad in Syria, noting that the Sunni Muslims who come under Islamist influence will turn against not only the ruling Alawites but also the Shi'ites and the Christians, as well as all other minorities. A couple of days later, I posted a comment on Malcolm Pollack's blog post concerning President Obama's 'secret' order providing US support for rebels against the Syrian government:

So . . . we're going to support the Sunni Muslims against a brutal dictator who protects minorities so that the Sunnis can set up a brutal dictatorship that will wipe out the minorities? To replace a theocratic Iran with a theocratic al-Qaeda? Do we stand to gain anything from this?

Does anybody other than Sunni Islamists stand to gain anything? Apparently not, as Kapil Komireddi reports from Syria for the NYT in an article, "Syria's Crumbling Pluralism" (August 3, 2012):

The day begins here with the call to prayer and ends with the roar of gunfire. Syria's pluralistic society, which once rose above sectarian identity in a region often characterized by a homicidal assertion of religious belief, is now faced with civil disintegration and ethnic cleansing.

Komireddi summarizes the transformation in Syria:

Syria's 2.3 million Christians, constituting about 10 percent of the country's population, have generally known a more privileged existence under the Assad dynasty than even the Shiite Alawi sect to which President Bashar al-Assad belongs. Yet their allegiance to Assad was never absolute. Some Christians openly clamored for political change in the early months of the anti-government uprising. But as the rebellion became suffused with Sunni militants sympathetic to or affiliated with Al Qaeda, Christians recoiled.

Komireddi talks with a Syrian Christian:

A churchgoing Syrian told me that he used to see himself primarily as "Syrian" and that religious identity, in political terms, was an idea that never occurred to him -- until an opposition gang attacked his family earlier this year in Homs. "It's a label they pinned on us," he said. "If their revolution is for everyone, as they keep insisting it is, why are Christians being targeted? It is because what they are waging is not a struggle for freedom, and it's certainly not for everyone."

Follow the money:

As Saudi Arabian arms and money bolster the opposition, the 80,000 Christians who've been "cleansed" from their homes in Hamidiya and Bustan al-Diwan in Homs Province in March by the Free Syrian Army have gradually given up the prospect of ever returning home.

Meanwhile, the US, which should be the natural allies of threatened minorities, again stabs itself in the back:

The seeming indifference of the international community to the worsening condition of Syria's religious minorities -- and the near total absence of censure of the opposition forces by the Western governments arrayed against Assad -- is breeding a bitter anti-Americanism among many secular Syrians who see the United States aligning itself with Saudi Arabia, the fount of Wahhabism, against the Arab world's most resolutely secular state.

And the US just keeps digging that knife in deeper:

Washington is aware of the scale of the problem. As early as June 2011, Robert Stephen Ford, the U.S. ambassador to Syria, briefed his counterparts in Damascus about Al Qaeda's penetration of the opposition forces. By still ploughing ahead with its support for Saudi Arabia's effort to destabilize Syria, Washington, far from assisting Israel or weakening Iran, is helping to fuel a humanitarian crisis that will come back to haunt the United States.

I disagree on Iran. If Syria's government falls, Iran will lose influence in the region, but the trade-off will not be to America's benefit if the Sunni Islamists take over. Nor will such a state of affairs help Israel, as Komireddi notes, a point on which I agree, for Islamists will be even more hostile to Israel than the secular Alawites.

Could this be prevented? Perhaps if the West had worked more closely earlier with Russia on getting Bashir to step down, but nobody has been ahead of the curve on these developments in Syria . . .

Rise of Jihad in Syria . . .

Map of Syria

New York Times

I've condensed a NYT article by Neil MacFarquhar and Hwaida Saad, "As Syrian War Drags On, Jihadists Take Bigger Role" (July 29, 2012), for it reports on a development that I've already been keeping an eye on from other sources:

[T]he uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's government . . . is becoming more radicalized: homegrown Muslim jihadists, as well as small groups of fighters from Al Qaeda, are taking a more prominent role and demanding a say in running the resistance . . . . [L]arger, more organized and better armed Syrian militant organizations [are] pushing an agenda based on jihad, the concept that they have a divine mandate to fight . . . . [I]t attracts more financing . . . . [In] Idlib Province, the northern Syrian region where resistance fighters control the most territory, . . . jihadists [are] fighting under the black banner of the Prophet Muhammad . . . . The groups demanded to raise the prophet's banner -- solid black with "There is no god but God" written in flowing white Arabic calligraphy . . . . [T]he changes on the ground have actually brought closer to reality the Syrian government's early . . . claim that the opposition was being driven by foreign-financed jihadists . . . . Salafist groups, or Muslim puritans, now receive most foreign financing . . . . [J]ihad has become a distinctive rallying cry . . . . [G]reater attention has been focused on a Qaeda involvement in the uprising since mid-July, when fighters professing allegiance to the terrorist organization appeared during the opposition takeover of the Bab al-Hawa border crossing with Turkey . . . . Fighters, activists and analysts say that jihadi groups are emerging now . . . . [M]ost of the money flowing to the Syrian opposition is coming from religious donors in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region whose generosity hinges on Salafi teaching . . . . One recent . . . video, highlighting the storming of a police station hear Aleppo, featured a pistol, the Koran and a song about fighting [for Islam]. "The Koran in our hands, we defy our enemy, we sacrifice with our blood for religion."

Given the religious complexity of Syria, and the fact that these are Sunni jihadists, we can expect an increasing division of forces in which Sunni Arabs radicalized by Islamists drive Alawites, Christians, Shi'ites, and other minorities to band together in a common front opposed to the Sunnis and expressing support for the secular government.

This conflict could get very bloody as the government uses the minorities to fight an increasingly radicalized Sunni Arab majority (60%) to the death . . .