Opinion

Syria's dangerous Assadism-Alawite conflation

Remnants of the old regime want to perpetuate the myth that the ruling Assad family and the country’s Alawite minority were one and the same. They never were and still aren’t.

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Lina Shamy
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Syria's dangerous Assadism-Alawite conflation

Lina Shamy
last update on

For decades, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and then his son, President Bashar al-Assad, deliberately and systematically equated their respective rules with Syria’s Alawite community, presenting the two as inseparable. Carefully engineered, this bound the fate of a religious community to the survival of an authoritarian regime.

Today, more than a year after Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia as his government and army crumbled, some Western media outlets still perpetuate this conflation between the Assads and Syria’s Alawites. By stripping events in Syria of their political context and framing them instead through a sectarian lens, it perpetuates the Assadist legacy. The result is a superficial narrative—one that reduces complex political struggles to crude communal labels and obscures the actual faultlines.

This was evident in the coverage of the recent demonstrations in Alawite areas, including Latakia, Jableh, and Tartus, on 28 December. Several reports described them as “Alawite protests” even after it became clear that they had been infiltrated by those loyal to the former regime.

Such framing implicitly aligns with the regime’s long-standing effort to brand Alawites as synonymous with Assadism. In reality, the protests weren't a show of communal will, but rather were heavily penetrated by Assadist networks seeking the return of former regime officers and the release of those responsible for atrocities against their fellow Syrians during the Assads’ rule.

False equivalence

The coverage also failed to make it clear that the counterprotests were not a response to the religious identity or perceived Alawite character of the protests, but to the perception of Assadist infiltration. In short, they were a response to a political provocation rather than a sectarian mobilisation. So when journalists casually note in their reports that Assad was an Alawite, this only serves to reinforce the false equivalence.

Regardless of the sectarian cloak some wish to dress their narratives in, the problem Syrians face isn't Alawites, it's Assadism. Therefore, there is a moral imperative to draw a distinction between Alawite identity and Assadist ideology and media institutions bear a responsibility here. Failure to do so comes with dangerous consequences.

Regardless of the sectarian cloak some wish to dress their narratives in, the problem Syrians face isn't Alawites, it's Assadism

One example of this failure is how the international media either ignored or downplayed statements issued by prominent Alawite figures explicitly rejecting protests incited by regime remnants and adopted a national discourse that sought to disentangle the community from Assadist efforts to permanently bind them to decades of rule.

And while none of this negates the difficult truth that there was widespread Alawite involvement in Assad-era crimes, this reality is inseparable from the former regime's deliberate policy of hijacking the Alawite community's political agency and coercing it into complicity. A serious reckoning means confronting painful questions and engaging in uncomfortable dialogue. There is no shortcut if Syria is to move beyond its past.

Germany as a case study

History offers a useful parallel. After World War II, disentangling the meaning of 'Nazi' from 'German' proved profoundly difficult. There was no official policy equating the two, yet socially and psychologically, they were often indistinguishable, particularly outside Germany.

Allied media initially used language that blurred the line, frequently referring to Nazi crimes as German crimes. Inside Germany, however, the understanding was very different, and state newspapers operating under Allied supervision deliberately distinguished between 'Germanness' and 'Nazism'. For instance, post-war Nazi demonstrations were led by a "criminal minority" and were "un-German".

These divergent journalistic approaches sparked intense debates about German identity and the roots of Nazism. Some Allied commentators argued that Germans were culturally predisposed to Nazism; others maintained that Nazism was the project of a criminal elite that hijacked society.

Media terminology is never neutral. The words chosen to describe events are inseparable from prevailing political strategies.

Reeducation, media play key roles

It took a generational distance to dismantle the stigma. Education and the press played decisive roles. The Cold War reshaped Allied priorities, and integrating West Germany into the Western bloc became a strategic imperative, so language fusing Nazism with German identity was increasingly seen as counterproductive.

There was a growing recognition that collective attribution of guilt and sustained moral panic risked democratic reconstruction. By the early 1950s, Allied media was framing Nazism as a criminal ideology imposed by a narrow elite, not an intrinsic feature of German identity.

De-Nazification programmes emerged from this conceptual shift. These distinguished ideology from society, and perpetrators from the broader population. This historical lesson matters today. Media terminology is never neutral.

The words chosen to describe events are inseparable from prevailing political strategies and policy orientations. They shape public perception, collective identity, and the possibilities of reconciliation in transitional contexts. In Syria's pivotal moment, insisting on analytical precision is not an academic exercise; it is a prerequisite for justice, coexistence, and any meaningful post-Assad future.

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Related topics Syrian Alawites Assad Syria Sectarianism conflation