If Alawites are turning against Assad then his fate is
sealed

There seems to be a Baathist pattern of destroying Sunni
villages on the edge of the Alawite heartland

ROBERT FISK    
MONDAY 23 JULY 2012

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-if-alawites-are-turning-against-assad-then-his-fate-is-sealed-7965154.html

'Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' th' Tiger,"
Macbeth's First Witch announces, but Shakespeare got his
geography a bit wrong. Aleppo is 70 miles from the
Mediterranean. It's certainly ancient; Aleppo was
mentioned in the cuneiform tablets of Ebla in the third
millennium BC and belonged to the Hittites and the Emperor
Justinian, its 14th-century citadel walls still lowering
today over the revolutionary capital of northern Syria.

And that's the point. While the drama of last week's
assault on Bashar al-Assad's regime in Damascus stunned
the Arab world, the sudden outbreak of violence in Aleppo
this weekend was in one way far more important. For Aleppo
is the richest city in Syria - infinitely more so than
Damascus - and if the revolution has now touched this
centre of wealth, then the tacit agreement between the
Alawite-controlled government and the Sunni middle classes
must truly be cracking.

As the birthplace of agriculture - the Euphrates is only
70 miles to the east - Aleppo is also the headquarters of
the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry
Areas (Icarda), one of the finest institutions of its kind
in the world. It increases food production in Asia and
Africa in an area containing a billion people, 50 per cent
of whom earn their living from agriculture. Donors include
Britain, Canada, the US, Germany, Holland, the World Bank
- you name it. And its 500 employees are still operating
in Aleppo.

Alas, its principal research station at Tel Hadya, 20
miles from Aleppo, was raided by gunmen who stole vehicles
- to use them as "technicals" mounted with machine guns -
along with farm machinery and computers. Mercifully,
Icarda's gene bank is safe and has been duplicated outside
Syria. The Syrian government moved a military checkpoint
closer to Icarda's property at Tel Hadya - the Syrian
ministry of agriculture was always one of the more
progressive offices in Damascus - but what use this will
be in the coming days, we shall see.

Across all of Syria, the revolution has spread.
Tragically, there now seems to be a Baathist pattern of
destroying Sunni villages on the edge of the Alawite
heartland, the "frontier" of Alawi-stan in the great
agricultural plain of Hama province, below the mountains
where the Assad home town of Qardaha stands.

Last Wednesday, for example, two Syrian helicopters
attacked the small Sunni town of Haouch, forcing its 7,000
population to run for their lives. For two weeks, Haouch
and other small Sunni towns have been shelled; they do
indeed contain rebels but there is a growing suspicion -
no evidence, mark you - that this is a deliberate policy
of the Baath to prepare Syria for partition if Damascus
falls. Ominously, this "frontier" of fire matches almost
precisely the "State of the Alawites" temporarily created
by the post-First World War French mandate which chopped
Syria up into mini-nations partly on sectarian lines.

There are equal suspicions, I should add, that the first
great Syrian massacre of throat-cutting and executions in
the Sunni village of Houla on 25 May might have been a
reprisal for the attempted poisoning of Bashar al-Assad's
brother-in-law Asef Shawkat, whom the rebels at last cut
down in the bombing in Damascus last Wednesday. Others say
the attempted poisoning was more recent; but everything
that happened - and happens - in Syria is connected.

Take the faint outline of the old French mini-state of the
Hauran where Syria's Druze communities now live in growing
disharmony with the Assad regime. This month, there was a
dangerous outbreak of kidnapping in the region - resolved
only after Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader, made
a series of phone calls to prominent Druze in Syria.
Jumblatt himself has had a
friendly-hostile-friendly-hostile-relationship with the
Assad family - I may have left out a couple of 'friendlys'
and 'hostiles' there - but there is no doubt where he now
stands.

Last week, he urged the Druze as well as the Alawites in
Syria to join the revolt against the Assad regime. He has
even attacked his allies in Moscow, calling Russia's
support for Assad "no longer acceptable, morally or
politically."

And not without reason does he speak thus. Three Syrian
Druze have died in the revolution this month. Majd Zein, a
Druze Free Syrian Army member, was killed during an attack
on Rastan. Shafiq Shuqayr and Yasser Awwad were executed
by the Syrian army when they were discovered to be helping
government soldiers to defect in the area of Lajat. Now
Jumblatt is calling upon all Alawites to join the
rebellion instead of allowing themselves to remain a
minority dependent on Assad for their survival. "I say to
them that they must say they are Syrians before they are
Alawites."

And a final statistic to explain the revolution outside
Damascus. Latest figures show that 58 per cent of Syrian's
population under 24 years old are unemployed (higher,
even, than Egypt), while 48 per cent of the 18-29 year-old
age range - a statistic only beaten by Yemen - have no
jobs. They do now, of course. Most have joined the Syrian
revolt.

___________________________________________

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