Sectarianism in Syria

Sectarianism in the Syrian context refers to political mobilisation along religious community lines — Sunni, Alawite, Druze, Christian, Shia — and to the use of communal identity as a resource for political competition and conflict. Syria’s diverse religious landscape (Sunni Arab majority of approximately 70%, Alawite 10–12%, Christian 10%, Druze 3%, with smaller communities) has made sectarian politics both a persistent risk and a consistently exploited political tool. The French Mandate explicitly cultivated sectarian identity as an instrument of colonial management, creating separate administrative units for different communities and recruiting minorities into security forces on explicitly communal grounds. Under the Assad regime, the Ba’ath Party officially proclaimed a secular, non-sectarian ideology while the security state was simultaneously built on Alawite patronage networks whose logic was inherently sectarian. When the 2011 uprising began, the regime deliberately used sectarian mobilisation as a survival strategy — warning minority communities that a Sunni majority uprising threatened them, and deploying shabiha militias from Alawite communities in attacks on Sunni neighbourhoods in mixed cities like Homs. This activation of sectarian fear, alongside the entry of jihadist groups whose anti-Alawite rhetoric fulfilled the regime’s predictions, transformed what began as a broadly based civil uprising into a conflict with increasingly sectarian dimensions. The sectarian violence that the uprising produced was simultaneously a consequence of the regime’s survival strategy and a self-fulfilling prophecy that justified it.