Latakia, Syria - Flag-draped coffins depart from the drab military hospital here each morning these days, carrying the dead soldiers of the Syrian regime along winding rural roads to ancestral villages in the surrounding hill country.
All along the way, women come out to the roadside to throw rice and rose petals at the passing caravan. Cheering men shoot machine guns in the air. Children shout, "God! Bashar! Syria!" in homage of President Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian nation. They believe their native sons have sacrificed their lives to become "martyrs."
These are Syria's Alawites, one of the more peculiar and least-known sects in the Middle East. Here in a country ravaged by civil war, they make up only about 12% of the country's population of 22.5 million. And yet, as that war intensifies, they are taking on a potentially critical—and controversial—role defending the Assad regime.
Many Alawites characterize themselves as the first and last line of defense for their nation. And they may be right, now that other sectarian groups, including many Sunnis and Kurds, have turned into opposition or pulled from the government orbit.
"The Syrian army is being transformed into an Alawite militia," said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma. "As the Sunnis defect, more and more Alawites are being brought in, which is bringing in more of these villagers."
But as their own body count rises, Alawites are finding themselves supporting a regime whose violent attacks—first against demonstrators and now against an armed insurgency—have drawn international condemnation. Activists say unarmed civilians have been brutally killed, while the government casts the opposition as "armed gangs" or "terrorist mercenaries." Last week, in a widely reported military operation, hundreds of Syrians were killed in a suburb of the country's capital of Damascus. It was one of the bloodiest assaults in the 18-month war, with activists saying that men, women and children were shot while fleeing.
Whether any Alawites had any role in that attack isn't known. But soldiers and security officers from the sect have spearheaded other violent crackdowns on opposition in the country, according to experts on the Syrian military. Analysts say those attacks clearly leave the sect facing reprisals should the government fall or withdraw.
Indeed, some analysts and opposition figures believe senior regime officials are preparing a backup plan to retreat into the mountainous redoubts along the coast of Syria—perhaps with Syria's chemical weapons cache in tow—if they lose the battle for the two big cities Aleppo and Damascus, where fighting now takes place daily.
Whatever their future, Alawites—small groups of whom also live in Lebanon and Turkey—have an unusual history. Their name means "followers of Ali," referring to the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. They are treated as heretics by Sunni Muslims, and have their differences with Shiite Muslims as well. But in everyday life, modern Alawites are overwhelmingly secular. Many drink alcohol. They don't attend mosques. Women aren't required to cover. Their religion, guarded by a handful of sheiks who act as religious figureheads, is secretive and little understood even by many Alawites.
Here in Latakia, and especially in the villages in the hills surrounding the city, some of the largest and only populations of Alawites in the world can be found. The president's father, Hafez al Assad, rose from one of these hardscrabble villages to become president in 1971, drawing heavily on fellow Alawites to man high posts in the military and intelligence services. The clan has run the country ever since, and Alawites have dominated the key institutions of state power.
Today, most Alawites here say their support for the regime is unshakable. Echoing the regime line, repeated over and over on state media, they assert the country is pitted against foreign-inspired terrorists bent on destroying Syria.
"We're loyal to the president not as a person, but as a symbol of the state," says Rami Mahfoud, a 29-year-old Alawite from a village near Latakia.
Still, while the group's backing remains strong overall, some activists say the daily return of dozens of bodies has led to quiet grumbling among local Alawites, who have watched the Assad family enrich itself during their four-decade long rule. "We get the coffins, you get the palaces," goes one refrain among disaffected Alawites, though not one heard publicly. For its part, the regime has said all sects in the country support it.
The village of Kafr-Dabil, an enclave of about 2,500 Alawites about 20 miles in from the coast has held eight funerals for men killed in fighting across Syria in 18 months. Villagers gathered recently to "celebrate" a ninth.
They insist the funeral is a celebration because to them the soldier—Fouad Assad Mahfoud, a 34-year-old sergeant who was killed in the city of Homs—died defending his country.
Kafr-Dabil is a typical Alawite village, made up of a collection of dilapidated concrete homes with a main street of store fronts. Thousands of mourners walked an undulating path to the village cemetery. The men prayed while the women held back, comforting each other. Occasionally a defiant chant came up from the crowd.
Though poor, residents in the village are better off than their forefathers, who were mostly rural peasants. Some come from higher up in the hills, where they were safer from persecution during centuries of Ottoman rule.
They moved down from the mountains only during the early 20th century during the colonial French ruling mandate, which sought to build up the Alawites as a counterbalance to the predominantly Sunni population. Alawites even had their own state under the French mandate in the 1920s and '30s.
In the modern era, Alawite fortunes began edging upward in the late 1960s. Alawite generals who had joined the military under the French took control of the independent Syrian state. Hafez Assad became the country's first Alawite president in 1971.
In Kafr-Dabil, like many Alawite villages, some benefits began to flow. Pitted dirt roads were soon paved. Electricity arrived in 1980. A dam was built in 1985 for irrigation; now local farmers could switch from barely profitable tobacco to more lucrative lemon crops. Jobs in the military, security services and burgeoning national bureaucracy went to Alawites for the first time.
No one got rich—not like the Assad family, whose members dominated the local economy and began staking out prime developments sites along the coast in recent years. But the Alawites had a stake in Syria, a status they have enjoyed in only a few periods of their long history.
Today, the crisis has made the villagers more patriotic and yet at the same time left them looking inward. "We have our fish. We have our lemons. We have our olives. We have everything that we need here," said Samir Youseff, a 49-year-old who has long headed the local council of the village. "We're pulling together more and more, getting stronger."
Still, the uprising has put unprecedented pressure on Alawite communities, which are sprinkled in and around substantial populations of Sunni Muslims where antiregime sentiment often runs high.
Latakia has seen fewer protests and less of the continuing violence than elsewhere. But that is largely due to a massive armed security presence in and around the city—where Alawites make up less than half of the population—and the local authorities' willingness to use lethal force on even nonviolent demonstrators.
Protests erupted early on here, in late March last year, which was a surprise to many familiar with the strong support the regime enjoys in the area. At first they attracted just a few hundred people, mostly Sunni Muslims but also Christians and leftist Alawite activists in the city. Several protests took place beneath a statue of Hafez al Assad in the main square.
Within weeks, they grew larger—sparking a ferocious reaction by regime supporters. Armed Alawite youths showed up at demonstrations, some of the first instances of "shabiha," the gangs of regime-supported thugs that have become a hallmark of the government's response to dissent.
On April 17 last year, according to several activists, thousands of protesters were met by sniper fire from rooftops and armed thugs on the street. Some were gunned down as they walked with candles chanting, "The People are One!" Dozens were killed and injured, according to activists. Government officials say fewer people were killed and injured. They say the shooting came from armed protesters.
It was the last major demonstration in the city center. Two outlying areas have broken out in conflict since—an enclave of mostly poor Sunni Muslims, including a Palestinian refugee camp, on the fringe of Latakia city and the town of Haffa, which is wedged between several Alawite villages in the hills.
Both were shelled and then largely cleared of residents by the military. Security services arrested hundreds, according to activists and former residents. Haffa, once a town of about 100,000 people, remains largely empty, especially of its Sunnis.
Resident families have moved down into poorer Sunni areas around Latakia and to refugee camps in Turkey, say area residents. Many of the men have joined the Free Syrian Army or other rebel outfits, they say.
Government officials say the areas were taken over by armed "terrorist" gangs and residents requested the military help to remove them.
Potential reprisals aside, how Alawites react to the growing unrest in the country will be a critical factor in determining whether the country spirals into an all-out civil war or finds some way to bridge the sectarian rifts cleaving more deeply into the country's landscape each day the violence continues.
Some analysts and local Alawite activists wonder whether the expressions of die-hard support for the regime here might eventually give way to a fracturing of the Alawite community if the regime were to lose control of more of the country.
For now, though, the Assad regime repeats, often and loudly, that the Syrian state as constituted is all that prevents a return to this persecution. Most believe it. "We want dialogue. But we won't surrender," said Jaber Mohammed, a 41-year-old engineer from Kafr-Dabil. "We have rights in this country."
In the city of Latakia below, the cost of that effort was clear. Each night during the Islamic month of Ramadan, hundreds of heavily armed Alawite men gathered in front of mosques to prevent protests. Alawite youths roamed the streets in the back of pickup trucks, machine guns slung over their shoulders. Armed guards surrounded the statue of Hafez Assad in the main square.
"They're afraid," said an Alawite activist and government opponent as he looked on. "They don't know what will happen."