Many Syrians often claim that they never experienced sectarianism before the war, but this assertion is difficult to verify. While this may reflect the lived experiences of many Syrians, it is important to recognise the underlying power struggles and other sensitive issues.
The explosion of tensions during the Syrian revolution resulted from a long process of sectarianization rooted in the Ottoman period and French Mandate, becoming particularly pronounced under the Assad regime. While presenting itself as secular, the regime implemented policies that contributed to rising sectarian tensions across various regions of Syria, both before and after 2011.
Sectarianism as a Political Process in Syria
The literature on sectarianism in the “Middle East” is typically divided into two contrasting approaches: essentialist interpretations, which view sectarianism as an ancient and inherently conflictual factor, and instrumentalist approaches, which see sectarian identities as fluid and easily manipulated by political elites.
Recent research has adopted different approaches, examining sectarian identities as political constructs shaped by processes of sectarianization, in which existing identities are politicized within broader power struggles. Thus, while sectarian identities may exist, they do not automatically produce sectarianism; rather, it is their political instrumentalization that drives sectarianism.
In Syria, sectarianism wasn’t the sole factor shaping power struggles or state formation. However, over the past century, from the French Mandate to the present, sectarian identities have been politically mobilized in various ways; in favor of or in opposition to the colonial rule; toward Syrian nationalism or separatism.
Identity and State-Building: The Early Syrian Republic
The Syrian Republic emerged after a struggle against French colonial rule under a mandate that lasted from 1920 to 1946, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. During this period, sectarian identities weren’t fixed but rather influenced by factors such as class, region, and institutional dynamics, elements that would later play a significant role in shaping Syria's political trajectories.
Under Ottoman rule, most Muslims were considered part of the Islamic Ummah, while Christian and Jewish minorities had a degree of autonomy under the millet system. However, several Muslim groups, such as the Alawites, Druze, and Ismailis, were ostracized, often isolated in mountainous regions and exposed to Bedouin attacks. This discrimination was not driven by religious dogma alone but a political state of affairs, subject to political calculations. For instance, the Ottomans granted Ismailis protection against Alawite attacks in the mid-19th century and formally included them in the Ummah (Balanche, 2018).
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the imposition of the French Mandate fundamentally reshaped these dynamics. The French Mandate is considered the first to overtly politicize sectarian identity as part of its "divide and rule” strategy. It introduced territorial division by briefly establishing the Alawite State along the Syrian coast and the Jabal al-Druze State in Suweida, in an attempt to challenge the Sunni majority population. It also supported Kurdish-Christian autonomy movements that emerged in eastern Syria’s "Al-Jazira" region between 1936 and 1939 (Savelsberg, 2014).
While these territorial divisions didn’t last, the French introduced a personal status law that classified Syrians according to religious affiliation, a measure widely argued to have a long-lasting impact on the institutionalization of sectarianism in Syria (Khalaf, 2025). These French policies and strategies weren’t conditioned by sectarian favoritism but rather were aimed at preserving French interests and undermining the liberation movement represented by the Syrian nationalist movement.
The nationalist movement mobilized against both French colonial rule and its attempts at sectarian fragmentation, seeking to consolidate the Arab character of the country to unify Arabs against French and British colonization and threats of settler colonialism in Palestine. This consolidation included religious recognition of Muslim minority groups. In 1932, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, issued a fatwa, or religious legal ruling, recognizing these groups and pursuing policies to reintegrate the fragmented regions into the Syrian state (Balanche, 2018). Meanwhile, Syrian nationalists instrumentalized political identities to mobilize against the French occupation and their allies, including launching a pan-Islamic campaign among Kurdish tribes to turn them against Kurdish-Christian movements.
The nationalist bloc was primarily led by urban Sunnis, prompting the French to favor the recruitment of Alawites, Druze, Christians, Ismailis, and Circassians into the regional army known as Les Troupes Spéciales du Levant. The favoritism shown to rural minorities in the army was part of France's strategy to counter the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925-1927 (Savelsberg, 2014). This force later became the backbone of the Syrian armed forces, creating opportunities for upward mobility, particularly for Alawites, who by 1945 constituted approximately one-third of the army in Syria and Lebanon.
Following the withdrawal of French troops and the establishment of the Syrian Republic, Arab nationalism became the dominant political ideology in Syria. While it was successful in reducing sectarian tensions, the structural legacies of the French and Ottoman periods persisted. Moreover, Arab nationalism was considered repressive toward non-Arab groups, especially Kurds.
These structural conditions, marked by the empowerment of local and regional elites, the weakening of central state capacity, and an army dominated by officers from rural and minority backgrounds, laid the groundwork for political instability that resulted in successive military coups. Moreover, dissatisfaction among the imperial powers, especially following the union between Syria and Egypt, encouraged intervention in Syrian politics. This period set the stage for reframing political struggles, particularly class-based and urban-rural struggles, in sectarian terms.
Hafez al-Assad and the Authoritarian State
Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970 through an internal coup within the Syrian Ba’ath party, establishing one of the longest-lasting authoritarian regimes in the region. Although formally committed to Arab nationalism and secularism, Assad governed through networks in which sectarian, tribal, and regional ties played significant roles. His rule is essential for understanding how sectarian narratives later gained political potency under his son, Bashar al-Assad.
Assad’s rise followed decades of political instability. Successive military coups and failed unity with Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser largely contributed to repressing political life in Syria. His first objective was to consolidate power within the Ba’ath Party, then the Syrian Army and ultimately the Syrian Republic. Assad instrumentalized Alawite sectarian affiliation to form a cohesive, loyal elite core, appointing trusted Alawite officers to command security forces and elite military units, ensuring firm control over state power. This strategy centralized authority within a minority core (Hinnebusch, 2025).
The military and state security apparatus became primary avenues of upward social mobility for the historically poor and marginalized Alawite community, therefore tying the regime's survival to the community's loyalty. At the same time, Assad promoted an inclusive Arab national identity to secure legitimacy among the Sunni majority, positioning Syria as the champion of Arab nationalism against Zionism.
Economically, Assad’s socialist reforms, such as land redistribution, directly threatened the interests of upper-class Sunni landlords and merchants, who dominated society in the post-independence period. However, Assad later reversed some of the Ba’athist radical policies to co-opt key businessmen of the traditional Sunni elite, especially in Damascus and Aleppo, exchanging political loyalty for economic privilege.
Assad's strategy succeeded in gaining the trust and loyalty of Sunni elites in these two major cities but failed to secure broader Sunni legitimacy. In Hama, the Muslim Brotherhood found support among dispossessed Sunni elites affected by Assad's socialist reforms, and the conservative middle class opposed to Assad's secularism. The Brotherhood framed their confrontation with the state as a sectarian struggle against an Alawite-led regime. Hama slowly became the epicenter of anti-Assad mobilization in the late 1970s, combining religious legitimacy with local grievances.
Assad seized this opportunity to crush the Muslim Brotherhood movement and instill fear in his opposition. Framing it as an existential threat, the Syrian army, led by loyal Alawite commanders and intelligence units, marched toward Hama to crush the rebellion, leading to a massacre that killed thousands of civilians. The massacre was a test of Assad's strategy: the loyalty of his army and intelligence forces, the compliance of the co-opted bourgeoisie, and the absence of mass Sunni participation and mobilization. Ultimately, this massacre shaped the following decades of both Hafez and Bashar al-Assad's rule: a securitized state sustained by fear of Sunni retribution and by binding the Alawite community's fate to the regime's survival.
Bashar al-Assad: Liberalizing the Economy, Reinforcing Authority
When Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2000, many Syrians hoped for political reform. Instead, the early years of his rule revealed contradictions within the Syrian political system. While pursuing economic liberalization, Assad simultaneously reinforced authoritarian control. These contradictions intensified social fragmentation and allowed sectarian perceptions to resurface, undermining the regime’s secular Arab nationalist narrative.
The early months of Bashar’s rule witnessed what became known as the Damascus Spring, a brief period of heightened political and social debate, primarily led by secular intellectuals and civil society figures calling for constitutional reform. Initially, Bashar seemed tolerant of this movement; however, he decisively repressed it in autumn 2001. He arrested activists involved in the movement, closed independent forums, and reinforced the power of his security apparatus. This episode, coinciding with a series of economic liberalization policies, highlighted a consistent pattern in his leadership: economic change without political reform.
Bashar adopted neoliberal reforms, shifting from the economic model inherited from his father. He reduced state subsidies, privatized banks, and expanded trade. These policies deepened inequalities and concentrated wealth among a narrow elite connected to the presidency through family and patronage, most visibly through Bashar’s cousin Rami Makhlouf and Bashar’s wife Asmaa al-Assad. The reforms fueled perceptions of sectarian exclusion, especially among the middle class, which was most affected.
Economic stress deepened among Syrians due to the state’s retreat from rural welfare, while the 2006-2010 drought, considered one of the worst in Syria’s modern history, pushed more people from rural and agricultural regions toward urban peripheries. However, the growing grievances articulated in class and regional terms were increasingly framed through sectarian idioms, especially with the regime’s alignment with Iran and Hezbollah during a period of extreme sectarian polarization following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The Syrian War: The Militarization of Sectarianism
When the Syrian revolution began in March 2011, it wasn’t sectarian in its initial phase. Protesters were motivated by demands for dignity, political reform, and social justice; their chants emphasized unity and rejected sectarian division. However, the uprising erupted into a domestic and regional environment profoundly shaped by sectarian and geopolitical polarization. The war in Syria did not create sectarianism but activated and militarized a long-standing process of sectarianization.
The Assad regime immediately seized the opportunity, interpreting the uprising through the strategies inherited from Hafez’s era: survival through securitization and identity-based mobilization. From the outset, the regime framed the protests as an Islamist conspiracy threatening minorities and the secular state, presenting itself as the guarantor of diversity and defender of minorities. As repression escalated, the regime relied heavily on sectarian militias from Iraq and Lebanon, reinforcing perceptions that violence was being exercised along sectarian lines.
On the opposition side, early cross-sectarian mobilization gradually eroded under escalating violence and regional and foreign interventions, and the civic space disappeared as civilian coordination committees were replaced by armed groups built on familial and sectarian networks. Regional rivalries between the Gulf states and Iran were crucial in the flow of funds to Islamist factions on both sides and in the war of proxies over Syria.
The Syrian war must therefore be understood as the endpoint and culmination of a long process of sectarianization rooted in colonial fragmentation, weak state formation, authoritarianism, economic inequalities, and regional sectarian geopolitics. The war did not introduce sectarianism into Syrian society but transformed it into a dominant logic of violence and governance.
Syria Post-Assad: Can Syria Move Beyond Sectarianism?
The trajectory of sectarianism in Syria, especially during the civil war, offers little hope that it’ll be easily overcome with the fall of Assad. The Assad regime has left a legacy of sectarian hate and collective fear, especially among minorities, alongside a fragmented national identity and a collapsed state unable to guarantee equal safety and inclusion to all its people.
On the other hand, the rise of Haya’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Islamic legitimacy under Ahmad al-Sharaa have not demonstrated a departure from past patterns of Assad’s rule. Instead, it has once again chosen to centralize power in the hands of a few, while establishing a state of fear among minorities through collective punishment and exclusion.
Sectarianism in Syria is neither an eternal social reality nor a product of revolution and war. It is the outcome of a long historical process rooted in colonial rule, state formation, authoritarian heritage, and regional political competition. The politicization of sectarian identity began early under the French Mandate, was entrenched through Hafez al-Assad’s securitization, deepened under Bashar al-Assad’s neoliberal exclusion, and continues today through Ahmad al-Sharaa’s politics of fear and majoritarian control.
The post-Assad landscape suggests that dismantling sectarianism requires far more than regime change. It demands inclusive state reconstruction and a redefinition of citizenship beyond fear, loyalty, and sectarian identity. Without this, sectarianism risks remaining a framework for Syria’s future conflicts.
References:
Hinnebusch, R. & Valbjørn, M. (2025). Theorizing Sectarianism in Syria – Toward a Framework of Analysis. In Hinnebusch, R. & Valbjørn, M. (Eds). Sectarianism and Civil War in Syria. Routledge.
Khalaf, R. (2025), Sectarianism Amongst Syrian Christians: Aleppo, Damascus, Daraa, Al‑Hasakah, Maaloula and Homs. In Hinnebusch, R. & Valbjørn, M. (Eds). Sectarianism and Civil War in Syria. Routledge.
Conflict, democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East: Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Palgrave Macmillan.
Seifan, S. (2024). Economic Reform in Syria during the First Decade of Bashar al-Assad’s Presidency. Haramoon Center For Contemporary Studies.