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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| Against Syrian anger |
| 2012-02-06 |
| Hat tip Dry Bones A year ago, Ali was enjoying university in Damascus, looking forward to a career in dentistry and paying little heed to politics in a country controlled by a single family for over 40 years. That all changed, not so much when other Syrians took to the streets to demand President Bashar al-Assad step down, but when a mysterious message popped up on his Facebook page; it told him to get out of town, or die – because he was the wrong religion. “You Alawite,” read a text on the social networking site, widely hailed by pro-democracy activists for enabling the Arab Spring uprisings. “We don’t want to see your face in Barzeh.” Now, long dormant religious bigotries have thrust politics on Ali, who was born into the minority Alawite sect and still lives in the Damascus suburb of Barzeh, where most of his neighbours are Sunni Muslims. The 25-year-old student is now a firm supporter of Assad, not from any admiration for the wealthy elite that has run the country with an iron – and often bloody – fist for four decades, but because they too are Alawites. “They sent me the threat just because I am an Alawite living in Barzeh,” Ali said during a series of interviews Reuters conducted in the Syrian capital last week with a variety of Alawite residents who asked that their identities be concealed. If Assad falls, they fear a bloodbath for fellow Alawites, outnumbered six to one by the Sunnis in a Syrian population of 23 million, which also includes large minorities of Christians and ethic Kurds. The facts that MSM considers too confusing for you simple peasants |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #1 From the article: Typical of such tales is that of Ali, the dental student. He said he took the threat on Facebook seriously because one of his uncles had been killed. His body parts were delivered in a bag to his home village in the Alawites' western mountain heartland. Mahmoud, who hails originally from Rabia in rural Hama province, said 39 people from his village had been killed since March: "If someone leaves the village, is stopped at a checkpoint and they know he is an Alawite, they kill him." If this is indeed what Assad intends, the eviction of the Sunni community from Syria would be the first time in recent memory since the creation of Israel that Sunnis have been forced out in large numbers from the lands they conquered many centuries ago. Prior to Israel's creation, the last time something like this happened in the Mediterranean region was during the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, when large numbers of Sunnis fled the Christian majority Ottoman territories that became Serbia, Greece, Wallachia, Moldavia and Montenegro. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2012-02-06 21:11 |