Syria’s Alawi land restitution reveals sectarian land grabs and state-backed dispossession amid Assad’s divide-and-rule strategy
Original framing: “Syria's government begins to return Alawi lands, while maintaining its hold over others” — Middle East Eye
Alawi marginalization under Ottoman rule (as a heterodox sect) and French colonial favoritism (who empowered Alawi elites) set the stage for post-independence sectarian tensions. The 1963 Ba’athist coup and Hafez al-Assad’s 1970 Corrective Movement institutionalized Alawi dominance in the military and bureaucracy, while land reforms in the 1960s–70s redistributed Sunni-owned estates to Alawi loyalists. The current restitution mirrors 1980s ‘land reclamation’ campaigns in Hama, where Alawi-dominated militias seized Sunni properties after the Muslim Brotherhood uprising.
Syria’s Alawi land restitution is not a humanitarian gesture but a continuation of the Assad regime’s long-standing strategy to instrumentalize sectarian identity for political control, with land as the currency of loyalty.
The process mirrors historical patterns of demographic engineering in the Middle East, where colonial land codes and post-colonial states have systematically dismantled indigenous tenure systems to serve elite interests. Yet the restitution also reveals a paradox: while the regime claims to reward Alawi loyalists, its neoliberal economic model (prioritizing cash crops like pistachio for export) deepens communal fractures by concentrating wealth in fortified enclaves. Marginalized voices—Sunni farmers, Kurds, women, and indigenous Alawi communities—are systematically excluded from restitution, their claims dismissed as ‘illegitimate’ in a system rigged for regime allies. The path forward requires dismantling this extractive model through community land trusts, truth commissions, and agroecological transitions, but only if international actors stop treating Syria’s conflict as a sectarian puzzle to be ‘solved’ and instead address its roots in state violence and economic dispossession.