Alawites

The Alawites are an ethnoreligious community concentrated in the coastal mountains of western Syria, adherents of a distinct branch of Shia Islam that incorporates doctrines historically kept closed to outsiders and to most ordinary Alawite believers. Long a marginalized rural minority under Ottoman and French Mandate rule, Alawites rose to disproportionate political and military influence in Syria after the Ba'ath Party seized power in 1963, particularly under the al-Assad family, which ruled Syria from 1971 until Bashar al-Assad's overthrow in December 2024. Alawite identity is thus tightly bound up with modern Syrian political history, and smaller Alawite communities also live in Lebanon and Turkey's Hatay Province.