With every new security incident targeting Alawites – and, more broadly, other minorities – memories resurface of the “Useful Syria” that former president Bashar Al-Assad once spoke about before his flight from the country. That imagined Syria was to be emptied of anyone who might support the revolution. Entire towns and districts were depopulated through siege, forced displacement and “reconciliation agreements” that ultimately bused residents of opposition areas to Idlib, then under the control of Turkish-backed Islamist factions.
As those areas were emptied, an aggressive wave of property acquisition swept through Damascus and elsewhere. Much of it was conducted by Iran and by foreign militias it brought in from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond – fighters and families intended to settle in place of those expelled. Parallel to this came the reconfiguration of whole neighbourhoods along sectarian lines, especially around shrines and sites linked to Iran. A series of decrees issued by Assad allowed for confiscating the homes of the displaced or rebuilding their districts after their expulsion or killing.
A similar process unfolded in northern Syria. Islamist factions imported “mujahideen” from across the world and settled them, with their families, in villages emptied of their Druze, Shia and Christian inhabitants. Something comparable happened in Kurdish areas, especially in Syria’s far northwest near the Turkish border, where Afrin and its surroundings were taken over by Turkish-aligned Islamist factions. Its original Kurdish residents were expelled and replaced with displaced families from the Damascus suburbs, Homs and elsewhere.
In effect, Syria was being re-engineered demographically to serve the logic of a “Useful Syria”, and every actor with power on the ground – regime forces, opposition factions, foreign states – was deeply involved. The groundwork for partition was being laid quietly, despite official talk of territorial unity. None of this would have been possible without the approval and support of the main external players: Turkey, Russia, Iran and the United States.
This demographic transformation drove the final nails into the coffin of Syrian society and its cohesion. It was not only a form of collective punishment everywhere it was applied, but also a near-insurmountable barrier to any future social reconciliation. Such reciprocal demographic engineering sidelined the idea of a shared homeland, replacing it with sect, tribe and ethnicity. It entrenched dangerous fault lines that Syrians continue to pay for nearly a year after Assad’s escape and the takeover of Damascus by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) under Ahmad Al-Sharaa.
Assad’s departure did not end these practices. It simply reshuffled the actors. Demographic engineering continued, now under a new authority. For many of the displaced and marginalised who suffered under Assad, HTS’s rise to power felt like an unexpected moment of triumph – the first time in years they felt represented and protected by a power aligned with their sectarian identity.
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The new authorities dismantled the old institutions – army, security forces, police – and imported their own cadres from Idlib and the eastern provinces, placing them mainly in Damascus, a city already strained by overcrowding. The “solution” became the displacement of poor Alawite families from their neighbourhoods through threats, intimidation and, at times, legal manoeuvres related to property seizure. These areas, long settled informally by poor Alawite migrants to the capital, were declared reclaimable by their “original owners”.
HTS failed to activate any form of transitional justice and allowed weapons to remain freely in the hands of its partisans, without scrutiny of their backgrounds. It appointed its own members – often from the same communities involved in earlier sectarian tensions – to sensitive areas. This produced a rise in acts of revenge, initially individual but increasingly patterned. Innocent Alawites, including elderly people, women and youths, have been killed in escalating attacks, especially in Homs, its countryside and parts of rural Hama. Entire Alawite villages have been emptied through targeted killings meant to terrorise residents into fleeing, their places soon taken over by HTS-aligned families.
These actions are reinforced by a daily barrage of sectarian incitement on social media by HTS supporters, sending a clear message to Alawites in Homs and Hama: leave.
The coastal massacres last March also bore the unmistakable imprint of demographic engineering. Mixed Alawite–Sunni villages were burned to the ground, rendered uninhabitable – echoing what the former regime had done in many Sunni areas. Similar events unfolded in parts of Suwayda after the July massacre, where entire villages were torched and their populations killed or displaced. Meanwhile, armed groups from Suwayda expelled Bedouin families living in the province.
Assad had sought a “useful state” populated exclusively by loyalists, protected by an oligarchic elite and a sect-neutral security grip, manipulating sectarian fears whenever convenient. The new authorities, by contrast, seek a state that resembles them – intolerant of plurality, closer to the factional order HTS maintained in Idlib, anchored openly in sectarian dominance and reducing the Sunni majority to a sect anxious about protecting its new privileges. This undermines any chance of Sunnis serving as the national anchor capable of safeguarding a Syrian social contract and protecting the minorities scattered across the country.
Demographic change continues today, as it has since 2012, but now it takes on a new face shaped by shifting international dynamics and the decision to dispense, at last, with Assad. Yet those same dynamics have deep roots in Syria, destined sooner or later to collide with the worsening security chaos generated by the current authorities’ demographic ambitions. Nothing lies ahead but further ruin unless the ruling powers accept that they govern a country that is plural, diverse and enriched by its many components – and that preserving this richness is in their own interest as much as it is in the interest of the Syrian people.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of +963.
