The Alawite Dilemma

The Alawite people of Syria has a dilemma.

It is Assad or genocide for them.

The Sunday Telegraph said recently that Assad’s Syrian Arab Army (SAA) will collapse soon, because one-third of Syrian Alawite “males of military age” have already died fighting the Sunny. Lack of manpower, the theory goes, will doom the Alawites.

But the SAA won’t fall simply because it reaches a certain fixed percentage of casualties. There have been a lot of attempts to come up with a percentage like that, but they just don’t work. Too many variables, especially the question of morale, are involved, and there are too many cases where armies have dissolved without firing a shot, or held out to the last cartridge, to come up with a formula that works everywhere.

And when you’re dealing with the war in Syria, everything is murky, everything is doubtful. For example, how many Alawites are there in Syria? Not just Alawite fighters; how many Alawites, period? The usual figure is 15% of the total Syrian population of 27 million, say 4,000,000 people. But this is Syria we’re talking about, not Norway; there aren’t neatly dressed census-takers knocking on doors in Syria’s sectarian-segregated neighborhoods asking, “One last question, sir/madam, if I may: can you tell me your sectarian identity so I can paint a red X on your door for the death squads?” All we have are guesses about the Syrian population and its sectarian breakdown.

And one of the more sensible guesses is the one made by Kyle Orton, who says the Alawite population was much smaller than the official estimates. The Alawites, like the Maronite Christians down the coast in Lebanon, have been emigrating for generations, partly out of a deep fear of the Sunni majority dominating the Euphrates River Valley to the east.

Once a pattern of emigration starts, it tends to grow, as first-generation emigrants beg their kin to join them in a new country. In fact, the total Alawite population may have been closer to 2,000,000 than 4,000,000 at the start of the war.

And there’s no doubt that a lot of Alawites have been killed fighting. The SAA is really an Alawite combat force. So almost all of the SAA’s casualties have been Alawites. And SAA’s casualties have been horrific. Again, it’s hard to get a clear estimate, but it seems likely that at least 200,000 fighters from the SAA and its auxiliary forces have died. That’s a huge, horrific death toll for a small community like the Alawites.

But does it mean the Alawites are doomed? Not necessarily. It’s just not easy to say how many dead it takes to destroy the fighting ability of a tribe or army.

There are hundreds of examples of tribes who fought to the last man, then the last woman, and then the last child. In fact, there are probably far more of these stories than we remember, because…well, you know, genocide. Real genocide, the kind where nobody’s left to tell about it. Moby Dick with no narrator, just a few hats floating on the waves. Who knows how many tribes have vanished from the planet? Genocide is the hidden norm of history.

Then there are the tribes and nations that survived, the ones we remember, but suffered incredible casualties before surrendering. A prime example of this sort of suicidal heroism is Paraguay, the most heroic, unappreciated story in the Western Hemisphere. During the War of the Triple Alliance, Paraguay lost two-thirds of its male population. When the men were dead, the women and kids fought on. Long after casualty rates reached the 15%, the Paraguayan forces, which pretty much consisted of everyone in the country, fought on and even won major victories.

In September 1866, long after Paraguayan casualties had passed that supposedly magic one-third level, a Paraguayan force defeated a mixed Brazilian/Argentine army that outnumbered it five to one in the Battle of Curupayty, killing or wounding 5,000 out of 25,000 invaders while losing only about 150 of their own.

You could multiply these examples of armies and tribes fighting on, way past that 30% casualty mark, across eras and continents.

And if you look at the other anomaly — big, powerful armies skedaddling like puppies after suffering only a few casualties…well, those examples are even easier to find (and a lot less heartbreaking to read about).

The so-called Iraqi Army, which set a new world land-speed record bugging out of Mosul before losing even one soldier to the handful of Islamic State pickup trucks “closing in” on the city. In the case of the “Iraqi Army,” aka “Cash Cow for Al-Maliki’s Dawa-Party buds,” the percentage of casualties which rendered their fighting force ineffective and outta town was . . . zero.

So, no matter how eagerly the Telegraph rubs its liver-spotted old hands in glee at the prospect of the Alawites’ imminent dissolution, there’s no magic casualty formula that can tell you when Assad’s regime will dissolve. You’d think we’d know that by now, since pundit imbeciles have been predicting the imminent demise of Assad’s regime since 2011.

The Alawites are likely to fight to the last boy or old man because they know very well there’ll be very little mercy for them if the Sunni win. Long before the current war started, graffiti in Sunni neighborhoods in Syria said, “Christians to Beirut, Alawi to the graveyard.” That wasn’t what you call “mere hyperbole,” either; when Sunni militias made it into Alawite territory in Latakia Province in 2013, they killed hundreds of civilians.

Even Alawites who hate Assad’s clan have joined up, because when you belong to a small hill sect in a sea of Sunni sectarians, you’re in a prison situation: stick with your own or die.

The fact that the SAA may eventually collapse isn’t really as interesting as the fact that this tiny minority sect’s army has lasted so long against a Sunni majority.