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| Hafez Assad's tomb, the Assad mausoleum and Dr. Khayyer |
Unrest and infighting involving the most prominent
Syrian Alawite clans in President Bashar al-Assad’s hometown seems to have
taken a turn to the worst with the kidnapping by pro-Assad shabiha of three
girls from the dissident Khayyer family “to bring Qardaha to heel.”
An unnamed female Alawite activist tells Sky
News Arabia, “(The shabiha) said the girls’ abduction would teach Qardaha a
lesson. They said before they taught Deraa a lesson by locking up its children.”
“But this won’t happen,” she added cryptically.
“Kidnapping is not alien to Alawite families that
have long suffered at the hands of the Assads’ shabiha and sidekicks. However,
it’s the first time kidnapping takes place over differences of political
opinion,” she said.
Qardaha is a sleepy mountain town of 20,000 Alawites
overlooking the coastal city of Latakia.
Its
chief claim to fame is that it is the birthplace of the late Hafez al-Assad,
president of Syria for nearly 30 years.
It
is also home to the Assad mausoleum, where Hafez, his mother Na’asa and son
Basel, who died in a 1994 car crash at the age of 32, are entombed.
Tension and unrest have been on the rise in Qardaha
since September 28, when local enforcer Mohammad al-Assad, a cousin of Bashar
nicknamed Sheikh el-Jabal (or “Lord of the Mountain”), was killed in a shootout
with rival Alawite clansmen.
According to various press and social media accounts,
Mohammad al-Assad was in a town café when he overheard a
discussion of the growing number of body bags and death notices in Qardaha, the
escalating level
of violence in the country and the risk this represents to the Alawite
community.
Mohammad
al-Assad took offense when a member of the Khayyer clan said Bashar should step
down, having mishandled the uprising. He pulled out his firearm and started
shooting, triggering a prolonged gunfight between his Assad and allied Shaleesh
cohorts and members of the rival Khayyer, Abboud and Othman clans, all of them
Alawite families.
Novelist
and Alawite activist Samar
Yazbek, a kinswoman of the Othmans, said last Monday five of her relatives
had been killed.
The Khayyer, Abboud and
Othman families are well respected within the Alawite community. They have
produced many lawyers, engineers and doctors.
Hostility between the
Khayyers, three of whose girls have now been taken hostage, and the Assads
dates back a long way – to the execution of the poet Hassan al-Khayyer in 1979,
according to France’s authoritative Le Monde.
The hostility was inflamed
last month by the arrest of Dr. Abdelaziz al-Khayyer on his return from an
official visit to Beijing with a delegation of the
National
Coordination Committee for the Forces of Democratic Change, an opposition
group tolerated by the regime. He has not been heard of since.
Bashar’s father Hafez
had jailed Dr. al-Khayyer, a physician, for 13 years.
Syria’s Corleone
Marie Michelet, writing
for France24, quotes a French Syria expert on the state of play in
Qardaha:
“If
it’s a scene reminiscent of the film ‘The Godfather,’ that’s because this is
indeed a town run by a ruthless mafia-style family,” said Syria expert Fabrice
Balanche, who is head of the Mediterranean and Orient Research Group at Lyon
University.
“Qardaha
is Syria’s Corleone,” he
said in reference to the Sicilian town immortalized in Francis Ford Coppola’s
classic mafia trilogy. “The Assad family has ruled the town mafia-style with
impunity for decades.”
Balanche
was not surprised that rival clans had started to turn against the Assads, who
have maintained a stranglehold over the town since before they changed their
family name from al-Wahesh in the 1920s [Wahesh is Arabic for “Monster” while
Assad means “Lion”].
“They
were originally a minor Alawite family that over time imposed itself on the
region by brute force,” Balanche said.
“Many
previously powerful clans have been marginalized, and we’ve been hearing for
months that Alawite families are fed up of seeing their sons die and are
worried for the future.
“But
this is the first time we’ve heard of Alawites in Qardaha in anything like open
rebellion.”
The
story of the gunfight at Qardaha has also been told by former French diplomat
Ignace Leverrier on his Un Oeil sur la
Syrie (An Eye on Syria) blog.
Leverrier
paints Mohammed al-Assad as a government-sanctioned Mafia lord, making huge
profits from business across Syria and of using the Mukhabarat secret
intelligence service as a weapon to terrorize the local population.
He
even made money, according to Leverrier, by taking payments from families with
relatives in prison in exchange for information on their health and
whereabouts, continuing to give positive reports for cash when some of these
prisoners had been long dead.
His
killing would prove to be a key turning point...
Since
September 28, Qardaha has been locked down, according to information from the
local Revolutionary Coordination Committee. All roads leading to the town are
blocked and no information has been allowed to come out...
