Syria’s crisis : The long road to Damascus

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  • Syria’s crisis: The long road to Damascus | The Economist
    http://www.economist.com/node/21547305

    It is no accident that the areas which have fallen under rebel control are almost entirely Sunni. In line with much of the region, Syria’s Sunnis have grown religiously conservative in recent decades, and increasingly influenced by the harsh anti-Shia rhetoric propounded by Saudi Arabia. As in Iraq, the Sunnis’ predicament has pushed many into outright radicalism. Comments posted below a YouTube video of an Alawite tank commander captured by the Free Syrian Army, for instance, proposed that he should be sodomised before being ritually slaughtered as an “infidel animal”. Many of the rebel army’s local brigades carry names associated with Sunni triumphalism. Mosque sermons in rebel areas habitually describe government forces as satanic hordes.

    Such talk, seemingly reflecting a Sunni rage that has long simmered under the surface, frightens other Syrians—and with good reason. Alawites recall that what prompted the atrocity in Hama was a far smaller massacre of Alawite army cadets, carried out by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Fear of empowered Sunni radicals has pushed many Christians, who are keenly aware of the decimation of neighbouring Iraq’s equally large and ancient Christian community, grudgingly to accept the government’s characterisation of the rebels as terrorists. “We were all with the revolution so long as the demonstrations were peaceful,” says a Christian housewife in Damascus. “But how can we support an armed criminal mob?”