La batalla de Siria

Watch The Battle for Syria on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

“The Battle for Syria”, un reportaje de la PBS (televisión pública norteamericana), centrado en los grupos insurgentes.

“Among the Alawites” es un reportaje de Nir Rosen sobre la comunidad alauita en Siria.

Alawite identity turns on a minority complex and fear of Sunni domination. Alawites like to rehearse the story of their oppression. ‘The lot of the Alawis was never enviable,’ the Palestinian historian Hanna Batatu wrote. ‘Under the Ottomans they were abused, reviled and ground down by exactions and, on occasion, their women and children led into captivity and disposed of by sale.’ They were practically serfs to the Sunni feudal lords put in place by the Ottomans. It was only when the French mandate began in 1920 that the traditional Sunni elite was eroded and minorities, Alawites among them, began to enjoy a measure of social mobility. The Alawites pleaded in vain with the French to grant them a separate state that would protect them from a Sunni ascendancy.