Assad’s Syrian stronghold is preparing for life after his regime.

On a recent morning in Syria’s Latakia province, more than a hundred veterans stood quietly, wide-eyed and wary, waiting to be registered with the country’s new rebel rulers. A man in fatigues holds a poster of ousted President Bashar al-Assad on a stick and demands that people spit on him. All are mandatory.

Since taking power this month, the new interim government – led by the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – has set up a number of so-called settlement centers across the country to allow veterans to visit and register for those who don’t. – Submit military ID and firearms.

Initiatives like these, they say, will help ensure security and start the reconciliation process after 13 years of brutal civil war that has rocked the country with weapons and armed factions.

“The most important thing is to disarm people,” said former rebel Abdel Rahman Trafi, now head of the center. This is the only way you can guarantee safety.

But in Latakia, home to the Assad dynasty and a one-time stronghold, many fear the descent is the start of worse. This leads to a new cycle of helplessness and revenge. Syria.

Despite widespread jubilation across the country, coastal Latakia is home to many soldiers and loyalists from Assad’s minority Alawite sect and others who — by choice or desperation — have helped prop up the family’s ruthless minority rule.

In the weeks since Assad fell, some have closed shops, stayed at home or hid in a security vacuum and stories of revenge killings and attacks on minorities.

An Alawi former security official said of the settlement centers: “I didn’t dare to go because I was worried about the roads.” “They are going to kill us on the road or in our village.”

The new forces have dismissed the reports as “isolated cases” and there is still little documentation of reprisal violence. Asked about rumors of people harassing Alawites at checkpoints and calling for insults against the former president, Trafifi said such violence does not represent the new government.

“But there are people who have lost children, wives, family members in bombings and beatings, and there are people manning checkpoints where their friends have disappeared in prisons. They have pain in their hearts,” he said. “We put up with them for 14 years. You can bear with us for a while.”

Some soldiers lined up outside the settlement center of Latakia seem cautiously receptive to the prospect of a new start, a sign of how desperate even the nominally loyal are.

A 29-year-old ex-soldier said he was repeatedly denied permission to visit his home over the past year because of fears that Assad’s weakening grip on the country and its drying up economy would drive his soldiers out.

“Our life was an army, we didn’t learn how to do anything else,” he said, adding that he had no security concerns. “We’ve wanted this for a long time. They want us to live our lives in this new chapter.”

However, Trafifi said that perhaps only 30 percent of those arriving at settlement centers are surrendering their weapons, adding that intelligence agencies are still working to identify and arrest those who hold them. Even the former government security official admitted that both sides still had weapons and that without total disarmament, “we will have a massacre in two months.”

In the year Before Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, came to power in 1970, the Alawites were one of the poorest groups in Syrian society: families sent their daughters to clean houses in the big cities and their sons to serve in the military to provide them with food and grain. Fixed income.

But the Assad family has elevated selected Alawite loyalists to high positions of power during their regime, giving them priority over all others. One of the popular protests that led to the civil war in 2011 was the protest against the barbaric practices to ensure that their wealth, power and political position were disproportionate to their numbers.

But on the eve of Assad’s fall, many of those Alawites now face an uncertain future, fleeing the capital Damascus to their ancestral homes by the thousands.

The former government security officer said he received a phone call from his boss at midnight, telling him to pack his belongings and go home. He described the final scenes: civilians and exhausted men filled the streets on foot and in cars, their abandoned weapons littered by the side of the road. “On the way to Homs, I stopped on the right side of the road and threw my rifle in the waterway,” he said.

The two-hour journey to their village on the Lebanese border took eight hours on bumpy roads. Then he found out that the people who had gone into exile in Lebanon to join the rebels and came to his village were now returning, so he took refuge in his house. He feared that those men were now preparing to take revenge on those they blamed for the massacre of their friends and family.

“There is no control or security here, so there is no one to stop the revenge killings,” he said. “There’s nobody here.”

A tense silence has hung in the air in Alawite villages and towns since Assad’s fall. Schools were open but empty. When asked if it was a groundskeeper, he said, “Yes, it’s the students who are missing.”

In Qardaha, the birthplace of the Assad clan, unlike the big cities, the green rebel flag was almost nowhere to be found. The interior of Hafez al-Assad’s mausoleum was covered in obscenity by the fire at his funeral, and an external curse was placed on him and his wife.

Such attacks on the tomb have become a “pilgrimage” for rebel supporters, a resident said.

But the Alawite elite who benefited from the Assad regime were a minority among the few. Others in the wider Alawite community remain impoverished in Syrian society, many terrorized by the same people who have been perpetrating crimes against the rest of the country.

A 40-year-old Alawite resident of Qardah, who asked to be identified only by her nickname, Nana, described how the residents of the city lived in fear of their Lord all their lives, and abused and insulted people from their own sect. .

“We wanted to keep[the poor]so that people could continue to enlist in the army,” Nana said.

Nana and her sister taught in schools where children could not afford the modest price of government textbooks; But her father-in-law has spent the last 14 years serving in the military.

But despite their disillusionment with Assad, minorities such as the Alawites and Christians fear not only their own safety, but also that the new rulers will impose a new and unusual social order.

Nana’s family makes and sells alcoholic beverages, including unlimited arrack and wine, during Assad’s time, and like many others, they took money to stock up before December, the busiest time of the year. But when they heard that the Assad regime had fallen to the Islamist HTS, the family packed up their belongings and took down the store sign as a precaution.

When Nana’s husband asked the gunman if he could reopen the city, he was told that selling alcohol is forbidden in Islam. The family, like others, is waiting for clarity from the new government on what is legal and what is not.

“We bought crazy and now they sit in our shop,” said her mother-in-law, who said she was told by another patrolman that her niece was wearing pyjamas.

He said that while they were “humiliated” under Assad, at least they knew how treacherous the regime was. “Right now, we don’t know what we have,” Nana said.

Cartography by Aditi Bhandari