Making Sense of Syria’s Surge in Violence

The violence that convulsed Syria recently was not unexpected. Although the family of ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad and others close to them escaped to Russia and the United Arab Emirates, a fair number of Assad loyalists, many of them well armed, remain in Syria. They are concentrated in the west, along the coast, and in the mountainous areas just inland from the port city of Latakia. Many of them are Alawites, the heterodox and minority sect, from which the Assads hail. Apparently, these loyalists staged an uprising against the new regime under Ahmed al-Sharaa and his Ha’yat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an offshoot of al-Qaeda.