On a winter night in 2014 I stood by the side of a highway outside Damascus as a Syrian army officer shone a torch over the contents of my suitcase he had ordered me to empty onto the grey dirt.

The young officer on checkpoint duty was a member of the elite Fourth Armoured Division commanded by President Bashar al-Assad’s younger brother, Maher. His manner conveyed both urgency and menace as he told me and my companions — a photographer and our Arabic interpreter — to get out of our taxi.

He had reason to be edgy: it was the third year of a savage war and Islamist forces were hitting military checkpoints with car bombs.

In this case, however, Syrian immigration officers at the Lebanon border had searched our luggage, catalogued our camera and recording equipment, and issued us with a pass authorising passage to Damascus via a designated fast lane just half an hour earlier.

The army officer contemptuously waved away our official papers, flaunting his authority over a lesser arm of the state – and us. I wondered how he might have treated ordinary Syrians who lacked the protection from arbitrary power usually afforded to authorised foreign journalists in Assad’s Syria.

Fast forward more than four years to 2019, my fourth and last visit to Syria. Assad’s army had retaken most of the country, but the economy was collapsing under the weight of US-led sanctions that had “suffocated” the Syrian people, a United Nations investigation found. Syria was also denied access to its petroleum reserves and major agricultural regions in the US-occupied, Kurdish-controlled north-east. Inflation was rampant and public servants sold family heirlooms to buy bread.

As poverty increased, so did corruption, while the political and business elite appeared blind to the need for reform.

There was another aspect of Assad’s rule that led many Syrians to overlook, if not endorse, political repression and gross inequality. Assad, like his father Hafez before him, supported a largely secular state with freedom of worship. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this in a nation of multiple ethnicities and religions where faith is deeply held.

The biggest minority religion, the Alawites, make up an estimated 12% of the population. There is a substantial Druze community plus Shia, Ismailis and Yezidis. Before war broke out in 2011, Christians were about 10% of the population, but are now thought to be less than half that number.

Today, religious minorities have good reason to fear Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the jihadist coalition that seized power in Damascus on 8 December. This re-branded derivative of al-Qaeda has set about reshaping pluralist Syria as an Islamic state.

Most at risk are the Alawites, a syncretic, liberal branch of Shia Islam regarded as apostates by the new Sunni fundamentalist regime.

In 2015, I met an Alawite officer commanding a Syrian army detachment outside the town of Yabroud. He was friendly and talkative and said he wanted to visit Australia “when the crisis is over”. A resident of Assad’s home village of Qardaha, he vowed he would never allow himself to be captured by the Islamist enemy. “If they find an........

© Pearls and Irritations