“They kidnapped; they killed; they humiliated; they kicked people out of jobs,” explained an Alawite writer living in coastal Syria. “One way or another, this was going to happen.”

"This" is the outbreak of violence in Syria that killed 745 civilians in 30 "massacres" along Syria’s Alawite-majority Mediterranean coast on Friday and Saturday, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The human rights group also reported the deaths of 125 fighters linked to Syria’s new Islamist-led government and 148 "pro-Assad" fighters.

Break that down and try to make sense of it. Alawites are a Shia sect that makes up about 10 percent of the population in predominantly Sunni Syria. (Many Sunnis do not even regard them as real Muslims). There are also Kurdish, Druze and Christian minorities in Syria, but for the past 50-odd years, Alawites have dominated the army and the government.

Yet Alawites are not a particularly prosperous group. France, which got Syria into the carve-up of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, deliberately recruited Alawites for its new colonial army precisely because they were an impoverished and despised minority — and, therefore, presumably less loyal to Syria’s old........

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