The stunner fall Syrian President Bashar al-Assad leaves not only a power vacuum in that country, but a nearly endless list of unanswered questions. One of the most important issues concerns the fate and future of the minority Alawite community, from which Assad and his entourage come. Assad’s dictatorship began when Bashar’s father, Hafez, took control of the country in 1970. The government that Bashar inherited upon his father’s death in 2000 was nominally Baathist, a socialist and pan-Arab ideology, but the The heart of the regime has always been – and, more importantly, perceived as – an Alawite community project at the expense of Syria’s Sunni majority. What happens to this community today will say a lot about whether post-Assad Syria will transform into a stable, pluralistic nation or whether it will descend into even deeper sectarian chaos.

Alawism is an offshoot of Shiite Islam, but the faith has been considered heretical almost unanimously by Sunni and Shiite religious authorities since its emergence in the 9th century. The Alawites therefore became an insular, close-knit and often secretive group, struggling to survive in their coastal and mountainous lands of northeastern Syria. During French colonial rule after World War I, Paris considered creating an independent Alawite state in eastern Syria, just north of the area that would become Lebanon, but the plan failed.

However, the Alawites became a sort of privileged minority under the French. They were strongly encouraged to join the developing Syrian army and heavily promoted within it. In 1970, Hafez al-Assad, an air force general, seized power and imposed a highly repressive political system that lasted until this weekend.

The Assad dictatorship did not rely solely on the support of the Alawites. Many Syrian minority groups, including Christians, Druze, and Jews, have truly come to view Assad as a defender of community minorities. The fact that even Alawites have refused to fight for him over the past week suggests that this rationalization of support has finally collapsed.

Anne Applebaum: The Syrian regime gradually collapsed—and then suddenly

Yet the Alawites surely fear a future without the regime that claims to protect them. The coalition poised to take control of the country is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni Islamist organization that was once an affiliate of ISIS and, later, al-Qaeda. This is a nightmare scenario for a community that has long been considered heretical and apostate by even “moderate” radical Muslim fundamentalists. HTS claims to have shown moderation and its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, has promised to show tolerance towards Shiites, Christians, Druze and Alawites. But skepticism is inevitable.

A curious aspect of Assad’s fall is the fact that he did not even attempt to retreat to an Alawite redoubt in northeast Syria. It has always maintained large elite military forces in and around Damascus, deeply involved in the regime’s record of atrocities and, in many cases, with every reason to fear from a new Sunni Islamist order. These groups also have an interest in protecting and controlling their remaining constituencies and preserving their legitimate and illicit business activities as much as possible. In other words, they may have lost their leader, but they have not lost their incentive to establish self-controlled territory.

Even excluding Assad, the new coalition may not be able to stop Syria’s increased fragmentation. There already exists a Kurdish autonomous zone in the north. HTS and its Turkish-backed allies stormed into Syria’s northwest Idlib province, where they were quietly maintaining their own Islamist mini-state. Israel is moving quickly to control a zone of influence around the occupied Golan Heights, which it claims to have annexed. Unless Syria can quickly unify around a consensus government blessed, but not dominated, by HTS and Turkey, and which does not threaten religious minorities, the Alawite community and remnants of the old regime may well seek to establish their own de facto regional autonomous zone.

The most plausible central location is the coastal town of Tartus. It has an overwhelming Alawite majority of 80 percent. The surrounding population is also predominantly Alawite and most others are Christian. Just as importantly, Russia – the Assad regime’s largest financier – maintains its all-important warm-water naval port at Tartus, an asset that Russian leaders have prioritized for centuries and would be loath to lose. lose now. The port is crucial to Russian supply lines to Africa, among other important functions. Russia is also working to rebuild a former Soviet submarine base nearby. A continued Russian presence in western Syria would also maintain existing signals intelligence centers.

Even if Moscow can no longer maintain its power and influence in Damascus, it can seek to preserve its most important assets in Syria by cooperating with an Alawite autonomous zone, if that community and the remnants of the old regime act quickly to establish one. This would be an ironic echo of the failure of the French Alawite state project of the 1920s. Largely because of their own disunity, the Alawites never achieved their independent state. But under Assad, they led a coalition that ruled Syria for more than half a century. They may soon attempt to return to the de facto independence of Syria that they once inadvertently traded for control of the entire nation. What is clear is that the long period of Alawite domination in Syria is finally over.