Visualizing Syria's Sectarian Divides

Syria’s Interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa signed off on a constitutional declaration for a five-year-long transitional period on Thursday, hoping to centralize power in order to unify the country. Al-Sharaa is the former leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni Islamist political organization and former insurgent group that spearheaded the lightning offensive that overthrew Bashar al-Assad on December 8. The constitution pledges freedom of speech, rights for women and media freedom and states that any calls for “division and separatism, requests for foreign intervention or reliance on foreign powers are criminalized.”

Al-Sharaa faces the challenges of a country that has been deeply divided along ethnic and regional lines through a bitter 14-year civil war, with many still wary of the intentions of new leadership. While he has made some headway in cooperation in the past week, having signed a pact to integrate the autonomous institutions of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the north and north east of the country into the government, the declaration for the new short-term constitution has also been rejected by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Council, who state that more needs to be done to protect the rights of diverse communities.

As Statista’s Anna Fleck shows in the chart below, large swathes of the country are still governed by different sects, with each region home to different concentrations of ethnic groups.

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Al-Sharaa and the HTS primarily represent Sunni Syrians, who accounted for around 74 percent of the population in 2023, according to estimates. Syria has several other Islamic groups, including Shia Muslims, who have similar beliefs to Sunnis, but believe that Prophet Muhammad was not the final prophet. Other Syrian ethnicities include groups such as the Kurds, Armenians and Turkoman. Meanwhile, some of the other main religions that are practiced are Christianity, including those belonging to Orthodox, Uniate and Nestorian denominations, who together accounted for 10 percent of the population in 2023, and Druze, who made up just three percent of the population.

The new constitution declaration comes just one week after a violent uprising in the western coastal governorates of Latakia, Tartus and Hama, which are strongholds of Syrian Alawites, a minority ethnic group that practices the Alawi branch of Islam and accounts for just 15 percent of the population. It is the community from which Bashar al-Assad originates and a group that had preferential treatment under Assad, filling civil service and military positions.

According to The Syrian Network for Human Rights, pro-Assad fighters had attacked the interim government’s forces. Official government forces launched a counteroffensive targeted at the fighters. The war monitoring group says that between March 6 and 10, local military factions, foreign Islamist groups nominally affiliated with the Ministry of Defense but not organizationally integrated with it, and local armed civilian groups had provided support to the government forces, but that violence escalated, driven by the latter groups, and were characterized by “widespread and severe violations, most of which were retaliatory and sectarian in nature”. More than 1,000 people have been reported killed, many of whom were Alawites and included entire families.

According to media reports, the violence was further inflamed by misinformation on social media. Al-Sharaa has condemned the attacks and has pledged to hold those responsible accountable.