Damascus, Syria – In late December, protests erupted in Latakia and Tartus that few in Damascus expected to see so soon, or at all.
Long portrayed as politically quiescent and regime-loyal, Syria’s coastal cities became the stage for demonstrations demanding detainee releases, an end to arbitrary killings, and protection from unchecked security forces.
The chants were not nostalgic invocations of the fallen Assad regime, but explicit political demands framed around survival, security, and self-rule.
Together with the demands of the Druze community of Suweida, these mobilisations have pushed a once-taboo question back into Syria’s political vocabulary: federalism.
For President Ahmed Al-Sharaa’s transitional government, the protests mark a critical test. The response so far reveals a leadership attempting to contain fragmentation without conceding structural change.
Breaking the coastal ‘exception’
The coastal protests were triggered by a 26 December bombing of the Imam Ali bin Abi Talib mosque in Homs that killed eight Alawite worshippers, an attack claimed by a jihadist group.
For many Alawites, the bombing crystallised a deeper fear: that post-Assad Syria is being permanently turned into a theatre of their collective punishment under the guise of accountability.
Since March 2025, coastal areas have seen waves of arrests, killings, and property seizures, often attributed to government-aligned militias operating with little oversight.
Bassam Alahmad, co-founder of Syrians for Truth and Justice, describes these abuses not as isolated excesses but as a sustained pattern, pointing to arbitrary detention, and disappearances that have continued well beyond the immediate post-transition period.
“These violations didn’t stop before or after the massacres in March. And there has been no real investigation, no accountability,” he told The New Arab.
For protesters in Latakia and Tartus, federalism has emerged less as an ideological project than as a protective mechanism – an attempt to create local buffers against a state they no longer trust to act impartially.
Calls for decentralisation are closely tied to demands for detainee releases, security reform, and genuine investigations into attacks on civilians.
An armed man stands inside the Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib Mosque following an explosion in the Wadi al-Dahab neighbourhood of Homs on 26 December 2025, which killed eight Alawite worshippers. [Getty]
Homs as a structural fault line
While the coastal protests captured attention, several analysts point to Homs as the deeper structural warning sign. Samy Akil, a political analyst, argues that the city’s long history of demographic engineering has produced unresolved tensions now resurfacing in dangerous ways.
“Homs is a ticking time bomb,” he told TNA, describing decades of state-driven social reconfiguration under Baathist rule that fractured communal trust.
According to Akil, the violence cannot be reduced to spontaneous unrest or residual Assad loyalism. “There are local dynamics, but there are also actors attempting to mobilise and put pressure on Damascus,” he noted, pointing to recent intelligence leaks suggesting external efforts to exploit instability.
At the same time, he emphasised that the transitional state’s security architecture remains brittle. The exclusion of Alawites from much of the reconstituted security apparatus, he argued, has weakened the government’s ability to manage unrest in mixed or sensitive areas.
For Akil, constitutional debates are premature. “Federalism is something that needs to be discussed openly, but not now,” he said, suggesting a longer transition timeline.
In the short term, he argues, stability hinges on expanding local participation in governance and security – precisely the issue Damascus appears most reluctant to address.
The real threat
Not everyone accepts the framing of marginalisation or collective punishment. Ghassan Ibrahim, a political commentator and journalist, rejects the notion that Alawites are being targeted as a community.
Ibrahim argues that the early post-Assad period demonstrated restraint rather than revenge, pointing to footage of security forces entering Damascus without widespread reprisals.
The real threat, he insists, comes from extremist groups, not the state. “The mosque bombing was done by terrorists, not by the government,” he said. “All Syrians are facing these extremists.”
From this perspective, protests demanding the release of former combatants or security personnel cross a red line. Ibrahim contends that the demonstrations lack coherent political programs and risk reigniting conflict.
Federalism, he argues, is neither realistic nor popular enough to succeed through referendum, warning that sectarian decentralisation would replicate the failures of Lebanon and Iraq.
The response so far to calls for federalism reveals a leadership attempting to contain fragmentation without conceding structural change. [Getty]
Information warfare
With the debate heating up across Syria, disinformation has played a decisive role in hardening positions around the protests, amplifying fear faster than facts.
On social media, especially X, the coastal demonstrations were often falsely framed as pro-Assad, Iranian-backed, or “Zionist–SDF plots,” while videos documenting abuses against Alawites were dismissed as staged or recycled from earlier phases of the war.
In parallel, exaggerated claims of sectarian cleansing circulated within minority networks, deepening perceptions of existential threat even where verified information remained scarce.
This information warfare has blurred accountability, allowing extremist attacks to be folded into broader political narratives and giving the state justification to securitise dissent rather than address its causes.
The result is a feedback loop in which mistrust, rumour, and selective outrage replace dialogue, accelerating polarisation at precisely the moment Syria’s transitional order is most fragile.
Rebuilding trust
The divergence between these narratives highlights the core dilemma facing Damascus: trust.
For minorities protesting in the streets, the state appears either unwilling or unable to protect them. For government supporters, the protests look like destabilising moves that risk unravelling a fragile post-war order.
This mistrust is compounded by the fragmentation of Syria’s security landscape, where Damascus increasingly relies on a patchwork of forces whose loyalty is negotiated rather than guaranteed.
Many militias operate under nominal alignment with the state but remain outside effective central command, enforcing order selectively and often with local agendas.
President Al-Sharaa has attempted to navigate this divide through a dual-track approach. On the coast, he has opened talks with local delegations and emphasised restraint, while official statements stress unity, warn against “territorial division,” and promise investigations into abuses.
Yet confidence-building measures remain limited. Arrests linked to past massacres are rare or underreported, and national commissions have been criticised by rights groups as performative – designed to appease international pressure rather than deliver justice.
For the centre, this institutional weakness feeds a deeper fear: decentralisation is not merely political reform, but a potential surrender of the state’s monopoly on force, risking the formalisation of fragmented armed power rather than its containment.
Robert Bociaga is a journalist and photographer focusing on international relations and human rights
Follow him on X: @BociagaRobert
Edited by Charlie Hoyle