By Ruth Sherlock, Beirut
In the Assad regime's heartland, dead officers are sent home in ambulances, while the corpses of ordinary soldiers are returned in undecorated pick-up trucks.
Then come the press gangs: military recruiters raid houses to find replacements by force for the dwindling ranks of
Syria's military.
Sharing their sect with
President Bashar al-Assad, Alawites have
long been the core constituency for the Syrian regime. As the
civil war drags into its fifth year, the minority sect is seen by opposition rebels as remaining unwaveringly loyal.
But from inside the community, the picture looks very different: as their sons die in droves on the front lines, and economic privileges – subsidies and patronage – cease,
Alawites increasingly feel they are tools and not the beneficiaries of the regime.
In a series of exclusive interviews, Alawites from the coastal province of Latakia, the sect's heartland, have told the Telegraph of how they are now trapped between jihadists who consider them apostates, and a remote and corrupt regime that told them the war would be easy to win.
"Most don't have salaries now, and some don't even have food to eat," said Ammar, a businessman in Latakia. "My friends ask me: 'Mr Ammar what shall we do? The regime wants to take us as soldiers. We will die. But we don't have the money to get out'."
The scale of the sect's losses is staggering: with a population of around two million, a tenth of Syria's population, the Alawites boast perhaps 250,000 men of fighting age. Today as many as one third are dead, local residents and Western diplomats say.
Many Alawite villages nestled in the hills of their ancestral Latakia province are all but devoid of young men. The women dress only in mourning black.
"Every day there at least 30 men returned from the front lines in coffins," said Ammar, who spoke to the Telegraph using a pseudonym to protect himself and his family.
"In the beginning of the war their deaths were celebrated with big funerals. Now they are quietly dumped in the back of pick-up trucks."
