Syria's Integration of Alawi Police
A months-long process of hiring non-Sunni security forces is bearing fruit
Last week, the first public announcement of the re-hiring of a regime-era Alawi police officer was made in Qardaha, the hometown of the Assad family. His appointment coincided with the reopening of the town’s police station, which had been closed since the fall of Assad and in which he now served as the director. Rather than a token hire, this appointment comes amid a months-long drive by Syria’s Ministry of Interior to integrate non-Sunni men, including Alawis, into its security forces in the coast.
The Unclear Minority Role
With the fall of Assad, the new Syrian government was left to rebuild the state’s two security pillars: the interior and defense ministries. Each was wracked with its own challenges. For the army, the rebuilding process was defined by complex integrations of dozens of opposition factions, many of whom had been at odds with one-another just weeks earlier. Integration, building new lines of command, and inducing behavior change were the main priorities here. For the Ministry of Interior, however, the challenge was the opposite – building a new force out of fresh recruits and former opposition personnel transferred from the MoD all around a small core of veteran security officers who had been training and serving in Idlib for years prior.
The MoI quickly established two armed branches, the General Security Service (GSS) and the civil police force. These were built entirely around Sunnis, mostly former opposition fighters and GSS and police personnel who had been serving in the opposition government in Idlib prior to liberation.
During these first months there was no clear policy on non-Sunni recruitment. For example, in the spring of 2025 I met one man in Latakia who insisted that five of his Alawi friends had recently joined the Police Academy, while at the same time another man told me his Christian friend had been rejected by a recruiter on the basis of his religion. Privately, some security officials acknowledged the complexity and fear they felt at the idea of integrating armed Alawis alongside armed Sunnis.
Yet at the same time, the MoI was already employing Alawi and Christian men in administrative roles. Like every government ministry, the new MoI involved some level of grafting ex-opposition institutions onto ex-regime institutions. According to one police officer working in Damascus since December 2024, many non-Sunni regime-era administrative employees had been retained and continued to work in the ministry throughout 2025. These employees worked in departments like IT, civil registry, and passports registration.
Furthermore, the MoI had also supported the establishment of several local, volunteer police forces within minority communities. These were most prominent in some Christian neighborhoods of Damascus, the Druze neighborhood of Jaramana, and the Ismaili town of Qadmus. In Qadmus, the district security official had not stopped at forming an armed Ismaili volunteer force but had even established 40 checkpoints in the Alawi villages around the city in January 2025, all manned by local Alawis.
Still, all of this non-Sunni employment was on an ad-hoc basis. The local non-Sunni security forces were all volunteers, and many of these forces were disbanded during the second half of 2025 as the MoI further institutionalized its forces. Even if a handful of non-Sunnis had been accepted by some recruiters by the spring, there was clearly no genuine push by the ministry to integrate non-Sunnis institutionally.
Expanded Recruitment for an Expanded Presence
However, this changed by late summer 2025. At this point, the Ministry of Interior had adopted a new policy clearly directed towards broadening its personnel base by expanding recruitment to non-Sunnis. The new approach followed two tracks: 1) recruiting new men and putting them through a two-month training program in regional centers, 2) reintegrating Assad-era police officers.
This new recruitment is central to one of the MoI’s core goals for the first half of 2026. According to multiple local security officials I met in the coast in November and December, the MoI plans to greatly expand the presence of police stations across the Alawi countryside this year. In 2025, the MoI’s presence in the coast was largely confined to GSS headquarters in district capitols, with a gradual expansion of police stations into sub-district seats. Now, the MoI plans to re-open or build new police stations across smaller towns and villages. This has been a consistent demand from Alawi civilians and activists that I have met with, who see the expansion of policing institutions as a way to strengthen safety and stability in their areas.
For the first track, the MoI in Tartous and Latakia opened a new recruitment round in late Summer for men from their respective governorates. This class of recruits would be the first to go through the two governorates’ new police academies and included men from every sect within the governorate.
For the second track, MoI officials reached out to trusted Alawi mukhtars and men who had been serving as local interlocutors in August, asking them to create lists of ex-regime policemen from their towns who had good reputations. These lists were compiled and submitted by mid-September, according to one such mukhtar I met with, at which point the MoI began investigating each man to ensure he had not committed any crimes under the regime.
On November 10, the first class of Internal Security Force recruits graduated from the Tartous academy. This class consisted entirely of men from the governorate who would only be deployed within Tartous. Several local MoI officials I spoke with that month told me this class, which numbered around 1,400 graduates, contained “men from every sect of the governorate.” On December 21, the first class of new recruits in Latakia graduated, also containing non-Sunnis. One of the Alawi graduates was interviewed at the ceremony, the first public recognition of the recruitment of Alawis.
Yet Alawi officers were already working in the coast by the time these classes graduated. The MoI’s efforts to re-hire ex-policemen had continued through the fall, and by mid-November, the MoI in Tartous was processing 2,000 such officers, gradually re-introducing them into the General Security and police forces in rural Alawi areas. At the same time the class graduated from the Tartous academy, there were already several Alawi men serving in armed GSS roles in rural Tartous.
Their re-integration has continued unabated in recent months, with the appointment last week in Qardaha just one of many. Upon reading the news from Qardaha, I contacted a local MoI official in rural Tartous to enquire about his district. He informed me that they had already re-hired around 11 policemen and detectives just in his area. This was confirmed to me by an Alawi activist from the same town. Similarly, an Alawi friend in Tartous city confirmed to me last week that the recruitment of Alawi ex-police is also occurring in the city. “My cousin went to file a complaint for a hit-and-run at the police station and was surprised to hear a lot of the officers speaking with a clear Tartousi Alawi dialect,” he told me.
Future Steps
The government has been understandably coy about advertising its recruitment of Alawi youth, and especially the re-hiring of ex-regime Alawi policemen. This process has been so quiet that many Alawi activists did not even know it was happening, even within their own towns. For example, one activist denied this was happening, saying he had just visited his home district and seen nothing, but upon my insistence made more calls and realized that several men had indeed been re-hired.
This is partially caused by the MoI’s policy of soft localization; men are not always hired to work in their own villages, but do remain within their governorate. This gives the government flexibility to fill-in personnel shortages where needed, while still capitalizing on the cultural sensitivities of each community yet lowering the risk of corruption. The official adoption of non-Sunni recruitment has enabled the Tartous and Latakia Internal Security Commands – which oversee the GSS and police – to rapidly expand their physical footprint across the governorates. The result has been increased security and safety in Alawi areas and improved trust building by local officials.
However, it is not clear if any other governorates have begun re-hiring regime-era officers who had served throughout the war. Activists in Alawi areas of Hama and Homs denied to me this week that similar steps were occurring in their areas. It is possible that the MoI is using the coast as a test for the integration of non-Sunnis, or that the severe manpower needs and density of Alawi communities here have pushed them to adopt this more expansive policy. Still, the government would be smart to begin this process in other minority areas as soon as possible. The MoI has proven itself to be a trustworthy local security force over the second half of 2025. Integrating local non-Sunnis across the country is the next step towards bonding these communities to the new state.