Once Syria's most influential minority, Alawites struggle to move on from their association with a hated dictator.

At the bottom of Nisrine Ezzedine's garden, cement blocks mark the graves of her husband, son and nephew, all killed by ...

How the rebels treat the sizeable Alawite population, will be some kind of litmus test of whether the takeover of Damascus leads to violent revenge against former Assad loyalists ...

DEIR SHMAYEL, Syria — In the mountains east of Syria’s Mediterranean coast, armed patrols root out Assad loyalists, masked gunmen monitor checkpoints and residents fret every strange face ...

The feeling is a new one for the Alawites, a group that was powerful and influential during the dictator's rule. The Alawites are a minority sect which follows an esoteric offshoot of Shiite Islam.

KHIRBET AL-MA’ZAH, Syria—When Sunni Islamist rebels toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime, many residents of this rural village were elated by the end of a half-century of oppression even though ...

But Alawites, from a branch of Shiite Islam, have an acute fear of reprisals because of their connection to the Assad clan, which recruited from and favoured its own religious community for ...