Who were the first Shabiha? How was the word coined? And how did their numbers spread? The following stories about a few shabiha pioneers are based on my personal experiences in Latakia, Syria in the 1970′s and 1980′s so I can vouch for their truth. I have refrained from embellishment or recounting stories that have been told to me by others.
The pioneer Smuggler
No one in al-Harf, a small Alawi village in the mountains east of Latakia, knew how Faysal Salloum managed to come into the possession of a car. Not a soul in the village had owned a car before Faysal Salloum drove into town. Fewer than a handful of the village’s inhabitants had driven a car, so seeing Faysal appear behind a dust cloud in his Peugeot 343 caused wonder and conflicting emotions among his townsmen. Like most Alawi villages of the mountain in the 1970s, al-Harf did not have a paved road. A hardscrabble dirt track wound up the hill on the southern side of the village. It plunged down into a steep valley and climbed over the adjacent mountain before connecting to a paved road. A single bus traveled that road going down to the coast road.
A single bus traveled the paved road down the mountain to the coast, where one could get to Latakia. It also connected al-Harf to the larger towns higher in the mountain. The bus was owned by the Awad family, Protestant Christians from al-Jawbeh, to the east. Of course, al-Harf had neither electricity nor running water. Two natural springs east of the village supplied it along with two other villages with water. Until the 1950s, Alawis rarely traveled to a city, which were the preserve of Sunnis. When the French conquered Syria and began taking censuses in the 1920s, they found that Alawis and Sunnis lived together in no town larger than 200 inhabitants. Alawis and Christians lived together, but not Alawis and Sunnis...
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