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The May 11 bombing in the Turkish town of Reyhanli, which killed 51 people and injured many more, was not some random occurrence. The town is a Sunni Muslim enclave in a province with a large Arab Alevi population. Arab Alevi citizens of Turkey are often referred to as “Nusayris” in both official and popular discourse--a term which they find pejorative. Hatay province, as the Turks renamed it, is what the Syrians call Alexandretta (“al-Iskandarun”)–and it is territory that France cut off from the Syrian mandate in 1938 and ceded to Turkey in 1939 (a bribe to keep Turkey out of Germany’s embrace as World War II loomed). Until the late 1930s, the majority of Hatay’s population was Arab Alevi, and around half the province’s 1.5 million people are still Arab Alevi.
Although I’m not at all one to believe everything leaders in Ankara say, I think they may have the right of it when they blame the Reyhanli bombing on the Syrian mukhabaraat. According to Ankara, Syrian agents with assistance from extremist Leftist groups in Turkey–the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C) and the Acililar (a splinter group from the Turkish People’s Liberation Party/Front (THKP/C)–were responsible. Alevis in Turkey make up a disproportionate number of both groups’ membership. The Acililar, in fact, is thought to be mostly composed of Alevis. Turkish security forces have arrested 13 members of the two groups, apparently due to their connection with the bombing.
Although I’m not at all one to believe everything leaders in Ankara say, I think they may have the right of it when they blame the Reyhanli bombing on the Syrian mukhabaraat. 
The bombing also fits a pattern. An International Crisis Group (ICG) report from April, a month before the Reyhanli bombing occurred, describes long festering Alevi alienation in Hatay and a worrying increase in Alevi unrest there: “In January 2013, four Damascus government agents crossed over to kidnap a Syrian opposition lawyer, apparently aided by several Turkish nationals, and were only stopped in a Turkish police firefight when they tried to smuggle him back over the border. When a car bomb hit the main Hatay crossing point at Cilvegözü on 11 February 2013, killing ten Syrians and four Turks, Turkey blamed Syrian government agents and apparently had help inside Syria to make arrests of both Syrian and Turkish suspects.”
The Alevis of Hatay have also held pro-Assad demonstrations and made no secret of their sympathy with the Assad regime and their displeasure at Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s total backing of the rebels. Sunnis in towns like Reyhanli hold diametrically opposed views, needless to say. Adding to the tensions, some Sunni refugees from Syria even presume to tell Alevis in Turkey how to live: the same ICG report cites the following account from a local Alevi politician: “Four bearded Syrians attacked two beer halls, kicked in the sign, people came out and stopped them. In Uzun Çarsı [the historic main shopping street] they walk around as if they own the place. Urban legends are widely believed about [Syrian opposition fighters] not paying restaurants, and saying that they are not doing so because Erdoğan invited them to Turkey.”
The Sunni majority in Turkey has a long history of discrimination against Alevi Turkish nationals as well, and according to some the discrimination worsens as Kemalism gets replaced with Mr. Erdogan’s brand of Sunni Muslim nationalism. An Arab Alevi leader interviewed by the ICG in April provides an account that should be very familiar to Kurdish readers: “Because of our sect and our race, we Arab Alevis have been subjected to oppression and assimilation. Because Syria has claims on Hatay, because we’re Alevis and because we are on the border, we’re seen as potential traitors.” Another Arab Alevi in Hatay adds this: “ Show me one Alevi minister, director general, governor, mayor, police chief in the whole country. They’re all Sunnis. This tolerance thing [the official state narrative] is like a drum, they beat it to make a noise, but its empty inside. We can’t even ask for Arabic lessons in school, because then we’d be tarred with the idea that we are separatists.”
As Turkey increasingly adopts the identity of a major Sunni power in a Sunni-Shiite regional contest, its Alevi citizens (who number some eight million) may thus come to increasingly occupy the position of “the enemy” (for Kurdish Alevis in Turkey, this will be nothing new). In the process, the Assad regime may have now rediscovered its brethren in Alexandretta. Syria never really forgot about its lost al-Iskendarun, of course–the maps I saw myself in government buildings in Damascus all showed the territory as part of Syria. Now that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party is withdrawing its forces and making peace with Ankara, however, the Assad regime may be turning to Alevi groups with renewed focus–especially when it wants to inflict “payback” for Sunni al-Nusra Front bombings in Damascus and other cities...
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since August 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press).
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