Syria’s Sharaa says Alawite protesters have ‘legitimate demands’

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa said on Thursday that protesters had “legitimate demands,” state media reported, days after thousands took to the streets to denounce violence against the country’s Alawite minority.

Speaking during a phone call with the governor of the coastal province of Latakia, Sharaa said, “We have observed that there are many legitimate popular demands, although some are politically motivated, to put it politely,” the official SANA news agency reported.

Sharaa — a former jihadist whose Islamist fighters led the overthrow of Assad — said his government was “fully prepared to listen to all the demands and to seriously consider them.”

The demonstrations earlier this week in several cities along Syria’s coast — the heartland of the country’s Alawites — were the largest by the community since the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad last year.

Assad himself is an Alawite, and some of the religious minority prospered under his rule.

In the months since his fall, there have been several incidents involving anti-Alawite violence — the worst of which involved the killing of more than 1,700 people in coastal Syria in March.

The protests followed the fresh outbreak of unrest in the religiously diverse city of Homs in central Syria, which was triggered by the murder of a Sunni Bedouin couple that was blamed on Alawites, after sectarian graffiti was found at the scene.