Alawites are of the apocalyptic “Twelver” school of Shiite Islam which is waiting for the Imam Mahdi to come and conquer the world for Islam. They believe that Jesus will come back and convert to Islam and lead the Christians to follow the Mahdi.
They’re a strange group, and probably the thing that gave Assad the ability to move between Sunnis and Shiites (Iran). Saddam was a secularist, but technically a Sunni by birth. However, he was able to ally with Syria enough to ship out some of his weapons stocks.
Mind you, I’m not defending either Assad or the Sunnis or the Shiites. I’m saying that it’s not clear where American interests like, and also that I’m not confident that Obama cares about American interests.
He seems to identify most heavily with the Sunnis, although I don’t know why, except possibly that the majority in Indonesia is Sunni.