Samar Yazbek, Branded Betrayer for Embracing Syria Rebels TO the senior secret police officer who slapped her repeatedly, toppling her off her feet, Samar Yazbek was a traitor. "I started to say I was an Alawite and I was with the revolution," Syrian author Samar Yazbek said. Marching in antigovernment demonstrations was bad enough. But what made this a truly appalling betrayal in the officer's eyes was the fact that Ms. Yazbek was among the scarce prominent Alawites who had broken publicly with the government. Starting in earnest in 1970, when Hafez al-Assad grabbed the presidency in a coup, the Alawites, adherents of an offshoot of Shiite Islam, have wrested Syria away from its historical Sunni masters. They could lose everything if the Sunnis reclaimed power. "You are a black mark on all Alawites," the officer spat out at one point. He eventually unleashed two muscular goons who dragged Ms. Yazbek through a series of basement torture cells as a dire warning. In the first, she said, three half-naked young men hung suspended by their wrists from the ceiling so that their toes barely scraped the ground. "Blood coursed down their bodies: fresh blood, dried blood, deep wounds carved all over them, like the strokes of an abstract painter," Ms. Yazbek wrote in her newly published diary of the Syrian revolution's first four months, "A Woman in the Crossfire." Suddenly one of the young men sluggishly tried to lift his head, and I saw his face in those dim rays of light. He didn't have a face: his eyes were completely shut. There was a blank space where his nose should be, no lips. Ms. Yazbek, 42, collapsed, only to be yanked to her feet to continue the butchery tour, which competes for the most harrowing day detailed in the book, a rare early chronicle of the revolution from inside. In both the book and in life, Ms. Yazbek, a novelist, oscillates between embracing the Alawite label and rejecting it, loath to paint the uprising in sectarian colors. It is a common sentiment among the limited number of Alawites who have publicly joined the revolution. "I had never cared whether I was an Alawite or not," she said, speaking in Arabic over coffee in a Midtown Manhattan hotel. It was like someone saying you had blue eyes. Embracing the peaceful protest movement that began in March 2011 was rare among the minority Alawites, who constitute about 12 percent of Syria's population of 23 million. The official narrative of the uprising, after all, holds that Sunni Muslim terrorist gangs imported from abroad are bent on toppling the government. Nevertheless, Ms. Yazbek said, "I started to say I was an Alawite and I was with the revolution." It was not the first time she had played the contrarian. Ms. Yazbek, who has the fair complexion of many coastal Syrians, was born into a prominent family whose fortunes had started to recede after her grandfather voluntarily distributed his considerable land to the peasants who worked on it. A distant relative married Osama bin Laden. One of five brothers and three sisters, she ran away from home at 16 and married at 20. She divorced two years later, taking her toddler daughter to Damascus. She was determined to fight for women's rights, she said, "to combat their status in the Arab world." EVENTUALLY she produced nearly a dozen books, five of them novels, and last month she was given the PEN/Pinter International Writer of Courage award. The authorities banned several. She broke taboos by writing about lesbian love, and used fiction to explore the Alawite experience. One ambitious novel detailed an affair between an actress and a senior officer, both Alawites and both thinly disguised from real life. Among other plot twists, the two determined that they had been lovers numerous times over the centuries. Alawites believe in reincarnation, unlike most Muslims. Even before the revolution, she was suggesting that the Assad family's rule had beggared Alawites. She was used to the ire that that brought her personally, but she was unprepared for the bile suddenly directed at her family after the revolution began. Leaflets calling for her death were spread around the coastal Alawite heartland, including in Jableh, her hometown, near Latakia. A teacher yelled at her niece that her aunt was "a whore."