The walls of the mausoleum for late President Hafez al-Assad are scrawled with graffiti now — things that Syrians have long felt but could never say aloud during his family’s five-decade dictatorship.

The cavernous building sits high on a hilltop overlooking al-Qardaha, the Assad family’s ancestral village. For the past few weeks, Syrians have converged there to curse, spit and even urinate on the memorial, its high arched ceilings charred from when rebels set the tomb on fire.

“Curse your soul, Hafez” and “Didn’t I tell you we were coming for you?” read some of the messages they left behind.

Al-Qardaha sits in the middle of Latakia province on Syria’s western Mediterranean coast — a region that is the heartland of the country’s Alawite minority, which includes the Assads. About 10 percent of Syrians belong to the sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and Alawites dominated the ruling class and upper ranks of the military under the Assad dynasty.

As the country emerges from the long dictatorship, Syrians are demanding accountability for crimes committed under the brutal rule that began with Hafez al-Assad and was passed down to his recently ousted son, Bashar al-Assad. This cry for justice has left the Alawite community with a deep sense of anxiety.

“When they come in and curse and ransack, it doesn’t matter who he was,” Dr. Fidaa Deeb, a gynecologist and an Alawite, said of the desecration of the mausoleum. “This is the grave of someone dead,” he said at a recent meeting at the al-Qardaha village hall. “It needs to be protected.”