The Kalbiyya (Arabic: الكلبية), or Kalbi or Kelbi tribe is one of four tribes, or tribal confederations, of the Alawite community in Syria. Appearing in historical sources from the 16th century, the Kalbiyya came to prominence when Hafez al-Assad, the son of a Kalbiyya tribal leader, seized power in Syria in a coup in 1970. Assad ruled Syria as a dictator for 30 years and ensured that power was concentrated in the hands of members of the Kalbiyya tribe, a policy which his son, Bashar al-Assad, continued for another 24 years until overthrown in 2024. The Kalbiyya population mainly live in the Latakia Governorate in north west Syria.

The Kalbiyya are a tribe, or tribal confederation, of the Alawite community of northwestern Syria. Also known as Nusayris or Alawis, the Alawites are a prominent mystical religious sect who follow a syncretic form of the Twelver branch of Shia Islam.

The Alawite homeland is in the Nusayri mountains coastal region, inland of the Mediterranean ports of Latakia and Tartus. Historically, the Alawites lived in about eighty villages in the region. The Kalbiyya are one of the four tribes, or tribal confederations, into which the Alawite community is divided, the others being the Matawira, Haddadin, and Khayyatin.

The Kalbiyya were estimated in 2011 to number approximately 480,000 out of a population of 3 million Alawites in Syria. At that time the total Syrian population was around 22 million. The main areas of Kalbiyya settlement are the districts of Jableh, Haffa and Latakia and the town of Qardaha, all within Latakia Governorate in north west Syria. They are the most geographically compact of the Alawite tribes, the others being more dispersed in non-contiguous areas across the coastal region.

The Kalbiyya consists of five branches: Rashawneh, Junaydi, al-Nawasireh, al-Jurud, and al-Qarahilah. Each branch of an Alawite tribe has its own hereditary chief, a structure which leads to frequent internal disputes within Alawite society. The Junayd family typically provide the leadership of the Kalbiyya and was based at Tell Salhab, near Masyaf. Traditionally, Alawite society is divided into three classes: religious leaders, landowners and peasants, with religious leadership, like chieftaincy, being hereditary.

There are no known references to the Kalbiyya in medieval sources. They are not, for instance, mentioned among the tribes led by the 13th century Alawite paramount leader Makzun al-Sinjari. It is only after the Ottoman conquest of Syria in the early 16th century that the Kalbiyya are mentioned in historical records. Stefan Winter, an historian specialising in Ottoman Syria, notes that, despite this, they may have existed as a grouping before the 16th century (but without any "special role" among the Alawites). He also speculates that their name "may originally have invoked a link" with the medieval Banu Kalb bedouin tribal confederation.

There is evidence that, following the conquest, the Kalbiyya were among the tribes favoured by the Ottomans in order to use them as part of their local administrative control and tax collection structure. The Kalbiyya's emergence as a recognised group may therefore be linked to this Ottoman policy. Nevertheless, there were a number of Kalbiyya rebellions during the 16th century, and by the beginning of the 19th century, the Kalbiyya had a reputation for lawlessness and were in constant and open conflict with the Ottoman authorities.

In the 1850s, Samuel Lyde, an English missionary, lived among the Kalbiyya and built a mission and school in the Kalbiyya village of Bhamra. He subsequently published a negative but influential account of his time there, in which he wrote that he was convinced that they were like St Paul's description of the heathen: "filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness". He criticized their brigandage, feuds, lying and divorce and claimed that "the state of [their] society was a perfect hell upon earth". Lyde's account has been described as "colourful" but "unreliable" in certain respects.