Days of Massacres Ravage Syrian Coastal Areas
After botched uprising, gunmen murder hundreds of civilians in Alawite-majority villages in sectarian killings.
Story by Amer Marei with Murtaza Hussein
LATAKIA, Syria—Samar Yazbek, an award-winning novelist whose family hails from the coastal village of Besisin, Syria, was terrified when camouflaged gunmen stormed into her family home on Friday, assaulting her brothers and stealing their cars, only to return the following day to demand money and gold. “They ransacked our home,” Yazbek, who was a vocal opponent of the former regime, told Drop Site News. But it was only when Yazbek went outside that she began to comprehend the scale of the horror. “When we went out into the street, we saw uniformed fighters executing civilians, leaving the streets strewn with bodies.”
Between March 6 and March 11, cities and villages along Syria’s Mediterranean coast witnessed a wave of mass violence targeting civilians from the minority Alawite sect—the worst violence in Syria since the fall of former president Bashar al-Assad in mid-December led to a coalition of militia groups led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) taking power. Graphic videos showing the aftermath of mass executions, as well as accounts from survivors, point to a staggering death toll.
After several days of fighting against what it described as “regime remnants,” the Syrian government declared an end to military operations on the coast on Monday, announcing that it had reasserted control over the area. As reports emerged from the province, it became clear that militants aligned with the government had carried out wholesale massacres of Alawite villages, with survivors forced to flee into the mountains for safety, or to the nearby Russian military base of Khmeimim.
The massacres of civilians came after a series of attacks reportedly carried out by armed paramilitary forces led by former officers from the Assad-era military, that killed 231 members of the security forces affiliated with the HTS-led government, according to the new government’s Military Operations Command. The violence had a clear sectarian component. The Assad family — which ruled over Syria for over half a century—are Alawites, and many of the senior military figures in the regime also drew from the sect, which makes up a small minority of Syria’s largely Sunni population. Minority groups, including Alawite civilians, were targeted by sectarian militias during the country’s decade-plus civil war.
The interim government responded to the initial attacks against its forces with a large-scale military operation across the coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartous, while sending out a general mobilization call to allied militias and irregular fighters across the country. According to a report on the killings by Human Rights Watch, after a full security mobilization issued by Latakia’s public security director on March 6, the following day al-Sharaa issued a statement declaring that “the time for forgiveness had passed,” and calling for “‘‘liberation’ and ‘purification’ of the region while urging security forces to protect civilians.”
Convoys of armed fighters arriving from Aleppo, Idlib, Hama, and Homs, descended upon the region over the course of several days, launching attacks on Alawite communities throughout the coast. Videos showing mass executions, abuse and humiliation of civilians, and looting quickly flooded social media.
The scale of the killing is still being tabulated by international monitors. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has estimated that over 1,300 people have been killed since March 6 in Syria’s coastal communities. The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), a separate monitoring organization, has so far assessed that 432 interim government security forces and civilians were killed by former Assad army fighters, while at least 529 people, “including civilians and disarmed members of the remnants of the Assad regime,” were killed by government-aligned militias, leading to a total of over 900 dead and counting. On Tuesday, the United Nations Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights also said that it had “so far documented the killing of 111 civilians,” adding that its investigation is ongoing and that, “the actual number of people killed is believed to be significantly higher.”
The HTS-led government has said that its attacks targeted former regime elements who were believed to be attempting a coup, and attributed attacks against civilians to individual violations by fighters. But many witnesses to the attacks have disputed this characterization, describing what appeared to be general sectarian massacres targeting Alawite communities uninvolved in the uprising.
HTS is still designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S.-government and other Western powers. Last December, the Biden administration lifted the $10 million bounty the U.S. placed on HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa—then known by his nom de guerre Mohammad al-Jolani—in 2013, which asserted that he embraced a “violent, sectarian vision” and noted that forces he led “carried out multiple suicide attacks throughout Syria.” Al-Sharaa, a former leader in both Al Qaeda and ISIS, has publicly renounced his past affiliations and sought to rebrand himself in the years leading up to the overthrow of Assad’s government. The murderous attacks of the past week against Alawite villages have intensified fears about the fate of Syrian minorities under the new regime, and the possibility of more sectarian killings in future.
Social media videos from the massacres point to the involvement of fighters from factions of the Syrian National Army (SNA), a Turkish-backed group that aided HTS in its campaign to overthrow Assad. In some gruesome videos shared on social media, armed men openly referenced their brigade names in the SNA while standing in front of rows of bodies of executed people. The SNA has already been sanctioned by the U.S. government for its involvement in crimes against humanity against Kurdish civilians in northern Syria. An SNA official who spoke to Drop Site acknowledged that its troops had been involved in killings, but referred to them as “individual acts that were not condoned or encouraged by the leadership.”
“No One Made It Out Alive”
Sawsan Khalil, a woman from a village near Jableh, fled, like many others, from her home into the hills and forests of the region, after hearing stories of the murder of friends and colleagues in nearby communities.
“When the factions reached my colleague’s house—he’s a physics teacher—he lived with his mother, sister, and his 3-year-old son, they asked him if he was Sunni or Alawite,” she told Drop Site. “Then they took his car keys, gold, and money, and executed him in front of his family. His body remained there for three days before they could bury him. Our neighbor, Majd Barhoum, met the same fate. They took his car and gold, then killed him in front of his wife and three children.”
Forced to flee from her home, Khalil said that she and others escaped into the countryside near their village and spent days hiding from militants. “We spent four days with barely enough food and no electricity,” she said. “If we found a house with solar power, we’d charge our phones there.”
According to local news reports, the initial attacks by armed insurgents tied to the former regime targeted military positions, hospitals, and other critical infrastructure in the region—threatening the HTS-led government’s hold on the region. Images of dead HTS government forces were broadcast widely on Telegram earlier this week, also showing apparent field executions. Lacking in manpower to control the entirety of the country or suppress the uprising on its own, the HTS-led government responded to the uprising with a general call to arms across Syria. Calls for armed jihad were issued from mosques in major cities, imploring both organized militias and irregular fighters from the Sunni majority population to join the fight.
The result was a deluge of militants arriving on the coast, many of whom were bent on unleashing collective punishment against the Alawite population. Summary executions in Alawite villages were often preceded by both verbal and physical acts of humiliation, according to several eyewitnesses who spoke to Drop Site. In at least one village, men were forced to crawl on the ground and bark like dogs, before being dragged away by militants and executed. Survivors and witnesses to the attacks told Drop Site that some of the worst abuses were carried out after HTS forces had already passed through an area, only to be followed by other militants whose affiliation was unknown, and who engaged in mass killings targeting the population.
“The village of Brabshbo sought refuge in the forests. When the security forces entered, they announced over loudspeakers that they guaranteed safety. The residents were convinced and returned to their homes,” said Ahmad Ibrahim, who witnessed the aftermath of the killings. “However, as soon as the security forces withdrew, one of the factions entered and massacred everyone in the village. No one made it out alive.” Videos on social media reported to be from Brabshbo appear to corroborate his account of a massacre, showing rows of corpses and mourners arrayed on the streets of the village.
Fadi Moussa, a long-time resident of Ain al-Arous in Latakia, recalled the persistent crackle of gunfire as he raced through the streets in search of safety. He said homes were systematically looted and set alight, as many residents fled to the nearby the Russian-operated Hmeimim Air Base in Jableh. “The Russians set up temporary tents for the growing number of displaced,” he told Drop Site, adding that he had no plans to return home anytime soon after the violence he witnessed. Meanwhile, thousands of Syrians have also fled to neighboring Lebanon, according to the UN.
Several eyewitnesses reported entire villages set ablaze, with residents forcibly displaced. In the village of Sanobar alone, roughly 100 civilians were said to have been killed in a matter of hours. A survivor, who spoke to Drop Site last week on condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety, managed to escape from Sanobar to the city of Latakia. “The bodies are still lying in the streets,” he said. “And new factions have arrived to finish off those who survived the first wave."
The UN commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, on Sunday called for investigations into the massacres. “The killing of civilians in coastal areas in northwest Syria must cease, immediately,” Türk said in a statement. “We are receiving extremely disturbing reports of entire families, including women, children and hors de combat fighters, being killed. There are reports of summary executions on a sectarian basis by unidentified perpetrators, by members of the caretaker authorities’ security forces, as well as by elements associated with the former government.”
Al-Sharaa vowed to hold anyone involved in harming or killing civilians accountable in a nationally televised speech on Sunday. He also promised to hunt down Assad loyalists. "Today, as we stand at this critical moment, we find ourselves facing a new danger — attempts by remnants of the former regime and their foreign backers to incite new strife and drag our country into a civil war, aiming to divide it and destroy its unity and stability,” he said. "We affirm that we will hold accountable, firmly and without leniency, anyone who is involved in the bloodshed of civilians or harming our people, who overstepped the powers of the state or exploits authority to achieve his own ends.”
The interim president announced a decision to form an “independent committee” to investigate violence against civilians. This was cold comfort, however, for survivors. "We don’t trust them," said one resident who had fled from an Alawite village, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. "There will be no real investigation, no real justice. What’s happening here is systematic extermination."
“All I Want Now is To Flee”
The international community has long expressed concerns about the fate of the Alawites and other minorities in Syria under a government led by former Al Qaeda and Islamic State militants. After the fall of Assad, the new government declared a general amnesty for all military personnel associated with the former regime, provided there was no evidence that they had personally taken part in massacres or crimes against humanity.
Yet while the attacks this week were the worst since the fall of Assad, they were not the first. A spate of other killings had taken place in recent months, carried out by irregular militias against Alawite communities in the city of Homs and its surrounding countryside. Many groups in Syria are now seeking revenge for crimes committed by the Assad regime during the war, and the HTS-led government has been accused of turning a blind eye to these sectarian attacks.
Locals in the town of Baniyas, where numerous residents were massacred this week, told reporters that that the perpetrators were “Syrians from surrounding villages seeking vengeance over a 2013 massacre in the nearby town of Beyda, where paramilitaries killed several hundred Sunnis.”
But amid the general mayhem of the fighting and massacres this week, Alawites in other parts of the coast told stories of their Sunni neighbors intervening to save their friends and family.
“A group of armed men confronted my friend Abid – when I say ‘armed men’ I don’t even know if they were part of a faction, brigade or something else entirely. They demanded to know if he was Alawite or Sunni and to show his ID,” said an Alawite woman from Jableh who spoke to Drop Site. “They kept shouting at him, pressuring him to prove his identity. But then, his neighbors from Idlib stepped in. A woman opened her door and said to them, ‘He’s my brother. He’s my brother,’ and she pulled him inside her home.”
In a statement this week on the attacks, Kurdish militant leader Mazlum Abdi appeared to place the blame squarely on the Turkish-backed SNA, claiming that its forces were “primarily behind the killings,” while calling on the new government to “reconsider the method of forming the new Syrian army and the behavior of the armed factions,” to stop sectarian conflicts and the settling of internal scores. Abdi’s group, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which is a bitter rival of the SNA, signed a reconciliation agreement with the Syrian government on Monday that will likely entail power sharing and integration of their forces.
Despite issuing condemnations of the violence—including official statements that demurred on whether the interim government or former Assad era elements had been responsible for the majority of the killings—the European Union looks set to continue tightening its relationship with the new Syrian government. Sharaa is expected to visit Paris this month on the invitation of French President Emmanuel Macron, as Europe bolsters the new government in Syria, in part to prevent a recurrence of the 2015 refugee crisis that followed the collapse of the country under Assad.
Despite these offerings of international concern, the massacres have shattered the optimism that some Alawites felt about their future after the fall of Assad. “I wanted to leave during the days of Assad, but I stayed, hoping for his downfall. Today, I am certain that this land is bloody and cursed, breeding at night only to devour its children in the morning,” said one man who spoke with Drop Site. “All I want now is to flee to any land far from this hell.”
Amer Marei is a reporter based in Syria. Another reporter in Syria contributed reporting anonymously because of safety concerns.
This article is published in collaboration with Egab.