Syria’s Alawite community continued to huddle in fear over the weekend after hundreds of them were murdered by militants loyal to the Islamist government of former al-Qaeda leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.
One of the militants reportedly posted a Facebook video of himself marching around a ruined Alawite home while repeatedly chanting “ethnic cleansing.”
More details of the March 7 massacre of Alawites and other minorities emerged from survivors over the weekend, even as militants loyal to Sharaa’s junta posted online messages calling for even more violence to crush what they described as an insurgency loyal to ousted dictator Bashar Assad.
Reuters reported that the March 7 killings, triggered by an ambush attack on junta forces, was an even larger and more brutal operation than originally suspected:
Hundreds of pickup trucks full of fighters, as well as tanks and heavy weaponry, poured down major highways towards the coastal heartlands of the minority Alawite sect to which Assad belonged. They were seeking revenge against loyalists to the ousted president, mostly his Alawite former officers. Some of them had allegedly carried out a spate of hit-and-run attacks on the new military in an effort to stage a coup against the Sunni Islamist-led government.
Overnight and in the early hours of March 7, pro-government fighters fell on the neighborhood of Al-Qusour in the city of Baniyas, among the first major highway exits, opening fire on residential buildings and killing families in their homes. Similar attacks unfolded in a string of towns and villages further north along the coast including Al-Mukhtariya, Al-Shir, Al-Shilfatiyeh and Barabshbo where the ethno-religious Alawite community is concentrated.
“I heard children screaming, gunfire, and my father trying to calm down the children,” said Hassan Harfoush, an Alawite from Al-Qusour who’s now living in Iraq, describing a phone call with his family before his parents, brother, sister and her two children were shot dead in the town on the afternoon of March 7, a Friday.
Reuters noted that Sharaa’s government did not respond to a request for comment about its article, which was compiled from the testimony of over two dozen survivors. Their testimony made it more difficult to credit Sharaa’s excuse that the killings were perpetrated by a handful of “foreign fighters” who went rogue and began wantonly killing Alawites and other minorities without permission from Damascus.
Sharaa told Reuters last week that the massacre began as a legitimate security response to attacks by Assad loyalists, but spiraled into mass executions as rebel fighters vented “years of pent-up grievances.”
Independent monitoring groups have said the Assad loyalists are a real and dangerous threat, blaming them for many of the murders that occurred during a week of bloodshed along the Syrian coast. Survivors did, however, say they saw unit patches from Sharaa’s General Security Service (GSS) on the uniforms of fighters who gunned down civilians.
CNN on Monday interviewed the family whose ransacked home became the stage for a masked militant to film a Facebook video demanding “ethnic cleansing” of the Alawite population. The same militant posted another video in which he taunted Alawite civilians by saying: “We’ve come to you. We’ve come to you with the taste of death.”
“The sword of the people of Idlib wants only you,” he said in the second video. Idlib is the province ruled by Sharaa’s insurgent group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), for years before they finally managed to overthrow Assad in December. The masked militant wore what appeared to be HTS patches and insignia on his fatigues.
The family lived in a town called Sanobar, where “government-aligned forces subjected largely unarmed villagers to summary executions, looting, arson and sectarian slurs, and bodies were piled up in two mass graves.”
According to the survivors, Sanobar was attacked a day after the ambush by Assad loyalists triggered a wave of revenge killings against Alawites. The Alawites are a sect of Shiite Islam that the Assad family belonged to. Although relatively small in number, they held a large number of important government positions and received other benefits during the decades of Assad family rule.
Eyewitnesses said regime fighters marched the men of Sanobar into the streets, dragging those who resisted, and then gunned them down. Only a few of the male residents of the town were spared. Some said they were rescued by “men from Idlib” who disagreed with the wanton killings perpetrated by their colleagues.
CNN said it used geolocation and image data to confirm some of the mass graves described by survivors were genuine, including graves dug near Alawite shrines in Sanobar.
Survivors in another Alawite town called Salhab told the UK Guardian on Saturday they also watched dozens of men get dragged out of their homes and shot. One of the victims was reportedly a 95-year-old “local religious figure” who was forced to watch the murder of his son before he was himself executed.
The Guardian consulted with experts in the complex hierarchy of the decade-long Syrian insurgency who said two groups in particular seemed enthusiastic about murdering Alawite civilians, the Sultan Suleiman Shah Brigade and the Hamzat division.
“Both rebel groups were previously affiliated with the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA). Both factions and their leaders are under U.S. sanctions for alleged serious human rights abuses, including rape and torture,” the Guardian reported.
Both of those groups have been incorporated into Sharaa’s new Syrian army, which putatively replaced all of the many armed factions in Syria with a united force.
“Currently it appears that the integration of SNA factions into the ministry of defence has only occurred at a symbolic level. The institutional ties are weak so HTS’s tools in terms of cracking down are limited,” researcher Alexander McKeever told the Guardian.
Some international observers, eager to make postwar reconstruction and humanitarian aid easier – and, in some cases, to profit from reconstruction – seem willing to give Sharaa a chance to make good on his promises to hold fighters involved in the Alawite massacres accountable.
Others, like Dr. Michael Milshtein of the Forum for Palestinian Studies at Tel Aviv University, say last week’s massacres may have revealed the “real intentions” of Sharaa’s regime and exposed Western optimism as “misplaced.”
Writing at Ynet News on Monday, Milshtein quoted Alawite leaders who said the new Syrian regime intends to purge them through “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide, akin to the Holocaust.”
“In a particularly grim twist, jihadist forces this week were seen dropping barrel bombs on civilian areas – replicating a tactic once employed against them by the Assad regime and its Russian allies,” he noted.
“In recent days, the massacres have slowed, pro-government demonstrations have taken place in Damascus, and al-Sharaa has received an invitation for his first official visit to Brussels. However, these gestures appear to be mere bandages on a festering wound,” he said.
“Much like past illusions about Hamas moderating over time, some in Israel had hoped Syria was moving toward stability. Instead, the region has once again demonstrated that sectarian hatred and historical grievances often outweigh aspirations for democracy,” he judged.
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