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When armed men entered Hayan’s house last Friday, he thought he was going to be killed like his neighbours before him. Militants dragged him outside, threw him to the ground and started shooting right above his head, making it so he could no longer hear the insults they lobbed at him for being a member of the country’s minority Islamic Alawite sect.
Hayan was lucky – they chose merely to scare not kill him – but by the time the rampage finally ended, 25 residents of the Alawite town of Salhab, northwest Syria, were dead. They included a 90-year-old local religious figure whom militants killed after forcing him to watch them murder his son.
Such massacres had become a feature of Syria’s 14-year civil war, but Salhab’s violence last week took place during some of the country’s deadliest days since the beginning of the war itself. Besides the high death toll, what marked these killings as different — and a dark omen for the country’s future — is that many were carried out by militants nominally a part of the new Syrian army created by the country’s new president.
The massacres brought into question the ability of Syria’s government to control its ranks and the challenges of reining in the patchwork of militias that currently control the country.
Fighting started when fighters loyal to ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad launched a coordinated attack on Syrian government forces across the country’s coast on 6 March, prompting the government to call for help. Thousands of armed individuals and several rebel groups answered the call. The incensed militias and crowds carried out a wave of revenge attacks against members of Syria’s Alawite community, the same sect from which Assad hailed, though most had nothing to do with the former regime. Massacres in most Alawite villages ensued.
In total, the four days of fighting left more than 1,000 people dead, including 745 civilians, many of whom were killed in revenge attacks targeting the sect. In addition, Assad loyalists killed 211 members of the Syrian security forces and 228 civilians.
Experts have pointed to two factions, Abu Amsha’s Sultan Suleiman Shah brigade and the Hamzat division, as being responsible for the bulk of killing of civilians and unarmed prisoners during the explosion of violence on Syria’s coast last week. Both rebel groups were previously affiliated with the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army. Both factions and their leaders are under US sanctions for alleged serious human rights abuses, including rape and torture.
Abu Amsha said in a post on x that his division adhered to orders from Syria’s ministry of defence and said that news of their participation in massacres was “propaganda.” He added that every member of his faction are “subject to the law and accountability.”
“The vast majority of the violations were committed by Abu Amsha’s [faction] and Hamzat. Lots of residents were asking government security forces to defend them from those factions,” said Fadel Abdulghany, the founder of the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR).
Along with dozens of other armed groups, the two factions have only recently been integrated into Syria’s new army, led by the now-disbanded Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
HTS, the leader of the rebel coalition which ousted the Assad regime on 8 December, dissolved all armed factions in the country, including itself, and announced they would be integrated into the new Syrian army.
In practice, however, the government has struggled to integrate military factions and exercises limited control over them.
“Currently it appears that the integration of SNA factions into the ministry of defence has only occurred at a symbolic level,” said Alexander McKeever, researcher and author of a weekly newsletter on northern Syria. “The institutional ties are weak so HTS’s tools in terms of cracking down are limited,” he added.
Syria’s president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has promised that all those who killed or abused civilians on Syria’s coast last week will be held accountable, even if they are allies of HTS.
“We will hold accountable, with full decisiveness, anyone who is involved in the bloodshed of civilians, mistreats civilians, exceeds the state’s authority or exploits power for personal gain. No one will be above the law,” Sharaa said.
It’s unclear if Sharaa can indeed hold accountable some of the very same factions who helped bring him to power, for fear of alienating militias who could provoke instability or even conflict in Syria. If he does not punish those militias who massacred civilians, he will alienate many citizens of Syria, who would be reminded of regime figures slaughtering their countrymen with impunity.
The slaughter of civilians on Syria’s coast has also given the international community pause about lifting sanctions. Syria has been under US sanctions since 1979, which intensified after the Assad regime’s brutal crackdown on protesters in 2011.
Syria’s new authorities have made the lifting of sanctions one of its top priorities, to help its ailing economy and allow it to build a functional state with a professional army.
The killing of Alawite civilians deeply disturbed evangelical members of the Trump White House, who viewed the protection of Syria’s religious minorities as a key benchmark for the new government.
“They only have one agenda about Syria and that’s Christians. They don’t care if the rest of the country goes to hell. And they were furious about what happened last week,” said Kamal Alam, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who advises the evangelical members of the Trump team on Syria and support to Christians in the Levant.
Alam added that after last week’s killings, these members of the Trump administration have sought to add the protection of all minorities to their portfolio, not just Syria’s Christians. This could in turn, blunt the efforts of congresspeople who have been trying to get US sanctions lifted.
To many members of Syria’s Alawite community, the damage has already been done. Almost 11,000 Syrians have fled into Lebanon since the violence on the coast, according to the UN.
“The streets are empty. No one dares go outside. All of us here cannot sleep from the fear that we will be killed in our beds,” Hayan said.
