Last Thursday, fighting erupted in the Latakia and Tartous regions in northwestern Syria. The area is largely populated by the Alawites, a liberal Muslim sect that deposed leader Bashar al-Assad was a member of. During his reign, Alawites were often seen as Assad’s primary base of power, with thousands of Alawites dying for Assad in the Syrian civil war, but their support is said to have dwindled in the last years of Assad’s rule.
After HTS militias deposed Assad in December, their leader Ahmad al-Sharaa proclaimed he would work with Syria’s various minorities. However there was much anxiety about whether his government would be able to contain acts of revenge against the Alawites.
Over the following weeks and months, sectarian violence broke out occasionally, and there were raids in the Alawite territory by government forces in the weeks leading up to the recent escalation.
Al-Sharaa says he is trying to establish order, disarm militias and bring people complicit in the Assad regime to justice.
Yet, Alawites tell an entirely different story of the last few months. Israfil Erbil, the founder of the British Alevi Foundation, an organization representing thousands of Alawites in the UK, sees his community as the victim: “Alawites were celebrating when Assad fell, his rule was largely propped up by Sunnis and other groups.”
“Framing us as Assad supporters, and this whole thing as Assad loyalists fighting the new government is wrong. We also just want peace.”
Other Alawites agree. Mohamed- not his real name- lives in London. He left the country 15 years ago to live abroad as an artist, but keeps in close contact with his mother, sister and her kids, who still live there.
When Assad fell in December, Mohamed says he had high hopes for the new government- but then was quickly disillusioned by what his family and friends were telling him.
He said: “Alawites were fired from their jobs, even those who never supported Assad” he recalls, “”only because they are Alawites.”
The new government has been accused of firing Alawites who were not affiliated with Assad from their jobs based solely on their ethnicity.
Then, a few weeks ago, Mohamed says a friend found graffiti on her Alawite family’s house. It said: “We are coming to get you.”
He said he tried to convince his relatives to leave the country after this, but his mother refused: “She kept telling me that she has no enemies, who would harm her and her little granddaughters?”
The Washington Post quotes Alawite leaders saying that some in the community started arming themselves as a form of self-defence amidst these growing threats. Mohamed says there were also some peaceful protests, largely fueled by the firing of Alawites from their jobs, as many families were left without an income. He says the government treated these protests as justification to attack the Alawites, the reason for last week’s escalation.
Contradicting that, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, believed to be relatively unbiased, said the initial outbreak of fighting occurred after government forces had tried to arrest a wanted man in the city of Jableh, and were then ambushed. The government reaffirms this, and speaks of a “coordinated attack” by Alawite militias and Assad loyalists.
There is no way to independently verify the government’s or the Alawites’ version of events as to why the violence escalated last Thursday, and who attacked who. But when the fighting started, for Mohamed and many other Alawites, hell began.
He was suddenly receiving messages about people being killed in his old hometown. Soon, he learned in a call that his cousin Sawsan and her two children, 11 year old Farah and 15 year old Khodr, had been killed by gunmen. They were shot in their own house, Mohamed says, unprovoked.
Her sister describes 52-year-old Sawsan as a kind and hospitable lady, always happy to host people in her house in the coastal city of Baniya: “When I opened the door, she and her children would always run to greet me. Sawsan lightened up Baniya.”
Later, Mohamed found out that Sawsan’s older brother, Munzer, had also been killed, along with his teenage son Yaqub. Munzer, his sister says, was also known for his hospitality, often welcoming refugees into his home. Mohamed says nobody in the family was ever involved in any kind of uprising against the government: “They were just Alawites.”
Distraught, Mohamed tried to reach out to his mother, with no success. Grieving the loss of his cousins, but even more sick with worry about his mother, sister, nieces and nephews, he started a Facebook page aimed at identifying those who had been killed, and notifying their families abroad.
Since then, the group has also become an outlet for people to share their grief.
He’s also been aiming to use the platform to raise awareness for the Alawites’ suffering with foreign media. Mohamed said: “It’s a window to the outside world.”
While he had still not heard from his mother by last Friday [March 9th], Mohamed was sent hundreds of messages and pictures from people who were mourning their killed relatives.
Hazem Hamamh, a plastic surgeon from the city of Latakia, was notified that his parents and his sister Tala had been killed, also in the city of Baniya. Tala had recently graduated from University with a degree in pharmacology, and Hazem’s mother, Khaledia, and his father, Muhi, were educators. Hazem says they were killed as innocent civilians.
Hazem remembers the last time he spoke to his mother on the phone on Friday, just briefly, about a water outage. Hours later, she was dead.
Hazem gave PoliticsGlobal permission to publish words he wrote in an obituary posted to Facebook: “If only I knew that was the last time I would hear your voice. I would never have hung up the phone.”
On Saturday morning [8th March], he wrote he had not had an opportunity to bury his family: “They are still laying on the ground.”
The local universities postponed their exams until further notice as the fighting began, and have commemorated their killed alumni on their social media pages. The posts mourning dental students, pharmacy alumni or junior doctors seem never-ending. Many posts commemorate students as well as their entire families, including small children, all killed on the same day, many in the city of Baniya.
Through his online group, Mohamed has gained an understanding of how all these people were being killed, as he was sent pictures and videos of what he says were government troops committing war crimes against Alawite civilians.
One picture shows a soldier with a gun, standing on top of the body of a dead woman, who is still wearing her house slippers. In another video, a man in fighting attire is walking around in a ditch, below him bodies in civilian clothing. He boasts about having “eliminated the remainders of the old regime.
Several videos show the bodies of what appear to be small children inside houses, and men lying down in fields before being executed. None of these videos can be verified independently, but the Guardian spoke to Alawite locals describing similar executions of entire families in villages in the area.
And, the Syrian Network for Human Rights reported that in al-Mukhtariya in Latakia province, less than an hour away from Baniya, where Mohamed’s cousins and Hazem’s family were killed, about 40 civilians were executed by government-affiliated troops on Friday. Unverified videos show people in civilian clothes trying to crawl away from the shooting on their hands and knees.
The Patriarch of Antioch, head of the Greek Orthodox church in Syria, said that several Christian civilians were dragged out of their houses and then executed during the fighting. He also said Christian symbols had been desecrated. Although not specifically blaming anyone, the Patriarch stressed that these actions stood “in stark contrast to the President of Syria’s vision for a new Syria,” and called on al-Sharaa to put “an immediate end to these massacres.”
Mohamed had still not heard from his mother on Saturday. By then, government forces had taken control of all urban centers in the region, and the violence seemed largely over.
Finally, on Saturday evening, Mohamed received a call from his mother. She had made it into hiding together with his sister and nieces, the youngest of whom is six years old. They were scared, but otherwise well.
Mohamed said: “Had they stayed at home, they would have been killed. They made it out just in time.”
Amidst the killings, Syria’s state-owned news agency ,SANA, cited a government official saying that “large, unorganised crowds have moved toward the coast” to fight the Alawites on Thursday and Friday, even acknowledging that “individual violations” had taken place as these crowds entered the region.
An interior ministry source told the state broadcaster: “We are working to put a stop to these violations that do not represent the Syrian people as a whole.”
“Unorganized crowds” could be referring to a certain part of the Syrian government’s security forces. During the civil war, thousands of foreign Jihadists flocked to Syria to join HTS, with many hailing from Central Asia. They have been the source of much controversy, often seen as trying to force fundamentalist beliefs onto Syrians, with little regard for minority rights.
Interim president Al-Sharaa, once an al-Qaeda member himself, has ousted some foreign fighters since taking power, trying to transform his HTS into a more nationalistic force, but many foreign Jihadists remain present in Syria, with some being given leadership positions in the interim government.
There have been concerns that some factions amongst these foreign fighters hold ISIS-like ideologies, and that al-Sharaa has little control over them.
Century International fellow ,Aron Lund, an expert on Syria, told al-Jazeera: “The forces the new al-Sharaa regime depends on are only partly under its control, and they are full of anti-Alawi chauvinists.”
Mohamed agrees: “The foreign fighters are on a Jihad against us.”
Mohamed says his family and friends told him they were starting to see more and more non-Syrians on the streets of their towns in the country’s northwest.
He tells PoliticsGlobal: “Many of those now ethnically cleansing my people are not Syrian, but rogue jihadists from Central Asia.” And he shows videos and pictures of Asian-looking men committing what he says are war crimes against his people.
The videos cannot be verified independently, but on Sunday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that his government ‘condemns the radical Islamist terrorists, including foreign jihadis, that murdered people in western Syria in recent days” – making clear he acknowledges the foreign fighters are an issue.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar have however pledged their support for the Syrian government, while the UN envoy to Syria urged for restraint and the protection of civilians.
Alevi Federation founder Israfil Erbil, meanwhile, calls on the world to protect his people from al-Sharaa and his fighters: “Do not believe his lies about a peaceful Syria. He played a role in an ethnic and sectarian massacre. The international community has to help us.”
The Syrian government did not respond to a request for comment, but Prime Minister al-Sharaa said on Sunday [9th March] that the fighting had been an “expected challenge”.
Syria’s president also said those committing war crimes would be brought to justice, but did not specify who exactly he was referring to.
Marco Rubio also urged al-Sharaa on Sunday to “hold the perpetrators of these massacres accountable.”
Mohamed does not believe that will happen. He says the government has now brought in trucks and water cannons to clean the streets of any evidence of what has happened. Videos seen by PoliticsGlobal appear to verify his claim.
Mohamed said: “I promise you, next week they will invite an al-Jazeera camera crew and tell the world nothing happened.”
“But this will go on. Now it’s the Alawites- the Christians and Druze are next. Syria is a ticking time bomb.”
With additional reporting by Henry Snowdon
