For three days, pro-government fighters have been targeting and killing Alawite Muslim civilians in Syria’s coastal region. The international community must hold Syria’s new government accountable.
The entire Sobh family was executed in their apartment in Baniyas, Syria, on March 7 – part of a larger massacre of Alawite civilians on Syria’s coast.
Over the past three days, the worst fears of Syria’s religious minority groups have been realized. In Syria’s coastal region, fighters loyal to the new government headed by former al-Qaeda leader Ahmed al-Sharaa have been massacring Alawite Muslim civilians and looting their homes. Hundreds, possibly thousands of civilians have been killed. As of the evening of March 9, the killings were ongoing.
Christian Solidarity International (CSI) is in touch with its partners on the ground in Tartous and Latakia provinces, where the killings took place, and is preparing a humanitarian aid response.
CSI calls on the international community, particularly the United States and Russia, to demand accountability from the new Syrian government, and to maintain individual sanctions on leaders in the government until such accountability arrives. (CSI has long advocated an end to the broad economic sanctions on Syria, which hurt the whole population).
In December, the Assad regime, a brutal but secular dictatorship that had ruled Syria for over 50 years, was overthrown by a coalition of Sunni Muslim rebels led by the jihadist group (HTS) – al-Qaeda’s former affiliate in Syria.
Syria’s Christians, Alawites, Druzes, Ismailis, and other religious minorities – around 25 percent of the population – had long feared a Sunni jihadist victory in Syria’s civil war, concerned that it would lead to their persecution. (Syria’s former president, Bashar al-Assad, was himself an Alawite Muslim.) During the long civil war, jihadist groups often attacked religious minorities.
But the new Syrian government, headed by HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, promised that religious minorities would be safe and equal in the “new Syria.” For the first three months after Assad’s fall, that promise largely held.
In recent weeks, however, there were a number of clashes in the coastal region between the new government’s security forces and forces still loyal to the Assad regime.
On March 6, those clashes came to a head. The government called for volunteers to mobilize, and mosques in cities across Syria called for a jihad in the coastal region. On March 7, the massacres began.
For three days, across Latakia and Tartous provinces, armed fighters attacked Alawite villages, rounding up and executing men, and sometimes women and children. In the village of Tuwaym, 31 people were buried in a mass grave on March 8, including nine children and four women.
In larger towns like Baniyas, where Sunnis, Christians and Alawites live together, numerous reports say that pro-government fighters entered apartment buildings and went door to door, demanding from the people who lived there, “What is your sect? What is your religion?” Alawite men, and sometime entire families, have been killed.
The dead include a mother and two brothers from the Sadeq family, who were well known in Baniyas for their opposition to the Assad regime.
One Alawite man in the town of Jableh told Georges Malbrunot, a reporter with Le Figaro newspaper in France, that his family’s life was saved by their Sunni neighbors. When the armed fighters arrived in their apartment building, their neighbors lied to them and said that they were all Sunnis.
Dozens of disturbing videos filmed by pro-government fighters and circulating on social media show the fighters executing Alawites en masse – in one case, ordering them to crawl and howl like dogs before they are killed.
Estimates of the death toll range from over 700 into the thousands. On March 8, one journalist shared a list of 717 Alawite civilians killed in the previous two days.
One of the figures who is apparently involved in the attacks is a commander named Abu Amsha, a leader in the “Syrian National Army,” a rebel group created and funded by Turkey. Abu Amsha was recently appointed as a brigade commander in the new Syrian army.
In his speech to his men ahead of their attack on the coast, he declared, “Syria will be Sunni or we will burn it.”
The vast majority of the civilians killed are Alawites. However, some Christians have also been killed, including Antoine and Fadi Boutros, an Armenian father and son who were shot in Latakia city. Adnan Hassan, an Alawite who has long lived in exile in France because of his opposition to the Assad regime, said that his niece’s husband was shot in his apartment building in Baniyas on March 7. All the other Alawite men and one Christian man who lived in the building were also shot. Only the Sunni Muslim was spared.
In other cases, Christians were spared while their Alawite neighbors were executed.
In a joint statement, the patriarchs of Syria’s three biggest churches condemned the “massacres targeting innocent civilians,” and called for “an immediate end to these horrific acts, which stand in stark opposition to all human and moral values.“
They also called for “the swift creation of conditions conducive to achieving national reconciliation among the Syrian people.”
Thus far, the international response to the massacre has been muted.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a statement condemning “the radical Islamist terrorists, including foreign jihadis, that murdered people in western Syria in recent days.” He continued, “The United States stands with Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities, including its Christian, Druze, Alawite, and Kurdish communities.” But he stopped short of criticizing the new Syrian government itself.
The European Union, on the other hand, criticized “pro-Assad elements” for attacks on “interim government forces,” and condemned, almost as an afterthought, “all violence against civilians.”
On Friday, hundreds of Alawites gathered outside a Russian military base in Latakia, asking for Russia to protect them from the massacres.
CSI’s international president, Dr. John Eibner, noted, “The Western backers of the al-Sharaa Islamist dictatorship have not called for an international investigation into the massacres, nor have they condemned the perpetrating regime. They appear content to allow the perpetrators to investigate themselves.”
CSI is calling on the international community to hold the new Syrian government to account for these massacres. If urgent measures – such as targeted sanctions, an international investigation and an international monitoring mission – are not taken immediately, further massacres of religious minorities in Syria are to be expected.
