• Northeast

• Aleppo and Idlib

• Damascus

• Coast

• Homs

• Hama

This week saw a slight increase in violence, with five murders in Homs city in particular. Among the dead was a family of three Alawis who were targeted by gunmen reportedly after the wife had shared old photos on Facebook showing that her husband had served in the regime’s forces. At least two kidnapping executions also took place this week, one each in Homs and Damascus.

Meanwhile, security forces arrested at least five regime-era criminals, continuing a recent trend this year. Major counter-narcotics operations were also conducted in border regions including two joint busts alongside the Iraqi and Jordanian governments. Lastly, late in the week government forces prevented a Hezbollah operation attempting to kill a senior Syrian Rabbi in Damascus, detaining the five-person cell.

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• Northeast

• Aleppo and Idlib

• Damascus

• Coast

• Homs

• Hama

Violence remained at a lower, though still consistent, level this week than the first two months of the year. For the fifth week in a row there was only one reported murder in Homs City, and violence in the Homs countryside also remained minimal. However, there has been growing anger by some Sunni residents in Talkalakh over alleged corruption and abuses by the security official in the area.

The most significant incidents this week came in Hama governorate, following the prior week’s events in Suqaylabiyah. Two Alawi men were murdered in Masyaf, a string of robberies were reported in al-Ghab, and Sunni ex-regime fighters attacked a local MoD member in northwest Hama, triggering a multi-day military operation in the town.

Meanwhile security operations continue across the country, still largely focused on regular crime. A large kidnapping ring was dismantled in Aleppo and three men responsible for killing a taxi driver outside Homs recently were arrested. At the same time, at least six ex-regime criminals were arrested in Homs and Hama.

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On March 27, hundreds of men rioted through the streets of Suqaylabiyah, a Christian town in northwest Hama, vandalizing and burning hundreds of shops and cars. The mob formed following a personal dispute a few hours earlier, fueled by misinformation and a decades-long complicated relationship between Suqaylabiyah and the nearby Sunni town of Qalaat al-Mudiq. The attack quickly gained national and international attention, becoming another piece of the wider debate over the new Syrian government and minority safety after Assad. Yet the attack was rooted in local dynamics, part of a wider pattern of deeply local inter-communal conflicts across the country. These conflicts require locally-rooted solutions, and should serve as a warning for Damascus regarding the fragility of much of Syria’s countryside.

Complex Historic Relations

Small-scale personal disputes between these two towns date back to before 2011. Suqaylabiyah is the commercial hub of the region, its main café street a lively place on weekend nights hosting people from the surrounding area. Men from Qalaat al-Mudiq, for example, have frequently visited here for years before the war, and at times gotten into disputes and brawls with local men. These incidents are not new and not sectarian in nature, and they have occurred amidst the existence of close personal and commercial ties between the two towns.

The relationship was strained, however, by the Syrian War. Each town became a strategic point on the frontline between the regime and opposition. Regime, and later Russian, forces established positions in and around Suqaylabiyah from which they indiscriminately shelled Qalaat al-Mudiq. The regime and Russian militaries also formed a militia from some of the Christian men in the town. This militia was involved in every battle against Qalaat, with its members looting homes and detaining and killing men from the other town.

Despite this, Suqaylabiyah also contains pro-revolution residents, and these men have formed the nucleus of a key civil peace network in the wider northwest Hama region. This network includes Amjad Hadad, a Christian opposition fighter who founded the Martyrs of St. George Battalion which fought for several years alongside Free Syrian Army factions in Qalaat. The network is led by several priests who had remained distant from the regime, and incorporates social dignitaries and activists from Sunni and Alawi villages across the area.

This network first began to take shape when the regime fell, its founders recognizing the need to rebuild relations between Suqaylabiyah and the destroyed Sunni villages. It has grown since then, particularly during the summer of 2025, thanks in part to support and guidance from a small international mediation organization. The network has been closely supported by the district Security Director, who has provided it with the support and autonomy to gain local legitimacy. This network and its coordination with the local security office was key for minimizing the damage last week.

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The Friday Riot

On March 27, a small group of men from the two towns fought on the main street over accusations of harassment. This is a not-uncommon occurrence that has happened several times already this year and frequently before 2011. One of the men from Qalaat, an off-duty General Security member, was stabbed and taken to the hospital. The others returned home and rumors quickly spread on WhatsApp that he had been killed. Soon around 200 men had mobilized to get revenge.

However, other members of these WhatsApp groups quickly informed the civil peace network about what was happening. The network then circulated messages for residents in Suqaylabiyah to leave the streets and return home. As the mob mobilized in Qalaat and moved towards the city, it passed through security checkpoint which did not stop them. It remains unclear if the checkpoint was unwilling or unable to stop the crowd of men of motorcycles, but these are usually only staffed by a small number of personnel. The checkpoint immediately contacted the district security official, who deployed his 20 police officers from the city’s station and helped ensure the streets were cleared.

The police escorted three members of the civil peace network to confront the mob and attempt to calm them down. Other officers rushed to put out the fires started by rioters, but there were far too few of them to contain the group. The mob moved through the main streets, vandalizing cars and shops while in Hama city, a 45-minute drive away, security reinforcements mobilized. At the same time, a small civil peace network in nearby Masyaf – established by the same NGO which supports the Suqaylabiyah network – contacted their district security director and urged him to send additional units to Suqaylabiyah. They were joined one hour after the attack began by 100 security members from Hama. Together, they moved into the mob, firing guns in the air to try and push the group off the main street, but this resulted in them dispersing into side streets and continuing the vandalism until they were eventually pushed out of the town. The units from Masyaf remained in the town on March 28 and were crucial for preventing a second mob from entering Suqaylabiyah that day.

Urgent Lessons

In the days since, local officials have engaged closely with community leaders from across the area and there are ongoing dialogues between the two towns. Current efforts are focused on resolving the immediate dispute that resulted in the escalation and on restitution for the destroyed shops and vehicles. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Interior has arrested the off-duty officer who participated in the brawl, and he remains in custody today. This is standard practice.

Government officials and community leaders insist that, “the problem is now solved.” It may be true that this specific incident’s causes - revenge over the brawl and misinformation – have been addressed, but the decades-long tensions between the cities are not, and neither is the severe loss in trust Christian residents now feel towards the security forces and government.

Preventing this from happening again requires locally-rooted solutions and a unified approach by social actors, political officials, and security leaders supported by third party experts.

First, the government’s approach to these types of communal mobilizations lacks any deterrence effect. Damascus has adopted a restorative justice-oriented approach to these forms of inter-communal violence, opting for dialogue between community leaders and financial restitution rather than prison sentences for every participant. This approach reduces the risk of fomenting new vendettas, but does little to deter future participation in riots. Furthermore, financial restitution can exacerbate post-war intercommunal conflict when there are significant economic disparities between the two towns. In this case, Suqaylabiyah is a relatively wealthy town with strong diaspora financial networks that largely escaped damage during the war, while Qalaat al-Mudiq is physically devasted, with nearly every home having been systematically looted by the regime during the war and most residents unemployed. Ordering Qalaat’s residents to pay for the damage they caused will likely only deepen resentment, even if it is the fair thing to do.

The Syrian government should therefore find an alternative approach to accountability and deterrence, something more than financial restitution but less than prison time. Lifetime bans on government employment for anyone who participates in an armed mob could be one avenue. Increased pressure and engagement within Sunni communities by veteran opposition leaders and by officials from Damascus could also help shape social norms against such actions and make it clear that these types of local events do not escape the notice of national leadership.

Second, the attacks highlighted the Interior Ministry’s ongoing personnel problem. Checkpoints in rural are too weak to prevent mobs from passing. These checkpoints used to be run by the army, but the MoI has taken over most of these in recent months with army units confined to bases. This is part of the government’s wider security reforms attempting to separate the army from civil policing. As such, nearby army units did not respond to residents’ requests to deploy during the hour prior to the arrival of the general security reinforcements. However, given the MoI’s resource deficit and inability to rapidly respond to such large incidents, some temporary system should be made which would allow the army to support cutting roads and preventing mob movement in coordination with area security directors.

Third, while these tensions go back decades, the war has exacerbated them. The presence of ex-militia members inside Suqaylabiyah has been manipulated online to frame the entire town as “regime remnants,” with some prominent pro-government media pages framing the initial dispute as a regime insurgent attack against the off-duty officer. Residents of Qalaat al-Mudiq have the right to be angry over the lack of transitional justice in the area, particularly when the government has been so opaque about its approach. Damascus must therefore own its decision to adopt near-universal amnesty for former regime members and realize the impact this decision has on Sunni populations. The Syrian government cannot simply demand Sunnis stay patient for justice without explaining its policies or addressing their consequences on the ground and on social media.

Lastly, the civil peace committee’s network worked well as an early warning system, ensuring that no civilians were harmed during the attack. This model should be expanded to other areas, and the networks in Suqaylabiyah and Masyaf given increased support from the government. At the same time, senior government officials should be more involved in engaging both communities beyond pleasantries, hosting their own dialogue sessions with residents on topics related to personal freedoms, transitional justice, and civil peace.

The issue facing Damascus now is not in reassuring Christians that the they are with them, but to prove to them that the government takes seriously the fact there is a problem within its own constituency and is willing to deal with it. The MoI’s failure to effectively intervene early on, even if out of a lack of capability, has significantly undermined its trust among locals and fueled perceptions of intentional leniency towards Sunni criminals. Dialogues between the two towns are important, but serious security reforms that could prevent future mobilizations and attacks against the city should also be made. As one activist involved in establishing civil peace networks in Homs explained to the author:

“What has transpired constitutes a clear test of the state’s authority. Through continued observation, we will gauge its capacity to maintain a monopoly on force, rein in uncontrolled weaponry, and enforce the law upon all parties without exception. Any laxity in this regard will inevitably lead to a recurrence of such incidents, albeit on a larger and more organized scale.”

This riot was a local event that risked triggering national repercussions had it not been mitigated by the strong civil peace network and presence of police forces. This should serve as a warning about the delicate state of northwest Hama, where most Alawi villages do not have police stations or civil peace committees. Damascus must take seriously the fragility of these mixed-sect zones and re-prioritize expanding police forces, including through the recruitment of locals, and establishing similar civil peace networks in these areas in order to help prevent any future outbreaks of intercommunal violence.

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• Northeast

• Aleppo and Idlib

• Damascus

• Coast

• Homs

• Hama

Violent events remained minimal this week, but the social fragility of some areas was also highlighted. Attacks in Homs city continue to drop with only one murder reported, and of a Sunni resident. However, a rare murder in rural Latakia and a violent armed robbery in rural Tartous underscore the ongoing dangers in these areas. Furthermore, a small personal conflict in rural Hama erupted into a large mob attack against the Christian village of Suqaylabiyah.

Security forces conducted numerous arrests of criminals throughout the week. These including kidnapping gangs, drug smugglers, and thieves. Interestingly, five regime-era criminals were arrested across the country, and the commander of another regime insurgent faction was killed in a security operation in Latakia.

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Khaled’s phone buzzed the day Aleppo was liberated. On the other end was an old friend from college who he had not seen since the revolution began in 2011. After college, Khaled (not his real name), an Alawi from rural Masyaf, had gone on to work as a computer engineer at a local office of a global telecommunications company. His friend had joined al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, Jabhat al-Nusra. In 2014, amid widespread anger by Syrian government employees over stagnating wages, Khaled posted a single line on Facebook in which he indirectly called President Bashar al-Assad a “dog.” He would spend the next ten years wanted by the regime, forced to smuggle himself through checkpoints any time he left his town. Meanwhile, his friend was rising through Nusra’s ranks, eventually becoming a respected commander in the group’s final iteration, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

With the unexpected ease of HTS’s advance into Aleppo city on November 29, the group realized they had a chance to seize far more territory than they initially expected. HTS leaders began contacting important minority communities in Hama, quickly identifying HTS officers who had personal or familial contacts in these towns. In Salamiyah, for example, HTS political officers quickly negotiated a deal with the head of the Syrian Ismaili Council, but HTS field commanders from rural Salamiyah were also calling their families and negotiating directly with town mayors to ensure there would be no fighting.

The same was happening in Masyaf. At the same time Khaled was contacted in his town of Jubb Ramleh, two of his friends in nearby Salhab and Muhrahdeh received messages from their own childhood friends who had gone on to join HTS. Before HTS had even liberated Hama city, the group was already negotiating the surrender of the Masyaf countryside, the regime’s manpower basin in Hama governorate. Khaled and the other men initially contacted then messaged men in other villages who they knew held similarly anti-Assad views and could be trusted to help prepare the ground for the rebels’ entrance. A spiderweb of communication rapidly grew across dozens of towns and villages in Masyaf.

On December 8, at 7am, Khaled’s old friend entered Jubb Ramleh. Despite Khaled’s best efforts, most of the town’s residents had fled to the nearby mountains, fearing the Sunni rebel fighters would massacre them. Khaled and a small group of men stayed behind, however, welcoming the HTS unit and sending videos of themselves with the armed men to the rest of the townspeople to try and assuage them of their fears. After a while the unit moved on, heading towards the city of Masyaf, and some residents returned.

At 9:30am another armed rebel faction entered the town. Khaled did not know them, but a larger group of residents gathered to welcome them this time. According to Khaled, the faction questioned whether Jubb Ramleh was a Sunni or Alawi town, and then executed one of the men who had welcomed their entrance. The faction then left for Masyaf.

Community Initiatives in the State’s Absence

“When the regime collapsed, everything collapsed,” Khaled tells me over tea on his rooftop. There were no services, salaries, or basic goods, even the bakery had stopped receiving flour. Despite the murder committed by the faction, Khaled knew he had to try and keep these basic necessities moving.

The Masyaf countryside became synonymous with pro-regime militias during the war, resulting in widespread demonization of the entire area by the Syrian opposition. The city of Masyaf is itself majority Ismaili with Sunni, Christian, and Alawi communities and had risen up against Assad in 2011. But the countryside is nearly entirely Alawi, and it was from these villages that the regime drew both soldiers and militia fighters. Warlordism grew rampant in rural Masyaf, fueled by wealthy regime-linked businessmen and a few prominent families who turned their wealth and regime-connections into networks of armed groups. These groups were used extensively in military operations against the opposition across the country. But as the regime recaptured most of the country and the availability of new Sunni communities to plunder evaporated, these militias turned inward. Beginning around 2018, these armed networks became increasingly predatory against Alawis in the Masyaf countryside, kidnapping, murdering, and stealing from the Alawi and Sunni communities alike.

Jubb Ramleh had long stood apart from this dynamic. Unlike nearby towns like Asilah, Salhab, and Rabia, few of Jubb Ramleh’s men joined regime militias. As the capital of Masyaf’s largest subdistrict, the town has a high education rate and more expansive government employment. Of the 7,500 residents of the town, roughly 70% worked in government jobs, with less than 11% serving in the military. This difference is starkly reflected in the publicly reported funeral records of the towns during the first years of the war. Between 2011 and 2013, for example, only 15 men from Jubb Ramleh died while fighting in the regime’s army, while in the same period 39 men from Asilah and 161 men from Rabiah were killed in the regime’s ranks.

The collapse of the regime’s security services on December 8 meant that thousands of men across Masyaf had lost their paychecks overnight. Subsequent government restructuring campaigns in early 2025 saw waves of municipal and national-level employees fired from their jobs. Due to the over-representation of Alawis among government agencies, these campaigns had an disproportionate impact on Alawis. The combined effect was a sudden, massive economic collapse within Alawi communities. In Jubb Ramleh, only around 10% of the town remains employed in the government today, and there is little to no natural local economy for newly unemployed college graduates to move into.

Khaled urged the town’s residents to return from the mountains throughout December 2024. At the same time, he established a small council in the town in order to address this sudden crisis, encouraging other towns to do the same. These councils worked to provide food, medicine, and flour to their communities, using both local fundraisers and personal funds from the council members themselves. Many of the men have gone into debt trying to support these initiatives, borrowing from wealthy Alawi businessmen. “When you form something like this, a small council to manage daily matters, you need resources and so it’s a huge problem that money is not available,” explains Khaled.

For seven months these councils and local charities raised money and supported local families. Economic stress was worsened by the arrival of families from the village who had been living in the military housing in Damascus and Homs. Now unemployed and facing uncertain stability in these housing blocks technically owned by the government, many of these families have returned to their villages across the coast. But by mid-summer the money had run out.

In mid-February, these informal community councils merged with the original network of interlocutors who had communicated with HTS prior to the group’s entry to the region. What emerged came to call itself the Higher Alawi Islamic Council of Hama and Homs. The organization’s initial focus was on filling the services gap left by the collapse of the regime, but it was also able to leverage the individuals’ ties to security officers to serve as community interlocutors. Khaled explains the philosophy behind the council:

“There is a proverb: ‘a small problem needs a small guy to resolve it, a big problem needs a big guy.’ All the other sects have a central structure to solve these matters, except the Alawis. So how do you collect all of the Alawis without a head religious man? You begin calling the friends from university or work, and you form a network. So, we created a 50-person network in Hama and Homs. We had the first meeting in Salhab with the knowledge of the new government in January 2025. We wanted to understand the new government and its principles. Previously we knew nothing about these rebel groups, how they lived or perceived us. All people were afraid of the new government. We wanted to create a bridge between the government and the people. The main goal was to return services.”

The council continues working today, though in a highly decentralized manner. Each member works individually within his community, with the council forms a sort of support network he can refer to if needed.

Building Security out of Chaos

The trust the council’s members had established with officials early on, as well as the clean backgrounds of Khaled and the other local interlocutors, enabled the men to engage in a more collaborative dynamic with security officials. Khaled organized weapon handovers and the peaceful surrender of wanted men, avoiding security raids like those seen in rural Homs which at that time frequently resulted in deaths and violations against Alawi residents.

When Alawi insurgents rose up in the coast on March 6, Masyaf remained largely peaceful. “The Alawis in the coast and Hama are a different class,” explains Khaled, “We knew nothing about the insurgency in the coast, because they did not trust us.” Insurgents had not expanded or activated their networks beyond the most westward edge of Masyaf, around Wadi Ayoun, Resafa, and Salhab, thus leaving security forces in the rest of Masyaf relatively untouched. Yet the insurgency undermined the progress Masyaf’s leaders had made with local officials, spurring renewed distrust towards men like Khaled. Khaled and the council were barely able to prevent new security raids in their towns in the days after, but intense dialogue eventually prevailed.

The success of this dialogue was rooted in the network’s attitdues towards security officials in the preceding months. Khaled had engaged HTS officers early on, encouraging them to establish a security point in the town’s former police station. “They brought a force and began doing patrols and dealing with criminals,” recalls Khaled:

“They gradually expanded security from here, but the turning point came when they brought in defected police officers in July and handed over control of the station to them. They were very relaxed and easy to work with, and the mindset here shifted from a military one to a police mindset.”

Many communities in the Masyaf region were similarly eager to have HTS establish security positions in the countryside, an attitude that was not as common at this time in rural Tartous or Latakia. For the residents in Masyaf, these police stations and checkpoints were seen as a form of protection from extremist and criminal elements of the security forces and from local communities. Due to Masyaf’s reputation for hardcore Assadist militias and its proximity to strategic areas of Hama and Idlib, many of the most hardened opposition factions were initially sent to the region on December 8. Among these were Ansar Tawheed and the Turkistani Islamic Party (TIP). It was likely the former of these that executed the man in Jubb Ramleh on December 8.

According to revolutionary activists from Masyaf city who I spoke with last summer, it was these two factions which immediately caused problems in the area. “They entered the city expecting us all to be shabiha,” said one man, an Ismaili media activist who had previously worked with the Free Syrian Army, “we had to sit down with them and show them videos of us protesting in 2011 to prove to them that we were with the revolution.” Only then did the factions begin to relax.

Ansar Tawheed was then assigned to help oversee security in the Masyaf region, working alongside units belonging to HTS and the local Free Syrian Army faction Jaish al-Izza. It was in this context that Khaled and other local notables had called on HTS specifically to erect new security points, hoping the group would help keep out the more extremist Ansar Tawheed while also addressing intercommunal criminality coming from some of the nearby Sunni towns. Jaish al-Izza was soon assigned as the primary army faction in the area, and its leader, Brigadier Jamil Saleh, has built a close relationship with the Alawi communities.

While Ansar Tawheed was withdrawn from Masyaf by the spring of 2025, the inter-communal violence remained. Revenge attacks, both directly against regime criminals but also against perceived communal culpability, became an increasing problem. “Before the regime fell it was a complete government,” says Khaled, “it had state branches, security and military, and Baath employees. Now having been in any of these jobs has become an accusation.” As the security forces in Masyaf improved and violations from the government units ended, it was the Sunni communities in rural Hama which became the primary threat to Masyaf’s villages. “They are threatening the farmers, sometimes using weapons other times going out and damaging farming equipment or bringing shepherds to graze on the Alawi farms,” Khaled explains.

Most of the tensions have come from one of the few Sunni villages in Masyaf district, Dimo. Dimo is less than a third of a mile east of Jubb Ramleh. Most of the tensions between the towns have centered around agricultural land and grazing rights. However, there have been incidents of theft, harassment, and murder. The most significant violence in recent months came on December 29, when two Alawi farm workers were killed near Jubb Ramleh. Residents accuse men in Dimo of being behind the murders. As we spoke that afternoon, Khaled received a phone call from a local shop owner. Two men from Dimo had shoplifted some goods and fled on motorbike.

An Uncertain Future

Khaled’s collaborative mentality is borne from years of opposing the Assad regime; dodging the compulsory conscription and hiding from arrest warrants for more than 10 years. His focus has been on rebuilding his community and working with the state, an approach which necessitates prioritizing civil peace over justice. Reflecting on the December 8 murder by the opposition faction, Khaled says, through a pained face, “We have to consider this a natural part of these kinds of huge transitions if we want to move forward and build something.” Yet the revenge killings that continued after December 2024 have undermined trust from the Alawi community for the new authorities, and the ongoing economic collapse has fueled perceptions of intentional marginalization of the Alawi countryside.

According to Khaled, the December 29 killings were a type of thievery against farmers. However, he is optimistic that the new Security Director for Masyaf will be able to improve security. Masyaf District has undergone a series of leadership changes since December 8 which have had serious impacts on security and trust building among all sects. The HTS officer who knew Khaled from before the war served as the military official for the district until late Spring 2025 and did a good job establishing basic security services. However, as part of the new government’s restructuring he was later replaced by a new District Director, an administrative official named Muhammad Taraa, who quickly began consolidating power in the district. Taraa sidelined and at times directly attacked the Sunni and Ismaili community while surrounding himself with wealthy Alawi shabiha, according to several activists from Masyaf city. At one point Taraa even ordered the imprisonment of the city’s most prominent Ismaili and Sunni businessmen over a verbal dispute.

By late 2025 Taraa was removed from his position and a new District Director and Security Director was assigned to the district. Both men quickly began to rebuild relations with each of Masyaf’s varied communities. The Security Director, a defector from Rastan, had served for nearly a year in Salamiyah, where he had a strong track record of working with that district’s Sunni, Ismaili, and Alawi communities and building effective local dispute resolution systems.

“We met with the director and introduced ourselves,” says Khaled, “He is a good guy on security issues and responsive.” When the double murder occurred on December 29, Khaled and his council met with Security Director to explain the problems the farmers were facing. The General Security subsequently established a series of patrols and new checkpoints in the area. “Maybe in 6 months the security situation will be settled and the social problems between the sects will be better,” Khaled hopes, “But the major problem of the economy remains and this will continue to exacerbate the social situations.”

Despite the security improvements, little has been done to address the roots of the inter-communal conflict in the region. Locals have held meetings and attempted dialogue sessions between village representatives, all supported by and coordinated through the new District Director. He had previously been in charge of engaging with and supporting Hama’s Alawi community from the governor’s office, and through this work had already built relations with many of Masyaf’s Alawi leaders, including Khaled. “He is a very good man,” Khaled says, “he engages closely with all communities and holds many meetings.” Yet there has been no recent engagement from the governor’s office or the Political Affairs Directorate, both of which would have more weight within the Sunni towns. Nor has there been any support from national or international NGOs.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis has become the dominant issue in the district. Khaled and his network have fostered close relationships with local security officials as well as some political leaders in Hama, but economic and service support to the area is still non-existent. Many activists and community leaders, like Khaled himself, have gone into debt in their attempts to fill the services gap left by the collapsed state and the absent INGOs. Debts are generally in the range of a few thousand dollars – nothing for the aid organizations that never arrived, but huge for communities where a government salary is less than $100 a month. Now the money lenders are threatening to take people like Khaled to court to get their money back.

Like every Alawi area I have visited since late 2025, Khaled and the residents of Jubb Ramleh believe their community has been intentionally marginalized by the new Syrian government. They see the lack of NGO activity and economic investment as a result of explicit orders by Damascus banning such work in Alawi areas. Yet this is the case across all of rural Syria, Sunni or Alawi. Just a few dozen miles north, in Idlib’s Jabal Zawiya region, scores of towns have been left to rebuild on their own. This area was the heart of Idlib’s revolutionaries, as Masyaf was for the regime, and yet its communities have also received no government or INGO support. When asked about this, government officials often point to the scale of economic and infrastructure crises facing the entire country. Their priorities, and those of international donors, are with the cities, the economic and social heart of Syria.

This reality does nothing to dissuade perceptions of abandonment and marginalization. For Alawis, it is just another indicator that they are not part of this new government. For many rural Sunnis, there is an unhappy acceptance of the countryside’s isolation. Every discussion about the lack of support ends with the phrase, “but we must be patient, the government has too many problems to address.” It remains to be seen how long this patience will last. Meanwhile, in rural Masyaf, there is only so much that the District and Security Directors can achieve on their own. Security can be improved through the efforts of the General Security forces, but this only addresses the symptoms of instability. Continued economic strife and unaddressed inter-communal grievances remain the heart of Masyaf’s fragile peace, and resolving these requires a holistic and unified approach – more than what Khaled can achieve on his own.

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• Northeast

• Aleppo and Idlib

• Damascus

• Coast

• Homs

• Hama

This week saw continued protests and tensions across the northeast related to the ongoing integration of the Syrian Democratic Forces. A video showing a Kurdish man removing the Syrian flag during a Newroz celebration in Kobani triggered a wave of protests in Arab areas, as well as mob violence against Kurdish civilians in Afrin. This in turn resulted in mob attacks against ISC offices in Qamishli and Hasakah and resulted in a series of statements by government and Kurdish leaders condemning all of the actions.

Meanwhile, low-level but persistent violence continued with several murders reported in Homs, Aleppo, Hama, and Latakia. Some of the murders were the result of family disputes, others random sectarian killings, and at least one potentially linked to vigilantism. An Alawi shrine was also attacked in rural Masyaf, the first violent incident in the district since late December.

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Syria’s Christians have long adopted a stance of general neutrality throughout the country’s fraught history, largely as a survival mechanism. Most Christian communities were therefore able to avoid significant involvement within the Assad regime’s security apparatus (particularly its militias, unlike other minority groups who became the backbone of the regime’s forces during the war). After the country’s liberation, Christians have asked for little, wanting only for their rights to be conditionally protected and to be kept safe from attacks.

One exception to this trend is the large Christian area of Wadi Nasara in western Homs. This valley contains more than two dozen Christian villages nestled on the northern and eastern sides of a mountain atop which sits the famous Crusader fortress Krak des Chevaliers and Hosn, a Sunni Turkmen town. Hosn and the neighboring Sunni Turkmen town of Zara had risen against the Assad regime early in the war and were quickly besieged. Given its geographic position, the regime used Wadi Nasara to maintain the siege and attack Hosn, including through the establishment of a Christian militia under the National Defense Forces (NDF) umbrella.

There are now decade-old grievances between Hosn and Wadi Nasara as a result of these battles, as outlined in one of my previous pieces:

Last month I visited Wadi Nasara, following a visit to Zara and Hosn in December, and met with a local priest involved in civil peace efforts between the communities. The following is an edited transcript of our meeting. This long interview covers the core problems between Hosn and Wadi Nasara and recent attempts at civil peace dialogues between the two communities, as well as topics on government relations and social issues within the community.

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• Northeast

• Aleppo and Idlib

• Damascus

• Coast

• Homs

• Hama

Violent incidents in Syria continue to be centered in the Homs governorate, though still not to the degree seen earlier this year. This week saw tensions rise in western Homs, where security operations targeting Sunni smuggling and criminal groups triggered an attack against the local security station. A vigilante killing was also conducted in rural Hama, the first in a long time.

Meanwhile, significant steps were taken this week in the northeast integration deal, including the deployment of Ministry of Interior forces to half a dozen new checkpoints in Hasakah. The new Assistant Minister of Defense for the Eastern Regions was also appointed this week, triggering widespread protests across Raqqa, Hasakah, and Aleppo.

The Ministry of Interior continued to expand this week, with new cadet graduations in both Idlib and Latakia and the opening of the Women’s Police Institute in Damascus.

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This unique blend of cultures has driven the area’s experiences since the fall of Assad. The district lost more than 6,000 men during the war fighting under the Assad regime, and thousands more underwent ‘taswiya’ after December 8. Yet the district has the strongest youth civil movements in Tartous and also saw one of the only grass-roots civil peace committees form, with strong, persistent engagement with local security officials since December 2024. This engagement was undermined significantly by the insurgency on March 6, 2025, and has floundered in the year since. See my recent report for a lengthy account of what happened in Dreikish on March 6:

I have visited Dreikish several times over the past year, meeting with youth activists and members of the civil peace committee. Below is an interview I conducted in mid-February 2026 with a former member of the committee. We discuss the security situation, impact of the SDF’s defeat in the northeast, the weakened role of the civil peace committee, the economy, and most importantly, clear steps the government could take to rebuild trust with the Alawi community.

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The SCM and COI reports provide excellent contextual background on the rising tensions and violence prior to March 6, as well as some aspects of the insurgent attacks that triggered the mass Sunni mobilization, and both should be read in full. However, they lack a broader examination of the insurgent networks pre-March 6 or the role of local Alawis in protecting security forces and their own towns, all of which has become clearer with the passage of time. A more holistic look at the origins and patterns of violence underscores the strength of ex-regime insurgent networks prior to March 6, the role of social media in mobilizing Alawi youth and fueling retaliatory violence, and the fragility of post-war peace even in places where security officials and Alawi leaders do everything right to prevent violence.

The events of March 2025 were neither just an insurgency nor just a massacre, as many have tried to frame it. The motivations behind the insurgency are just as varied as those that drove the subsequent mass killings, neither of which can be reduced simply to Alawi fear of the government or Sunni sectarianism against Alawis. The actions of both the Alawi community and of the pro-government fighters are similarly varied and should not be viewed as one-dimensional, with members from both sides actively working to prevent violence in the days leading up to and through the March massacres. Understanding the roots of this violence and the dynamics that fueled or limited it is crucial for understanding the coast’s trajectory since March 2025.

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A Typology of Violence

The following report is based on months of field work in the coast, both in the weeks prior to March 6 and the year since, speaking with dozens of security officials, eyewitnesses, and local activists. This is not an investigation into the violations and crimes committed by armed civilians and government forces, although they are mentioned where possible. These have been covered extensively in the aforementioned reports. Instead, it examines the competing narratives within the Alawi community that underpinned support for the insurgency, how the insurgency unfolded across the coast, and 10 case studies examining patterns of violence or non-violence between March 6 and March 10. Understanding these foundations of the March violence is critical for developing effective policies to address the ongoing fragility of Damascus’ integration of Alawi communities into the new state.

The case studies reveal one important dynamic of the initial insurgent attacks: localities where many government forces were killed on March 6 and 7 are also where many of the largest anti-Alawi killings subsequently took place. Places where security forces survived generally saw far fewer violations. While members of the Interior Ministry’s General Security Service (GSS) also took part in anti-Alawi violations, the GSS broadly speaking, and especially local GSS officials, appear to have played a central role in limiting these killings in areas where they survived the initial insurgent attacks. This is important of course not because it justifies the violence that occurred, but rather because it speaks to the range of motivations of pro-government forces and the complex relationship between local Alawis and the GSS. While the GSS contributed to the massacres in some areas, they acted as barriers against the violence in others. This relationship has grown in the year since, with the GSS becoming the pillar of state engagement with rural Alawi communities, which many now view as the only trustworthy entity within the new Syrian government.

A rough typology of violence can be found in the following case studies, though again there is no singular pattern to the violence in March and some pro-government forces were certainly driven by purely sectarian motivations. Nonetheless, these the case studies, as well as the COI investigation, suggests three broad categories of violence with more multi-layered factors:

• Targeted indiscriminate killings: One of the most unaddressed questions after March 2025 was why some Alawi communities were attacked and others were not. Most of the communities with the most significant Alawi massacres were also the sites of the largest insurgent attacks. These includes Sanobar2, Mukhtariyah3, Jableh4, Da’atour5, Resafa6, and Baniyas7. There is a clear pattern of pro-government forces specifically targeting villages from which significant insurgent movements arose, but once inside those villages killing any Alawi male, and at times women and children, that they encountered. Yet, most of these reprisal killings came after insurgents had already fled the area, leaving behind only civilians.

• Survival of GSS on March 6 and 7 prevented wider violence: Some of the places with minimal-to-no killings of security forces during the initial uprising saw similarly few attacks against Alawis in the days after, like Dreikish, Sheikh Badr, Bahluliyah, Khirbet Maazah, and Beit Yashout.8 In each of these places, the survival of GSS units during the initial uprising enabled those officers to prevent or limit pro-government factional violence in the following days.

• Sectarian-driven communal retribution: Nevertheless, there were also multiple towns where there was no insurgent activity on March 6 which still suffered significant attacks, killings, and looting by pro-government forces, such as Qurfeis,9 Harisoun, and Brabishbo10. Furthermore, widespread violations continued even after the insurgent threat had been dealt with by early March 8. Often, these crimes were rooted in a broader mentality of communal retribution against the entire Alawi community for crimes committed by the Assad regime during the war. In testimonies cited by the COI, Human Rights Watch, and SCM, pro-government forces often justified their indiscriminate killings as revenge for the regime’s crimes.11

Prelude to Insurgency

Insurgent activity by ex-regime personnel began shortly after the fall of Assad. While most of this activity occurred in Alawi areas of coastal and central Syria, intermittent clashes also took place within Sunni ex-regime communities in rural Damascus throughout January and February 2025. However, these networks played no role in the March uprising, with insurgent activity on March 6 and 7 isolated to the coastal regions.

The first insurgent attack occurred on December 24 in the area of Khirbet Maazah, just outside Tartous city. While security forces responded professionally and with discipline to this attack, according to multiple locals I spoke with, many of the subsequent insurgent attacks were met with violent security raids, killings, and indiscriminate detentions. The security response to attacks fueled escalating support for armed opposition to the new government, particularly in the rural coast where most Alawi men had served in the Assad regime. Between December 2024 and January 2025, insurgent activity shifted from reactive (attacks against security units conducting arrests) to proactive, consistently targeting security checkpoints and patrols across the coast. Between January 14 and March 6, insurgents averaged at least two attacks per week in Tartous and Latakia alone, including seven attacks just in Latakia city.

These escalating activities paralleled an increasingly coordinated insurgent network. By late January, attacks began being claimed on behalf of specific Alawi insurgent factions, openly threatening broader violence against the state. These networks were built around a core of ex-regime officers and fighters who flatly rejected a Sunni-run state. Investigations in the months since have shown that these networks were supported and often directed by senior regime officials who had fled to Russia and Lebanon, including Kamal Hassan, Suheil Hassan, Ghiath Dala, and Rami Makhlouf.

These regime irredentists spent the first three months after Assad working to expand their recruitment within the Alawi community. Ex-soldiers were the primary target, with recruiters playing on their security fears and economic hardships linked to the December 2024 taswiya process. However, the insurgents also recruited Alawi men who had never served in the regime’s forces. These recruitment efforts were aided by the amplification of ongoing anti-Alawi crimes by security forces, further bolstered by a constant stream of mis- and dis-information of fake crimes. These propaganda networks would play a crucial role in the mass mobilization on March 6, as discussed below.

The growth of insurgent networks came alongside fierce debates within the coastal Alawi community over the proper response to violations by government forces. Alawi civil society, weak and fractured after decades of Assad’s suppression of civil movements within the sect, were strongly advocating for a non-violent political approach against Alawi disenfranchisement and abuses. But they were fighting a losing battle for influence among the mostly rural coastal community against “the Alawi deep state,” as one activist described it to me in February 2025.

This ‘Alawi Deep State’ was run by militant sheikhs and ex-regime officers who outright rejected any Sunni governance within the country. I met one such sheikh in mid-February 2025, who explained their position bluntly: “We want the new regime to grant us power,” emphasizing repeatedly that the Alawi sheikhs themselves must be given power, not civil activists. He ended the conversation with a direct threat, “we are all in unison and have thousands of trained young men who will take up weapons against the new regime the moment we tell them to.”

The January 2025 violence in western Homs, covered in detail in the COI report, was a catalyzing event pushing more Alawi men towards the militant sheikhs. In a series of violent raids in and around the town of Fahel on January 23, security forces summarily executed 17 ex-regime officers and dozens of Alawi men were arbitrarily detained. The raids triggered local protests and re-flamed Alawi fears that the new government was planning a “slow genocide” of the community and was viewing every ex-regime soldier as guilty for the regime’s war crimes. For its part, Damascus seemed to understand the seriousness of the violations and quickly issued new security policies in the coast. Military factions were withdrawn from every area of rural Tartous and most parts of rural Latakia and village raids targeting weapon caches were halted and instead security forces began coordinating closely with Alawi community leaders to arrange voluntary hand-overs.

While violations in the coast dropped dramatically in February, especially in Tartous, isolated killings and robberies against Alawis continued and insurgent attacks against security forces continued to grow. By late February it was clear that insurgent networks were preparing for a wider uprising, staging mobile weapons caches and hoping to take advantage of some individual spark to mobilize the broader community. Tensions first escalated on February 26, when a reportedly recently hired security member harassed and fought a businessman in Qardaha. This triggered protests in the city while insurgent media pages attempted to mobilize additional communities. That evening, insurgents arrived with a truck loaded with guns to Qardaha’s outskirts, but were quickly intercepted by police. Five days later, insurgents executed two police officers near the Da’atour neighborhood of Latakia city, triggering a security operation in the which government forces killed nine men. Alawi social media accounts spread this news widely, calling it “the Da’atour genocide” and claiming all nine men were innocent civilians. At least one security member was arrested the next day for engaging in sectarian behavior, according to security officials.

Insurgency

On March 6, police officers arrived in the village of Daliyah to arrest a young man. Fearing that he would be executed or disappeared, locals asked if their mukhtar could accompany him to prison. The police agreed and the situation was resolved. However, on their way back to Jableh the bus was stopped by a checkpoint of armed Alawis at the nearby village of Beit Ana, who executed the four police officers and freed the prisoner. As security forces mobilized to respond, insurgents entered the villages with trucks laden with guns and, according to someone in Beit Ana, many teenagers and young men “volunteered” to fight the approaching forces and were quickly armed by the insurgents.12 Responding security forces were then ambushed on the road to Daliyah with all 18 men killed, as reported by the COI and confirmed via local activists.13

It was not an isolated attack, but rather the beginning of the coast-wide uprising.14 As the COI reported, “The attacks in Jablah took place 30 minutes before clashes started in Tartus.”15 According to multiple local activists and ex-regime officers across Tartous, Latakia, and Hama that I spoke with over the past year, as well as investigations using captured insurgent phones and laptops, the core insurgent network had a clear plan to isolate the coast from the rest of Syria. Government checkpoints along every highway were attacked, most captured, and dozens of security forces killed that afternoon and evening.16 Parts of Latakia, Jableh, and Baniyas cities were quickly captured alongside several military installations such as the Istamo Airbase. COI investigators confirmed that insurgents succeeded in capturing or besieging six hospitals across the three aforementioned cities, as well as besieging the Naval Academy in Latakia.17 Other security forces that weren’t wiped out were besieged in their rural positions and took to social media, calling on anyone to some to their aid.18 Early government reinforcements were ambushed at highway overpasses which had been seized by insurgents, resulting in additional deaths among security forces.

The government’s decision to withdraw most military factions from the rural areas of the coast had left interior ministry units undermanned and exposed. By the morning of March 7, the entirety of Tartous’ Dreikish and Sheikh Badr districts had been seized by insurgents, as well as all of Qadmus district aside from the Ismaili-majority city, which was now besieged.19 Most of Baniyas district, all of rural Jableh and Qardaha districts, and parts of Haffeh and the Masyaf districts had likewise fallen to insurgent control. Multiple Alawi activists told me that Russian military forces in Latakia’s Hmeimim Airbase had supplied insurgents with weapons and ammunition in the early hours of the uprising.20

There were two types of insurgent cells on the eve of March 6: those connected to the broader coastal network and ultimately coordinating with external commanders, and local cells of young men who had formed independently of the central networks.21 Both types now mobilized, with the independent cells seeing the movement of other networks and taking up arms to join them. Videos filmed by insurgents on March 6 and 7 show large groups of armed men, some dressed in full military uniforms others in civilian attire, freely walking around captured areas of the coast. Local networks varied from a few dozens of fighters to hundreds, according to residents I spoke with across six coastal districts, meaning thousands of armed men were involved in the initial uprising.

Scores of heavily armed insurgents celebrate capturing the 107th Brigade base in rural Jableh on the morning of March 7

Insurgents, some dressed in civilian clothes others in military uniforms, walk through rural Jableh on the morning of March 7.

Online propaganda networks played a central role in fueling additional recruitment in these first hours. Through social media and word of mouth, insurgents pushed the claim that a foreign military, sometimes Russia, sometimes Israel, would enter the coast in 24 hours once locals had seized the major ports and airbases.22 Media networks further claimed the coastal uprising was part of a nation-wide coup against the new government, encouraging every Alawi man to take up arms. For example, one long-running pro-regime news page with 35,000 followers made a series of claims during the evening of March 6, including that the Russian military had announced it would strike any government convoy entering the coast and had fired missiles at security forces coming from Idlib, and that anti-Damascus coups had been launched by Ahmed Awda in Dara’a, tribes in Deir Ez Zor, and the SDF in Aleppo. These claims were interspersed with videos of insurgents taking control of positions across the coast and of captured or killed security forces.

Yet the insurgency had not spread beyond the coast, largely because those core networks had intentionally not engaged with Alawis in Homs or Hama governorates. According to one prominent Alawi mayor in rural Hama, “the Alawis of the coast don’t trust us, so they did not include us in their plans prior to March 6.”23 The only non-coastal area to rise up was the Wadi Ayoun sub-district of Hama’s Masyaf, which sits deep in the coastal mountains, and the adjacent village of Resafa, which resides on the edge of the Wadi Ayoun mountain range.

Motivations to join the insurgency varied significantly. Certainly, many men joined out of fear for their safety and anger over government violations over the previous three months. Others, especially young Alawi men, were paid to join the insurgents, according to one Alawi community leader I spoke with in rural Tartous. But other insurgents were acting out of sectarian and power-driven motivations, as made clear by the sheikh I met in February 2025. Desires for power and anti-Sunni sectarianism helps explain why the insurgency occurred in many areas where government forces had worked well with the Alawi community, as will be shown in the case studies. The COI report includes an insightful testimony on the violently sectarian rhetoric insurgents used internally:

“Pro-former government forces then abducted the witness and took him to a civilian house in Deir Elbishel village, where he was held with another civilian man from Homs. The witness observed approximately 30 additional armed men in or around the house, with most wearing civilian t-shirts bearing the logo of the “Coast Shield” and others dressed in military uniforms associated with the former Syrian Army. Both victims were beaten, threatened and insulted, including with sectarian slurs. One of the armed men was carrying a sword and threatened to behead one of the victims saying: ‘You are coming to slaughter the Alawis, you dogs’, that: ‘Assad will return to power, and will shut their mouths, rape their women and slaughter them’.”– COI report, page 27

Aftermath

Many of the worst massacres came in the immediate aftermath of the initial insurgent attacks. Surviving security forces and their reinforcements conducted indiscriminate killing campaigns in several towns on March 7 from which insurgents had attacked their positions the night before. This includes places like Mukhtariyah, where dozens of security members were killed on March 6, Qabou, whose nearby checkpoint was besieged throughout the night, Sanobar, from which insurgents attacked a nearby military base, Da’atour neighborhood, whose insurgents had besieged the local police station, and Jableh and Baniyas cities. Other massacre sites were previously highlighted on social media posts as being safe havens for insurgents, even if this was not the case.24 These social media rumors may have played an additional role in which communities were targeted by pro-government forces. This pattern suggests that the insurgency itself played a significant role in determining which areas were targeted on March 7, even if the killings within those towns were conducted with more base sectarian motivations.

The patterns of violations shifted over March 8 and 9, with killings occurring more often in the context of mass looting and displacement as roaming convoys of armed Sunnis, some civilians, some former opposition factions, and others members of state forces, exploited the chaos. This period also saw a common pattern wherein GSS units, which had by now been reinforced, would respond to community calls for help, expel factions committing crimes, and then move to another area at which point another faction would re-enter.25 It was not until the widespread establishment of permanent checkpoints across the region that these daily factional abuses ceased.

Coastal Sunnis played a large role in the retributive violence, owing to a number of overlapping factors. In places like Baniyas and Jableh, Sunni communities were often seeking revenge against the broader Alawi community for the brutal massacres Alawi militiamen had committed against them earlier in the war or during the March 6 attacks. Class disputes also played a role, with wealthy Alawi neighborhoods in particular being targeted by Sunnis coming from disenfranchised towns, especially in Baniyas.26 Across the Sunni community, a deep sense of betrayal was universally expressed. One testimony published by the COI cites armed men telling male Alawis “’Al-Shaara gave you security and you betrayed him.’ before shooting and killing 15 male relatives.”27

The betrayal narrative and accusations against the wider Alawi community were fueled by widely held perceptions that most Alawis knew about the insurgency before it began. Christian and Sunni residents I met with in Baniyas and Latakia in April 2025 all spoke about seeing their Alawi neighbors closing shops early and keeping their kids out of school on March 6, or leaving the cities for their villages the day before. One Christian businessman in Baniyas recalled seeing an Alawi ex-officer packing his family into his car in the evening of March 5, saying to the Christian man, “What are you doing here? Close your shop and leave, everything will be settled soon.” According to one Alawi activist from rural Tartous, there were widespread rumors of an impending uprising within the community due to leaks from ex-officers involved in planning the operation.

The sense of betrayal ran particularly deep in Latakia city, whose Sunni residents had suffered under 14 years of Assad regime oppression. “They have not accepted that the regime is gone,” one Sunni businessman told me during a dialogue session, “we had gathered with Alawi sheikhs and influential men and all agreed on rejecting violence, but now after March 6 they have changed their way of talking and say Sunnis are threatening every Alawi.” Prior to the uprising, Sunnis in Latakia in particular already feared the Alawi ex-soldiers. In my visit to the city in February, every Sunni I met with was convinced that, “the Alawis will never accept living with us as equals and are waiting to take back control,” as one young government worker described. The March 6 insurgency, which most pro-government Sunnis described as a coup attempt, solidified their belief that the Alawi community as a whole was against them.

The insurgency’s failure and subsequent mass killings also fomented a sense of betrayal within the Alawi community. Many Alawi activists in rural Tartous spoke in the months after the uprising of a deep rift that had formed among the insurgents and their sympathizers between Tartous and Latakia. Latakian insurgents blamed those in Tartous for the uprising’s failure, claiming that they had failed to keep the coastal highway cut as was planned. “The former soldiers in Latakia now call the men here ‘traitors’,” explained one resident in rural Tartous.28 Most insurgents in Tartous had fled the moment pro-government reinforcements arrived on March 7, leaving those in Latakia exposed. For their part the insurgents in Tartous felt manipulated by the insurgent leaders in Latakia, who had lied about imminent foreign support. This divide significantly weakened the insurgency’s ability to rebuild, with the remaining networks largely receding to rural Latakia.

In the year since the insurgency and massacres, the experiences and trajectories of Alawi communities that were not attacked and those who survived the mass killings have also diverged significantly. “There is a difference in support [for armed opposition] from region to region,” according to an ex-regime officer, “based on what is happening in each region and where the massacre happened.”29 As the new government has made continued improvements in its treatment of and relations with coastal Alawis, there has been a reduced degree of fear and anger and many people started returning to their daily lives. Yet there have been no attempts by the government to reconcile with communities impacted by violence, leaving those residents still deeply angry and constantly afraid of new killings.

According to the former regime officer, insurgent networks have attempted to leverage this anger into renewed recruitment. “Alawis are full of hate right now,” he told me in a meeting in July, “I asked an Alawi woman recently, ‘What if the government falls and Alawis take over,’ and she said, ‘I would ring the blood of Sunnis,’ and this is because they killed her family in Sanobar.” Yet even here, the false promises of foreign intervention are not forgotten. Now, insurgent networks tell their recruits to wait until the always unspecified foreign country, “gives the green light.”

The way the insurgency unfolded has changed the new government’s strategy in the coast in the year since. While increasing government distrust in ex-regime soldiers, it also pushed Damascus to engage directly with them through ex-regime interlocutors like Fadi Saqr and Khalid al-Ahmed. Empowering these regime war criminals in order to prevent a new uprising has only further alienated those Alawis who oppose armed opposition. The insurgency also resulted in a renewed securitization of the coast, with dozens of new checkpoints and bases manned by military factions erected across rural Tartous and Latakia. Members of these forces would continue to commit crimes against Alawi civilians throughout the summer of 2025. At the same time, it was clear the GSS had a central role as a disciplined security force that could effectively engage with Alawi communities, and expanding the GSS became a priority. This expansion eventually paid off, with security and trust building improving significantly since late 2025.

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Case Studies

The following case studies examine how the insurgency and subsequent retaliation by pro-government forces played out differently across ten different areas; one in Hama, five in Tartous, and four in Latakia. These represent different patterns of insurgency and violence, and also underscore the important role that local Alawis played in protecting security forces in some areas. Each case study demonstrates some aspect of the events discussed in the above sections, but of course they do not represent every community’s or individual’s experiences those days.

Resafa

Resafa is one of the most infamous massacre sites the March 7 and was heavily covered by western news outlets. The events of the town are emblematic of a broader pattern across the coast, where pro-government massacres can often be matched to the severity of insurgent activities. Three neutral sources provide a fuller picture of the events in Resafa, based on their conversations with survivors. All three narratives come from non-Sunni activists and aid workers from Dreikish, Masyaf, and Salamiyah who have visited the village throughout 2025.

Resafa represented the eastern edge of the core insurgent network, with most Alawis in the rest of Hama and Homs being left out of insurgent plans in the weeks prior to the uprising, according to one prominent Alawi leader in Masyaf. Large insurgent groups mobilized in Wadi Ayoun, where the government had no presence at the time, and moved west into Tartous’ Sheikh Badr and Dreikish districts to secure the countryside.30 Resafa, which has an outsized number of ex-regime fighters compared to other Alawi villages in Masyaf, sits at the edge of the coastal mountains on the highway leading to Wadi Ayoun, Dreikish, and Sheikh Badr. It was therefore a key position for closing the government’s access to Tartous governorate.

When news of the uprising in Tartous reached forces in Masyaf, a large security convoy departed Masyaf city heading towards Tartous via the Resafa road. Upon reaching the village, the highway takes a steep uphill turn. Insurgents from Resafa and the nearby town of Sindiyana had coated this turn in oil, causing the vehicles to slip and stall at which point the insurgents shot and killed all 16 security members. On the morning of March 7, another convoy was dispatched, and upon reaching the ambush site and seeing the dead bodies outside the village, entered Resafa and began executing men and teenagers, killing 65 residents according to the COI. Some residents would later tell aid workers that, “the insurgent attacks brought the massacres to Resafa.”

Sheikh Badr District

The government security presence in Sheikh Badr was extremely limited since December 2024, thanks in large part to more extensive cooperation between Alawi mukhtars and GSS officials than in other parts of the coast. At the time of the insurgency there were only a handful of GSS officers in each of the district’s three subdistrict offices.31 Despite the absence of crimes or violations in the district during the first three months after liberation, insurgents still mobilized and quickly seized the isolated security offices.32

In the eastern subdistrict of Brummanet al-Mashayekh, a large convoy of insurgents, numbering more than 100, arrived from the Wadi Ayoun area of Masyaf and quickly captured the small GSS office, according to the security official for the area. However, the GSS officials here had spent the past three months building strong ties with the local Alawi community, including establishing a civil council through which it supported community needs. This civil council was able to negotiate with the Wadi Ayoun insurgents to prevent the killing of the GSS members, and local Alawi civilians then smuggled the security forces to Tartous city under the cover of night.

In Sheikh Badr’s western subdistrict of Qamsiyeh, local insurgents similarly besieged the small General Security outfit on the evening of March 6. Insurgents here were led by an ex-brigadier general, according to a resident from the town, but, “they were mostly just following orders, so they weren’t as violent.” The Qamsiyeh insurgents allowed the besieged GSS men to withdraw safely to Tartous, avoiding any bloodshed.

With all of the GSS officers safely secured in Tartous thanks to the support of local Alawis, they were able to lead the entry of government forces back into Sheikh Badr on March 9. Prior to their return, the officers contacted the influential mukhtars of the district and asked them to gather residents’ weapons. “The General Security said that our area had been good and cooperative, so they were fine with this peaceful resolution,” explained one local activist working as an interlocutor with security officials.

This act reduced tensions as security forces re-entered. As happened in Qadmus and Dreikish, the first car in the government convoy contained the GSS commanders. The personal background and power of the GSS officers here and their close ties with the local mukhtars enabled them to keep a stronger hand on faction abuses than in other areas, and within a few days of their return most factions were withdrawn from Brummanet al-Mashayekh, and in Qamsiyah were largely confined to a few bases. Altogether, these dynamics prevented killings from occurring in Sheikh Badr district.

Qadmus District

The origins of the Qadmus insurgency and killings lie in the first two months after liberation. While Qadmus city is majority Ismaili, and strongly pro-revolution, several villages in its countryside were strongholds of regime support. Chief among these is Hamam Wasl, in which 20% of all residents served in the regime’s forces. Two ex-regime officers in particular were seen as holding the most influence over the former soldiers, Ali Melhem and Yousef Safa.33

General Security officials adopted an extremely open approach to Hamam Wasl and the other Alawi villages in January 2025, meeting with local leaders and ex-regime officers and offering to arm small groups of Alawi ex-soldiers to man local checkpoints. Around 80 such checkpoints were established in 40 Alawi villages in Qadmus, all manned by ex-regime Alawi soldiers, according to multiple security officials and Ismaili activists involved in the initiative. “I knew that the former soldiers were angry,” explained Abu Huzayfa, the Qadmus Security Director, who made the program, “so my goal was to make them invested in the new state by giving them responsibilities.”34 As part of the initiative, Abu Huzayfa and his deputies held daily meetings with Hamam Wasl’s Melham and Safa, often sharing breakfast with each other.

The approach failed. On February 28, two Ismaili security volunteers were executed by insurgents at one such checkpoint in Kaf Jaa, a remote village surrounded by caves later believed to safeguard insurgent cells. On March 6, two GSS members and an Ismaili volunteer were lured into an ambush by the mukhtar of Midan al-Atiq, who had made a request to meet with the GSS. All three men were executed by local insurgents upon entering the town.

The ambush marked the start of the Qadmus insurgency. Alawi and Ismaili activists place the number of insurgents in the district at 700 to 1,000. “Only around 20 villages really joined the insurgency,” explained one Alawi media activist, “and many of the fighters joined once they saw the area had been ‘liberated’.”35 All those interviewed agreed that most of the Alawi men who the GSS had given weapons and assigned to local checkpoints joined the insurgency.

That evening, just a few hours after sharing tea in his home, Ali Melhem called Abu Huzayfa and told him his fighters were coming to Qadmus, “to cut off your head.” Melhem and Safa, who it turned out were serving as the Qadmus region commanders of the Coastal Shield Brigade, had mobilized around 150 men from Hamam Wasl. Other similarly-sized cells rose up to Qadmus’ east and west, cutting the roads to Masyaf and Baniyas, and then marched on the city. Ismailis grabbed what weapons they could and took to the streets to defend their city alongside the small group of 15 police and GSS members.

“They said ‘we will come to Qadmus and massacre you all if you do not hand over the security officials for us to kill,’” described one activist involved in the negotiations, who also emphasized that none of the Alawi residents of the city itself supported the insurgents.36 Several influential Alawi leaders quickly stepped in to try and prevent more violence and an attack on the city. In eastern Qadmus, one prominent mukhtar immediately contacted Abu Huzayfa and the GSS office when news of the uprising reached him. In coordination with the Ismailis in Qadmus city, he was able to negotiate the safe passage of the GSS and police units out of Qadmus to Masyaf, and in turn received promises from the insurgents not to attack the city. Following the March 6 events, this mukhtar would become a key interlocutor for security forces working to rebuild trust and root out insurgent cells in rural Qadmus.

The next morning, at around 9am on March 7, insurgents ambushed two vehicles of pro-government fighters from Maghawir Ahrar attempting to reach Baniyas via Masyaf. The group, which was not merged into the Ministry of Defense at the time, had come from Homs city and thought Qadmus was still under government control. They were ambushed along the main highway near the town of Hattriyah. Nine of the fighters were killed instantly. The surviving two men were taken by insurgents to the private hospital just outside Qadmus city, which they had seized the night before. In order to rescue the men, a few Ismaili activists smuggled themselves into the hospital and snuck the wounded fighters out, securing them safely in an Ismaili home until the GSS arrived on March 9.

The situation remained like this for two days, with the Ismailis and Alawi and Sunni residents of Qadmus city trapped and cut off from the rest of the country. Ismailis began receiving hundreds of WhatsApp messages from local numbers, all threatening them and their families for ‘siding with the government.’ Yet as news spread of the massacres being conducted by pro-government forces and armed Sunni civilians across the coast, residents in Qadmus became equally afraid for their own safety. Rumors spread that the pro-government faction responsible for some of the worst crimes in Baniyas city was nearby and might soon enter the Qadmus region. Ismaili leaders were in regular contact with the security officials who had been safely evacuated, who promised them that they had explained the situation of the Ismaili community to other commanders and were trying to make sure no extremist factions would enter the area.

Yet on March 9, when the pro-government factions began entering Qadmus from Baniyas, there were only 12 GSS officers in the convoy. “They had no power over the factions,” explains one of the Ismaili coordinators, “and only when the convoy reached Qadmus was the senior official able to say, ‘this town is with us, don’t touch anyone,’ and the GSS took over the town.”37

These convoys included HTS units and one local faction known to have been involved in killings in Baniyas. According to Ismaili leaders who coordinated closely with government officials organizing this convoy, the local faction had departed from Baniyas first, spurring the quick deployment of the GSS and HTS units to try and ensure the faction did not commit new massacres.

Yet the factions had already committed killings and arson in three villages on their way to Qadmus city. While the specific people who were murdered were random, the three villages were clearly targeted for specific reasons. Two men were killed in Hamam Wasl, one was killed in Midan al-Atiq, and 14 men killed in Hattaniyah, with dozens of homes burned as well. According to several sources, pro-government fighters had already identified each town as having been a source of significant numbers of insurgents. Additional rumors then spread among the MoD and factions that they would face resistance in Hattaniyah, which, “may have contributed to their targeting,” according to one Alawi activist in the area. In Hattaniyah, one remaining insurgent shot at the faction convoy as it approached on March 9,38 resulting in the faction raiding the town and gathering and executing 14 men in the nearby shrine. “Most of the men in Hattaniyah were part of the insurgency,” according to one Ismaili activist involved in civil peace work in the countryside, “but the 14 killed there were just random people, because the insurgents had all fled by the time the factions arrived.”

In Midan al-Atiq, the pro-government factions went directly to the mukhtar’s house and executed him for his role in killing the Ismaili and Sunni security men on March 6. But the main objective of the convoy was Hamam Wasl, where the leaders of the Qadmus insurgency were from. By the time the factions arrived, however, everyone in the town had fled aside from two elderly disabled men. The factions executed these two men and burned several homes, including the home of Ali Melhem.

When the military faction from Baniyas reached the outskirts of Qadmus city they began vandalizing homes and shops. One Ismaili resident went out to stop the looting, confronting one of the faction men and asking him why he was destroying the property. “He told me, ‘I am not here on military orders. My entire family was executed by the regime and I’m here for revenge’,” the resident recalls. Locals were able to contact the arriving General Security officers who quickly intervened and stopped the violations.

General Security units spent the next two months trying to prevent and resolve continued violations by these military factions until the factions were eventually withdrawn. Abu Huzayfa remains the security official for the district and continued to engage both the Alawi and Ismaili community after his return, working to rebuild trust and ties between the communities and with the state. “My brother was killed on March 6,” Abu Huzayfa told me in May, “but I will still push for peace, I know this is what is required to build a future.”

Khirbet Maazah Subdistrict

The Khirbet Maazah subdistrict sits on the southeast edge of Tartous city, straddling the highway to the Christian city of Safita in southern Tartous. The area was the scene of the first major insurgent attack on December 24, 2024, but persistent trust-building by security officials and locals since that moment have forged close ties between residents and the General Security here. This foundation was critical for largely protecting the area from violence on both sides in March.39

I previously published a detailed history of these trust building steps and the events of March 6 in Khirbet Maazah, found in the below link. A summary of the March events follows.

Due to the ex-Assad uprising in December 2024, the subsequent security operations, and the close engagement by security officials, the Khirbet Maazah area had little local support for the March 6 insurgency. As a result, GSS units were not only not attacked, but senior officials immediately dispatched additional units to protect the area. A new GSS checkpoint was established on the main road into the area from the coastal highway, which soon came under pressure from pro-government factions.

In one of the most clear examples of the absence of high-level government coordination for the subsequent violence in the coast, these factions attempted to force their way through the MoI checkpoints to the point that GSS personnel had to fire into the air to prevent their advance. After negotiations between the MoI and faction leaders, the factions were allowed to pass and move towards Safita, with the understanding they would stay on the main road. Yet several faction vehicles used side roads to reach the villages of Yahmur and Zirqat, where they killed two civilians and looted some homes. In Yahmur, one local man fired his pistol in the air near faction members and then fled. The next day he returned on his motorcycle, driving back and forth alongside the faction, whose members eventually shot and killed him. These three men were the only ones killed in the area.

Small violations occurred during the four days these factions traveled to Safita, like car theft and looting of businesses along the road and shooting in the air from their camps at night to scare residents. During this later event, General Security personnel intervened, forcing the factions to cease their fire. Later, MoI officials would also coordinate the return of much of the stolen property from the factions. “In general the situation was good and stable,” says a local Alawi activist, “but there was still a huge amount of fear.”

Dreikish District

Dreikish district sits directly east of Tartous city, its towns containing both highly educated, art-oriented communities and many families which were close to the regime’s security forces. As a result, it was one of the few coastal communities to form its own civil peace committee after the fall of Assad and work closely with the new security officials. The first officials assigned to Dreikish were very welcoming, according to Abu Ahmed, a member of this committee, treating the population with respect and engaging closely with them to resolve any security issues. “For three months we had no problems and no events,” one local activist told me during the summer.40

Just like in Khirbet Maazah, the first security challenge here came on the morning of December 24, when the video of the Qussaibi Shrine burning went viral on Facebook. According to Abu Ahmed, “this resulted in an insurgent moving building.” But unlike in Khirbet Maazah, the civil peace committee was able to intervene and prevent any violence against security forces. “We thought the same thing was happening March 6 when saw news of shootings across the coast,” he told me, “so I talked to Abu Zein [the district director] about how to stop it, but Abu Zein said just stay home because this is looking way bigger than anything we can deal with.” As with the rest of rural Tartous, Dreikish was held by only a handful of GSS men, 15 in total, with no nearby army units to support them.

The civil peace committee members helped the GSS officers return to their office that afternoon, with some members even retrieving some of the police cars which had been stolen by locals as the insurgents mobilized. An Alawi sheikh, known as “Sheikh Alaa,” who had been a member of the committee, took Abu Harith in his car, offering to drive him home. Instead, he kidnapped Abu Harith and delivered him to the insurgents, with whom which he had secretly been working. “We didn’t even consider that Abu Harith was killed three days later because we knew that he had gotten in the car with a man he knew,” Abu Ahmed explained, “We assumed he was safe.”

Abu Harith would remain missing for months, only confirmed dead when his body was found in the woods in June 2025. On March 7, the insurgents attacked Dreikish city, besieging the police station and the remaining 14 security personnel. Sheikh Alaa, now leading around 55 armed insurgents, captured the security members later that day. By now, however, news had reached the insurgents in Dreikish of the pro-government mobilizations elsewhere and the failure of the insurgents in Latakia. Sheikh Alaa attempted to save face by publishing a video of the captured GSS men claiming he had “found them,” and offering to hand them over to officials in Tartous. The anti-insurgent members of the civil peace committee, like Abu Ahmed, entered into negotiations with Sheikh Alaa, ultimately securing the release of the survivors and their escort back to Tartous. However, Abu Harith was missing, and a second GSS member had been killed in the fighting, and everyone now suspected Sheikh Alaa’s involvement, so he fled the area.

On March 8 the pro-government factions began to move down the highway from Tartous city to Dreikish. At this point, Dreikish’s wealthiest local, a businessman named Nizar Assad, began calling senior government security officials in order to get a hold of the faction commanders approaching Dreikish. The murder of the two GSS members had terrified locals, knowing that the factions would now want revenge. According to several local accounts, Nizar paid large sums of money to the faction leaders for them to cease their advance. On March 9 they paused at Hmeen, 10 kilometers from the city, and began establishing checkpoints on the road and issuing threats online that they would kill Alawi residents. Nizar Assad then pressured the insurgents in Dreikish not to attack these new checkpoints in order to prevent a new round of clashes and open the door to mass reprisal killings. “Everyone kept to their houses and this is what saved us,” says Abu Ahmed, “I was calling everyone to keep them calm, yet I was terrified and anxious.”

At this point the remaining civil peace committee members contacted the GSS survivors now in Tartous, requesting that they return to Dreikish. They did, telling locals that, “we are protecting you from the factions who want to kill you for killing Abu Harith.” For two weeks the GSS maintained a cordon around Dreikish city, preventing factions from entering the city or the deeper countryside villages and committing any serious violations.

Baniyas City

Baniyas city experienced perhaps the most violent and prolonged assault of all areas in March. The city was the focal point for Tartous’ insurgent networks, experiencing the most significant anti-government violence during the evening of March 6, which then devolved into multiple days of killings, looting, and vandalism by pro-government security forces and armed Sunni civilians against Alawi neighborhoods. Much of the violence here is rooted in the massacres committed by Alawi militias against local Sunnis in 2011 and 2013, which left hundreds of men, women, and children dead and houses destroyed to this day.41

A lengthy account of the March violence in Baniyas can be found in my previously published report containing two eyewitness perspectives. A summary of the key events follows. Much of this account comes from George (not his real name) a Christian activist who has heard first-hand testimonies from Sunni and Alawi residents in the months since the violence.42

The violence in Baniyas began on March 6, when insurgents ambushed General Security forces and armed Sunni volunteers at the city’s highway entrance. At least eight security members were killed and the Baniyas hospital and security office were quickly besieged.43 Some insurgents had come from the nearby villages, but most had been living in the Alawi-majority Qusour and Muruj neighborhoods and now took up positions on some of the building rooftops in these neighborhoods.

Many security forces in the Baniyas countryside came under attack at the same time. Scores of wounded and dead GSS members were brought to the Baniyas hospital that evening and night, some by boat from elsewhere along the coast in order to avoid the insurgent forces. According to George, between 150 and 200 security members, wounded and killed, were brought to Baniyas that night.

Yet unlike in Jableh, where insurgents would hold their positions well into March 7, in Baniyas the fighters quickly abandoned the battle. “They realized there was no foreign intervention coming and they had been tricked by the regime media and leaders and had made a huge mistake,” George explained.44 By early morning on March 7, armed Sunni civilians from the nearby villages of Bayda and Marqab, along with Sunnis from Baniyas city, had joined newly arrived government forces and entered the city. “They realized there was no foreign intervention coming and they had been tricked by the regime media and leaders and had made a huge mistake,” George explained.

At least five different pro-government armed factions moved through Baniyas city from 10am on March 7 until the morning of March 8. The insurgents had long been killed or fled by this point, but the factions continued to raid Alawi homes in Qusour neighborhood, killing residents, stealing valuables, and burning some homes.

Central to the post-insurgent violence in Baniyas was the role of local Sunnis, many of whom were acting on a decade-long desire for revenge for the crimes committed by the Assad regime and local Alawi militias early in the war.

“They came with the foreign factions and agitated them. The foreigners didn’t want to kill anyone initially but they [the people from Bayda and Marqab] kept demanded the foreigners kill certain people. Despite everything, this is just a natural reaction to the massacres against them, because all of their families were killed in such a random and indiscriminate way by regime men, they don’t know who exactly was the culprit and just reacted with the same random type of killings in Qusour.”45

Most survivors of the massacres I spoke with guessed that the local Sunnis were responsible for as much as half of the killings in March. Some of the earliest killings on March 7 were committed by armed Sunnis from Bayda and Marqab who had followed the first factions through Qusour. “Even before the massacre there were armed groups of IDPs returning to Bayda from the north and calling for revenge against Baniyas Alawites,” George told me in the fall of 2025, “There are some [civilian] men who still walk around the city bragging about how many Alawis they killed.”

Yet, as in other parts of the coast, local Sunnis also played a role in preventing violence. Everyone I have spoken with in Baniyas knows an Alawi family that was saved by their Sunni neighbors.46 One Alawi survivor, a well-known activist who had organized anti-Assad protests in 2011, recalled how a masked man accompanying some faction members saved his life that night by telling them that he, “was a good one.”

“Some armed men tried to enter my apartment building, which has Sunni, Christian, and Alawite families, and so one of my hijabi neighbors came out and yelled at the men until they left. I had other Sunni friends who were killed by insurgent snipers when the fighting began as they tried to help some Alawi families escape.” - George

Late on March 7, the prominent Baniyas revolutionary Sheikh Anas Ayrout began to intervene. According to multiple local sources, Ayrout gathered some General Security members and established the workers housing block at the Baniyas Cement Factory, just outside the city, as a safe haven for Alawis.47 Ayrout and the GSS men then began escorting civilians to the refinery amid the factions’ violence. The COI investigation confirmed this intervention, as well as reporting that the GSS guarding the Alawis clashed with armed factions:

“During the afternoon of 8 March, people heard that they could go to the Masakin school where they would be safe…Another witness described General Security organizing vehicles, including a bus, to bring Alawis to the Masakin school, and once there, they distributed tinned sardines and bread. Witnesses reported that Masakin school was attacked during the night of 8 or 9 March, reportedly around 9.30 p.m. Unknown armed people attempted to enter the school. They opened fire on General Security who returned fire alongside their backup personnel. The Alawi civilians reportedly stayed in the Masakin school for a few days.”48

While security improved in Baniyas by late 2025 and sectarian harassment from security forces has ended, the city remains deeply divided. Nothing has been done to address the widespread violations committed between March 7 and 9, nor the regime massacres committed in 2011 and 2013.

Jableh City

Jableh city and its immediate countryside saw some of the most intense insurgent activity and Alawi killings. The insurgency’s heart was in the Daliyah and Beit Aana region east of Jableh, but insurgent cells had mobilized across the plains around the city as well. Between the evening of March 6 and evening of March 7, insurgents had seized every checkpoint around Jableh city, taken over the northern and eastern neighborhoods,49 besieged the Jableh National Hospital, the city’s security office, and Naval Academy on the city’s northern outskirts, and captured the al-Nour Private Hospital.50

The UN’s Commission of Inquiry reported extensively about the events in Jableh. According to the COI:

“On 6 March, at around 7 p.m., the Jablah national hospital was surrounded by these fighters until the evening on 7 March. At the same time, PFGFs stormed the Al Nour private hospital, also in Jablah, and prohibited medical staff inside from leaving the facility until late afternoon on Friday, 7 March. PFGFs forced medical staff to treat their injured fighters and stored ammunition inside the facility. Medical services were disrupted for several days.”51

In all of these positions, the small security detachments were mostly killed. For example, in the pre-dawn hours of March 7, insurgents from Burjan village seized the nearby highway overpass, using it to fire on any vehicle attempting to reach Jableh city. Just east of the city, insurgents erected a checkpoint outside the village of Bisaysin.52 One mile south of the city, insurgents in Zuhriyat, a rural, dispersed farming area, had seized the Umm Burgal Bridge checkpoint in the early evening of March 6, killing six security members and opening the door to the southern suburbs of Jableh city.

The city was now encircled, with insurgents attacking or having already captured the northern, eastern, and southern neighborhoods. When insurgents entered the city’s southern Sunni neighborhoods they began, according to SCM, “carrying out sectarian killings against the Sunni component.” The storming of the southern neighborhoods triggered calls online for Sunni youth in Jableh to mobilize in response.53 Syria Direct report on this moment, quoting a local resident as saying:

“‘While first storming the city’s southern neighborhoods, regime remnants carried out sectarian killings against the Sunni component…[prompting]…Sunni youth to announce a public mobilization in the city and pursue the regime remnants to stop them from taking control of the city. They broke the siege on hospitals that were besieged by groups affiliated with the former regime.’”54

The first significant pro-government forces were deployed to Jableh throughout March 7, joining many local Sunnis who had taken up arms to defend the city. As the military operations against armed insurgents proceeded, violations and killings against unarmed Alawis increased, as well as looting and vandalism against both Sunni and Alawi homes.55 The following 24 hours mirrored the events in Baniyas closely, with armed pro-government fighters engaging in widespread looting and killing unarmed Alawi men. As in Baniyas, many of the factions that arrived were then joined by local Sunnis, who directed faction members to Alawi areas.56 As reported by the COI, most killings in Jableh city specifically targeted Alawi men, often explicitly framed as revenge for the crimes of the Assad regime.

However, as in Baniyas, these crimes were not centrally directed or uniform across all units. According to one Alawi survivor, the security director for Jableh, a young HTS veteran named Sajd Allah Deek, was seen trying to protect Alawi homes from faction members throughout the evening, at times threatening and verbally fighting with factions to prevent them from entering homes.57

Qurfeis

Qurfeis resides between Daliyah and the coastal highway on the edge of a large cliff overlooking the Jableh plains. It is the home of the most revered Alawi shrine in Syria’s coast, and endured several months of violence and abuses from government military factions, as I have previously profiled:

No insurgent activity emerged from Qurfeis, with all anti-government attacks occurring in either Daliyah, to the east, or along the highway near other villages to the west. Nonetheless, once Jableh city had been secured, the factions which had previously been deployed in Qurfeis and had withdrawn on March 6 returned.

On March 7, a convoy of former HTS fighters from the Othman Brigade, which had been stationed along the highway and come under heavy attack the night before, moved towards Qurfeis. According to a media activist from rural Jableh and a resident of Qurfeis, these faction passed through most of the Jableh plains without incident, heading directly to Qurfeis. They entered the town from the west, just off the coastal highway, passing through the village of as-Sin first. According to Karim (not his real name), a local activist from the town, the convoy fired its 23mm anti-air cannons at every house in the village, resulting in the death of one resident hiding in his home. Upon reaching Qurfeis, the faction members entered and killed five men hiding in the first homes. The convoy then moved to the town’s shrine, where many residents had sought refuge. Seven men who were caught while in the main square outside the shrine were killed. Then some faction members pulled out seven more men hiding in the shrine and executed them, while other members killed three more men hiding nearby. Within 45 minutes of the first shots being fired, orders had come to stop the killing, according to Karim. At this point the fighters began looting homes.

On March 8, Karim attempted to return to his home, having sought refuge in a relative’s house during the previous 48 hours. As he approached Qurfeis late that morning he saw a large convoy of fighters from the former HTS 400th Division as well as Jaish Ahrar arrive in as-Sin. The 400th Division had been deployed elsewhere in the Jableh countryside and lost more than 25 members to the initial uprising on March 6. One fighter then fired a shot in the air, triggering the entire convoy to begin firing in the air and at the mountain for several minutes, causing random injuries among civilians hiding in their homes and the bushes. After shooting, the faction members began looting as-Sin, killing six more men. Karim and the group of leaders from Qurfeis contacted the commanders of Jaish Ahrar who they had known from the previous months, asking them to stop the attacks, but the commanders told them, “those fighters are from the 400th Division, not us, we cannot tell them to stop.” The looting in as-Sin would continue off and on until March 11, at which point both factions left the area.

On March 9, a small group of General Security members and military commanders arrived in Qurfeis to meet with community leaders. The commanders pressured the men to record a video alongside them thanking the Military Operations Room, “for securing the village.” The security officials also interrogated residents about the location of a specific ex-regime officer who they believed had led the insurgent network in Daliyah.

Beit Yashout Subdistrict

On the highway between Hama and Jableh lies the Beit Yashout subdistrict. This area has a significant ex-regime population, with more than half of the men here having served in regime forces, according to the mayor of Beit Yashout.58 Unlike other parts of Jableh’s countryside, like Qurfeis, the security official in Beit Yashout, known as Sheikh Yacub, had been highly cooperative with local leaders, thanks in large part to the support and cooperation from Beit Yashout’s mayor Maher Ibrahim. Maher is unique in that he was Syria’s only mayor who had left the Baath Party before the collapse of the regime. He is a revered local figure who had a history of confronting local shabiha and regime officials.59

This area saw several murders, kidnappings, and robberies in the first two months after the fall of Assad. This insecurity culminated in the January 13 murder of three farmers by government faction members operating out of the old 107th Brigade base near Ain Sharqiyah. The next day, a group of ex-regime insurgents captured a group of GSS members, executing two and holding seven hostage inside a remote Alawi shrine outside the town. Security forces were able to kill the insurgents and secure the hostages the next day. By February, however, the factions had been withdrawn from the 107th base just as they had from the Tartous countryside, leaving only an isolated GSS detachment in Beit Yashout town.

It was in this context, and in close proximity to Beit Ana, that insurgent networks rose up in Beit Yashout on March 6. Insurgents ambushed Sheikh Yacub and his men. “His unit was being killed and he called me asking for help,” Maher tells me, “So I started to call everyone I knew, and eventually I found someone who was working with the insurgents. I told him, ‘if you hurt him [Yacub] I will start an Alawi versus Alawi conflict.’” The insurgents ceased their attack and allowed Yacub and his surviving member to leave for Jableh unharmed. Large groups of insurgent fighters also stormed the 107th Brigade base, publishing videos early on March 7 from the entrance and interior. The videos, linked earlier in this report, show scores of armed men, many dressed in full military uniforms and others wearing civilian clothes, freely moving around the countryside.

Securing Yacub’s safety and the role of Maher as a trusted community interlocutor would prove pivotal two days later. On March 8, several factions were ordered by the Ministry of Defense to leave Jableh city and return to Hama. Among these were one brigade of the Sultan Suleiman Shah Division, also known as Amshat, whose members had committed massacres in and around Jableh the day prior. According to Maher, “Sheikh Yacub pressured these factions not to cause any problems, and when they arrived, I faced them with a smile and kindness and they began to calm down and realized the people here were ready to cooperate.” One media activist live streamed a video at the time of the Amshat faction entering Ain Sharqiyah, showing a calm meeting between the brigade commander and Maher and other local leaders. Both Maher and the activist confirmed that the factions committed no violations while passing through the area back to Hama.

Maher Ibrahim and local residents speak with an Amshat commander as his unit passes through Beit Yashout on March 8.

Bahluliyah Subdistrict

Residing on the border between Sunni north and Alawi south of Latakia governorate sits the Bahluliyah subdistrict. The area has had a unique experience since December 8, with significant trust building steps taken by both security officials and the local community, as I have previously profiled.

In Bahluliyah there was no local support for the insurgency and the GSS office was not attacked, while terrified locals remained in their homes. Similar to Beit Yashout and Khirbet Maazah, the survival of the GSS here and the close ties they had built with locals would prove crucial for protecting the area over the coming days, in contrast with several nearby areas whose GSS detachments were wiped out by insurgents.

On March 7, pro-government armed groups began entering the region via the M4 highway from Idlib. A small group of armed men from one of these convoys turned north to Bahluliyah, encountering a local Alawi family driving on the outskirts of the towns and killing all four people. A local Alawi interlocutor quickly called the GSS office and, “Within 12 minutes they had sent 14 trucks to the main road and expelled the faction from the area,” he told me.60

The situation was very different further down the highway. Early on the morning of March 7, Alawi insurgents attacked the GSS checkpoint overlooking the highway outside the town of Mukhtariyah, which sits just outside the Bahluliyah subdistrict. This attack was reported by the COI and confirmed to me by local Alawi activists.61 The insurgents killed all 30 GSS members in the village.62 Later that day, armed factions entered Mukhtariyah and killed between 120 and 240 Alawi civilians, mostly men.

Over March 7 and 8, two armed groups also entered the nearby village of Brabishbo, which sits on the edge of the Bahluliyah subdistrict just east of the M4. According to a local who later led aid convoys to these towns after the massacres, the first two factions that entered Brabishbo on March 7 and 8, “were polite, telling the residents that they had confirmed there were no insurgents or threats and passing out their phone numbers in case any problems occurred.” This narrative was shared by a resident I spoke with in March 2025, who specified that the first group to enter was from Faylaq al-Sham and was respectful and professional when they searched the town. When they left, the commander gave everyone his phone number and said to call him if there were any issues.

However, on March 9 a third armed group entered the town and began killing residents and looting homes. Residents quickly called the numbers provided by Faylaq al-Sham, who then returned and forced out the third faction, but not before more than 30 Alawi civilians had been killed.63 Faylaq al-Sham units remained in the Bahluliyah and Haffeh regions after March, where they had a widely positive reputation. Following the March 9 attack on Brabishbo, the GSS expanded its checkpoints along the highway, preventing any armed groups from entering villages, according to locals.

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Footnotes

• Northeast

• Aleppo and Idlib

• Damascus

• Coast

• Homs

• Hama

Violent incidents dropped this week following several weeks of near daily killings and attacks, mostly in Homs city. Several men were killed in Homs city and its countryside, as well as a rare murder of an Alawi man in Damascus city. At the same time, ISIS attacks continue in eastern and northern Syria with more than five soldiers left dead. Multiple attempted ISIS operations were also thwarted, including a car bombing in southern Damascus. Government security and intelligence operations appear to have grown substantially in eastern Syria this week, with numerous reports of arrests and deployments across Raqqa and Deir Ez Zor.

Aleppo governorate saw a series of violent incidents late this week, including the murder of a family of four in Aleppo city and the killing of a young girl in southern Aleppo as a result of failed tribal mediation. Tensions in eastern Aleppo also exploded on March 7, when displaced Arab residents of Shuyukh clashed with General Security and SDF forces. This issue, detailed below, remains unresolved and likely to escalate without outside intervention.

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The fall of Assad and return of many displaced Sunnis opened the door to new waves of revenge campaigns, fueled by a lack of transitional justice and local civil peace initiatives to address the history of violence in the area. As a result, Homs city has seen regular sectarian and targeted violence against minorities. This violence has ebbed and flowed over the past year, with several extended periods of significantly reduced violence in the city. However, the past two months have seen some of the worst bouts of killings and security chaos since the fall of the regime.

I met with several local activists in the city in mid-February to discuss the situation. One noticeable new trend is the concentration of killings in Akrama neighborhood, a mixed-sect commercial area in southern Homs surrounded by several very poor Alawi and Sunni neighborhoods. Below is an edited transcript of an interview I conducted with an Alawi dentist and his daughter who live in Akrama. I previously published an interview with them in December in which we covered the history of the neighborhood and the need for targeted civil peace initiatives. In this interview we discuss the root causes of Homs’ violence and impact of the violence on Alawi communities, particularly in pushing some to sell their homes and leave the city.

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The complex social and geographic divisions of the governorate would come to define Latakia’s experiences throughout the war. The city experienced some of the first protests in March 2011, with tens of thousands of residents taking to the streets to demonstrate against the regime. But the sensitivity of the region and the concentrated pro-regime presence in the governorate resulted in a rapid backlash. The scars of the regime’s suppression here are still fresh, fueling recurrent cycles of inter-communal violence even after Assad’s fall.

Syria’s coast saw some of the regime’s first serious military operations in 2011, beginning with the storming of Bayda village, outside Baniyas, in early April and escalating further with the siege and storming of Latakia’s Raml neighborhood in August. These early events shaped the revolution’s trajectory in the coast. From Raml to Kabineh, there is a direct line connecting the history of revolution and defiance against the regime in the Latakia. The rapid and brutal crackdown on dissidents in the urban heart of Latakia resulted in a concentration of opposition armed movements in the northern mountains of the governorate which would persist until the fall of Assad.

While these mountains would become the heart of Latakia’s armed revolution, their complete story cannot be told without also telling the story of Raml and the defectors who emerged from Latakia city in 2011; men who would go on to become household names like Malik al-Kurdi, the future Deputy Commander of the Free Syrian Army, and Mohamad Hamdou, the future founder of Liwa Ahrar Sahel. I met with Hamdou in Latakia in December 2025 for an extensive interview about the revolution in Raml and the origins of the Free Syrian Army in rural Latakia. I also received access to an extensive unpublished interview conducted by the Syrian Memory Project with Colonel al-Kurdi several years ago in which he discusses these same events. These interviews, combined with archival footage of the battle, provide a unique insight into Latakia’s early revolution and the regime’s assault on Raml.

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Protests and Massacres

“On June 10, 2011, a Friday that would forever be etched in my memory as ‘Tribes’ Friday,’ my city of Latakia transformed into a battlefield. Since the first sparks of protests began to appear on the horizon, we had been hearing news of sporadic clashes between the regime forces and civilians, but I had never witnessed any of them directly; I was always far from the center of events.

However, that Friday was different. The intensity of the confrontations escalated unprecedentedly. The protesters went out bare-chested, facing the machinery of oppression with stones, firecrackers, and homemade Molotov cocktails. The regime’s response was brutal, devoid of any consideration for the presence of civilians in the area. Bullets and shells began to rain down from every direction, especially on our neighborhood, as our house was located directly opposite a military barracks. The shelling was indiscriminate, piercing walls and windows without distinction.

I vividly remember the sound of bullets shattering the living room window, and how fear drove us to take shelter in the kitchen, which seemed to us then the safest place in the universe. But even the kitchen walls could not block out the continuous sound of gunfire, which lasted for more than twelve terrifying hours. I felt as if my nerves were tearing apart with every shot, and my whole body trembled hysterically whenever I heard the sound of bullets piercing the walls of our house. It was a never-ending night, a night where we knew no sleep or rest, but remained awake, our bodies stiff and our hearts pounding with indescribable terror, until that auditory nightmare finally stopped.

The following morning, my father decided to get us out of that hell, to flee in search of a safer place. As we walked through the streets, I saw something I never wished to see: men and women washing the streets of blood. In that moment, I grasped the horror of what had happened that night; I knew that innocent lives had been lost. And since that ominous day, the sound of gunfire has triggered a deep fear within me, and I am completely unable to bear seeing any weapon or armed person, even in a picture or a fleeting scene. That night left a scar on my soul that will never be erased.”

- An account of the siege of Raml by a young Palestinian college student, shared with me following Syria’s liberation.

On March 25, 2011, demonstrators from across the city gathered for a march to the Sheikh Daher Square where a statue of Hafez al-Assad stood. Lieutenant Colonel Muhammad Hamdou remembers these first days well. He had been forced to retire from the army in 2008 after he and nine other officers were detained and investigated for anti-regime sentiments. For three years he had lived in his home in the Southern Raml neighborhood. As soon as the protests in Dara’a began in 2011, he started organizing his community in Latakia. “We all agreed we would pray at Khaled Ibn Walid Mosque that Friday then go out to the city center at Sheikh Daher where there is a statue of Hafez Assad,” he tells me during a meeting in now-liberated Latakia, “We wanted to destroy the statue, but as we arrived the regime started to shoot at us, and this was when the first martyr fell.” Two protestors were shot to death by Air Force Intelligence members hiding in a nearby school and police station that day, according to both Hamdou and al-Kurdi and shown in videos published by protestors at the time.

Protestors begin chanting anti-Assad slogans at the Khaled Ibn Walid Mosque, March 25, 2011.

Heavy gunfire erupts when protestors reach the Sheikh Daher Square

The next day, the first convoy of Alawi shabiha from Qardaha was mobilized. Colonel Malik al-Kurdi, still serving in the regime’s Navy at the time, was driving to his home in Haffah that afternoon. “I turned right to head towards the Haffah road, and there was a convoy of cars,” he recalls in his 2021 interview with the Syrian Memory Project, “some people were carrying sticks, others were brandishing weapons, and some had machine guns. I slowed down to observe the convoy, and by the time I reached the bridge, more than 60 cars had passed in front of me.” Latakia’s governor, Riad al-Hijab, a Sunni from Deir Ez Zor, was able to stop the convoy at the edge of the city while the Syrian Navy mobilized forces to establish checkpoints at the city’s entrances. It was too early in the revolution to allow what would have been a massive massacre of Sunnis.

Yet later that evening the Agriculture Director of Latakia, Hussam Badour, gathered and armed around 50 members of his office to attack Sunni shops in the al-Qaala Project area. According to Colonel al-Kurdi, Badour would gain power from here, establishing himself as a central militia figure in Latakia and turning his Agriculture office into a detention and torture center for Sunni residents. Far from individual acts, these Alawi militias were directly organized and controlled by regime intelligence and Baath officials. It was part of a broader system of violence and oppression directed from the very top of the Assad regime since the emergence of the very first protests, as documented by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.

From this moment the protesters in Latakia faced increasing violence. Three weeks later, on April 17, huge crowds gathered again for peaceful demonstrations across the city. That evening the army and intelligence forces moved in and opened fire on the remaining demonstrators in the Al-Olabi Square. “When we arrived, I saw the snipers on the roofs, but despite warning the people everyone insisted on protesting,” says Hamdou, “Thirty-two people were killed that day by the snipers.” The next day, regime forces fired surrounded and fired on a peaceful sit-in at Homs’ Clock Square. killing at least 30 demonstrators.

The Olabi Square massacre marked the end of the ‘leniency’ the regime had shown Latakia’s protestors. Checkpoints were spread across the city to monitor and prevent movement and gatherings, forcing activists into an increasingly isolated area. “We chose Southern Raml as a protest place as it was easier to keep the regime out of the neighborhood due to its geography,” explains Hamdou. Raml was among the poorest areas of Latakia. Originally formed as a refugee camp for Palestinians, it had expanded with the migration of poor rural Sunnis from Haffeh and parts of Idlib governorate like Jisr Shoughur. These social connections to the mountainous north would prove crucial in a few months time.

On June 4, 2011, protestors and armed locals in Jisr Shoughur rose up, besieging and capturing the two Military Intelligence offices in the city and killing more than 100 intelligence members. The regime responded swiftly, sending columns of tanks and special forces units into Idlib. Many residents from Jisr fled, arriving in Latakia city and making their way to Southern Raml. The demography and poverty of the neighborhood and the arrival of newly displaced Sunnis fueled the intensity of the protests here, even as other parts of the city went underground out of fear.

The Siege of Raml

Throughout this period and the next year, Hamdou would receive intelligence from a Sunni officer from Homs serving in the Latakia Military Intelligence Branch, Adnan Nahili. “At this point, Adnan told me that the regime had given instructions to the mukhabarat that 50 protestors were allowed to be killed a day,” Hamdou tells me, “With this we knew we had to be even more careful with our protests.”

That summer, the regime established seven checkpoints covering each entrance into Southern Raml and tried repeatedly to break into the neighborhood to disrupt the protestors. Both Hamdou and al-Kurdi remember the regime spreading rumors as early as that spring that, “the Alawis would be coming down from the mountains to kill the Sunnis in Raml, and that the Sunnis in Raml were going to the mountains to kill the Alawis.” Initially, the governor of Latakia, Riad Hijab, was able to deescalate the situation, standing between the two communities and preventing serious bouts of inter-communal violence. Yet he was replaced in mid-April, and from there the situation continued to deteriorate.

A driver films one of the checkpoints at the entrance to Raml neighborhood shortly before the regime’s attack. Originally posted on August 13, 2011 by the now-removed Latakia Coordination Youtube channel.

Around mid-June 2011 the regime began trying to undermine the protests by sending some military rifles into the neighborhood through its agents. “Again, I warned everyone not to fall for the regime’s tricks and not to use these weapons to attack regime forces,” says Hamdou. “At the same time, one of my friends put me on contact with Hussein Harmoush through skype and we formed the Free Officers Movement. It was just five of us at this time, but then Harmoush started to invite other officers to defect, and bit by bit it grew.” Colonel Riad al-Assad formed the Free Syrian Army shortly afterwards, with both groups encouraging the defection of military officers amid the surge in violence from the regime. Yet both of these groups were small and concentrated in Idlib, far from Raml. “Still,” says Hamdou, “these movements had no effect on us.”

Throughout the late summer, Latakia’s protestors shifted to a new type of “rapid protest,” going out in small groups of 50 or 60 people before returning home. These were common in the Sleibah, Bustan Qasr, and Qarmines neighborhoods. Nonetheless, the heart of the protest movement and the regime’s violence remained concentrated in Raml.

The regime’s noose continued to tighten. By early August the revolutionaries in Raml learned that the regime had gathered its forces in the Tala’a Camp, along the coast on the southeast edge of Raml, and were preparing to storm the neighborhood. These forces included tanks and BMPs and two naval ships which had arrived in the bay. The revolutionaries in Raml were armed with less than 200 rifles, mostly hunting rifles and shotguns, and had only two medium machines guns and two RPGs to defend themselves.

Regime armored vehicles gathering to advance into Raml, August 13, 2011. Originally posted by the now-removed Latakia Coordination Youtube channel.

Hamdou described those final tense weeks:

“In August, we would hold protests every day. My members, the men who carried hunting rifles, formed checkpoints across the neighborhood’s entrances to try and monitor who was entering and leaving. The regime’s forces were stationed along the southern corniche and along the railroad tracks [forming the neighborhood’s northern border] which gave them a good view of the neighborhood. They also had snipers deployed around the camp, and every day two or three people would be shot, whether protestors or our armed men. We had no hospitals or medical points in the neighborhood which made treating the wounded very difficult and increased the fatalities a lot.”

The Battle for Raml

It was clear the regime would storm the neighborhood soon. More forces had gathered around Raml and sympathetic officers, like al-Kurdi and Nahili, were keeping the residents updated with the latest plans. Colonel al-Kurdi had first-hand knowledge of the operation’s planning thanks to his position in the Navy:

“Brigadier General Fouad Reda was tasked with reconnaissance and planning for the assault operation,” al-Kurdi says in his 2021 interview, “Brigadier General Malik Deeb assisted him in this planning, and I was present. Brigadier General Malik invited me to his office for some reason, I think for breakfast. Brigadier General Fouad arrived and placed the plans in front of me. He had drawn the entire Raml neighborhood on a map and colored it. There was a color indicating those loyal to the regime, another indicating those who were neutral, and a third indicating those who supported the revolution. It was then that I realized the time was drawing near.”

“Adnan Nahili informed us the regime was preparing to storm the neighborhood,” Hamdou tells me, “So we, the senior men of Raml, decided we would fight back.” The neighborhood was famous for its small fishing explosives made from nitrogen fertilizers. Revolutionaries had begun turning these into IEDs and bombs to use against the regime. Malik al-Kurdi, his brother, and a Navy 1^st Lieutenant named Abdullah Idris had also been using their vehicles to smuggle additional explosives into the neighborhood to help prepare its defenses.

On August 11, 2011, the heads of the Latakia intelligence and Baath Party branches arrived at the naval headquarters; the operation was only a few days away. Al-Kurdi immediately contacted Lieutenant Abdullah, who had family in the neighborhood, and told him to inform the men of Raml that the camp would be stormed that weekend. He also advised the fighters to move all of their mines to new positions along the camp entrances. “Some of the people who lived there, including some navy assistants, were leaking information,” says al-Kurdi, “They were all tasked with relaying information to the regime, and they assigned people to monitor everything. So, when the young men planted a mine, they would see them, and they would immediately cut the wires at night.”

On August 14, 2011, the regime began storming the Southern Raml neighborhood. Special forces and naval units entered by land, infantry following behind tanks and BMPs, while Navy warships shelled the area from the sea. Most of the mines’ wires had indeed been cut by internal saboteurs, the fighters unable to move them the day prior. The neighborhood was defended by around 300 fighters, according to Hamdou, but they were still loosely organized by the time of the attack and operating mostly as independent cells.

Video filmed from outside the neighborhood showing the intensity of clashes. Originally posted on August 14, 2011 by the now-removed Latakia Coordination Youtube channel.

Infantry and armor firing on Raml from the southern edge of the neighborhood. Originally posted on August 14, 2011 by the now-removed Latakia Coordination Youtube channel.

The battle lasted only one day. “We were able to destroy one BMP and killed and wounded some soldiers, but 30 revolutionaries were also killed,” recalls Hamdou, “We then attacked part of the front, the Ain al-Tamrah checkpoint, destroyed it with explosives and were able to break through and escape.” From here, most of the fighters and the wanted activists fled into Latakia city, moving through their own personal networks to avoid regime capture.

A convoy of regime soldiers withdrawing from Raml Neighborhood, being cheered on by some residents as they pass through the Alawi Az-Ziraa’ Neighborhood. Originally posted on August 16, 2011 by the now-removed Latakia Coordination Youtube channel.

With the battle over, the regime began a widespread detention campaign across the neighborhood, searching and destroying homes in multi-day operation. According to international reporting at the time, at least 36 people were killed by regime forces and hundreds detained. Al-Kurdi and a few other pro-revolution officers used their military vehicle to transport some families out of the neighborhood and remove a weapons cache from someone’s home. But the regime mukhabarat were detaining anyone they found suspicious. The Raml Police Station was turned into a detention and torture center as the mukhabarat attempted to uncover the remaining opposition networks.

Regime security forces, including armed civilians, patrolling the Sleibeh Neighborhood following residents’ attempted demonstrations in support of Raml. Originally posted on August 14, 2011 by the now-removed Latakia Coordination Youtube channel.

Hamdou found himself moving between relatives houses for the next 20 hours, searching for a way out of the city:

“From the Ain al-Tarmeh checkpoint I went to my brother’s house close to the southern corniche train station. I was already wanted by the regime, so I hid at my brother’s house for 17 hours, then moved to Sheikh Daher where my sister had a house. From her house I moved to my uncle’s house, who was one of the respected elders of the city. He told me I was too wanted to remain in the city. My uncle gave me sunglasses and a formal suit to change my appearance and an ID he had borrowed from one of the men in his shop who looked like me. Then he drove me out of the city. To reach Jabal Akrad we had to pass three checkpoints, but they each knew him personally and he was waved through. My uncle left me in a house in Jabal Akrad and returned home.”

Ten days later, Lieutenant Abdullah was arrested by the mukhabarat. Forty-eight hours after that, on August 26, al-Kurdi and another close colleague, an assistant named Othman, got in the vehicle of one of the weapons smugglers who had helped supply Raml Neighborhood and drove to Turkey. Colonel al-Kurdi had spent the past five months attempting to organizing a coup within the Naval Forces alongside a small group of Sunni officers. Abdullah’s arrest not put an end to those plans, and al-Kurdi was forced to officially defect from the regime. Abdullah Idris remains missing to this day.

Regrouping Along the Border

The revolutionaries of Southern Raml had dispersed across the governorate. “Some of the fighters from Raml went to Turkey,” Hamdou says from the café in Latakia, “but I went to Jabal Akrad and Khirbet Jawz.” Hamdou was the only man from Raml there at first, but the area was an attractive place for hiding. Khirbet Jawz sits between the Turkish border and the Latakia-Idlib highway. It is a remote, mountainous area dotted with small Sunni villages and rough roads. “I did know that some men from Raml who had defected were hiding in Jabal Akrad, but I had no contact with them yet,” says Hamdou. Like Colonel al-Kurdi, most of Raml’s fighters had gone to Turkey.

While Hamdou had been living in Raml, his family was from the village of Hanboushiyah, adjacent to Khirbet Jawz. When he arrived, his cousins introduced him to a small group of 16 men already carrying weapons. “They knew my background and welcomed me to join and appointed me as their commander. We then chose an area along the border to base ourselves.” From here, Hamdou contacted Riad al-Assad, who had been building his Free Syrian Army network for two months, and after providing his background began to receive small amounts of money from al-Assad to buy ammunition and weapons.

It was a slow process of rebuilding. “From the time of leaving Raml and connecting with the men in Hanboushiyah and planning the first operations, everything took 4 months, so we didn’t start fighting until December 2011,” Hamdou explains, “Sometimes buying one rifle took 15 days. We were buying these from corrupt regime members and weapons smugglers which were growing at the time. Many regime officers would steal things from the bases and sell them illegally, like rifles and ammo. Each Kalashnikov back then was $1000. This period of time was so difficult because we started from scratch, no guns or ammunition or food. We were hunting birds for food.”

During these four months of rebuilding, Hamdou’s small group made a base close to the Turkish border, including digging some trenches and fortifications. They chose a nearby regime checkpoint close to a chicken farm as their first target. In December they began their attack. The checkpoint had a tank which quickly engaged the fighters. Hamdou described the skirmish:

“The tank fired at us but missed and hit the Turkish side of the border. The Turkish army then moved units to the border, essentially protecting our backs. The tank moved further and got stuck in the winter mud. A regime truck winch came and got stuck, too. At this point the soldiers abandoned the whole checkpoint.”

Liberating the checkpoint further secured the group’s new base. But winter was setting in and the snow became too deep to do any further operations. Hamdou and his small group used the enforced pause to go to Turkey and visit the camps where the men from Raml had arrived. They then moved to the defected officers camp, where Riad al-Assad and Malik al-Kurdi were organizing the FSA. “I told Riad, ‘I am going back to Jabal Akrad to fight and I want you to support me.’”

Two months later, Muhammad Hamdou would return to northern Latakia where he would mobilize dozens of villages into the first united armed faction in Jabal Akrad.

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• Northeast

• Aleppo and Idlib

• Damascus

• Coast

• Homs

• Hama

This week saw near daily violent incident in Homs city, a continuation of escalating violence in the city throughout February. Killings and attacks against security forces were concentrated in and around Akrama neighborhood, but extended north to Zahraa and Abbasiyah. Violence included attacks against minorities and security forces.

This year’s trends of protests across the country continued, with a series of protests in Arab town in the northeast against the reintroduction of SDF forces, protests in Raqqa against the People’s Assembly selection process, and protest and violence in Palmyra due to tensions over a lack of transitional justice.

The week began with a major security operation in the coast, the first one since January, targeting the same belt of villages in the southeast Jableh countryside where ex-Assad insurgents remain active. One civilian was killed in the raid, along with one security member and three insurgents, including two commanders.

Meanwhile, ISIS attacks increased in the northeast, all in the same manner as previously conducted against SDF positions prior to the government’s takeover. Counter-ISIS campaigns ramped up in the response, with several arrests made in Deir Ez Zor.

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Over the past two weeks, I visited communities in northern and western Homs, western Hama, and rural Latakia and Tartous. Everywhere I went I saw the same changes; different even from just two months earlier during my visits in November and December. Everyone I spoke with now echoed the same thing: the people have decided to return to life.

The return of activity should not be mistaken for a true return to normalcy, however. The surface layer of fear and self-isolation that many Alawis felt following the fall of Assad and the March 2025 massacres has ebbed away. Yet the deeper layer of anger and mistrust in the new government remains. Yet this is still an important change that has real impacts on ground and opens the door for renewed outreach and engagement by both Damascus and the international community.

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A Partial Return to Life

There are several underlying factors for this partial return to normalcy. Most important has been the continued improvement in the conduct of security forces. This improvement began in earnest in the fall of 2025 and has steadily continued since then. The Ministry of Interior’s (MoI) conduct during the coastal protests late last year further built trust among locals, and the end of harassments and violations at checkpoints combined with the increase in friendly interactions by checkpoint personnel has helped encourage more travel. Since the start of this year, the MoI has also significantly expanded its presence in the countryside, taking over most checkpoints which had previously been manned by the Ministry of Defense (MoD).

The defeat of the Syrian Democratic Forces in January also helped push people back into their normal routines. Since the fall of Assad there has been a segment of the Alawi population which resolutely rejected the new government in Damascus, insisting that an outside power should and would intervene. Many had looked to the SDF as this power, or at the very least had been inspired by the perceived U.S. loyalty to the non-state actor and thought that Alawis could attain their own foreign backer. Multiple Alawi leaders and activists I spoke with in all four governorates this month said that the SDF’s rapid defeat broke this perception among the more reticent parts of the population, who are now looking for ways to build their lives within the existing system. This is not to say there are not still people refusing to engage with the state and instead pushing for an armed insurgency, but their influence and reach was greatly diminished by the SDF’s defeat.

Yet the current peace and significantly reduced violence in recent months is not a reflection of renewed social cohesion. Some small degree of inter-communal interactions has grown, but these are largely relegated to businessmen and traders who work between different areas. Genuine inter-sect relations outside of this remain limited in much of western Syria. In some places, new civil peace initiatives have sought to address this by tackling the underlying violations and lack of accountability which have fueled distrust. But this work remains limited to a few areas, like Wadi Nasara and the al-Ghab Plains, and must be expanded.

Underlying Anger Remains

This return to life also does not mean the coastal communities trust Damascus or have recovered from the violence of early last year. As one activist in Baniyas described the atmosphere in his city: “Psychologically there are no improvements, but life is returning…the situation has returned to a careful normalcy of some sort. Because the economic heart is here in Baniyas the people had to move around and leave their homes to continue their lives. But in my opinion, the security forces and locals are both being performative, they smile but nothing inside has changed.”

Trust remains extremely fragile and vulnerable to backsliding. A Christian leader in northern Homs described the challenge succinctly, “To rebuild trust takes years, to destroy it takes seconds.” Many Alawis expressed a surge in trust in the MoI following the November Ghazal Ghazal protests in the coast, citing the MoI’s good conduct and efforts at protecting the protesters from counter-protestors. Yet a second round of protests in late December had markedly different results. These protests were more violent, with ex-regime insurgents embedding themselves in multiple demonstrations and Sunni counter-protestors mobilizing more aggressively. The MoI was unable to prevent clashes from breaking out in several cities, with multiple deaths in Latakia. Most importantly, in the days and week afterwards, MoI units arrested scores of protestors across Latakia, Tartous, and Hama. Nearly all of these men were released within a few days, but the Ghazal-linked sheikhs who coordinated the region-wide protests remain in jail.

The arrest campaign has had a clear dampening affect on the Alawi community. It successfully delayed renewed protests – which some activists were already calling for the night the second round ended – likely preventing a serious outburst of inter-communal violence. But the arrests eroded some of the trust the MoI had earned the previous month. Furthermore, the government’s lack of transparency on releasing the December 2024 prisoners of war has added to the continued distrust and anger. While Alawi detainees have continued to be released over the past two months, none of these releases come with public statements explaining who they are or why they were detained. Most local activists told me that they believe that these men are the ones detained in recent arrest campaigns, rather than the men from December 2024.

Growing Economic Anger

As the security situation has improved, the economy has surfaced as the main source of anger and tension now. All of Syria is suffering economically, but geographic isolation and distrust in the state have created divergent perceptions of the causes of this economic strife. Many Alawis believe the government is explicitly banning aid organizations from working in their areas. The feeling of intentional marginalization is fueled by the ongoing dismissals of government employees across municipalities in Latakia, Tartous, Hama, and Homs. These firings create a continually expanding pool of unemployed Alawi households, straining an already non-existent local economy.

Yet at the same time, most Sunni areas also remain unserved by Damascus or international organizations. Two friends from Idlib’s Jabal Zawiyah, both of whom are veteran HTS members now serving in the MoI, told me that their towns remain partially destroyed, with all rebuilding having been done by locals, and little to no jobs outside of the security forces for the residents. Huge swathes of northern Latakia, Hama, Idlib, and Deir Ez Zor face the same problems. Far from a marginalization of Alawi areas, the state instead faces a universal inability to support any rural community. This situation is exacerbated by most international organizations’ refusal to operate outside of major cities.

Perceptions of marginalization are also fueled by the lack of government engagement in rural areas. In nearly every part of Syria outside of the major cities, the main, and sometimes only, contact people have with the state is through local MoI officials. Rural Sunni communities usually have a means of engaging with the state through long-established personal and social networks with new officials and institutions. Christian communities work effectively through their religious leaders and are supported by strong and semi-independent international organizations, but Alawi communities lack any real feedback mechanism to state officials, especially those in Damascus.

This has resulted in increased trust in the MoI and a significant reduction in security-related fears, but it has done nothing to ease concerns over the direction of the new state or the competency of its bureaucrats. Widespread anger online over claims of nepotism and corruption impacting new hiring practices adds to the belief that governorate-level directorates have no concrete development plans, all creating a broad perception that this current government does not know how to bring the country forward.

Next Steps

Much of the coast and western Syria is currently experiencing a degree of calm not seen since the fall of Assad. Damascus and international organizations should take advantage of this period to institute the next series of reforms and local interventions; steps to ease some of the economic and political tensions, which remain widespread, and solidify locals’ willingness to engage with the new government. Such steps could include:

• Approving the elections of local councils. These would fold into the current Rais Belediye system (pseudo-elected mayors who report to a single Damascus-appointed official at the governorate level), having authority over local social and administrative duties like municipal budgets and supporting cultural events. Such councils would give rural communities in particular the ability to participate directly in their own governance and reduce their widely felt feeling of abandonment.

• Government outreach to rural communities. Rural areas’ only real interaction with the state is through the Ministry of Interior. Government officials, whether at the governorate level or a committee formed in Damascus, should begin holding town hall-style meetings in rural Syria to hear from local communities. Providing a means for people to express their concerns and needs, followed by actions that address them, will help show that rural Syria is just as important as the major cities.

• Targeted economic initiatives. Economic development as social cohesion should be the driving philosophy for (I)NGOs going forward. Targeted, low-cost development projects in rural areas that are designed to address basic economic deficiencies while creating opportunities for inter-communal collaboration can help reduce the risk of violence between communities while easing tensions caused by financial stress. Such projects should focus on the agricultural sector, including waste water treatment and recycling for irrigation, processing factories, storage warehouses, and training.

• Supporting youth exchanges. Such organizations should also focus on reducing the geographic isolation between communities that was exacerbated by the war. Youth groups and youth engagement has shown itself to be an effective means of inter-communal engagement. Offering tailored training and cultural activities that bring together youth from specific areas, followed by exchanges of those youth groups between wider areas, is a low-cost, high-impact way to build new ties between regions.

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Yet the sense of calm that has come over Baniyas is part of a wider change across all Alawi regions of western Syria, and a facade of calm that lasts for more than four months has the potential of solidifying into something more substantial. Yet the lack of any serious civil peace or inter-communal efforts in the city risks throwing away the current opportunity.

In this two-part interview, I speak with the same Christian and pro-revolution Alawi activists that I have profiled several times before. Speaking regularly with these men provides a unique insight into changing perceptions from the same people who are centrally placed within their respective communities. We discuss the nuances of the coast’s “return to life”, the challenges of pursuing civil peace in Baniyas, and the role of Fadi Saqr and Ghazal Ghazal in Tartous.

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I visited one such place, Harisoun, earlier this week. It is a small town north of Baniyas and close to rural Jableh (there is another “Harisoun” marked on google south of Baniyas, but this is not where the town actually is). It, like most of the Baniyas countryside, is dominated by greenhouse farming. I met with an engineer who runs several nurseries in the area. Our interview covers the massacre on March 8, how locals view security forces in the year since, and a detailed discussion of the agricultural industry, challenges farmers are facing, and what type of support could help the local economy.

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The town is close to the opposition bastion of Talbiseh, and the two communities have a long history of economic and personal ties. Since the fall of Assad, Sunnis from Talbiseh have reopened shops in Mushrefa, and security forces have succeeded in building a good degree of trust with locals. My recent interview transcript with one such business owner in Talbiseh explores these inter-communal dynamics from that city’s perspective.

Yet while there is no overt inter-sect conflict in Mushrefa, there have been no initiatives designed to repair the more subtle war-time divides between sects, particularly the problems created by the actions of Alawi militiamen against Christian and Sunni residents of the town. The lack of any transitional justice efforts whatsoever, combined with the absence of any inter- or intra-communal dialogues, have prevented the town and surrounding areas from fully healing the scars left by the regime.

I visited Mushrefa earlier this month to learn about inter-faith relations and the town’s history after the fall of Assad. The following is an edited interview with a retired Christian engineer who works in one of the town’s churches.

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While a bedrock of the opposition, this area also contains many non-Sunni communities from nearly every sect. The two closest towns to Talbiseh, for example, are majority Christian and Alawi. To the east is Mushrefa, a mixed Christian, Alawi, and Sunni town which saw a gradual exodus of Christians throughout the war due to the violence and harassment from local regime fighters. Umm Sharshuh to the west was a Christian town, destroyed through regime looting and airstrikes. Enab Baladi profiled Umm Sharshuh in 2020, detailing its takeover by regime militiamen from local Alawi villages, the eviction of its residents, looting of their homes, and later regime airstrikes which destroyed the town entirely.

These three towns have a long history of integration dating back decades. Their personal and economic relationships were strained through the war, but never fully disappeared. They now serve as the foundation of renewed inter-communal ties as the region rebuilds. I visited Talbiseh, Umm Sharshuh, and Mushrefa earlier this week to learn about their history, interfaith relations, and life after Assad. Below is an edited interview with a businessman from Talbiseh who works in Mushrefa and whose family has ties to all three towns. He had moved to Turkey briefly late in the war but returned to Talbiseh in 2022 and remained in the town through its liberation.

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The experiences of individual Alawi communities during the first year after the Assad regime has varied widely, particularly in the first months of the post-Assad transition. These differences were exposed during the March 2025 events, in which some parts of Syria’s coast became hotspots of Alawi insurgent activity and dozens of Alawi communities suffered pro-government massacres in response. How exactly each of these communities transitioned into the post-Assad era was usually a result of several factors: the (perceived or real) security threat from that community, the attitude of the specific security officials assigned there, and early outreach by local Alawis.

In the recently-profiled area of Bahluliyah, for example, the area was not viewed as posing a security threat, security officials were very open and engaging with locals, and local leaders made an early effort to engage and cooperate with the new government. These combined factors have resulted in an area that has largely escaped the bouts of insecurity and violence that plagued the coast in early 2025, strengthened trust between locals and security forces, and reduced the level of fear among residents compared to other Alawi areas.

Yet these underlying factors are fragile, and one misstep can condemn a community to cycles of violence and fear. Two other Alawi towns exemplify this complexity: Tartous’ Khirbet Maazah and Latakia’s Qurfeis. Unlike Bahluliyah, neither of these towns were viewed as low security risks. Khirbet Maazah, which sits just outside Tartous city on the road to Safita, was home to several senior regime figures. Among them were Ali Muhanna (the infamous Tiger Forces commander), Muhammad Ali (a senior officer from the Air Force Intelligence’s Palestine Branch), and Major General Muhammad Kanjo Hassan (head of the regime’s Military Field Court). Qurfeis did not have such prominent profiles, but the town had a significant population of ex-soldiers (more than 30% of its population), is the site of the most important Alawi shrine in the coast, and sits atop a strategic plateau overlooking the Jableh countryside, from which the most hardened of the Assad security forces resided.

Despite these similar profiles, the experiences of Khirbet Maazah and Qurfeis diverged early on, and the gulf between them has only grown since. The following case study presents the history of these two villages through three periods: 1) The first two months after the fall of Assad, leading up to the January 24 rumors of Maher Assad’s return, 2) The interim period of “demilitarization” in the coast just prior to the March 6 insurgency, 3) the March massacres. These details are based on multiple visits to these two communities and interviews with local activists working as interlocutors between their communities and the government. These divergent histories provide further insights into the complexity of security and Alawi relations in the aftermath of the Assad regime.

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Equal Fear, Unequal Treatment

Khirbet Maazah

Khirbet Maazah made news in December 2024 as the site of the first serious clash with regime remnants, or fulul in Arabic. The first two weeks after the fall of Assad has seen a tenuous security situation in the coast as opposition forces newly transformed into policing units struggled to prevent crimes. Armed robberies of Alawi homes, isolated murders, and the occasional clash during arrest operations had become a near daily during middle of December. It was in this context that a General Security patrol was ambushed by ex-regime soldiers in the village of Khirbet Maazah on December 24.

Several factors combined leading to the attack. On the morning of December 24, a video showing the burning of an Alawi shrine in Aleppo went viral on Facebook. While the shrine’s destruction had actually occurred during the November 30 takeover of Aleppo city, social media posts now claimed this was a new assault on an Alawi religious site. An Alawi sheikh in the Khirbet Maazah region then took to Facebook calling for a general mobilization of the youth. Fearful from the social media propaganda, some young men gathered in one of the nearby villages. Later that day, a patrol heading to Dreikish was shot at while passing by Khirbet Maazah. As a result, two General Security trucks moved into Khirbet Maazah to sweep the area. Insurgents quickly ambushed the security forces, killing three and taking six prisoners.

Rather than assault the town, the head of security for the area called for a meeting with the area’s influential people. According to Bassem, a pre-revolution anti-Assad activist from the town, the security officials presented a list of demands to the locals in order to avoid a military operation; among them was the return of the prisoners, handover of bodies, and withdrawal of insurgents from the town.

The next day, the town’s residents were informed via social media and the mosque minarets to stay indoors and away from windows as security forces arrived. Four checkpoints were established around the town and security forces raided the villas of several senior regime figures believed to be involved in the insurgency. Units would continue to conduct security operations in and around Khirbet Maazah for six more days. Some small clashes occurred throughout this, and some security members used sectarian language during their interactions with locals, but multiple residents and activists all agree that the raids resulted in no civilian deaths, no property damage, and no looting.

“These steps were the basis of strengthening the relationship between the government and the people,” explains Bassem, “Civilians knew the regime’s people were the ones trying to instigate clashes, while government forces came in without violations.” Some local men were arrested during the operation, but all were released in good health within a month following an investigation. Security officials and local activists believe the senior regime officers involved in the initial clashes quickly fled to Lebanon. Their removal from the area further relaxed both the residents and security officials.

This early security challenge and the response both by locals and officials set the tone for the area’s relationship going forward. Shortly after the December 25 operation, a new batch of security forces were deployed to Khirbet Maazah. These men included former Sunni officers who had served in a regime base near Khirbet until defecting in 2014. They knew the area and the people well, according to Bassem, and helped to reinforce good behavior by the other Interior Ministry personnel deployed there. “There was one officer, Abu Fidai, who is beloved by the people here,” says Bassem, “He would explain the local situation to all new security members and one time even got in a fight with another member over the harassment of a woman at a checkpoint.”

Qurfeis

While the officials assigned to Khirbet Maazah adopted a diplomatic approach and worked diligently to enforce discipline within their ranks, this was not the case in Qurfeis. In Qurfeis, an initial opposition faction arrived right after the regime fell, staying for just under three weeks before leaving without having caused any issues. Just before this faction left, another faction arrived, Jaish Ahrar. This group set up a base on the western edge of Qurfeis near a village called as-Sin. As with the security forces in Khirbet Maazah, Jaish Ahrar would exchange shifts every Monday, making it more difficult to build a relationship with the fighters.

As with every Alawi community, the collapse of the regime triggered widespread fear that opposition factions would begin indiscriminately killing Alawi civilians. In order to protect their town, five men from Qurfeis formed a sort of negotiating committee to engage with the newly deployed factions. Karim (not his real name) was among these men. At the end of the month, the leader of the Jaish Ahrar unit deployed in the town, Abu Maher al-Homsi, ordered the residents to hand over their weapons in 48 hours or he would raid the town. The negotiating committee met with Abu Maher to try and convince him that they had none of the heavy weapons and caches he was claiming existed, just some personal small arms among the households.

The men from the committee handed over their five personal rifles as a sign of good will. Karim and the negotiators insisted that the faction would get more support from them in the long term if they pursued these security measures through cooperation, rather than force. After another few hours of intense debate, Abu Maher agreed not to conduct a raid.

Two days later, Abu Maher was replaced by a new commander from the faction, and within a week the first murder happened. On the night of January 7, three faction personnel kidnapped two local farmers. These three fighters had been meeting with one of the farmers, Qusay, for several days already, preaching to him in an attempt to convert him. But this night they tied up Qusay and a second man, beating them and calling them sectarian slurs before taking Qusay out and executing him. The second man was able to escape after he convinced the fighters he had hidden gold in the river valley, later losing them in the darkness.

That morning the survivor informed the town leaders of what happened, who in turn called the Ministry of Interior officials in Jableh. An investigation was launched and the three perpetrators, all Jaish Ahrar members, were identified. At this, the entire group deployed in Qurfeis was changed. No other punishments were made known to the residents, who to this day do not even know the real names of the men who killed Qusay.

Maher’s Return

Khirbet Maazah

The next major trust-building event in Khirbet Maazah was during the night of January 24, 2025, when rumors spread across social media that Maher al-Assad was returning to the coast at the head of a Russian military column. Some of the social media posts spreading these rumors used it to call for an armed movement in the countryside to support Maher’s arrival. These rumors coincided with the removal of significant ministry of defense units from Tartous, meant to calm locals’ fears by demilitarizing the countryside. As a result, the remaining General Security units were isolated and undermanned and surrounded by Alawi towns suspected of harboring insurgents.

Two Alawi activists from Khirbet Maazah gave near identical accounts of that night. While the vast majority of residents did not believe the rumors, the security forces deployed in the area’s checkpoints had no idea what was happening. Rumors spread that a shift change might occur that evening with a military show of force and gunfire in the air to deter any insurgent attack. Out of fear, residents shut off the towns’ lights around 7pm. Confused about what was happening, Abu Fidai went to a nearby checkpoint and called a local. The local man explained what they were seeing online and then joined Abu Fidai, sitting at the checkpoint with him until 7am. Locals contacted the other checkpoints in the area that evening as well, explaining what they were doing and urging the security members to not be afraid. One resident then opened his house to around a dozen General Security members, encouraging them to sleep there until morning to ensure their safety.

The concern shown by residents towards security forces that night further reinforced the trust between the two sides. This trust and positive relations remained even as key personnel, like Abu Fidai, were transferred elsewhere and newly trained General Security units deployed to the area. In other areas, transitions like this were fragile, at times resulting in the collapse of local-security relations. However, the continued positive developments in Khirbet Maazah through this change indicate that the individual-based relationship had become institutional.

“How do we know the people here trusted the government forces?,” Bassem explains, “Because we saw consistent use of filing complaints to the District Director and clear and quick responses to these complaints.” This does not mean the people of Khirbet had no fear. Fake news still held power over every community. For example, one time claims spread on social media that armed factions from Baniyas were coming to avenge the soldiers killed on December 24, resulting in most of the town’s residents fleeing the area. But each time, the trust in local officials resulted in quick resolutions. After the Baniyas rumors, the District Director called the town’s leaders, telling them that this rumor is not true but that he would establish new checkpoints regardless to protect the residents.

Qurfeis

The personnel change in Qurfeis following the January 7 murder did nothing to reduce the tensions. Other Jaish Ahrar fighters remained in the village for the next two months, causing daily problems with the residents, like verbally harassing women and stealing harvests from farmers.

The small group of men continued to try and engage with the local commanders to solve problems and reduce the tensions, like making daily requests to allow farmers to pass through the faction base and enter their land. “People in Qurfeis were very pressured because of the actions of these faction members,” explains Karim, “The harassment was so bad that at some point the faction members would question children, ‘Are you a Sunni or Alawi’.” This atmosphere continued until March 6.

The daily harassments were now amplifying the sense of isolation and fear among many of the residents, especially those who had lost their income from serving in the regime’s security forces. Killings of Alawi men by criminals and government factions continued across rural Jableh in January, such as the January 8 murder of three farmers near Ain Sharqiyah. Meanwhile, the armed insurgency led by ex-regime officers continued to grow in the area, such as the January 14 standoff with a cell of ex-regime militiamen who killed two security members and captured seven others, and the January 22 attack on a government checkpoint which left two soldiers dead.

The March 6 Uprising

Khirbet Maazah

Like Bahluliyah, the Khirbet Maazah subdistrict largely escaped the violence of March thanks to the efforts of locals and the Ministry of Interior. The night the insurgency began residents were terrified, and many fled to Lebanon or deeper into the mountains. There were no insurgent movements in Khirbet Maazah due to the security operations in December, though insurgents had clashed with pro-government forces at the nearby highway overpass. Still, reports of massacres being committed by government forces in Baniyas and rural Latakia terrified resident, with some turning to the District Director for help. According to Bassem, the director urged people to return home, telling them that he would prevent anything from happening even if he had to order the security forces to fire on the army units.

Ministry of Interior units then established a large checkpoint at the main junction between the coastal highway and Khirbet. When the pro-government factions came from the highway, the security personnel stopped them with gunfire in the air and told them the entire area to Safita was safe and had been secured since December. After negotiations, the factions were allowed to pass and move towards Safita, with the understanding they would stay on the main road. Yet several faction vehicles used side roads to reach the villages of Yahmur and Zirqat, where they killed two civilians and looted some homes. In Yahmur, one local man fired his pistol in the air near faction members and then fled. The next day he returned on his motorcycle, driving back and forth alongside the faction, whose members eventually shot and killed him.

Small violations occurred during the four days these factions traveled, like car theft and looting of businesses along the road and shooting in the air from their camps at night to scare residents. During this later event, General Security personnel intervened, forcing the factions to cease their fire. Later, MoI officials would also coordinate the return of much of the stolen property from the factions. “In general the situation was good and stable,” says Bassem, “but there was still a huge amount of fear.”

Qurfeis

Qurfies sits on the edge of the deep Jableh valleys and mountains from which the core of the ex-regime insurgency resides. The trigger for the March 6 uprising occurred just a few miles east, outside the town of Daliyah, when a security convoy was ambushed during an arrest operation. Qurfeis, with its shrine, strategic geographic location, and military base on the edge of the insurgent heartland thus became a central target of the new government’s military units. From March 6 to March 9, Qurfeis endured four days of terror and violence.

Like many Alawi areas of the coast, rumors of an impending uprising were widespread throughout the day. Insurgent networks had spread claims that the Russian military was preparing an aerial attack against government positions in support of ex-regime fighters who would invade from Lebanon. As a result, insurgent networks rapidly expanded that day with new local recruits and independent mobilizations. While no attacks happened in Qurfeis, insurgents from the area had set up ambushes on the coastal highway in the plains below the town, targeting security checkpoints and reinforcements throughout the night.

On March 7, a convoy of former HTS fighters from the Othman Brigade, which had been stationed along the highway and come under heavy attack the night before, moved towards Qurfeis. They entered the town from the west, just off the coastal highway, passing through the village of as-Sin first. According to Karim, the convoy fired its 23mm anti-air cannons at every house in the village, resulting in the death of one resident hiding in his home. Upon reaching Qurfeis, the faction members entered and killed five men hiding in the first homes. The convoy then moved to the town’s shrine, where many residents had sought refuge. Seven men who were caught while in the main square outside the shrine were killed. Then some faction members pulled out seven more men hiding in the shrine and executed them, while other members killed three more men hiding nearby. Within 45 minutes of the first shots being fired, orders had come to stop the killing, according to Karim. At this point the fighters began looting homes.

On March 8, Karim attempted to return to his home, having sought refuge in a relative’s house during the previous 48 hours. As he approached Qurfeis late that morning he saw a large convoy of fighters from the former HTS 400^th Division as well as Jaish Ahrar arrive in as-Sin. The 400^th Division had been deployed elsewhere in the Jableh countryside and lost more than 25 members to the initial uprising on March 6. One fighter then fired a shot in the air, triggering the entire convoy to begin firing in the air and at the mountain for several minutes, causing random injuries among civilians hiding in their homes and the bushes. After shooting, the faction members began looting as-Sin, killing six more men. Karim and the group of leaders from Qurfeis contacted the commanders of Jaish Ahrar who they had known from the previous months, asking them to stop the attacks, but the commanders told them, “those fighters are from the 400^th Division, not us, we cannot tell them to stop.” The looting in as-Sin would continue off and on until March 11, at which point both factions left the area.

On March 9, a small group of general security members and military commanders arrived in Qurfeis to meet with the local leaders. The commanders pressured the men to record a video alongside them thanking the Military Operations Room, “for securing the village.” The security officials also interrogated residents about the location of a specific ex-regime officer who they believed had led the insurgent network in Daliyah.

Divergent Paths

Since the March events little has changed in Qurfeis. Units of the Othman Brigade stayed in the town until April 16, at which point new fighters from the 400^th Division arrived. According to Karim, these fighters killed a resident on April 21 and would beat anyone who walked too close to their base. The small group of Qurfeis leaders continued to engage with security officials and even Fadi Saqr, trying to negotiate the removal of the army units from their town. Eventually the Othman Brigade returned, replacing the 400^th Division, but no Ministry of Interior units were ever deployed. The severity of the violations gradually decreased, but verbal harassment remains.

Throughout much of the year, Qurfeis would be whispered about by Alawis in Jableh, a ghost town occupied by the army. On November 17, the governor of Latakia and commander of the Ministry of Defense’s 50^th Division – a post-Assad unit within which all of the aforementioned factions have been merged – visited Qurfeis, the first high level delegation to do so. The meeting was intended to send a signal of resetting relations with the town, but for many, it was too little and too late. Already internal divisions within the residents were emerging, with some residents facing accusations of using their money and influence to maintain the military deployment in exchange for business deals and personal access.

Karim believes the town remains occupied for three reasons: 1) to protect the shrine from attack by Sunni extremists, 2) for the psychological impact of controlling the most important Alawi shrine, and 3) controlling a key strategic point both overlooking the Hmemeim Airbase and providing a military base close to Daliyah, where ex-regime insurgents still operate. Regardless of the government’s reason for maintaining this presence, the inability of the military’s commanders to either end the violations or hold those personnel publicly accountable has ensured the area remains steeped in fear and anger.

In Khirbet Maazah, the local activists attribute the positive relations between themselves and the local government to the actions of the different officials who have overseen the area since December 24. These relations and the trust built between residents and the MoI have only deepened through each of the major crises the area has endured. Bassem insists that the MoI, “continues to be very good and responsive to the people.” Yet since March, the deployment of military factions in the area has threatened to undermine these positive developments.

Fear remains due to uncertainty over the stability of the situation in the long-term. Since March 7, a military unit has resided in a former regime officers’ home on the town’s outskirts. While direct harassment has been limited, they occasionally fire bullets into the air, scaring residents and causing material damage to homes. People are unsure if or when this military unit will leave, and worse, whether the MoI can prevent the soldiers from committing violations should a new security issue arise.

“It is the faction which is driving the fear,” says Bassem, “The locals have trust in the MoI, but don’t know what the faction will do.” Residents regularly file complaints against the military unit’s personnel, and say the local MoI officials are quick to resolve them. But the uncertainty remains. Despite the Ministry of Interior’s efforts at building trust, the events of the past year have caused many residents to leave for Lebanon or the larger cities, reducing the subdistricts population from around 30,000 residents to 18,000.

Both Khirbet Maazah and Qurfeis had locals who engaged with security forces early on, and both had legitimate security challenges. Yet the experiences of the two towns were completely different due to the actions and attitudes of the officials and personnel assigned to them. It’s important to note that Khirbet Maazah was not free of violations - like was the case in Bahluliyah - but the consistent outreach by officials and earnest responses to complaints earned them locals’ trust and patience.

These two experiences showcase the complexities of post-Assad security and trust building, particularly in Alawi areas in the first months after Assad. A high degree of autonomy seemingly given to local officials meant that some were able to pursue genuinely constructive approaches towards community engagement, while others consistently undermined trust building through rigid sectarian beliefs and a refusal to enforce discipline within their units.

Still, regardless of whether it is Bahluliyah, Khirbet Maazah, Qurfeis, or any other Alawi town, many of the ongoing demands remain the same: Resolve the taswiyah process and hand out new civilian IDs, remove military units from residential areas and replace them with General Security forces, combat the social media stigmatism against specific Alawi towns, and do more government and economic engagement to show that these communities are an equal part of Syria’s future.

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