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.

Share

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.

Share

Subscribe now

Share

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.

Subscribe now

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

Subscribe now

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.

Share

Subscribe now

Footnotes

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.

Share

Subscribe now

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Subscribe now

Share

The Unclear Minority Role

With the fall of Assad, the new Syrian government was left to rebuild the state’s two security pillars: the interior and defense ministries. Each was wracked with its own challenges. For the army, the rebuilding process was defined by complex integrations of dozens of opposition factions, many of whom had been at odds with one-another just weeks earlier. Integration, building new lines of command, and inducing behavior change were the main priorities here. For the Ministry of Interior, however, the challenge was the opposite – building a new force out of fresh recruits and former opposition personnel transferred from the MoD all around a small core of veteran security officers who had been training and serving in Idlib for years prior.

The MoI quickly established two armed branches, the General Security Service (GSS) and the civil police force. These were built entirely around Sunnis, mostly former opposition fighters and GSS and police personnel who had been serving in the opposition government in Idlib prior to liberation.

During these first months there was no clear policy on non-Sunni recruitment. For example, in the spring of 2025 I met one man in Latakia who insisted that five of his Alawi friends had recently joined the Police Academy, while at the same time another man told me his Christian friend had been rejected by a recruiter on the basis of his religion. Privately, some security officials acknowledged the complexity and fear they felt at the idea of integrating armed Alawis alongside armed Sunnis.

Yet at the same time, the MoI was already employing Alawi and Christian men in administrative roles. Like every government ministry, the new MoI involved some level of grafting ex-opposition institutions onto ex-regime institutions. According to one police officer working in Damascus since December 2024, many non-Sunni regime-era administrative employees had been retained and continued to work in the ministry throughout 2025. These employees worked in departments like IT, civil registry, and passports registration.

Furthermore, the MoI had also supported the establishment of several local, volunteer police forces within minority communities. These were most prominent in some Christian neighborhoods of Damascus, the Druze neighborhood of Jaramana, and the Ismaili town of Qadmus. In Qadmus, the district security official had not stopped at forming an armed Ismaili volunteer force but had even established 40 checkpoints in the Alawi villages around the city in January 2025, all manned by local Alawis.

Still, all of this non-Sunni employment was on an ad-hoc basis. The local non-Sunni security forces were all volunteers, and many of these forces were disbanded during the second half of 2025 as the MoI further institutionalized its forces. Even if a handful of non-Sunnis had been accepted by some recruiters by the spring, there was clearly no genuine push by the ministry to integrate non-Sunnis institutionally.

Share

Expanded Recruitment for an Expanded Presence

However, this changed by late summer 2025. At this point, the Ministry of Interior had adopted a new policy clearly directed towards broadening its personnel base by expanding recruitment to non-Sunnis. The new approach followed two tracks: 1) recruiting new men and putting them through a two-month training program in regional centers, 2) reintegrating Assad-era police officers.

This new recruitment is central to one of the MoI’s core goals for the first half of 2026. According to multiple local security officials I met in the coast in November and December, the MoI plans to greatly expand the presence of police stations across the Alawi countryside this year. In 2025, the MoI’s presence in the coast was largely confined to GSS headquarters in district capitols, with a gradual expansion of police stations into sub-district seats. Now, the MoI plans to re-open or build new police stations across smaller towns and villages. This has been a consistent demand from Alawi civilians and activists that I have met with, who see the expansion of policing institutions as a way to strengthen safety and stability in their areas.

For the first track, the MoI in Tartous and Latakia opened a new recruitment round in late Summer for men from their respective governorates. This class of recruits would be the first to go through the two governorates’ new police academies and included men from every sect within the governorate.

For the second track, MoI officials reached out to trusted Alawi mukhtars and men who had been serving as local interlocutors in August, asking them to create lists of ex-regime policemen from their towns who had good reputations. These lists were compiled and submitted by mid-September, according to one such mukhtar I met with, at which point the MoI began investigating each man to ensure he had not committed any crimes under the regime.

On November 10, the first class of Internal Security Force recruits graduated from the Tartous academy. This class consisted entirely of men from the governorate who would only be deployed within Tartous. Several local MoI officials I spoke with that month told me this class, which numbered around 1,400 graduates, contained “men from every sect of the governorate.” On December 21, the first class of new recruits in Latakia graduated, also containing non-Sunnis. One of the Alawi graduates was interviewed at the ceremony, the first public recognition of the recruitment of Alawis.

Yet Alawi officers were already working in the coast by the time these classes graduated. The MoI’s efforts to re-hire ex-policemen had continued through the fall, and by mid-November, the MoI in Tartous was processing 2,000 such officers, gradually re-introducing them into the General Security and police forces in rural Alawi areas. At the same time the class graduated from the Tartous academy, there were already several Alawi men serving in armed GSS roles in rural Tartous.

Their re-integration has continued unabated in recent months, with the appointment last week in Qardaha just one of many. Upon reading the news from Qardaha, I contacted a local MoI official in rural Tartous to enquire about his district. He informed me that they had already re-hired around 11 policemen and detectives just in his area. This was confirmed to me by an Alawi activist from the same town. Similarly, an Alawi friend in Tartous city confirmed to me last week that the recruitment of Alawi ex-police is also occurring in the city. “My cousin went to file a complaint for a hit-and-run at the police station and was surprised to hear a lot of the officers speaking with a clear Tartousi Alawi dialect,” he told me.

Future Steps

The government has been understandably coy about advertising its recruitment of Alawi youth, and especially the re-hiring of ex-regime Alawi policemen. This process has been so quiet that many Alawi activists did not even know it was happening, even within their own towns. For example, one activist denied this was happening, saying he had just visited his home district and seen nothing, but upon my insistence made more calls and realized that several men had indeed been re-hired.

This is partially caused by the MoI’s policy of soft localization; men are not always hired to work in their own villages, but do remain within their governorate. This gives the government flexibility to fill-in personnel shortages where needed, while still capitalizing on the cultural sensitivities of each community yet lowering the risk of corruption. The official adoption of non-Sunni recruitment has enabled the Tartous and Latakia Internal Security Commands – which oversee the GSS and police – to rapidly expand their physical footprint across the governorates. The result has been increased security and safety in Alawi areas and improved trust building by local officials.

However, it is not clear if any other governorates have begun re-hiring regime-era officers who had served throughout the war. Activists in Alawi areas of Hama and Homs denied to me this week that similar steps were occurring in their areas. It is possible that the MoI is using the coast as a test for the integration of non-Sunnis, or that the severe manpower needs and density of Alawi communities here have pushed them to adopt this more expansive policy. Still, the government would be smart to begin this process in other minority areas as soon as possible. The MoI has proven itself to be a trustworthy local security force over the second half of 2025. Integrating local non-Sunnis across the country is the next step towards bonding these communities to the new state.

Subscribe now

Share

Abu Hassan, a large man with a stern face, fought for fourteen years in Syria’s revolution in Idlib, but for the past year he has served as a police officer in this rural Alawi subdistrict 30 minutes east of Latakia city. We are sitting with Samer, the owner of the cafe, discussing security and sectarianism after the fall of Assad. Outside on the street, Abu Hassan’s son is playing soccer with Samer’s son and other boys from the town. Every now then other policemen, much younger than Abu Hassan, come over and buy a tea, making small talk with the men sitting outside.

This was my second visit to the town, having previously met with some residents in September. During that visit I was struck by the degree of trust those I spoke with had for the local security officials. The every day fear I had encountered in a year of field work across Alawi communities seemed to be absent here, but I didn’t understand why.

I returned in December to better understand why relations in this area were so much better than elsewhere in the coast, and what lessons could be taken and applied to other Alawi communities.

Share

Not Like the Others

The Bahluliyah subdistrict consists of around a dozen towns and villages containing a few tens of thousands of residents. It lies on the wide plains between Syria’s coastal mountains and the coast’s largest city of Latakia. Around 75% of the residents relied on government work under the regime, according to the last government census in 2004, with the rest of the area’s income coming from agriculture, trade, and work in the city. It has been and remains a genuinely impoverished area.

Unlike many parts of the coast, Bahluliyah did not have many residents in powerful regime positions, and those that were did not use their resources to enrich the area. “Once under Hafez there was a deputy minister of defense from our town,” Samer tells me, “so we went to him and said, ‘please can you build us a hospital?’ but he rejected us, saying, ‘there’s no land to build one.” Samer smirks and spreads his hands, gesturing vaguely and the large amount of empty land surrounding us.

This dynamic kept Bahluliyah’s Alawi population at more of an arms length from the Assad regime than most coastal communities, whose sons and fathers were more deeply enmeshed in the regime’s apparatus. “The people here are very educated [aware] and have always been sidelined by the regime,” insists Samer, “we are not like those in Jableh or Qardaha or Tartous.”

The difference in mentality was obvious to the first opposition factions that arrived here just days after the fall of Assad, and the positive first impressions they had would be crucial for the budding relationship built between the community and security forces.

First Impressions are Key

Like many rural Alawi areas, panic seized the residents of Bahluliyah when the regime first fell. For three days the towns here were empty, most families having fled to the forests and mountains. “We imagined jihadists with large beards and swords would arrive,” remembers Samer, reflecting on the image of the opposition fighters pushed by regime propaganda. Late on December 11, residents hiding in the forests instead saw an “organized and professional looking unit” turn off the M4 Highway and head towards their communities.

Samer and a large group of locals made their way to the main road to greet the two opposition factions. “We cheered as they entered, which surprised them,” he says. The sun was setting by this point, so the locals offered the faction members to sleep in two nearby municipal buildings and brought them blankets, water, and food. “We began building trust from these first steps", explains Samer. That night he contacted other residents who had not yet returned, “assuring them of the factions’ good actions.” At the same time, the leaders of the two factions contacted security officials in Latakia city, telling them about their positive experiences.

The faction leaders gave residents their personal phone numbers to use in case of any security issues. Meanwhile, newly appointed security officials in Latakia city also got in touch with local notables, connected via the faction leaders, and similarly shared their phones numbers and began building a rapport.

After ten days one of the two factions, the HTS Othman Brigade, withdrew. The other faction maintained only a limited presence due to the lack of any security threats. For more than a month there was no permanent police presence in the area, though the General Security (GSS) units based in Latakia City were always quick to respond to any needs. There were no raids against ex-regime soldiers and arrests were increasingly conducted in coordination with local notables or village mayors.

When a GSS detachment did arrive in late January, they came relaxed and open to the population thanks to those initial experiences and reports by the first factions. On January 24, 2025, rumors spread across social media that Maher al-Assad was returning to the coast at the head of a Russian military column. By this point, many of the heavier armed government military units had been withdrawn from civilian areas, leaving isolated GSS offices in the Alawi countryside. Fearing they would be attacked by Alawi insurgents supporting the rumored invasion, the security forces in Bahluliyah took refuge in locals’ homes. This action further strengthened the forces’ trust in the locals.

March Massacres

These initial trust-building experiences were put to the test on March 6, 2025. That evening, a large, coordinated insurgency erupted across much of coast, led by ex-regime officers who had recruited hundreds of former Alawi soldiers and civilians. In Bahluliyah, however, there was no local support for the insurgency. The GSS office was not attacked - the only such case in Alawi parts of Latakia - and terrified locals remained in their homes.

The next day, pro-government armed groups began entering the region to retake the areas captured by Alawi insurgents. Some convoys traveled along the M4 highway that connects Idlib with Latakia and passes between the Bahluliyah and Haffeh regions. 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.

Samer, who serves as an unofficial community leader, quickly heard about the killings and called the GSS office. “Within 12 minutes they had sent 14 trucks to the main road and expelled the faction from the area,” Samer tells me. The situation was not so good further along the M4, however.

Early on the morning of March 7, Alawi insurgents attacked the GSS checkpoint overlooking the M4 outside the town of Mokhtariyah, which sits just outside the Bahluliyah subdistrict (this attack was reported by the Commission of Inquiry and confirmed to me by Samer). The insurgents killed all 30 GSS members in the village. Later that day, armed factions entered Mokhtariyah 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 Samer, who 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.” However, on March 9 a third armed group entered the town and began killing residents and looting homes. One resident, who I spoke with in March, told me they quickly called the numbers provided by the earlier factions, who were then able to return and force out the third faction and end the killings, but not before more than 30 Alawi civilians had been killed.

According to Samer, after the March 9 attack the GSS took control of the entire highway, setting up new checkpoints and preventing any armed groups from entering villages. “Our relationship with the GSS grew stronger after the events of March 6,” says Samer. “Before March 6 I don’t think they [security forces] knew how to deal with us, but that’s changed since then.”

Strengthening Bonds

In the weeks following the insurgency and massacres, locals in Bahluliyah organized several aid convoys to Mokhtariyah, Brabishbo, and other affected villages along the M4. These convoys were escorted by local GSS units and members of Faylaq al-Sham, the faction which had stopped the killing in Brabishbo. But the local initiative soon ran out of money and the work stopped. Free of any massacres or looting, Bahluliyah’s residents were able to more quickly return to their daily lives. The GSS presence in the area was gradually reduced, replaced by a single police station.

Governorate officials further strengthened their relationship with the Bahluliyah area in the summer when they appointed a new police director, also referred to as the Subdistrict Director. Captain Mazen Qunaifdi was transferred from Latakia City, where he had been serving as police chief of the Sheikh Daher neighborhood since December 2024. Qunaifdi, from the nearby Sunni town of Salma, had served as a police captain in Latakia before defecting in the beginning of the war and forming a Free Syrian Army faction in northern Latakia. His family had a long history in Latakia’s police force, with his brother having previously served as a senior official in governorate’s police.

“Forty members of my family were killed during the war,” Captain Qunaifdi tells me in his office, “three of my brothers were disappeared in Sednaya. This history is well known to all the people of this region as well as the security forces, and I know all the Alawi villages and families here, who was with the regime and who was against it.”

Qunaifdi’s deep local roots have allowed him to work in Bahluliyah without the heavy-handed approach that often accompanies ‘outsider’ officials who are afraid of the Alawi population. He and his family’s history in the local police forces also gives him an established reputation and connection to many of the Alawi areas, helping them to begin with a base layer of trust.

All residents I spoke with emphasized the openness and responsiveness of Qunaifdi and his police officers as a key reason for the lack of fear in the area. When asked how he builds trust, Qunaifdi responds, “Justice is the basis of all - give the oppressed people of any sect his rights and sideline the criminals, this will always increase trust.” On why he has chosen to pursue such an open and engaging approach with the residents, he explains:

“We have strict directions from the President on how to deal with people with mercy and compassion. I was an officer who defected because I saw the oppression of the regime. We rebelled for a cause and this cause never ends. I am from this area so I know that many Alawis were oppressed as well.”

Both Qunaifdi and every resident I spoke with said the senior government and security officials in Latakia city have placed an emphasis on the Bahluliyah region. There seems to be an understanding that, through the efforts of both the locals and security forces, the situation in Bahluliyah has been untarnished by the problems elsewhere in the coast. Keeping it that way is now a priority. GSS units in Latakia city are quick to send any resources towards Bahluliyah for issues outside of the police station’s control, and strict orders are issued to checkpoint personnel on the highway connecting Bahluliyah to Latakia which have helped prevent any cases of harassment or violations.

Sheikh Raji Nasr, a prominent Alawi religious leader in the Bahluliyah area, described this dynamic succinctly to me over coffee at his home:

“The Ministry of Interior are the ones who can hold us together or cause divisions. The officers in Bahluliyah have played a large role in settling the community’s fears because they do their jobs professionally, establish connections with the people, and are responding to needs.”

The Sheikh echoed what other residents had said throughout my two visits. After the massacres, government officials had made “shy” attempts to make amends with the affected communities, but a ‘return to life’ after such rapid and brutal violence needed time. Some individual violations continued across Latakia for a period, which further undermined trust building attempts, but gradually these ended. Persistent responsiveness by Captain Mazen and the GSS to any security concerns or violations committed by army units stationed nearby, along with the expansion of MoI checkpoints, have reinforced trust throughout the Bahluliyah subdistrict.

Lessons for Local Civil Peace

I returned to Bahluliyah in December in search of a specific answer for the coast’s most important question: “How do you reduce fear and build trust between Alawi communities and the government.” But there is no clever trick to Bahluliyah’s success, nor one specific moment in which everything changed. Instead, it was many small moments building on each other, all underpinned by a population that was brave enough to open itself to the new government, and officials who were equally brave enough to approach their communities with open minds.

Two crucial factors have made trust building easier here than in many other places: the lack of serious violations committed by security forces here and the lack of an insurgent movement among the local population. With this basis, simple trust building measures have deep impacts. Where these problems have occurred, however, more is needed to absolve the past and help the two sides move forward.

Bahluliyah is a glimpse at the kind of simple, local civil peace that is already being built in some parts of Syria. Yet these relationships are local, between the community and the officials living there. The trust building rarely extends to the national government. Larger steps are still needed to bridge the wide gap between the Alawi community more broadly and the new Syrian government: Passing and enforcing a law criminalizing sectarian speech, continuing the release of Assad-era soldiers in detention, addressing food insecurity and damaged infrastructure in poor Alawi areas, and providing loans to help families transition from employment in the military to owning small businesses.

Back at the cafe, Abu Hassan and Bassam tell me about a field trip they arranged a few months prior. Abu Hassan had taken Bassam’s two sons with him to his hometown in Idlib’s Jabal Zawiyah for the weekend, showing them the villages and towns which were among the first to rebel against Assad and which suffered immensely as a result.

Abu Hassan is tired of the violence of the war. Unless on a mission, he and the other policemen in Bahluliyah walk around without weapons. They make house calls to check on families and sit with young Alawi men on the street. They even moved their families to Bahluliyah in the fall, renting apartments and enrolling their children alongside the local Alawi kids.

Throughout our discussion, Qunaifdi repeatedly emphasized the need to change the mindset of a populations which only knew Assad’s propaganda. “We need to reduce the gap between the people and government,” he says, “but this takes time and effort.”

Subscribe now

Share

Yet in the intervening years, the SDF and Coalition has built a large anti-ISIS apparatus, including counter-terrorism units, informant networks, and prisons holding more than 7,000 ISIS fighters. The collapse of the SDF has raised concerns among some western observers about the impact of this territorial change on the counter-ISIS fight. The Institute for the Study of War went so far as to claim that:

“The Syrian government cannot immediately replace the Syrian Democratic Forces as a reliable counter-ISIS partner in northeastern Syria. The SDF performs a range of functions that require well-developed networks and military infrastructure, which the Syrian government cannot build overnight. The SDF has excellent human intelligence networks that probably provide it with an excellent understanding of the ISIS threat it faces on the tactical level.”

This claim is heavily flawed, however, ignoring years of evidence from both the northeast and northwest about the tactics and successes of each side’s counter-ISIS campaigns. While it is true that the SDF has spent a decade receiving U.S. training, funding, and technical support, these resources do not directly translate into building effective clandestine networks. In the post-Caliphate era where ISIS operates as underground cells, it is these intelligence operations that underpin the ISIS fight.

Both the SDF and HTS have engaged in years of anti-ISIS campaigns within their respective territories. The divergent history of these campaigns suggests that Syria’s new government may actually be better suited to root out the persistent ISIS insurgency in formerly SDF-held areas.

Share

Subscribe now

SDF’s Failed Cooption

As the SDF rolled back ISIS in northeast Syria, it quickly encountered the huge challenge of building intelligence networks in Arab regions where the Kurdish-run organization had no history. Dareen Khalifa, a Senior Advisor at the International Crisis Group, has been visiting the northeast for more than a decade, meeting extensively with military, intelligence, and government officials as well as local communities. In 2019, she wrote about the SDF’s approach to gathering intelligence in Arab areas:

“This deficiency and its lack of local knowledge has led it to often rely on pre-existing structures that ISIS created to co-opt tribes as informants for the group’s security branches. Today, the SDF uses them for the exact same purpose. Thus, in Deir al-Zour some of the SDF’s local intermediaries, who once similarly cooperated with ISIS, today turn a profit by securing the release of ISIS followers in exchange for money and (not necessarily reliable) information.”

The SDF’s reliance on tribal networks and lack of local knowledge to vet any information it received resulted in persistent cases of false reporting – sometimes just to secure payment from informants’ handlers, other times as a means to settle local disputes. Khalifa writes that in March 2019 alone, SDF raids in Deir Ez Zor using inaccurate intelligence resulted in the murder of at least 111 innocent Arabs, with the SDF then having to pay blood money to many of the families and subsequently pause anti-ISIS operations to reduce tensions.

Despite these challenges, the SDF was able to initially identify and empower a few key Arab interlocutors in Deir Ez Zor in 2019. These men had the trust of the Arab community and the Kurdish military leaders. With their help, the SDF was able to initially secure the genuine cooperation of several key tribes in Deir Ez Zor. Yet continued security failures by the SDF eroded this fragile trust. ISIS cells were able to assassinate several crucial interlocutors early on, as well as other local Arabs working with both the civil and security institutions. Persistent insecurity resulted in locals increasingly wary of collaborating with a security force they did not believe was capable of protecting them.

In 2022, Dareen and I published a follow-up report on the ongoing counter-ISIS campaigns in northeastern Syria. Like her 2019 report, this one was again built on multiple field trips to Deir Ez Zor and Raqqa throughout 2020, 2021, and 2022 speaking with local security officials and activists. We found that growing perceptions of insecurity – fueled both by SDF failures and repeated claims by U.S. leaders of an imminent withdraw from the northeast – had, “discouraged the population from cooperating with the SDF’s counter-ISIS raids or providing intelligence on ISIS cells.”

ISIS operations in Deir Ez Zor in particular appeared to be specifically designed to undermine SDF intelligence gathering efforts by targeting anyone perceived as collaborating with local government and security forces. As early as 2021, SDF officers in Deir Ez Zor had told us that these attacks were successfully hindering their attempts to gather intelligence. This dynamic was further cemented by continued SDF raids targeting and killing innocent men based on wrong information. For its part, the SDF had also grown increasingly distrustful of any intelligence gathered by local networks in communities which had been major ISIS recruitment hubs, according to one senior intelligence officer. The lack of trust from both sides was, at its core, a result of the continued exclusion of Arabs from any real positions of power.

By late 2024, these dynamics had resulted in a substantial return of ISIS activity in the northeast, particularly in Deir Ez Zor. When I visited the area in September of that year, both security officials and locals claimed that ISIS recruitment, extortion, and ‘shadow governance’ had all increased in the governorate. According to one senior SDF official I spoke with, there were already twice as many ISIS attacks in the first six months of 2024 than in all of 2023, claiming that, “ISIS is now stronger than it was in 2019.” The situation was already unraveling before the collapse of the Assad regime.

HTS’s Northwest Campaign

Prior to the fall of Assad, HTS had run its own anti-ISIS campaign within its territorial holdings in northwest Syria. Unlike the SDF, HTS’s personnel were rooted within these communities. Even if locals had disputes with HTS leadership or its political and social policies, the group was able to tap into a huge breadth of influential individuals and veteran revolutionaries from every community to build trust at a local level. This would be the foundation from which HTS dismantled ISIS networks in its areas of control.

From mid-2017 through early 2019, ISIS cells conducted a robust insurgency across Idlib. ISIS relied on pre-existing networks that were then bolstered first by the Assad regime facilitating ISIS convoys into Idlib in 2017, then by targeted Russian airstrikes in 2019 against the main prison holding ISIS fighters which enabled hundreds to escape, and lastly by individual smuggling efforts from northeast Syria after 2019. HTS engaged in brutal battles against these ISIS fighters, particularly starting in May 2018 after it had consolidated military and political control over other opposition factions in Idlib. While eventually staving off the worst of the ISIS activity, clandestine ISIS activity renewed in 2020, triggering a new round of counter-ISIS operations.

In 2023, Dareen, Jerome Drevon, and I published a lengthy report on the history of HTS’s counter-Al Qaeda and counter-ISIS campaigns in northwest Syria, based on multiple trips to Idlib and interviews with intelligence and military officials there. The initial battles against ISIS coincided with the early establishment of new governing and security institutions in Idlib. A Ministry of Interior was established, and with it a new “General Security Force” which operated in close conjunction with HTS’s intelligence apparatus, led by the now-Minister of Interior Anas Khattab. This professionalization and creation of formal internal security forces played a large role in countering extremist networks. By the end of 2021, ISIS activity had been essentially eliminated in the northwest. 2022 saw at most three ISIS attacks, all unclaimed and which appeared to be lone-wolf attacks directed from outside Syria.

All of this success was built on sophisticated human intelligence networks. As one senior security official told us at the time, “We don’t have the technology or [surveillance] drones, as the Coalition does, to listen in and monitor ISIS members.” A veteran General Security officer now involved in operations against regime insurgents elaborated on this in a recent conversation with me:

“What helped us eliminate ISIS was our significant experience and the cooperation of the local population. ISIS was a danger to society, and the people of Idlib hated ISIS very much. Therefore, any information they received about ISIS was immediately shared with the security forces.”

Despite these successes, senior ISIS leaders were still able to hide in Idlib. ISIS’s first leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed in a U.S. raid in Idlib in October 2019; his predecessor was similarly killed in Idlib in February 2022. The two operations were huge blows to HTS’s otherwise good record of counter-ISIS operations and underscored the serious gaps in the group’s capabilities at the time. Any overt ISIS activity could be exposed via local informant networks, but leaders simply sending physical messages via one or two trusted individuals were much more difficult to uncover.

A New Era of Collaboration

Following HTS’s overthrow of the Assad regime, it expanded these operations across former regime areas. Security forces suffered two serious failures when ISIS cells successfully conducted terror attacks against a church in Damascus in June and an Alawi mosque in Homs in December. Yet the government has prevented many more ISIS attacks throughout 2025 as well. In November 2025, Syria’s new government officially joined the U.S.-led anti-ISIS Coalition. However, according to Charles Lister, Director of MEI’s Syria Program, intelligence cooperation goes back several months earlier, already resulting in 11 joint operations, including two nation-wide arrest campaigns, and the disruption of at least 10 attempted mass casualty ISIS attacks.

The new government has proven, both during its time in Idlib and after the overthrow of Assad, its skill in establishing and utilizing human intelligence networks. Security forces have even been able to build effective informant networks in the heart of ex-regime Alawi communities, using these to routinely disrupt and arrest insurgent cells in Syria’s coast which had, in the first months after liberation, conducted extensive attacks against government forces. Damascus will now seek to do the same in the areas previously controlled by the SDF.

While the rapid change in territorial control inevitably provides ISIS room to maneuver, Damascus has been quick to fill the security void. The SDF withdrew from Deir Ez Zor in the early morning hours of January 18 under pressure from locals, with government military units already entering these towns by dawn. By the next morning the Ministry of Interior had established checkpoints across much of the area and announced the opening of police recruitment centers. At least some of these centers were already operating by January 20, a hopeful indicator that new local security forces will be formed quickly to support those brought in from outside.

Establishing new security and intelligence networks in Deir Ez Zor and Raqqa should not pose a challenge to Damascus. The new government has already spent the past year strengthening its ties to local Arab communities under SDF control, using these rebuilt networks to help expel SDF forces from half of its territory in less than 48 hours. Damascus’ established practice of security localization – appointing security, intelligence, and administrative officials within their own governorates or districts – will also ensure an immediate base level of local buy-in.

The General Security and General Intelligence officers now deployed to the recently liberated areas will be able to compound their local knowledge with years of experience combating ISIS, al-Qaeda, and more recently regime remnants. Rather than undermining established Coalition efforts, Damascus should be able to quickly leverage its extensive local networks in these areas to enhance intelligence gathering that, in conjunction with the Coalition’s resources, will amplify the counter-ISIS fight beyond what the SDF could do.

Share

Subscribe now

The five-day battle for the neighborhoods this month marked the first major turning point in the year-long Damascus-SDF negotiations over the broader fate of the autonomous Kurdish government and its armed force. Control over these three neighborhoods allowed the SDF to periodically close the main northern entrances to Aleppo via sniping and drone attacks. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, SDF snipers had killed 65 civilians in just the first two months after the fall of the regime. The April 1 agreement between the two sides had, theoretically, demilitarized the neighborhoods. Yet the SDF had maintained heavy weapons such as anti-aircraft machine guns, rockets, and an extensive stockpile of weaponized drones, and had continued expanding its tunnel system throughout the neighborhoods.

After nine months of stagnating talks on Damascus-SDF integration, the territorial changes this past week have reset the table. Yet despite the diplomatic gains the successful operation has brought Damascus, it also refocused the domestic and international spotlight on the conduct of its armed forces. Syria’s new army has, in its one-year history, built a long record of human rights abuses and war crimes, particularly when used against minority dissident movements. It had been six months since the last government military operation prior to the Aleppo battle; how did the Ministry of Defense’s conduct change, if at all, this time? And what does the victory in Sheikh Maqsoud mean for Damascus-SDF negotiations going forward?

Share

Changing Conduct of the Syrian Army

This was the government’s third major military operation since December 2024. The prior two operations in the coast in March and Suwayda in July had seen widespread human rights abuses, field executions, and looting against Alawi and Druze communities. Despite their differences, both operations were heavily marred by a lack of a clear chain of command and coordination between the various government forces, the participation of unauthorized armed security personnel and civilians, and extensive violations against civilians as well as captured militants.

The battle in Aleppo differed significantly from both of these previous events in, 1) how the military leadership commanded the operation, 2) the army’s ability to keep non-authorized armed men out of the battle, and 3) the type and scale of violations.

These changes began at the highest levels of command. Damascus took a more slow and methodical approach to the clashes in Aleppo. Political and military leaders in Damascus made repeated attempts at negotiating an end to the fighting, even as they mobilized army units and after beginning operations, according to several mediators involved. Government media was also highly transparent about who was leading this battle, publishing pictures of the MoD operations room. From these, it is clear that the battle was commanded by the MoD’s Chief of Staff, the Deputy Minister of Defense for the Northern Region, the commanders of the 60th, 72nd, and 98th Divisions, and the commander of the Ministry of Interior’s Internal Security in Aleppo.

With this more structured senior-level command chain came a more deliberate approach towards the deployment of government forces in the battle. A smaller number of units were brought to the city compared to what was used in Suwayda or the coast, and this time there was close coordination between the MoD and MoI, with police units deploying rapidly into civilian areas as they were captured and senior MoI commanders directly overseeing the detention of POWs.

The coordination between the two ministries was crucial for addressing several of the government’s major failures in the prior operations. As outlined in depth by a recent al-Majalla article:

“To prevent any acts of revenge or abuses during the military operation, the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Interior, through their checkpoints, prohibited the participation of any personnel from either ministry whose name was not on the list of forces authorized to enter the two neighborhoods.”

Syria expert Elizabeth Tsurkov had spoken with one soldier, based in rural Aleppo, who had tried to join the battle on his own but was prevented by his unit commander. A General Security officer she spoke with in Aleppo city confirmed that they had been tasked with ensuring no one other than the approved units were entering the frontlines. The inability to do this had been a major problem in both prior massacres, and it is an important baseline ability for the government to prevent unauthorized armed men from entering conflict zones.

In addition to this, military, police, and local government officials coordinated extremely closely to create daily humanitarian pauses and facilitate the evacuation of civilians from both the SDF-held areas and from government-held neighborhoods close to the fighting. These displaced people were met by civil defense and humanitarian workers and brought to more than a dozen aid centers and temporary shelters within Aleppo city and the Afrin and Azaz countryside. The army, as reported by al-Majalla, also published 12 detailed coordinates and maps of the main SDF command and weapons storage points which would be targeted each day, helping to reduce the number of potential civilian casualties.

As a result of these efforts, more than 155,000 civilians were able to flee to fighting, with most having already returned to their homes since the battle ended. The resources and coordination placed on the humanitarian response during the battle, combined with the seemingly effective efforts to prevent unauthorized armed groups from entering the area, resulted in far fewer civilian deaths than in the coast and Suwayda operations. At the end of the battle, SDF leadership reported that 47 civilians had been killed in Sheikh Maqsoud. However, this number may rise, with neighborhood officials reporting on January 13 that 271 people are still missing.

Altogether, the MoD’s continued efforts at professionalizing its force - from the senior levels down - has clearly had some impact. That being said, government forces still committed violations throughout the operation, yet the scale and types of crimes are very different from the prior operations. According to initial assessments by the Kurdish human rights organization Hevdesti, there is widespread documentation of “public humiliation, threats, arbitrary detention, and degrading treatment” towards civilian detainees and SDF prisoners (much of this is easily verifiable in public footage). These types of violations, particularly the degrading treatment of detainees, shows a continued failure by the Ministry of Defense to enforce discipline across its forces.

The Syrian army’s conduct in Aleppo was inarguably improved compared to that of the coast and Suwayda, particularly with regards to the extreme reduction in violations against civilians, such as executions, looting, and beatings. Furthermore, the coastal massacres in particular were dominated by field executions of detained insurgents, something which, based on initial assessments, seems to have at least been very rare during the Aleppo operation. Still, the widespread use of derogatory language and physical mistreatment of captured SDF fighters shows that the government has failed to fully ingrain respect for human rights and fear of accountability among all members. Despite the structural and behavioral improvements that have been made, the MoD must continue to address this lack of discipline and the recurring violations that we have seen.

Potential Impacts on Future Negotiations

How Damascus’ forces behaved during the Aleppo operation will be closely examined by the international community and will have a large impact on their reaction to any future clashes between Damascus and the SDF. Unfortunately, it seems all but guaranteed that fighting will now expand to the eastern front. Damascus will continue to maintain a diplomatic line to the SDF, but the negotiating positions between the two sides have now been reset, with Damascus clearly in the stronger position.

This most recent round of fighting began on January 5 in eastern Aleppo, along the Deir Hafer frontline, when an SDF suicide drone struck a STG Military Police truck. The attack came one day after the last round of direct talks between the two sides following months of negotiations on how the SDF could integrate into the new state. As Charles Lister wrote in a recent piece, Damascus had been offering the SDF a security-focused deal which would see the SDF’s Internal Security Forces (ISF) integrated directly into local Ministry of Interior units, the SDF itself being restructured into three divisions which would be responsible for Hasakah, Deir Ez Zor, and Raqqa, the YPJ and counter-terrorism forces being given their own regiments, and several senior MoD positions assigned to SDF commanders, including the Deputy Minister for the Eastern Region. In exchange, these forces - essentially just the SDF but restructured and with new names - would have to report to Damascus.

Yet the SDF’s leadership has repeatedly rejected this offer on several grounds. The most critical dispute, according to several involved mediators, was over access to the northeast. In the last series of talks just before the outbreak of clashes in Aleppo, the SDF had insisted that the integration deal would have to require any police or military convoy of more than five cars receive SDF permission and escort to enter the northeast. In other words, the SDF’s territory would remain semi-autonomous. SDF negotiators were over the past year seemingly pursuing a strategy of drawing out the negotiations in the assumption that Damascus’ position would weaken; whether through internal divisions or international intervention against the new government.

Then Damascus took Sheikh Maqsoud in five days, suffering minimal losses, and showing a marked improvement in the behavior of its forces. Sheikh Maqsoud had been under the control of the YPG, which forms the core of the SDF, since 2012 and had withstood attacks from opposition factions in 2016. The rapid loss of this symbolically and strategically important neighborhood has not just exposed the weakness of the SDF, but the SDF’s failure to genuinely engage in diplomacy before and during the operation has undermined its legitimacy as a negotiating partner. The battle also undermined the SDF’s domestic and international image by exposing its continued and self-admitted use of child soldiers and suicide bombers, and its ongoing recruitment of ex-regime soldiers tied to Alawi insurgent groups.

The final hours of the Sheikh Maqsoud operation saw ongoing negotiations for the surrender of the remaining SDF fighters in the neighborhood, who were offered safe passage to the northeast. Amid these talks, the SDF launched more than a dozen suicide drones at Aleppo city, likely from their positions in Deir Hafer in the eastern Aleppo countryside. One of these drones struck the Aleppo Municipal Office at the same time or just after a press conference was held there by the Minister of Information, Minister of Social Affairs, and Governor of Aleppo. Another suicide drone attack was reported around 7pm hitting near a mosque in the city center.

These final attacks ensured that the tensions between the two sides will now expand east. On January 14, the Ministry of Defense announced that it would open a humanitarian corridor on the Deir Hafer front from 9am until 5pm for civilians to leave the frontline. It appears that Damascus is pursuing the same strategy it used in Aleppo: keeping the door open to a peaceful withdrawal of SDF forces and continuing integration talks while making it clear that it will use military force otherwise to achieve confined objectives.

The SDF will not be able to hold Deir Hafer, a rural area entirely consisting of Arab villages that it only took from the retreating Assad regime forces in early December 2024. Once Damascus’ forces have reached the Euphrates, either by force or by negotiation, there will likely be another military pause and new round of talks. This time, however, the SDF’s position will be far weaker and its room to maneuver far smaller.

The SDF’s leadership can still gain something from engaging earnestly with Damascus and through the existing third-party mediators. The previous deal, including three military divisions and senior leadership positions, may now be off the table. But Damascus has already pursued a localized approach to both its administrative and security structures. Securing genuine local governance and a central role in local security for Kurdish communities in the northeast is not out of reach.

Finding a Peaceful Resolution

The SDF-Damascus dispute has come to a head, with Damascus likely to re-enter the northeast in the coming months, if not weeks. How this happens remains to be seen. Damascus has clearly shifted its approach to the SDF, opening the door to a military ‘solution’ to the long-standing dispute, but at the same time it has not closed the door to a diplomatic approach.

In his January 13 interview, President Sharaa spoke at length about the rights and roles of Kurds in Syria, including that, “The rights of the Kurdish community are also non-negotiable: their right to citizenship, participation in parliament, holding sovereign positions, and so on.” Kurdish political and citizenship rights are not at threat by this new government.

However, there are still serious risks that renewed violence between Damascus and the SDF will result in human rights violations from both sides. The current frontlines are now along entirely Arab regions, but this does not mean that the prisoner mistreatment violations committed by the Syrian army will not be repeated against Arab detainees. The Aleppo operation was a success for Damascus, but it has sharpened international scrutiny towards its military’s conduct. A diplomatic solution between Damascus and the SDF would still benefit each side more than a drawn out military confrontation which will see new civilian displacements, deaths, and destruction.

New diplomatic talks should now shift away from the pure security focus of the past several months, given the SDF’s weakened military position. Instead, talks should focus on securing Kurdish cultural, language, and political rights, enshrining women’s participation in governance in the northeast, and ensuring that Kurdish communities will continue to have a role in their local security.

Share

Subscribe now

The villa and the security officers who uncovered the plot reside in the Bramanat al-Mashaeekh subdistrict, on the edge of Tartous and Hama governorates, high in Syria’s coastal mountains. The raid had been months in planning and resulted in the dismantling of the largest Iranian-linked insurgent cell in the coast. The success of the operation also underscored the effectiveness of the community outreach work these officers had engaged in since December, highlighting the stability that comes when security officers build close ties to local communities.

Share

The Raid

The cell was led by a Shia cleric from Idlib’s Maarat Misrin, Abdul Ghani Qassab, who had terrorized the people of his town in 2011 before eventually leading an Iranian-backed militia in Aleppo. With the fall of Assad, a regime officer from Sheikh Badr, Brigadier General Ghassan Dhawab, invited Qassab and his fighters to use his villa as a safehouse. With Qassab were 12 other men from Hama, Homs, Damascus, and Quneitra. No one in the cell was from Tartous itself, and all are believed to have been Sunni converts to Shia Islam who had fought in Iranian-backed militias during the war. Security forces even uncovered some Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps certificates the men had received during the war and brought with them to the villa.

Locals were so confused by this group that for months they had assumed the men were members of General Security who had established a base in an abandoned villa (many General Security and military bases in the coast were originally established in the villa compounds of regime generals who had fled). Eventually, however, locals in the valley realized the men were not with the government and reported their presence to the local General Security officer.

The tip-off triggered a long investigation. For three months, General Security monitored the house from a hilltop across the valley, watching the cell’s movements and activities. The insurgents were building a defensive position across the road from the house, cutting steps into the hillside that wound their way to a partially enclosed firing position where they had placed a small weapons cache. Within the compound, the fighters had two trucks and had built a field hospital and small garden. In the orchard downhill from the house they had made a makeshift obstacle course where they would train during the day. Dozens of rifles, multiple rocket launchers, a heavy machine gun, barrels of ammunition and grenades were hidden across the compound. In recent weeks the cell had begun establishing a satellite link on the villa’s roof to use with a drone in their possession.

On November 12, the security officials for the Bramanat al-Mashaeekh area moved in. They suspected at least part of the cell was getting ready to leave, and so once they saw all the men had entered the compound the two officers called for backup and drove to the house. They parked their car across the driveway gate to ensure the insurgents could not flee by car, and then knocked on the door. One of the insurgents opened, and after a brief exchange invited the officers in for tea. “We knew they would probably kill us after the tea,” one of the two officers told me, “but we had to keep them there.”

Thankfully the other General Security units arrived shortly after and the cell was arrested without a shot fired. Laptops and phones were recovered, providing invaluable evidence on the cell’s domestic and international connections. The officers believe the cell was establishing an operations base in the villa to support more coordinated insurgent attacks in the future.

Gaining Local Support

The two officers who led the operation stressed repeatedly the importance that the support of the local community played in this operation, and in maintaining stability in Bramanat al-Mashaeekh more generally.

Upon arriving in the subdistrict in December 2024, the small group of General Security officers quickly reached out to the local notables. “We did not know this area, its geography, its culture or its history, so we knew we needed to work with the locals,” explains one of the officers who had served here since Assad fell. They quickly met with the community’s leaders and encouraged them to establish a Civil Council to help resolve local disputes and serve as an intermediary between the security forces and the people. This council shares information with the General Security, but also serves as a trusted mediator for locals who are too scared to approach the security forces to voice complaints and questions.

Over time, the actions of the Civil Council and the officers eased tensions in the community. As one officer in the nearby Sheikh Badr station explained, “after the liberation the two sides were afraid of each other, but it is improving every day now.”

The relationship was further strengthened on March 6. That night, groups of insurgents surrounded the three General Security offices in Sheikh Badr district, quickly capturing the small, isolated forces. In Bramanat, the officers were held by insurgents for 24 hours, but the Civil Council’s intervention through their own social networks ensured the men weren’t executed (as happened in nearby Dreikish). Other locals then managed to rescue the officers and sneak them out to Tartous city. Three days later, these men returned at the head of the army columns entering Sheikh Badr, ensuring no massacres were committed against the Alawi population. In the following months, the General Security officers at the Bramanat office responded swiftly to any complaints about locally-deployed military units, ensuring soldiers who harassed locals or committed violations were removed from the area.

The General Security members in Bramanat now make social calls to peoples’ homes, sit at cafes and chat with passerby’s. They repeatedly cite the experiences of nearby Qadmus district, where the security officials there have worked closely with the local Ismaili and Alawi community leaders, as a model they sought to emulate in Bramanat.

The results speak for themselves. Across the coast there has been growing tensions within the Alawi community between those who want to work with the new government and those who either oppose any engagement or who explicitly support armed insurgency. The latter have increasingly attacked the former as “traitors", while some more moderate Alawis view those who work with the government as simply being opportunistic informants. Yet in Bramanat, the work of the civil council and actions of the security officers have successfully countered much of these internal divisions while also resulting in genuine stability and peace.

Subscribe now

Share

The most difficult aspect of a balanced transitional justice approach is how to address the hyper-local, community-driven crimes with underlying sectarian motivations. These were particularly prominent in Homs city and its countryside where Sunni opposition towns were isolated among Christian, Shia and Alawi towns. The regime leveraged some from these minority populations to besiege, starve, indiscriminately kill, and ultimately ethnically cleanse Sunni communities. Now those displaced survivors have returned and found that the same towns from which the regime militias operated out of remain untouched and their men free.

The recent killing of two Christian men in the western Homs region of Wadi Nasara sparked new public debate on the issue of accountability in this region. While Syria’s Christians largely stayed out of the war, one prominent Christian militia had been formed in Wadi Nasara which participated in the attacks against, and expulsion of, the Sunni residents from nearby Qalaat Hosn in 2014. The two killed men, it turned out, had been members of this militia.

In response to the violence, the first of its kind in this area, a prominent activist from Qalaat Hosn has attempted to chart a path towards local reconciliation. In an October 13 post on her Facebook page, Yasmine Merei bluntly explains what she sees as the main factors impeding reconciliation and the first basic steps needed to begin this process. The post in full is translated below, but a few key points are worth highlighting.

Mrs. Merei explains that the lack of awareness of crimes and acceptance of victims’ innocence has continued to stall any form of genuine dialogue between Hosn and Wadi Nasara. (This problem is extremely pervasive among the Alawi community as well, and has been a core complaint of every Sunni I have met in coast since my first visit in December). A key part of Mrs. Merei’s advocacy in this post is to find ways to educate non-Sunni communities about the reality of the suffering they faced - combating ignorance with education in order to spur new dialogue - and having communities from which regime militias emerged publicly mourn the victims and condemn the perpetrators.

Share

Mrs. Merei’s post was shared by the Facebook page for the Qalaat Hosn Local Council, which added the following important commentary:

“An initiative by activist Yasmine Merei, which we hope will find a receptive audience among the wise people of al-Wadi [Wadi Nasara]. Any reciprocal visits that focus on pleasantries and fail to call things by their names will not heal deep wounds. The people of Qalaat al-Hosn were displaced, killed, and arrested by the thousands. Their homes were destroyed, and they lost 14 years of stability, construction, and development.

The people of al-Hosn have the right to hold the valley responsible for a large part of their wounds and pain, as it was from al-Wadi that al-Hosn was shelled, and dozens, even hundreds, of innocent people from al-Hosn were killed and arrested at checkpoints guarded by al-Wadi’s own people.

Transparency, accountability, and justice are what build a promising future.

The first step is a serious investigation and confessions to uncover the fate of the detainees from the monastery and the St. George Hotel, and to reveal their mass graves, which remain unknown.”

As for Mrs. Merei’s post:

“Since last February, I have been in daily and intensive contact with the issue of missing civilians from Qalaat al-Hosn between 2012 and 2014, focusing specifically on the women and children who disappeared in March 2014.

Despite the bitterness of this work, and despite my connection to Qalaat al-Hosn with all its calamities and enormous civilian losses, under circumstances that were, to say the least, extremely difficult, I proposed an initiative in August and sent it to a group of official and influential figures in Homs and the Wadi. I will not name any of them in this post so as not to cause any embarrassment, but everyone knows who they are.

During these months, what struck me most during the interviews, meetings, and discussions was the lack of awareness among the majority of the Wadi residents regarding the nature and extent of the civilian casualties in Qalaat al-Hosn. The prevailing sentiment among many was that the residents of Qalaat al-Hosn posed a genuine threat to their existence and religious identity—a sentiment I regret, but this is not the place for regret or expressing personal feelings.

In good faith, I have included in this post a portion of lists compiled by media activist Khaled al-Hosni. These lists include the names of his mother and five sisters who were martyred. I have excluded from these lists the martyrs of Qalaat al-Hosn who were arrested by the Assad regime and died in detention, as well as the “martyrs of the Free Syrian Army.” I have included only civilians who died from sniper fire by the National Defense Forces, shelling, the siege and its resulting shortages of medicine, food poisoning from contaminated bread that entered Qalaat al-Hosn after months of shortages, or who disappeared at various times while attempting to leave the besieged Qalaat al-Hosn and regularize their status.

I am publishing these lists because I do not subscribe to the “Go, you are free” mentality, but rather to the principle of justice for every Syrian civilian. Furthermore, I have decided to believe that many in the valley are unaware of this, so I said to myself: Perhaps those who don’t know will learn! The lists include the names of:

• 92 civilians were killed by shelling (artillery fire by the National Defense Forces).

• 7 died during the siege from poisoning or lack of medicine.

• 65 were killed by snipers while trying to gather food (wild herbs, or what we call “saliq” in the local dialect) or to cross checkpoints to surrender.

• 174 people are missing at the checkpoints surrounding Al-Mushtaya, Ammar, and Anaz. The youngest was four months old; I will not name her in this post out of respect for her father’s feelings.

To my family in Qalaat al-Hosn: I do not claim that these lists are final or that they include the names of all the victims, so please excuse any shortcomings.

I am placing here the text of the initiative, noting that when I wrote it, I focused solely on the missing persons from Qalaat al-Hosn who crossed the al-Mushtaya checkpoint and disappeared after being detained at the St. George Hotel. Today, I am also considering the civilian victims from the valley during that period, and I demand justice for them with the same fervor I demand for justice for the people of Qalaat al-Hosn. Certainly, this initiative is not the ideal solution, but it can serve as a foundation, or one from which we can build, to reach a point of reconciliation.

An initiative proposed by journalist Yasmine Merei for reconciliation and civil peace in Wadi al-Nasara:

Since the end of last year, Syria has been moving towards a new phase in which Syrians, both leaders and citizens, aspire to a free, safe, and dignified future for all its people, a future in which they overcome their wounds and contribute to building the country and the state.

Between 2012 and 2014, the Wadi al-Nasara region in the western Homs countryside witnessed a harsh period, during which the city of Qalaat al-Hosn was subjected to violations and a siege by an armed group from some neighboring villages in al-Wadi. The Assad regime used this group to pressure the city’s residents who had rebelled against it. Certainly, this group does not represent all the people of the valley, many of whom are known for their patriotism, nobility, and rejection of injustice in all its forms. They and the region are also known for a high level of coexistence and respect. However, the incident of the detention and subsequent disappearance of dozens of Qalaat al-Hosn residents at the St. George Hotel in March 2014 by the “Lions of the Valley” group remains an open wound for the people of Qalaat al-Hosn.

Therefore, based on what we know of the nobility of the people of the region, given their commitment to coexistence with dignity and respect, and based on the desire of the residents of Qalaat al-Hosn to stand firmly behind the state with unwavering support, we propose the following actions as a genuine and lasting initiative for the region, and as a model for how residents of sectarian areas in Syria should respond when one group commits violations against another. All of this is within the context of protecting Syrian diversity and building genuine spaces for civil peace:

• A statement issued by the elders of the valley expressing their appreciation for the feelings and losses of the residents of Qalaat al-Hosn, unequivocally condemning those responsible, demanding accountability for their leaders, and expressing the residents’ mutual support.

• A group visit to the families of the missing in Qalaat al-Hosn, including prominent figures from the valley and official representatives.

• A vigil held by the valley’s residents, displaying banners bearing the names of those missing from the St. George Hotel.

• A candlelight vigil in the courtyard of St. George’s Monastery in memory of the victims.

• Erecting a monument bearing the names of the missing at the hotel site.

• Any proposal for financial compensation must be channeled through a donation fund for reparations, managed by an elected body.

• No donations should be considered “blood money” or compensation for bloodshed.

This initiative can achieve reconciliation and serve as a model for other areas in Syria that have experienced similar circumstances. — Very important note: The last clause of the initiative was written to contain cheap offers from some former National Defense leaders who tried to reach financial settlements with some of the victims’ families.

By the way, there was a time when not a single person from the original inhabitants remained in the Qalaat al-Hosn. The houses were looted and burned, and even today, the majority of the houses are uninhabitable, and less than a third of the original inhabitants have returned.”

Mrs. Merei provides screenshots of the database she and Khaled al-Hosni have built containing the names of the aforementioned 338 murdered civilians from Hosn, as well as a second database they are building containing the dates of detention or death and additional details.

Share

Subscribe now

New claims and reports of Alawi kidnappings once again became rampant on social media in October, spurring the Ministry of Interior to conduct its own investigation into the topic. On November 2, the Ministry held a press conference announcing the results of their short investigation into the kidnapping phenomenon in the coast. The investigation examined 42 reported kidnappings, concluding that only one was real, the others a mix of fabrications and familial or personal disputes. The MoI did not explain how it chose those specific 42 cases and it has yet to release the full investigation.

The investigation and its results appear to have only made the discourse worse. Several Syrian human rights organizations have condemned the investigation, labelling it as clear evidence that the government cannot be trusted to genuinely investigate kidnappings or protect women. On the other hand, Damascus’ supporters have cited the investigation as clear evidence that the Alawi kidnapping phenomenon is a social media ploy pushed by anti-Damascus propaganda networks.

The MoI investigation raises two distinct issues which have too often been viewed as mutually exclusive: 1) the issue of fake kidnapping claims, particularly regarding Alawi woman, created and pushed by pro-insurgent propaganda networks, and 2) the issue of real kidnappings. Most discussions on the issue seem to frame these two aspects as inverse of each other - if one is true the other must false. With this framing, the MoI investigation is either wholly true, or wholly wrong.

Yet in reality, the investigation has both exposed the scale of fabricated kidnapping claims and at the same time underplayed the reality of kidnappings in the country, which other Syrian government bodies have been reporting on frequently in recent weeks. The investigation found:

• 12 cases involving runaways with a romantic partner

• 9 cases of short absences of less than 48 hours

• 6 cases involving fake reports spread on social media

• 6 cases of runaways due to domestic violence

• 4 cases related to prostitution or extortion

• 4 cases involving criminal offenses

• 1 case of kidnapping

Despite the under-representation of real kidnappings - which will be discussed later - the investigation does provide for the first time a more granular look at the various forms of fabricated and misleading kidnapping claims spread on social media. These can be broken down into five general categories, of which there are many recent examples.

Share

Phantom Kidnappings

Perhaps most blatant are the entirely fabricated kidnapping claims, of which the MoI identified six out of its sample. These include fake reports of kidnappings, as was seen recently targeting the Christian town of Muhardah when propaganda networks spread a viral claim of widespread kidnappings in the town, triggering an explicit denial of any security issues by local pages. Other fabricated claims use pictures of real people, including those who are not in Syria, such as two mid-October claims of a man kidnapped in Latakia using the picture of a Syrian man in Germany and of a woman kidnapped in Homs using the picture of a Mexican woman.

Manipulated Disappearances

Kidnapping reports often begin circulating when someone does not arrive home at the expected time, with families then posting on Facebook asking if anyone has heard from them. These then get spread widely as definitive cases of kidnappings. Sometimes, however, the individual is simply late coming home or has spent the night at a friend’s or man’s house without informing their family. When this occurs, the large “violations documentations” accounts rarely post updates, with some going so far as to re-post the kidnapping claim with a new date rather than share an update that the person is back home. Other cases involve women running away with their partners against parents’ wishes, or cheating on their husbands. The MoI investigation documented nine “short absence” cases and 12 cases of running away with a partner.

Recent examples include the October 22 disappearance of an Alawi woman from Latakia’s Datour neighborhood who didn’t returned home after going to a nearby gym. Some anti-Damascus Facebook pages went so far as to claim there was an (unpublished) video showing General Security kidnapping her. However, 24 hours later her family reported that she had returned home, having spent the night at a friend’s house.

Such manipulated disappearances have innocent intentions more often than not, with friends and family reacting genuinely to not knowing where a loved one is amid a constant inundation of kidnapping claims. It is the lack of clear follow-up that amplifies the harmful impacts of these misleading claims, with most Syrians only seeing the initial missing persons post and not the ‘safe at home’ updates.

Domestic Abuse

Cases of domestic abuse are among the most commonly cited by local security officials when asked about kidnapped woman. Some women enduring domestic abuse who are seeking to escape will contact police or security officials to help them move somewhere else. These officials often have audio records of these ‘911 calls’ as evidence, while the women’s spouses then turn to social media claiming security forces kidnapped their wives. The MoI investigation documented six such cases.

Criminal Cases

Some claimed kidnappings are actually extortion attempts by the ‘victims’ themselves - a result of the dire economic situation many Syrians find themselves in. For example, on October 24 a woman and two men were arrested in an Alawi village in Masyaf for staging her kidnapping in order to extort her parents. A man was arrested for attempting the same thing in Damascus in November. Other criminal cases involve the initially voluntary travel of women who are then abused by their partner. One such case occurred in late October in rural western Homs, where security forces recovered the woman after her partner turned violent. The MoI investigation found eight cases of either extortion or criminal kidnappings.

ISC arrests

Unaddressed by the MoI investigation is a less common - though more serious- type of ‘fake kidnapping’ - that of arrests by uniformed men which witnesses believe to be kidnappings. These appear to exclusively apply to reports of Alawi men being kidnapped, with two recent examples. On October 14, an Alawi diaspora activist heavily involved in online anti-Damascus media campaigns reported that his brother had been kidnapped in Tartous city. However, locals in the city told the author that it was well known he had been arrested outside the police station.

Similarly, on October 23 a video was published showing armed men in what appeared to be General Security uniforms conducting a targeted arrest of an Alawi man in Latakia city (the uniformed men held back bystanders, taking only the one man after he arrived outside his home). Violations documentation pages all claimed he had been kidnapped, but a week later coastal anti-Damascus pages announced that he had “been released” with no mention of the security forces’ role in detaining him and still referring to him as a kidnapped person.

This is part of a broader problem when it comes to understanding the scale of kidnappings. The arrest of men by security forces in the coast is commonly referred to as “kidnapping”, even when it is an explicit arrest, due to the general perception that such actions are universally baseless. This leads to an often exaggerated perception of the frequency of kidnappings in Alawi areas. Nonetheless, local security forces could easily counter these narratives by being transparent about the arrests they are carrying out, rather than simply grabbing men off the street and into unmarked cars.

Real Kidnappings

Despite the huge amount of mis-information and fabricated stories online, kidnappings remain very real and have a range of motivations - financial, personal, and gender-based. They impact all segments of Syrian society, all sects, and all regions of the country, and perpetrators are likewise not just from one sect. While the MoI investigation claims to have found only one real kidnapping among its 42 cases, this implied rarity is directly undermined by recent statements from local security officials and rescued kidnapping victims. These statements alone include kidnappings targeting Alawi and non-Alawi men and women committed by both ex-regime Alawi criminals and Sunni criminals.

Throughout October, Internal Security Command (ISC) directors across the coast, Hama, and Homs have announced multiple arrests of kidnapping gangs as well as the rescue of kidnapping victims. On October 16, ISC forces arrested the brother of Bashar Al-Assad’s infamous cousin, Wissam Al-Assad, and his insurgent cell in the Qardaha countryside. The arrest was triggered by the gang’s murder of a civilian and the attempted kidnapping of a child. Investigators claimed that the gang has been involved in multiple murders, kidnappings, extortion and robbery cases along the coast and was also engaged in the March 6 insurgency. On October 21, the Latakia ISC announced another arrest of a criminal gang in the city attempting to conduct a kidnapping. That same day, the Homs ISC announced the arrest of a criminal gang who had conducted kidnappings in the Homs countryside disguised as security members, going so far as to describe a specific kidnapping for ransom they had recently committed.

Kidnappings by ex-regime security forces had grown so bad in the coast in recent weeks that the Latakia ISC commander issued a statement on this issue on October 25, saying in part:

“Investigations confirmed the continued attempts of some groups linked to remnants of the former regime to destabilize the province’s security and stability by carrying out terrorist acts targeting vital and government sites, committing systematic murder and kidnapping, and spreading rumors and inciting sedition.”

Security forces have also recently announced the liberation of some kidnapped people. On, October 22, the Talkalakh ISC announced it had intercepted kidnappers near the Lebanese border and freed a Christian family who was kidnapped earlier that day. Similarly, on October 14, a woman kidnapped in Latakia was found near the Lebanese border by ISC units. According to her video testimony, she had been placed in a van containing other kidnapped women and was being driven into Lebanon when a General Security patrol approached them, causing the driver to abandon the vehicle and flee.

The recent spate of kidnapped victims being taken towards Lebanon suggests a renewed role of Alawi criminal networks in kidnappings. However, the prominent case of a young Alawi boy taken outside his school on October 8 shows that Sunni criminal networks are also at work. According to the child’s uncle, he was eventually contacted by the men who took him and was able to recover the child in Idlib on November 1.

Other kidnappings last month are documented, but their motives and the details vague and unclear, resulting in widespread dismissal by Damascus’ supporters. On October 14, a woman who disappeared from Latakia’s Datour neighborhood several days earlier was found on the side of the road in Hama’s al-Ghab countryside, unconscious and severely beaten. Her sister lived nearby, posing the question as to whether her kidnappers knew her and her family.

Still other cases of documented kidnappings frequently result in executions a few days later. These types of kidnappings may be revenge motivated, or the victims’ families could not pay the ransoms. Such kidnappings are not sect-specific, however, and have impacted Sunnis and Christians across the country as well.

Absence of Dialogue

Kidnappings are not a new issue in Syria. During the war, regime militias and warlords ran extensive kidnapping and extortion networks across the coast that targeted both Sunni and Alawi civilians. Syrian opposition factions also participated in kidnappings and ransom demands throughout the war, especially those later affiliated with the Syrian National Army in northern Aleppo. Syria’s economic crisis combined with the massive proliferation of firearms and nascent state security forces means kidnappings will continue to plague to country for a long time.

The MoI investigation is likely accurate, about those 42 specific cases. Yet the clearly intended implication that there are almost no real kidnappings in the coast does not reflect the reality as reported by the local Internal Security Command over the past month. The MoI investigation should be seen as a testament to the scale of fake and misleading reports on kidnappings, but it is not an accurate representation of the scale of real kidnappings occurring in the coast or in Syria more broadly.

At the same time, many new Alawi rights organizations and activists have amplified every online rumor of violations against their community, rather than working to document and investigate accusations in a credible manner. The framing of kidnappings as an issue that only impacts Alawi woman, and the amplification of claims that are later disproven, has ruined the credibility of many of these organizations. The overlap between many of the online “activists” with former Assad apologists and Assad regime-linked propaganda networks has only further undermined any broader domestic support for this issue.

Syrians and the international community must de-politicize the topic of kidnappings (and insecurity more broadly). The Syrian government should stand above the media landscape that has garnered a chokehold over the country. Rather than trying to counter every fake online claim, security officials should pursue genuine, on the ground engagement with minority communities to earn their trust and thereby reduce the power online propaganda has over these populations. Taking seriously the real kidnapping cases, rather than instinctually dismissing questions about the topic as misled, would go a long way towards proving the fabricated stories wrong.

Subscribe now

Share

Spiraling Revenge

The first major incident began on September 10, when an Alawi girl from the western Hama village of Hawrat Amurin was stalked and raped by two men along the road outside her town. The perpetrators were driving a “Halfawiya” style truck - a small cargo vehicle typically used to transport livestock or agriculture product. However, the lack of government communication around the investigation and general distrust towards the government fueled social media rumors that the criminals were actually members of the security forces.

Two weeks later, on September 23, an unknown group from the nearby Alawi village of Nahr al-Bared kidnapped a soldier from his checkpoint outside the town. The kidnappers published a video online torturing the soldier, saying it was in revenge for the rape of the woman.

The next day, the family of the kidnapped man went to Nahr al-Bared and met with the Mukhtar and village elderly, demanding to know the identities of the kidnappers and for his return. At the same time, a group of Sunnis from nearby villages stormed Hawrat Amurin with guns, looting and attacking homes and killing one elderly man when he refused to give up his motorcycle. Nearby General Security and Ministry of Defense units quickly responded and set up checkpoints around the town.

At this point, the rape case from two weeks prior had spiraled into widespread inter-communal violence. In order to end the escalation, a group of religious and community leaders began holding dialogue sessions. Priests and General Security officials from the large nearby city of Suqaylabiyah took the lead. One participant described the subsequent series of meetings:

“We met with residents of Hawarat Amurin and we agreed with them on the fact that the government’s duty is to protect all its citizens and we said our condolences to the killed one’s family, may God bless his soul and may he rests in piece.

It was agreed upon to form a small council to be always directly in touch with the Ministry of Interior about any problem in the area and to prove that they are not involved themselves.

Then, another meeting happened in Nahr al-Bared, the village where the kidnapping happened, as they were afraid and nervous thinking they might be attacked as well. They were assured and we told them even if the kidnapping happened in the village, or on it’s roads or on a nearby area, it doesn’t mean that you are accused. But if you see or hear anything that is related to the incident you must report it. Because some people were making them horrified and weren’t letting them get in touch with MoI, [here implying that regime insurgents were threatening the townspeople] I got them in touch with the MoI and they took phone numbers and it was agreed that four or five people of the village would stay in touch with the MoI about any big problem.

We also told them about the sitting we had in Hawrat Amurin and how positive the results were, and they asked to join our group for all of us to be in one group to work to protect the area.”

In essence, the social and religious leaders of this area are now forming a Civil Peace Committee in close coordination with local security officials. Had such a system been in place two weeks prior, it’s likely that none of this violence would have happened. These types of communal intermediary networks are rare, but where they exist they have very positive impacts at the local level.

Lack of Security

Yet such systems cannot prevent the other types of revenge and sectarian crimes that have also plagued the region this past week. On September 27, residents of Jadrin, an Alawi village in the southern Masyaf countryside, took to the street in protest of the removal of a military checkpoint from the entrance to their town. The next day, four men were murdered nearby while returning from a construction site. On September 30, MoI officials announced the arrest of the murderers, but the crime itself never would have happened if the checkpoint had not been removed, and the fear and distrust the murders have caused cannot easily be resolved.

The next day, back near Suqaylabiyah, three brothers were kidnapped from their home and executed outside the village of Hayalin. Unlike the other crimes, this one had no sectarian dimension as it is a Sunni village. Rather, it was purely a case of old revenge. However, the ease with which the perpetrators kidnapped and murdered the men again speaks to a shocking lack of security in this part of Hama.

Lastly, late at night on October 1, gunmen drove a motorcycle from the Homs-Tartous highway up the main road into the Christian-dominated Wadi Nasara region and killed two Christian men in the village of Anaz. Wadi Nasara had, since December 8, been free of any of the instability and violence experienced in other parts of the coast, and this blatantly sectarian attack came as a shock to the community. It is unclear how the perpetrators entered the town given the presence of a security checkpoint on its outskirts.

Engage Communities, Expand Checkpoints

Despite the different motivations and contexts of this week’s crimes, all share one underlying factor: a lack of security checkpoints is enabling sectarian and inter-communal violence. These parts of western Hama and western Homs are particularly vulnerable given the dense mixing of Sunni, Alawi, and Christian villages and the bloody history of regime militia recruitment and massacres that occurred in these towns during the civil war. Of any part of Syria, it is here that the physical security apparatus should be extensive and prioritized.

The response to these killings by locals has been unanimous: expand the checkpoints. Prominent pro-Damascus media figures have echoed the same online. At the same time, local officials should be pushed to support the creation of Civil Peace Committees or Reconciliation Committees in these areas, forming locally-run institutions that can support the work of security officials while also mediating between communities and sects when tensions rise. These systems exist in various forms across the country, but they have not been institutionalized. It is time for senior officials in Damascus to prioritize the conditions in Syria’s countryside, before more preventable violence metastasizes.

Share

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

Ongoing Security Improvements

The government has continued to build on the the security improvements I noted following my trip two months ago. While in July there were still serious, institutional problems in places like Baniyas and rural Jableh, these issues had largely been resolved by my next visit in September. Activists in Baniyas reported a gradual return to commercial life in the Alawi areas of the city, as security forces have become more disciplined and cases of random harassment have decreased. In rural Jableh, those military units which had for months frightened and harassed locals have been replaced.

Relatedly, the Ministry of Interior (MoI) continues to expand its presence outside of urban centers, replacing many military checkpoints just outside of cities with MoI checkpoints. This includes the gradual introduction of the new “Road Security Directorate”, an evolution of the old Idlib Checkpoint Authority, which will theoretically eventually take over all rural road checkpoints currently manned by army units.

The MoI has also shifted in recent months from an emphasis on mass recruitment to an emphasis on training. Several new training systems have been introduced that are designed to take already-hired MoI members and improve their competency and professionalism. This includes domestic and international training programs supported by allied countries.

The Ministry of Defense has also shown a clear effort to consolidate checkpoints in rural areas under singular units, solidifying the chain of command and easing the work of local officials to deal with any violations committed by checkpoint personnel. New positions have also been introduced within local MoI offices to better facilitate communication between MoI security officials (in charge of each district) and the commanders of MoD units deployed in those districts. All of these structural changes come with sustained internal accountability (of which I was provided many examples both by officials and activists). However, the government continues to not publicly discuss the bulk of these arrests and internal disciplinary actions, harming its credibility.

Despite these ongoing improvements, fear remains rampant in many Alawi communities. A common refrain I heard across the coast was “there are no security problems here, but we see what is happening in other places on social media.” Whenever large General Security convoys depart from cities, social media lights up with rumors of impending raids and killings. Local media activists and Alawi mayors serve as crucial intermediaries in these cases, quickly communicating with security officials about the purpose of the convoys and then relaying that information to their communities in order to clam them down. However, these communication networks do not exist everywhere.

The major security problems now stem from two factors. The first is from poor-performing local security officials who are not enforcing discipline among their rank and file. It is clear, after extensive discussions with both local MoI officials and activists across many regions, that these local officials have a significant amount of influence over the behavior of their forces. Many officials have identified and implemented effective internal policies and civilian-engagement policies - now these need to be enforced across all districts.

The second factor is inter-communal conflict. This is now the dominating trigger for sectarian violence in Syria, and can be seen in this past week’s bout of killings and kidnappings in Hama. Every Alawi activist I spoke with said that there are no longer any specific areas which can be said to have continuous problems. Instead, security issues over the past several months have taken the shape of sporadic, individual incidents across the country. These are often triggered by inter-communal issues that either go unaddressed or which civil peace systems are unable to resolve before they spiral. In some places, these conflicts largely revolve around housing and property disputes, in others it is unchecked cycles of revenge.

Civil Society’s Precarious Space

The best systems for preventing disputes from spiraling into wider violence involve close coordination between security officials and locals. These can take the form of Civil Peace Committees, Reconciliation Committees, or unnamed, looser structures involving religious figures and social elites working as intermediaries between the community and officials. Where these systems exist, trust between minorities and the government is slowly being built, and disputes and violations by security forces or by locals are quickly resolved.

However, these systems are not ubiquitous, relying heavily on local security and political officials’ openness to the work of civil society organizations. Here the unclear role of the Political Affairs Directorate looms large. In some governorates, the Political Affairs Directorate is actively undermining inter-faith civil society organizations - including intimidating members and outright banning some of their work. Yet in other governorates, the office has either turned a blind eye to local civil society movements, works in a supportive capacity with them, or maintains a strained, but so far largely hands-off, relationship.

Inter-faith, and particularly Alawi-driven, CSOs seem to be the most heavily targeted, but it must be noted that even here the treatment is not homogenous. Inter-faith organizations in Tartous are severely limited in their work, while those in Homs and Hama are able to regularly organize and host activities. It seems that Damascus has not decided yet what stance it will take on CSOs more broadly, but especially those that it views as engaging in security issues.

Damascus would do well to consider the value of CSOs in supporting the work of local security officials, especially in heavily minority areas. Many proactive, well-meaning officials continue to stress the difficulty they face in engaging with and building trust in their respective communities. Civil society organizations can, and do, play a critical role as intermediaries - when they are allowed to freely operate. This issue of CSO freedom and local civil peace structures is, in my opinion, the pressing issue for the Syrian state today.

Economic Stagnation

Syria’s economy remains shattered, despite the millions of dollars of business deals signed in Damascus in recent months. Jobs are non-existent - even for highly skilled people with college degrees - and prices in some cities, especially Damascus, have skyrocketed. Many IDPs have returned back to the camps along the Turkish border, where they have access to NGO aid, and many refugees abroad have reported an unwillingness to return to Syria in its current economic state. Others are seeking ways back into Turkey after months of being unable to find work.

These issues persist across the country, but they are particularly felt in the coast. In the Alawi villages here there was never a functioning economy. These rural areas could only sustain their populations because, in most cases, more than half of all men left to serve in the regime’s military and security forces. These men have been jobless since the collapse of their army on December 8. Their towns’ and villages’ only local economy is farming, and that is suffering hugely under a years-long drought.

Some of these communities are too poor to even afford the bus tickets to Latakia or Tartous city, either to look for jobs there or to send their children to university. Water and agricultural projects, as well as skills training and basic education seminars, are crucial for all rural communities across Syria. But for the coast, particular consideration is now needed to determine how to build a real economy from scratch in an area that was never self-sustaining.

The economic crisis across the country has become a major pressure point on security. Kidnappings and robberies are integrally tied to the poor economic state, while the risk that ex-regime soldiers will turn to criminal or insurgent networks only grows the longer the remain unemployed and destitute.

President Sharaa seems to understand this. On September 17 he held a two-hour interview with myself and nine other researchers and journalists. At the end of the interview, he gave a short speech in which he emphasized repeatedly that economic development is the key to Syria’s future and the main means by which social conflicts will be resolved. Syria’s allies should take heed of this vision. Diplomatic support for a stable and united Syria is important, but those efforts will inevitably fall apart if the international community does not also actively support the revitalization of Syria’s economy.

Share Syria Revisited

Subscribe now

I visited Bahluliyah earlier this week to understand what exactly has happened in this rural farming region since December 8, and what type of relationship the locals here have with the new government.

Subscribe now

Share

Widespread Poverty

Bahluliyah subdistrict sits between Latakia city and Haffeh, straddling the northern edge of the Alawi-dominated parts of central and southern Latakia province. It is a lush farming land set on rolling hills with the looming Jabal Akrad and Jabal Turkmen mountains to the north and the long spine of the north-south coastal mountain range to the east.

Despite its initial appearance, the area has been suffering from a major drought for several years. Wells are going dry and many of the area’s key crops are dying off. The drought is so bad that water has not just become scarce for agriculture, but also for households. This year, residents ventured into the mountains in search of new springs to tap into, but this water was rife with bacteria and diseases. The Red Crescent ultimately had to organize deliveries of medicine this summer to deal with the rise in water-borne illness in the villages.

This region is truly poor. I spent the day with a family of seven in the city of Bahluliyah. All bore the physical marks of life-long malnutrition. Like much of Latakia’s Alawi villages, most of the men here served in the regime’s army. The remaining jobs were in teaching or farm work. Like the rest of Latakia, the local economy here was never built to sustain the actual population. The collapse of the regime’s army has left thousands of men without work now. While there are some jobs to be found in nearby Latakia city, working there would require paying for transportation and food and lodging in the city, making it prohibitively expensive. Part time farm work remains the only real job, but the ongoing drought has limited these opportunities even further.

The area also suffers from a lack of education. Sending children to university is a huge burden on families – not only the costs of attending school but the lack of income those children could have provided if they stayed home. Many people therefore dropped out of school in order to work menial jobs to help their family, others went directly to the military. There is now a huge skills gap in the area and a desperate need for basic education and skill training workshops.

Building Trust

This was the situation Syria’s new government inherited when it overthrew Assad on December 8. In the first days after, soldiers from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) arrived in the nearby village of Restin, followed shortly thereafter by members of the Interior Ministry’s General Security Forces. Damascus appointed a Security Official for the region, and later a District Director and Subdistrict Director to deal with administration and service issues.

According to locals, these men – especially the security official and directors, were extremely respectful and kind from onset. Many locals initially feared these unknown men, who for 15 years they had been told wanted to kill all Alawis. Yet within a month or two, says one youth Alawi man, they were completely comfortable with the local security forces. General Security members regularly engage with and reassure those ex-regime soldiers who had undergone the taswiya settlement in December, trying to keep them feeling safe so that they don’t feel forced into criminal or insurgent activity. These efforts have paid off, and while many still fear what they see happening elsewhere in the country online, they do not fear the local authorities.

This open and kind engagement by the security forces since December played a large role in encouraging the local Alawi community to engage back. One of the biggest problems leading up to March 6 was Alawi self-isolation from local authorities – either because those specific authorities were sectarian or closed off, or out of simple fear of the unknown. In Bahluliyah, the security official was able to foster an environment of respect and open dialogue that resulted in widespread engagement by the locals.

Only one security problem ever occurred. Sometime in the first three months after Assad’s fall, a soldier at the Restin base wanted to “do something”, as the family describes it, though it was such an insignificant event they don’t remember any more details. The local security official intervened, calling the military commander of Jableh, Sheikh Allah Deek, to assist. Deek came and transferred the soldier out of the region, and there have been no problems caused by security forces since.

“They Kept Their Promise”

The local government’s and security forces’ respectful conduct and the community leaders’ open engagement before March proved critical on March 6. Residents in Bahluliyah recalled hearing gunfire erupt in the countryside and continue for hours that night. Locals were terrified that they would be forced out of their homes, and so a group of respected elders called the nearby HTS and GSS leaders in Restin and asked them to protect the area. According to residents, the security officers told them not to worry and that they would be protected.

Local Alawi insurgents had attacked the security base, but here they were too weak to overrun the positions as happened across much of Latakia. Therefore, when other pro-government factions began to enter the area from the nearby highway, these local security forces were able to keep the factions out of Bahluliyah. Two Alawi men were killed by the factions on the outskirts of the villages, but the area was spared from the mass killings and looting seen elsewhere.

On March 8, police and GSS units deployed directly inside Bahluliyah, reactivating the police station for the first time since December. Locals in the town then began organizing aid baskets for some of the nearby affected villages like Mukhtariyah and Sharifa. This aid was delivered by a small local charity called Ahl al-Khair. General Security and local army units escorted these aid convoys and assisted in their deliveries for several weeks.

The local government’s protection of Bahluliyah that night has greatly increased the trust between everyone. As a result, security members now regularly spend time with the areas youth, make house visits to drink tea and check in on families, and have even provided some free water deliveries to households. When there are problems within the villages between locals, they prefer to go to the police station rather than their local mayors. The new District and Subdistrict Directors also work closely with their respective communities to try and address the economic and water crises. While their ability to make much meaningful impact remains limited, it is clear that people appreciate their genuine engagement in their daily lives.

Today, Bahluliyah remains a bright spot in local government-Alawi relations. The area’s history underscores the huge positive impacts that professional and respectful conduct by security officials, and reciprocal openness by locals, can have in reducing fears and preventing the larger security problems seen elsewhere. Still, like much of northern Latakia, Bahluliyah is devasted by poverty and drought and desperately needs basic development projects which are so far nowhere in sight.

Yet the neighborhoods’ leaders, known as mukhtars, and the new Security Official in charge of this area, Khaled Turkmani, have together worked with the residents and community leaders to maintain a general state of calm and helped return commercial and night life to the neighborhoods. When Mr. Turkmani arrived in Homs a few days after its liberation, he was immediately greeted by Basil Suleiman, the mukhtar of Abbasiyeh. Suleiman did not fear the new authorities, but says he knew the only way to help his community was to coordinate closely with them.

See a previously published interview I conducted with an Alawi woman from Abbasiyeh:

Within the first 24 hours he had already organized a mass handover of weapons from the neighborhood’s residents. When the local settlement process began, he pushed every man in Abbasiyeh to participate. He took Turkmani on a tour within days of his arrival, introducing him to the neighborhood’s people and complex inter-faith fabric.

For his part, Turkmani has insisted on working closely with all communities within his area of control, the city’s ‘Eastern Sector’. He regularly meets with all the eastern neighborhood mukhtars, maintains direct lines of contact with influential activists and religious leaders, and has worked hard to impart a high degree of professionalism and discipline among his general security members. As a result, there are no harassments at his checkpoints and the two neighborhoods’ commercial districts now stay open until nearly 1am each day, with people of all sects traveling from across the city to shop, eat, and relax.

Why then was Hala killed, and does it signify a deterioration of security in these areas?

The underlying crisis across the city can be traced back to the regime’s suppression and expulsion of much of the Sunni community from 2012 until 2017. These series of sieges and cleansing of mostly-Sunni neighborhoods were heavily assisted by Iran and Hezbollah, whose fighters, money, and weapons were key for fueling the regime’s war machine. Amid the violence, many Sunni families were pressured or directly threatened into selling their homes – others simply left everything behind while fleeing the regime’s bombardment.

As these families left Homs, men with connections to the Assad regime were able to access real-estate records in the municipal offices. According to one Alawi activist currently working to return homes to their rightful owners, these regime-affiliated men would take house deeds and forge new names on them, ‘legally’ transferring ownership to new families or landlords.

Then, starting in 2015, Iran began directly paying Shi’i families to move into empty homes or buy property from Sunni families in the Abbasiyeh neighborhood. Iran chose this neighborhood because it had a small Shi’i population already, but it soon ballooned with new immigrants. Once settled, Iran and Hezbollah began to aggressively recruit the men into their militias. The Iranian activity grew so strong that, according to Suleiman, they created their own security zone that neither the regime’s forces nor the local Alawis were allowed to enter. It was from this security zone that Hezbollah and its local affiliates ran their massive drug trade (the mansion of a major Hezbollah drug dealer in the neighborhood now serves as the General Security Headquarters).

Thus, Abbasiyeh turned from a mostly Alawi-Sunni neighborhood into a mostly Shi’i neighborhood, with significant displacement among the Sunni residents. On December 8, as Homs was liberated and Assad fell, nearly every single Shi’i family that had arrived after 2015 fled to Lebanon. In the weeks after, many displaced Sunnis returned, welcomed back by the mukhtar (himself an Alawi) and their Alawi neighbors. According to both the mukhtar and local residents, there are no problems between the two sects here, with both living mixed among each other.

However, both Alawis and Sunnis view the Shi’i population with anger and distrust. For the displaced Sunnis in particular, the Shi’i have become a prime target for housing restitution. Many displaced Sunni families moved into the now empty Shi’i homes upon their return. Others started to harass or attack Alawi and Shi’i families living in their old homes – though this problem is less common in Abbasiyeh. However, many of the Shi’i families have begun returning from Lebanon in the past several months, increasing the number of housing disputes in the neighborhood.

Hala’s murder was a direct result of one of these housing conflicts. According to the mukhtar, Hala’s family, who are Alawi, are living illegally in a house owned by a Shi’i woman who acquired the house after 2015 but since fled to Lebanon. A group of displaced Sunnis who had returned to Homs knew the house was illegally occupied, which made the family vulnerable, and had been harassing them for several weeks to try and force them out. On the night of August 13, one of the harassers threw a sound bomb at the house, the explosion killing the young girl.

More than 80 homes in Abbasiyeh have been sold by Shi’i families in the past three months out of fear of such incidents. According to Mr. Turkmani, the General Security is trying to address the housing conflict, but most of the harassment and threats happen at night and it is difficult to trace the perpetrators. Many of the kidnappings in Homs City have also been linked to housing disputes, with those trying to seize the homes kidnapping those either trying to report the case to the General Security or as a means of intimidation.

Turkmani, neighborhood mukhtars, and activists from all sects have identified housing disputes as the major cause of tension and violence in the city. These problems are not in and of themselves sectarian but often play out along sectarian lines simply by the nature of how the regime and Iran used land rights to disenfranchise Sunnis and rewards their allies. With so many Sunni neighborhoods lying in rubble, the housing pressure for returnees is immense.

The regime’s system of theft via intimidation and document forgery makes housing returns extremely complicated. Security officials and courts try to rely on documents for all housing disputes, but claims of forced land sale, lost deeds, and forged transfers delay these rulings. While Turkmani had himself previously acted as arbitrator, housing disputes in the city are now being resolved in the courts, with the General Security acting only as enforcers of eviction notices.

Homs’ housing disputes are just a microcosm of the broader crisis affecting much of Syria today. The regime’s seizure of housing and farmland dates back decades and has affected every part of Syria, from Damascus to Hasakah to Homs to Latakia. Not just a Sunni-Alawi conflict, the issue of historic land rights is now regularly mentioned by Ismailis and Christians as well, whose communities also had land stolen by Hafez al-Assad. Navigating these disputes will be a long and arduous process for local and central government authorities and inter-communal violence linked to this problem will likely continue for years.

Nevertheless, the work of men like Khaled Turkmani, the neighborhood mukhtars, and local influential religious and activist leaders has so far been largely successful in preventing wider violence. In communities where these figures have coordinated closely, most disputes have been resolved long before resorting to violence. The new government would do well to learn from these experiences and expand its cooperation with local civil society groups and community leaders in other parts of Homs and the country.

Share

Subscribe now

Among these is a June 30 investigation by Reuters which claims to address two aspects of the massacres: the killings of Alawite civilians and the pro-government armed groups responsible. The report does a good job of documenting the first issue, and falls far short in its claims on the second. The third major investigation recently published comes from the highly regarded Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), which looked both at the killings of civilians but also the coordinated insurgency that triggered the wider Sunni mobilization.

Share

The Victims

There are now three credible sources for the scale of violence during those three days in March, all of which roughly agree with each other.

SCM found 1,060 Alawite civilians were subjected to extrajudicial executions by pro-government armed forces across 61 distinct locations in Latakia, Tartous, and Hama. Among the murdered were 71 women and 61 children. The report notes that this number does not distinguish between civilians and those Alawite men who had taken up arms against the state, but that the execution of surrendered and unarmed combatants (which certainly occurred extensively) is itself a crime. The report also documented by name the deaths of 218 security personnel.

The Reuters investigation, released a few weeks after SCM’s, reports 1,479 Alawites killed by pro-government forces, relying largely on community-documented ‘martyrdom’ lists and visual evidence of the dead. The report also maps out 40 communities across Latakia, Tartous, and Hama where massacres occurred. The investigation did not attempt to document the deaths of security personnel, but referred to Sharaa’s statement that “more than 200” had been killed.

The Investigative Committee reported 1,426 mostly Alawite civilian deaths (there were at least dozens of Sunni civilians killed in the initial Alawite insurgent attack, as documented by both SCM and the Committee), among them 90 women. It also documented 238 security personnel killed in the March 6 uprising. All deaths were documented by name, as the Committee spent four months traveling between coastal communities meeting with survivors and community leaders.

A Pro-Assad Uprising

The SCM report provides an exhaustive timeline of the start of the March 6 events, beginning with a region-wide, coordinated uprising by pro-Assad and anti-Damascus Alawites that successfully overran every government position in rural Latakia and Tartous. Through the course of the evening, these insurgents captured the Naval Academy in Latakia and nearly every district capital in both governorates.

In Latakia governorate the violence was particularly pronounced, with many General Security members killed or executed after surrendering (as noted in the Investigative Committee’s conference and seen in videos at the time). In Tartous, however, most GSS units were able to negotiate their safe exit to Tartous city - although this was not the case in and around Baniyas, according to locals.

This uprising was not spontaneous, having been planned for at least weeks in advance. During my weeks in the coast from late January until mid-February I heard extensive testimony from Alawites about growing anger towards Damascus and Sunnis more broadly over a variety of economic and social issues, all underpinned by the ongoing violence against Alawites in Homs committed by government security forces. These combined factors created a fertile atmosphere for pro-Assad insurgent networks to radicalize people and impose a belief that violence was the only way forward.

In mid-February I met with a militant Alawite sheikh who explicitly threatened the government with “thousands of Alawite youth who will take up their arms the moment we call on them to do so” while at the same time stating that the “Alawite leaders” - as he described them - were running out of patience with Damascus. I know that other researchers heard similar statements from some Alawite leaders during this time, some indicating plans for a broader mobilization in early March.

SCM describes how the attacks began: “On 6 March 2025, unknown assailants opened fire on General Security personnel to prevent them from arresting wanted individuals from the village of Beit Ana in rural Latakia. This was followed by a series of organized attacks and ambushes against General Security, where armed groups, believed to be linked to the former regime – whose numbers we could not determine – attacked military and civilian sites and roads in the governorates of Latakia, Tartous, Homs, and Hama in a coordinated and simultaneous manner.”

At that time I was speaking with a friend who has family in Beit Ana. His family told him in that moment how trucks full of guns were brought into the town by ex-regime soldiers who then called on the youth to join the fight against Damascus. Other Alawite activists in Tartous later told me that many men had joined the insurgents those first hours as a result of intense propaganda campaigns claiming Damascus planned to kill all Alawites and that several foreign countries were coordinating a military intervention alongside the insurgent leaders. When this foreign intervention never came, but rather tens of thousands of armed Sunnis, most of these last minute supporters threw down their weapons and fled.

The Reuters report heavily downplays this initial uprising, the trigger for the wider Sunni and government mobilization, providing just a single anecdote about a “mercenary” turned GSS member killed in Baniyas. Beyond just the scale of the uprising, the loss of most government-run checkpoints throughout the coast ensured free movement for any armed group throughout the Alawite villages in the ensuing days. The brutal fighting that night also served as a key mobilizing factor for both Sunni civilians and government-aligned armed groups, as GSS members besieged by insurgents or under threat called on their friends and family to come to the rescue.

For example, HTS’s 400th Division (incorrectly referred to as Unit 400 in the Reuters report) lost more than 25 soldiers during the initial uprising in the Jableh countryside, likely contributing to the degree of violence the survivors would later inflict on Alawite civilians in the villages near the attacked positions.

The Perpetrators

According to SCM, “Armed formations affiliated with or loyal to the Transitional Government's Ministry of Defense, alongside foreign fighters, were involved in carrying out the violations,” which ranged from looting and harassment to extraductal killings. The investigation also highlighted the “calls for general mobilization and statements from tribes, religious leaders, and civilian figures in various parts of Syria,” which contributed to the flow of armed Sunni civilians into the coast and fueled the calls for sectarian-motivate revenge violence.

According to the Investigative Committee’s press conference, “the commission identified individuals and groups linked to certain military groups and factions from among the participating forces [pro-government and government-controlled]. The commission believes that these individuals and groups violated military orders and are suspected of committing violations against civilians.”

The Reuters report goes far further, naming explicitly a distinct set of government-controlled military units which the author claims committed each massacre in each town. The report attempts to link the overall number of killed civilians with specific units that were known or claimed to have been in those areas. For example, it claims that:

• HTS and Ministry of Interior forces were “involvement in at least 10 sites, where nearly 900 people were killed”

• The Syrian National Army factions Suleiman Shah and Hamza Division were present “in at least eight different sites where nearly 700 people were killed”

• Jaish al-Islam, Jaish al-Ahrar, and Jaish al-Izza, “were present in at least four sites where nearly 350 people were killed”

• “The Turkistan Islamic Party, or TIP, Uzbeks, Chechens, and some Arab fighters in six sites where Reuters found nearly 500 people were killed”

• Armed Sunni civilians were present in “the village of Arza and in the city of Baniyas, where a total of 300 people were killed.”

There are several core issues with this framing, which appears intended to both directly blame only the named factions as well as put most of the blame directly on HTS. First, Reuters counts the same massacres multiple times (the listed numbers add up to nearly 3,000 dead). This leads into the second, most basic problem with attribution: many different armed groups moved through every location during the course of the three-day violence.

Attributing perpetrators based purely on presence is a reckless method of investigation for the March 6 massacres because of the sheer number of forces involved in and moving around the area. Many different factions moved through the same towns within hours of each other, and many witnesses have differentiated the actions of these armed groups.

A recent Syrian Archive report explores the presence of armed groups - constituting the entire range of opposition factions and mobilized civilians - across the coast during this time. We identified 24 distinct armed opposition groups who were already deployed to or arrived to the coast after March 6, among these were elements from 12 factions of the Syrian National Army, 4 from the HTS-allied National Liberation Front, 4 legacy HTS divisions, and 4 newly formed Ministry of Defense divisions.

SCM’s report more accurately reflects this complexity than Reuters, naming more than half a dozen factions along with civilians who were present in the same areas of Baniyas and southern Jableh:

But while all of these factions, as well as tribes and civilians, were present, not all are clearly linked to executions or even to any violations at all. Furthermore, there are cases where the same faction is accused of committing violations in one area, and not in another.

Jableh

Recent debate over the role of Abu Amsha’s Sultan Suleiman Shah Division in the coastal massacres underscore this later point. One potential reason for the conflicting claims of his unit’s actions could be that the faction changed its behavior half-way through the events.

According to one Alawite activist who works extensively documenting violations in the Jableh region, Amshat fighters were directly involved in massacres in Jableh city when they first arrived to the area (the SCM report covers in detail the arrival of pro-government forces to Jableh). But by the end of March 7 the unit was facing heavy online criticism and accusations of widespread violations. Therefore, as the faction withdrew its fighters from Jabelh through the Ain Sharqiyah region on March 8, the unit’s officers ensured everyone acted professionally and respectfully. The aforementioned activist met with the Amshat brigade commander when he arrived in the man’s village, confirming that the group committed no violations in the area.

Bahlouliyah

Bahlouliyah is another case involving multiple factions present in the same town, with victims clearly differentiating the actions of each faction. In the Bahlouliyah region, Faylaq al-Sham was one of the first armed groups to arrive. According to one local I spoke with, the Faylaq commanders were respectful and professional as they searched the town. When they left, the commander gave everyone his phone number and said to call him if there were any issues. Later that day, another faction arrived - the witness does not know their name - and began looting homes and killing civilians. The man called the Faylaq commander, who returned and expelled the faction from the town. Faylaq al-Sham has remained in the Bahlouliyah and Haffeh regions since March where it has a widely positive reputation.

Baniyas

Baniyas suffered greatly under a deluge of pro-government factions and armed Sunni civilians. Here witness testimony both demonstrates the complexity of direct attribution and also the distinction between types of violations different factions committed.

Two months ago I published a detailed report on my interview with two survivors of the Baniyas massacre. It is worth reading in full to fully understand this dynamic, but in short: there were five distinct armed groups who entered the Qusour Neighborhood across a 24 hour period, including foreign fighters. Some of these groups are only known to have looted and abused civilians, others are accused of carrying out most executions. Local civilians, bedouins, and Roma also stormed the neighborhood, though again survivors make a clear distinction between those that only looted (Roma) and those who engaged in extrajudicial killings (locals from the countryside).

Qadmus

After the violence in Baniyas ended, multiple armed groups moved up the Masyaf highway to liberate the Ismaili city of Qadmus, which had been besieged by hundreds of local Alawites since March 6. These convoys included General Security members, HTS units, and one faction known to have been involved in killings in Baniyas. According to Ismaili officials who coordinated closely with government officials organizing this convoy, the criminal faction had left first, spurring the quick deployment of the GSS and HTS units to try and ensure the faction did not commit new massacres. In one village, Hataniyah, this faction gathered 12 men in the local Alawite shrine and executed them. It then arrived on the outskirts of Qadmus and began burning some Ismaili homes before the government forces arrived and stopped the attacks. General Security units spent the next two months trying to prevent and resolve continued violations by this military faction until it was eventually withdrawn.

Sanobar

Sanobar perhaps best exemplifies the difficulty of attribution based on unit presence. As documented in the Syrian Archive report, massive convoys consisting of multiple factions were frequently stopped on the coastal highway outside Sanobar between March 7 and March 8. At least three SNA factions are clearly identified as being here during this time: Hamza Division, Ahrar Sharqiyah, and the Sultan Murad Division. HTS’s 400th Division was already deployed in this area before March 6 as well. Which of these units was responsible for which violation is difficult to know.

Clarity Needed

The Reuters report goes one step further, directly accusing senior Ministry of Defense officials of ordering these massacres, something explicitly denied by the Investigative Committee. Reuters cites alleged Telegram messages between military commanders in the coast and the MoD spokesman, Hassan Abdel-Ghani, including one in which he responds to information about crimes being committed against Alawite civilians with “May God reward you” and others which allegedly show him directly coordinating the movement of units in the coast.

These messages are the only evidence that senior MoD officials condoned and/or directed the attacks against Alawite civilians. Reuters provides no evidence of their veracity, but rather heavily indicates that these alleged messages were shown to the author by Abu Amsha, who himself has embarked on an extensive public relations campaign after March 6, and who in private is not shy about his hatred of Syria’s new leadership. It is not clear if Reuters understands the political dynamics between Abu Amsha and Damascus, or if it did its due diligence to verify whether an MoD spokesman was truly directing military operations via Telegram.

Yet regardless of what extent senior leaders had control over the situation in the coast on March 6, they are ultimately required to hold those perpetrators accountable. The government has also failed to rebuild the trust of most Alawites in the wake of the massacre, with senior officials remaining largely silent about the devasting events and their impacts on civilians.

The independent Investigative Committee claims to have submitted to the authorities the names of nearly 265 Alawite men responsible for attacks against security forces, and another nearly 300 members of government-aligned forces responsible for violations against Alawites. Yet without a public record of the investigation, the Committee’s findings will do little to remove the obscurity of the events of that week. Without this, politically-motivated narratives on both sides will continue to hold sway, crowding out more objective work like that of SCM and the Syrian Network for Human Rights, and fueling distrust in the new security forces and central government.

The lack of transparent accountability for the March 6 massacres has only exacerbated reactions to the newest round of violence in Suwayda. Anti-Damascus activists now point to the extrajudicial killings of Druze civilians - committed both by security forces and by local armed Sunnis - as proof that Damascus is embarking on a systematic campaign against minorities. To prove otherwise, Syria’s new leadership must once again hold the perpetrators of these newest crimes accountable - in transparent and public process - and enact genuine reforms within the Ministry of Defense, which is clearly bereft of discipline and professionalism in many units.

The necessary next steps for Damascus are simple: arrest the perpetrators named in the Committee’s coastal report, make the report public, ]be fully transparent in all accountability measures against security forces responsible for violations during and after March 6, and stop deploying MoD units to deal with internal security issues until the new army is truly professional.

Share

Substantive Security Reforms

There have been some genuine and good reforms within the new government’s internal security (Ministry of Interior) and military (Ministry of Defense) that have begun to pay off these past two to three months. New accountability mechanisms have been introduced and are actively working, engaging both security officials and, crucially, local civil society networks.

The MoI also completed an extensive internal review around February or March after which it dismissed, promoted, and moved officers based on their performance. This seems to have significantly improved issues of security force violations in some areas, especially Homs City. A key part of recent MoI reforms has been moving and promoting security officials with good track records to more sensitive areas or more powerful positions. These changes have also seen the promotion of some non-Sunni officials (though seemingly men with historic links to Idlib).

MoD integration of factions has continued, with clear results on the ground. Checkpoints now appear more unified, operating under one coherent unit rather than a collection of small disparate groups. MoD internal accountability has likewise accelerated over the past two months.

Despite these changes, the overall lack of transparency from local officials continues to plague security-civilian trust building. While no one I met with accuses the security forces of being behind systemic violations anymore (compared to what was happening in Homs during the first two months after liberation, for example), there is little faith that these new accountability mechanisms are genuine. Among Alawites in particular, the common narrative is that detained criminals - whether Sunni civilians or security members - are quickly released after arrest. The government’s lack of transparency on judicial proceedings and punishments for these criminals fuels rumored sightings of detained men just days after their arrest.

Local Officials and Civil Society

There are likewise continued improvements in some regional governance structures. Improved conditions follow two factors: competent and proactive local officials, and organized and cooperative civil society. The relationships between these two sides takes time to develop, but where local officials and civil society have been open to building trust, real improvements can be seen.

However, there are still regions where either local officials are far too controlling and thus continually sidelining important civil society networks, and other areas where civil society networks remain too weak and afraid to engage with officials who might otherwise be open to them. In many of these cases, local administrative and security officials engage directly with mukhtars and sheikhs at the expense of civilian networks.

The Homs Dichotomy

The above two topics have both had significant impacts in Homs City in particular. There is a strange dichotomy to Homs where the social media coverage of the city has created an image of chaos and violence, while life on the ground seems to have ‘normalized’ significantly in recent months. Most importantly, nightlife has returned to many neighborhoods - including Alawite and Shia neighborhoods - with commercial streets remaining packed with shoppers and families well into the night.

The General Security’s defense of Alawite neighborhoods on March 6 was a turning point for the city. Locals and Alawite leaders I met with cited that moment has being crucial for starting to build trust with local officials. The type of security force-driven violations the city endured in December and January have also ended, in large part due to the aforementioned reorganization of officials and new accountability mechanisms, which has further strengthened trust. Local security officials and senior political officials now work closely with religious figures from all sects, and neighborhood mukhtars play a key role as intermediaries.

However, there are ongoing sectarian issues now driven by Sunnis who refuse to use the security and legal systems to address past violations by specific Alawites, and from Sunni extremists. Many crimes seem to be linked to some specific personal issue (often along sectarian lines given the nature of the war), but in neighborhoods with small Alawite minorities, some Sunni extremists continue to use harassment, kidnapping, and violence to seize Alawite homes. The local government’s struggle to contain these problems is emblematic of the government’s broader inability to contain the populist Sunni street after March 6.

The Threat of a New Insurgency

The debate around the “remnants” and threat they pose after March 6 is extremely muddled. It is difficult to get a clear understanding of just how dangerous insurgents are today, and to what extent they enjoy the level of popular support they had in the weeks leading up to March 6. Both security officials and Alawite activists have presented conflicting narratives of the conditions in the coast; generally, however, it seems that popular support is greatly diminished in Tartous governorate and still remains largely non-existent in Homs and Hama.

Latakia remains a significant question mark. However, it is important to highlight that even in just the past two months there has been major improvements in security positions across the coast: units have been consolidated smoothing the local command chain, strategic points have been hardened, and security officials have engaged local communities extensively. If there is another attempt at a coordinated, widespread uprising, it is unlikely to achieve anywhere near the kind of initial military gains that it saw on March 6, when insurgents were able to kill or expel most General Security positions across the coast.

One of the most important factors for the strength of any future insurgency is the status of those Alawite soldiers who went through taswiya, after December 8. By far the most common complaint I have heard from Alawites across Syria since May has been the lack of movement on this issue: ex-soldiers stuck with temporary IDs that clearly identify them as having been soldiers while the new government continues delaying the hand out of new civilian IDs. Many of these men are too terrified to leave their homes now, convinced they will be killed or detained at checkpoints - or at the very least severely harassed. This has kept them from rejoining the workforce while also making them wholly reliant on their wives and parents for bringing them anything from the outside world. Some Alawite activists and leaders have expressed concerns that these men, bereft of any opportunities, may take up arms and turn to criminality or the insurgents.

IDP Returns

It goes without saying that much of Homs City, northern Hama, southern Idlib, and northern Latakia remain in ruins. Every single home has been destroyed starting from the Sunni villages just north of Suqaylabiyah through the entire Jabal Zawiyah region of Idlib and all 40 villages in Latakia’s Jabal Akrad. Reconstruction is done on an individual basis relying on personal funds or charities. In Jabal Akrad, small numbers of displaced Sunnis and Christians have begun to return and rebuild, but the region has no working water lines, and its remote villages and treacherous roads make critical service provision significantly more challenging than in southern Idlib.

Mines and unexploded ordinance is likewise a continual life and death issue. In the village of Hamamiyat in northern Hama a few men have returned to try and reestablish their farms. They use an excavator to search for mines and rockets, just meters away from their flattened homes in which the regime has placed additional mines and tripwires. There is no support for their work, as the government’s singular de-mining vehicle battalion is overstretched in operations across the country.

Recording the Revolution

On a lighter note, the fall of Assad and the end of the war has made it far easier to meet activists and revolutionaries from every community across the country and record their stories. Travel to any town and ask around and you will find FSA commanders and protest organizers who will happily recount the early years of the revolution. As a personal project I have been recording these histories - both via interviews and reviewing old videos and Facebook posts - for the past two years. Keep an eye out for some more of these local histories published here and elsewhere in the coming weeks.

Subscribe now

Share

If you enjoy my coverage of these topics, consider becoming a paid subscriber. All of my fieldwork is self-funded, so any support from my readers goes a long way to continuing this research.

Tartous’ Baniyas suffered what is likely the most brutal and indiscriminate massacre of the March 6 events. The massacre targeted Alawite families, largely in the Qusour Neighborhood, triggered by a massive coordinated insurgent uprising by pro-Assad Alawites across Tartous, Latakia, and a few villages in Hama’s Masyaf. Two activists from Baniyas, one an Alawite the other a Christian, witnessed the uprising and massacre in their own way, each with their own narratives of what happened and what it means. These perspectives are as different as they are similar, both equally important for both the historical record and to understand the impact the events have had on Baniyas’s diverse community.

The following narratives begin with the initial pro-Assad uprising, then recount the various pro-government factions that arrived in Baniyas over the following 24 hours. Despite both men’s distinct opinions and framing of the uprising and massacre, both ultimately hold the new authorities in Damascus responsible for the violence.

This is not an investigative report of what happened, rather it is a record of how each man remembers those events, largely preserved in their own words. Both men have been anti-Assad activists since before 2011. Only their first initials are used in order to protect their security and privacy. “J”, the Alawite, was one of the first protest organizers in Baniyas and among the first in the city to be detained and tortured by the regime for his activism. He lost more than a dozen Sunni friends in the Bayda massacre, and his insistence on denouncing what happened resulted in his Alawite neighbors driving his family out of their home. “S”, the Christian activist, works closely with both Sunni and Alawite communities in the city. He was driven for 15 years by an unending optimism for the future of his city. I met both men in February, and each saw hope and possibilities for Syria’s future despite the ongoing challenges. I met them again after March 6. What follows are their memories.

Share

The Uprising

S spoke at length about the insurgent attack, something that J and most other Alawites I spoke with largely ignored, instead focusing on the subsequent attacks on Alawite civilians. S, who owns a small café on the edge of Qusour neighborhood, remembers that evening:

“The day before the massacre, around 7pm, I was in front of my café and I saw an Alawite man who I knew was an important local man in the regime. He was packing his things and family into his car and said to me, ‘S, what are you doing here? Close your shop and leave, everything will be settled soon.’ The same time my neighbor warned me to leave, around 7pm or 8pm, I noticed many Sunnis gathering in the main square with rifles, so it seems they had also been aware that something was going to happen but maybe they were caught off guard by how large the attack was. [An HTS member likewise told me that they had intelligence on the attack, but not the scale]. The General Security force inside the city was so small then that locals were motivated to take up arms to support them. The General Security hadn’t recruited any locals yet so this desire to join was very high.”

This specific experience – seeing local Alawites leaving the city to return to their villages – was shared widely by Sunnis and Christians I met in Latakia city as well. All focused on this point to emphasis how many Alawite civilians knew about the attack “but said or did nothing.” It should be noted that Baniyas appears to be the only part of Tartous Governorate where this occurred. Regardless, it has become a core piece of the divergent narratives of March 6; for Sunnis in particular it represents a major breach of trust between the two communities post-December 8 and has resulted in further downplaying the murder of Alawite civilians. S continues:

“Between 7pm and midnight is when the insurgents began their attack. I know the insurgents attacked because you could hear and see the bodies of General Security being brought to the hospital. I think 150 bodies of security forces were brought to the hospital in total. [from the city and countryside] Many Alawites here still deny that there was an insurgency, but then why was I warned that evening and how do you explain the killed security forces? After a few hours of the attack and taking over some neighborhoods, most of the insurgents fled. 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.”

The Factions Arrive

S recalls “non-stop heavy gunfire” throughout the night and into the early morning. It was during this time that the insurgents were actively fighting with local Sunnis and security forces, both in the city and the countryside. Outside factions would not arrive until the morning of March 7, according to both S and J, and it was these first hours when many of the Alawite civilians were killed.

J: “Thursday night [March 6] we were home when a huge amount of shooting began. We didn’t find it suspicious at first because there’s always random gunfire. Soon we heard that some attacks had happened outside the city, but nothing had happened inside and not in our neighborhood. Then we heard the call to jihad from the mosques. Next came the army. There was no shooting in the neighborhood when they arrived, so we invited them into our homes. The instant we opened the door they asked us, ‘are you Alawite or Sunni’ and shot anyone who said ‘Alawite’. My niece said she was an Alawite, I said I was a Sunni though. It is the only reason I’m alive today.”

S: “When the factions and army began to arrive it was so many, like one armed man for every citizen of Baniyas. The locals used this to take revenge. I saw some locals go to one house that belonged to a well-known member of the National Defense Forces – he had fled that evening knowing the attack was coming – and they burned his house down.”

J: “When the calls for jihad grew even louder, local Sunnis joined the ranks. I wasn’t scared at first because I am a known opposition activist since before 2011. I thought this would protect me. As the killings sped up we couldn’t run anymore. The killings went for hours and hours with no one raising a weapon against them.”

J: “Five different factions entered from 10am to 4am the next day [March 8].

The first factions arrived around 10am, [March 7] coming from the Hama region. They had Hamawi accents and wore long skirts. They were the worst and most violent and did most of the killings. They also stole gold, phones, cars, anything really. After that my brother and I began to smuggle some people out of the neighborhood.

Then the foreigners arrived. They had long beards and shaved mustaches. I opened the door and they immediately demanded to know if I’m Alawite or Sunni. I said the shahadah, but he told me “no you’re lying” but he spoke in fusha, not shami Arabic, so I started to argue with him. I asked him a question about the Quran that required a native understanding of Arabic, so he couldn’t answer me and just hit me and they searched my home. When they couldn’t find anything to steal, because the first group already stole everything, they began to harass me again. At this point my brother intervened saying I am a known opposition activist and soon after that they left.

By sunset, Baniyas locals had entered the neighborhood and were looting and even engaging in some of the murder.

Around 8 to 9pm, men with Shami accents arrived. At this point we were convinced this was the end of us. They were shouting sectarian slurs at us, shortly after that some local Baniyas Sunnis with facemasks entered my house as well, probably to steal, but I knew they were local from their accent so I confronted them and said you know who I am. He took off his facemask at that point and told the Shami fighters that he did know me, that I was with the opposition, and to leave me alone.

Next another group of foreigners came, I think they were Uighurs or Uzbeks. They were Asian, all very short and covered in machetes and daggers. They were calm, just demanding gold but not killing anyone. By this point I had the dog of my murdered friend in my house. When they came inside the dog started barking, and one of the foreigners asked ‘man or woman?’ like that, ‘man or woman’ not ‘male or female’. When I said ‘man’ he just patted the dog’s head and left to check my brother’s house for things to steal. He had already inspected my house but everything had been looted of course. He saw my library with my philosophy books and books on different religions, and when he left he said ‘no matter your religion, all Syrians are one.’ It was bizarre.

The last group to arrive had north African or Deiri accents. When I saw them enter the neighborhood I realized this was really the end. I tried to hide with my brother, but he couldn’t climb onto the roof quick enough and they caught him and severely beat him. They threatened to kill the dog too but just left after just a few minutes.”

Rural vs Urban Sunni Involvement

One of the oft-discussed elements of the massacre was the role of local Sunnis – both in saving Alawites and participating in the killing and looting. Both J and S talked about this, highlighting the difference between city Sunnis who tried to save people and rural Sunnis who used the chaos to take indiscriminate revenge for past regime massacres. S begins by explaining how the demographic layout of the city impacted the events:

“Baniyas is basically split in two, one half is Sunni and Christian and its entrance leads to the Sunni villages, the other half is Alawite and its entrance leads to Alawite villages. I live in a Sunni-Christian neighborhood, and it seemed the factions were told or knew to avoid our area and all the other Sunni neighborhoods, but because my apartment is right on the border with Qusour we had some armed men enter it. But our Sunni neighbors helped us a lot. At one point a faction vehicle entered my street and tried to steal my car, but some of my Sunni neighbors left their house and stopped them. Another time 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 Alawite families escape.”

J gave similar testimony, underscoring the close-knit nature of the city’s population:

“It must be said that some local Sunnis protected us. Even Anas Ayrout eventually used his men to save some people…but I think this was just to save face. I heard he had a truck he used to evacuate some Alawites to the cement factory housing outside the city. I won’t debate his motives – I think he waited until someone more senior ordered him to do something – but I will admit that he saved another 5-6% of Alawites who would have been killed otherwise. But the biggest role was Sunnis from the city itself, they are the ones who saved Alawites. We have a lot of social and economic relationships built over many years, so they acted quickly to hide who they could.”

I asked S about the role of Anas Ayrout. Ayrout, a native of Baniyas, was a 2011 protest organizing in Baniyas later linked to Faylaq al-Sham. He became famous in 2013 for his speeches calling for the killing of Alawite civilians in revenge for the regime’s targeting of Sunni civilians. After December 8, he was briefly made the governor of Tartous before being replaced and returning to Baniyas where he opened a small dispute resolution center. A close friend of S was with Ayrout that night and explained in more detail what happened:

S: “It’s true Anas tried to intervene eventually. My friend was with Anas Ayrout that night. He told me about what happened when Anas finally left his office to try and end things and evacuate some Alawites. On Friday, [March 7] when the killings started, every Sunni to some extent was happy. As the killings kept going a local Sunni Sheikh came to Anas’ office and said to him ‘isn’t 1000 dead Alawites enough to calm the anger in your heart?’ Anas told him no, and to get out. But eventually the killings became so much that he must have realized it had gone too far and would have serious political and global impacts, and that it could actually impact Sunnis. This is when he began to act and he started bringing Alawites to the cement plant housing. At one point, Anas told some faction members to leave an area and they pointed their guns at him and said ‘you have no power over us.’

In general, I don’t believe there was a green light or a red light from the government for what these factions did – in truth they had no control over them.”

While some Sunnis from the city tried to save Alawites, it was Sunnis from the Baniyas countryside who committed many of the murders and much of the looting.

S: “After the factions did their first combing of the Alawite neighborhoods the rural Sunnis entered and the killings began. Even before the massacre there were armed groups of IDPs returning to Bayda from the north and calling for revenge against Baniyas Alawites. [Nearly 200 men, women and children were executed in Bayda in 2013 in a massacre that heavily involved local Alawites]. Everyone in this country is filled with hate, and what happened was this hate erupting randomly in all directions.”

J: “Most of the local Sunnis who engaged in the murders were from the countryside, from the areas the regime massacred in 2012 and 2013. The factions, they were just passing by to other areas, they caused momentary damage. It was the rural Sunnis who kept returning and killing. The nawar (Roma) and Bedouins had a lot of weapons they scavenged from when the regime fell, which they sold to other Sunnis for very cheap. So these rural areas were flooded with guns. Saturday morning [March 8] these Roma and Bedu came to the city with their faces smeared with coal. The Bedouin participated in the killings but the Roma just did looting.”

J: “Rural Sunnis from the countryside and the General Security members all took part in the killings and looting. The rural Sunnis I would guess were responsible for around 40% of the murders, but of course all of them had facemasks or their faces painted in black to hide their identity. After that last faction arrived the General Security men began to calm things down and stop the looting and fighting. But still, for the next two days the neighborhood was deserted, and locals and General Security members continued to loot whatever they wanted.”

J: “We left our neighborhood with the killing. When we returned we could only count the living. The bodies stayed on the streets for two days until others came to help. We stored them in a café and on Sunday morning [March 9] we established a mass grave for all 241 people. We wrote the names of those we recognized on gravestones, but many were unrecognizable. Many bodies were thrown into the sea, ten days later we still found some decaying corpses washing up on shore. Others were brought to the hospital. I know Rami [of SOHR] and I saw he quickly wrote that more than 1000 civilians were killed in Tartous, but this is wrong, and I told him this is wrong, that in Tartous governorate it was about 600 to 700 civilians killed.”

The Aftermath

Neither S or J believe that Damascus ordered the March 6 massacre, but both men hold the new authorities ultimately responsible for the violence. They both see the Alawite uprising and Sunni attacks as a result of the government’s lack of action addressing the hate between both sides.

J: “I’ve never seen this kind of primitive savagery. All of my friends and loved ones are dead now. It feels like there has been some sort of high-up political decision to allow Sunnis to take revenge on us.”

S: “There has been no government response since March 6 in Baniyas. Officials here pretend like nothing happened. They even seem to antagonize the Alawites now. There was a memorial for the Ras al-Naba massacres a few weeks ago and the local officials ordered all of the Qusour neighborhood shops to close “in mourning” but all the Sunni shops remained open.”

The local government here is frozen, it barely exists. We have a regional director only, no other officials or administrators, there’s no money or salaries for government employees in the city. Where are the directorates? Where is the court, the services? When life is activated fear decreases, but today so many people are scared to leave their homes and go to work. At least under the regime the state pretended to cover up their massacres and crimes, like ordering teachers not to cuss at Sunnis and pretending to oppose sectarian language. Now the government is too weak and broken to do anything. A real strong government would have tried to address the hate building up since December 8, instead of letting it fester.

J: “We want a high level probe that is as honest as possible – If you truly want to be the rulers of this country then you must address what really happened on March 6. This wasn’t an insurgency it was a purposeful attack to instill fear in Alawites. If we really are citizens of this country then you must let us join this government and army and police or there will be more massacres, and in that case you cannot blame us for resorting to the devil himself.

There is a general opinion against the insurgents now among the Alawites, the population has really taken a step away from them and they have lost most popular support.

The massacres have made us very weightless. We have no political representatives, no economic and political agency. The Alawite sheikhs are idiots with no popular base, and we have no political, moral, or legal guarantees as real citizens in this state.

At the same time the government covers up for these massacres. So now Alawites in secret talk about how we can never live with Sunnis, this is where the language of foreign intervention comes from. The constant possibility of being branded as infidels and for bloodshed makes you think you can lose your life at any moment. Some killed in Qusour were long time political detainees against Assad. Now we all fake nice at the checkpoints because we are terrified of all armed men.”

S: “I am Christian, so everyone trusts me and sees me as a friend. This means they tell me things they don’t tell anyone else, the horrible things they think about each other. I have had Alawites show me videos from Bayda and Ras al-Naba that no one has seen before, horrific videos of the murders they committed, and I have had Sunnis show me videos of the murders and crimes they did here on March 7.

Even my son experiences this at school. His Alawite friends say to him “the Sunni teacher is a murderer” while his Sunni friends say “the Alawite students are murderers”. My son asks me “Dad, they both trust me enough to tell me this but who do I choose to play with?” He is squeezed in the middle, we all are. Now Christians are wrapped in rumors that we will be next, like what happened in Jaramana and Suwayda.

You remember what I told you in February? That no matter what, Syria is my country, I will send my children away for a better life but I will never leave? After March 6 I don’t care anymore. I am doing everything I can to leave this country. You can see I only bought a few tables and chairs for my café because why should I invest anymore money to replace everything now? I was always an optimist, but now I am worse than a pessimist. What happened in March broke Baniyas, now it is a dead city.”

Share

Subscribe now

Share

All the details provided by Syria 24 should be caveated as reportedly coming from a “source” within the Ministry of Interior: “A private source in the Syrian Ministry of Interior revealed to Syria 24 that the ministry has begun working on adopting a new organizational structure aimed at reorganizing and modernizing the security and police apparatus to meet field and administrative challenges.” However, I heard some of the claims in this report myself while meeting local officials earlier this month.

The report explains that five security regions will be established in order to “serve organizational purposes aimed at facilitating the management of security operations on the ground”, the unification of Ministry of Interior policing units and bringing them under both the Interior and Defense Ministries, and the creation of several new departments aimed at addressing insurgent activity.

First, the establishment of five security regions should not be seen as a ‘decentralizing’ approach to security. Under the Assad regime, military and security structures were likewise divided under the exact same five regions:

• Northern (Aleppo and Idlib)

• Coast (Tartous and Latakia)

• Eastern (Raqqa, Deir Ez Zor and Hasakah)

• Central (Hama and Homs)

• Southern (Damascus and Reef Damascus, Dara’a, and Suwayda)

Each of these regions had a military commander as well as region and sub-regional Security and Military Committees whose directors, theoretically, oversaw all military, police, intelligence, and auxiliary units within that region. This approach was designed, on paper at least, to smooth command and control over the hundreds of different units operating in close proximity of each other.

Interior vs Defense

Bringing back these security regions could likewise enhance the chain of command for the various new security forces operating across Syria. As it currently stands, security in Syria is conducted on two tracks: 1) the Ministry of Interior’s Police and General Security units which report directly to Regional Directors and security officials at the regional and governorate level, 2) military factions, theoretically under the command of the Ministry of Defense, which include core HTS units, close HTS allies, Turkish-backed SNA units, and newly formed MoD divisions. These military units have a much more complex chain of command and varied relationship with the new Ministry of Defense. Making matters worse, one small geographic area might have ten checkpoints each manned by a few dozen men from multiple units. These combined forces theoretically report to a regional military official - if there is one.

However, I have heard consistent reports from the ground that, in reality, the Regional Directors and security officials (both under the Ministry of Interior) are regularly left to reign in misbehaving military units themselves. Of course, being from a different ministry entirely and representing what is essentially just well-armed police units, they have little to no authority, legal or otherwise, over these factions. This dynamic has been a major factor for the slow speed of progress in ending violations in Alawite regions of the coast.

It is important to understand that the Ministry of Interior has largely built its administrative structure around geography. Regional Directors coordinate with local police stations and serve as the intermediaries between civilians and civil government and the local security forces. They are the nodes between the administrative, security, and civil state at the local level. This ministry, while suffering from the same manpower and resource shortages as everyone, is robust and clearly has a more mature bureaucratic structure than the Ministry of Defense. Most of the regional directors have some form of history in Idlib, whether within HTS, the Salvation Government, or the SSG’s Police Academy, and there is therefore a depth of experience, professionalism, and buy-in here that is absent in much of the Ministry of Defense.

The MoD, on the other hand, is now coordinating both traditional army units and operations while also managing an ever-changing landscape of checkpoints across the country. The checkpoints appear to be the main source of friction between MoI and MoD units, as these essentially act as independent, semi-permanent security apparatuses inside the geographic areas of responsibility for MoI Regional Directors.

This proposed plan by the Ministry of Interior may be an attempt at solving this issue. Adding a new layer of MoI officials directly below Damascus enhances the authority of MoI units everywhere. Combining Police and General Security will streamline internal MoI administrative structures and boost both undermanned agencies. Meanwhile, the proposal to make these units a “joint entity between the Ministries of Interior and Defense” that would still “remain under the full oversight of the Ministry of Interior” may mean that Regional Directors and General Security officials will now have legal authority over military factions manning checkpoints in their areas. The proposal to merge the Military Police (formed in early March but seemingly quite small) within this structure would further increase MoI authority over local MoD units.

A New Counter-Insurgent Approach?

The report goes on to provide details of new units that will be formed specifically to target ex-regime insurgents, largely in coastal areas. This conflict is one of, if not the most, sensitive in Syria, with March 6’s coordinated insurgent attack against government forces and the subsequent massacres of Alawites as a prime example of what can happen when it is poorly managed. Currently, counter-insurgent activity is being conducted by both MoD and MoI units. The new proposal appears to be an attempt to do away with this, centralizing operations under two specific departments: “new departments were established, including the Department for the Pursuit of Outlaws… The Ministry of Interior cooperated with the Ministry of Defense to pursue remnants of the former regime and undisciplined groups. The Rapid Intervention Forces Department was also created…tasked with carrying out special operations and responding immediately to incidents.” It remains to be seen how this would work in practice and where the ministries will find the manpower and resources to staff enough of these new units to cover all areas.

Addressing the Manpower Issue

This issue of human resources has plagued every ministry in the new government since December 8. One obvious solution for the security sector has been the recruitment of defected officers, vetted ex-regime members, and locals. The report claims the first of these is now underway, “the ministry has also begun communicating with a number of officers and personnel who defected in the past to reinstate them in their respective roles within the police, security, traffic, and other sectors, in an effort to leverage their expertise and fill the human resource gap.”

Evidence of this specific plan first emerged in early April, when the MoD announced that it had begun interviewing defected officers and NCOs for new positions. Since then, there have been several public announcements of senior defected officers being reinstated to sensitive positions, particularly in the Air and Air Defense Forces where their technical knowledge is highly valuable. However, it appears that some have begun to be hired into senior police positions this month as well, with a defected brigadier general appointed to the Damascus Police Command on May 12, for example.

Where there has been little to no visible progress is in the recruitment of non-Sunni locals into local police and General Security forces. To be sure, there are several regions where minorities serve in armed volunteer roles - particularly in Ismaili communities although also in some Christian and Alawite areas. Yet despite months of discussions around the topic, none of these volunteer formations have been formally integrated into the police command yet. Local officials claim the delay is due to a lack of salaries and available trainers, but some locals have begun to question whether they will ever be allowed in.

While the security reforms detailed in the Syria 24 report do not represent any form of “security federalism”, this centralization of authority under the MoI does not have to preclude a localized security approach. By this point, Regional Directors and security officials have built good lines of communication with the communities they oversee. It should not be difficult for them to identify trusted local interlocutors who can help build local police forces that reflect the sects and cultures of these areas while still operating under the authority of Damascus and the Ministry of Interior. This is not about creating new independent armed groups, but rather easing the critical manpower issue by expanding local recruitment in a way that also enhances trust building and strengthens security and intelligence gathering networks in sensitive areas.

The proposed reforms, if followed, may resolve many of the structural problems impacting the security sector across the country. But there are a few additional steps that should be added. Such a comprehensive approach to security will have huge positive impacts on civil peace while also taking a major first step towards tying minority regions to Damascus, ensuring that all Syrians feel they are a part of Syria’s future.

Subscribe now

Share