Baniyas Massacre Through the Eyes of Survivors

An Alawite and a Christian activist recount March 6 and its impact on their city.

“Five times that night I had a gun to my head.” This is the first thing “J” says when asked what happened on March 6. “My niece and her husband were killed in front of me,” he says it flatly. “My friend was executed in front of his dog, we couldn’t pull him off the body for hours. Every day since that night the dog returns to the spot my friend was killed, even though we cleaned the blood away long ago.”

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.

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.”