Surging Violence in Homs

Interview with local activists discussing the roots of the city's recent spate of killings

Homs City remains the most complex part of Syria. The city and its surrounding countryside contain communities from nearly every one of Syria’s various ethnic and religious sects, which the Assad regime quickly exploited when the revolution broke out in 2011. Regime officials mobilized Alawi youth across the region to assist in its crackdown against anti-regime communities. Sunni communities in the city and its countryside endured numerous massacres and ethnic cleansings over the course of the war.

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

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

A house in Karm al-Louz neighborhood still bears the graffiti of regime forces. The eastern edge of Karm al-Louz, which sits between Akrama and Karm Zeitoun, remains largely empty of its residents ever since the regime’s military campaign in 2012.