“We Wished for Night to Never Fall”: Forgotten Massacre in Syria’s Coast
It was only a few months into Syria’s revolution when Muhammad Qadour received a call from his son. Yahya was serving in Syria’s elite 4th Division at the time, far from his quiet riverside hometown. He was panicked. “They are indoctrinating us to kill civilians,” Muhammad remembers his son saying, “He was asking me what he should do, and I told him ‘you will never kill an innocent person’.” In June 2011, Yahya managed to defect from the division and return to his father in the small town of Mitras, tucked in the green hills along the Homs-Tartous border. He was one of the first defectors from the 4th Division, leaving his unit the same month the Free Syrian Army was being formed by senior defected officers further north, along the Turkish border. Slowly, more defectors made their way back to Mitras, returning to a town which had managed a tense existence in the pro-Assad heartland. But no revolutionary town in the Syria’s coast could escape the regime’s wrath for long.
Mitras is one of only three Sunni towns in the Safita region of Tartous, a governorate dominated by the largely pro-Assad Alawite community. To its east lies the mostly Christian Wadi Nasara region of Homs, an area to which many of Mitras’ young men would soon flee, seeking safety from the regime and the Alawite villages surrounding them in all other directions. The town had held one of the earliest protests in Syria, just a few weeks after the first demonstrations in Dara’a, and continued to promote and host pro-revolution activities during the ensuing months. “There was some pressure from the mukhabarat,” recalls Muhammad, who has served as the town’s mukhtar since before the war, “and many threats, but we continued to celebrate the revolution.” Mitras’ 5,000 inhabitants are almost entirely Sunni Turkmen, but there is a small Alawite minority of around 300 people who live in the town as well. None of them participated in the April 20, 2011 protest, but they also left the pro-opposition community alone. “Before the revolution we had normal relations with our neighbors,” Muhammad insists. He, like many people across Syria’s coast, remember the pre-2011 years as ones of decent inter-faith relations – their social fabric only shattered by the regime’s brutal sectarian approach to suppressing the revolution.
The second major protest in Mitras was a funeral. On September 9, 2013, a father and his three children were murdered in the farm outside the town by local shabiha – a common term for pro-Assad thugs, many of whom had organized into a country-wide militia known as the National Defense Forces (NDF). It was not the first murder by neighboring Alawite fighters – another man had been killed while traveling through a nearby village in 2012 – but it was the first attack on the town’s land and the first time children were murdered. A small group of local men and army defectors had formed an armed group inside Mitras specifically to prevent such attacks. But these men, led by a defected major named Ali Oghli, only carried their weapons at night to guard from criminals and had never launched attacks against the regime. While the funeral-protest was peaceful, tensions were rapidly escalating. Three weeks later, on September 29, a weapons cache belonging to this armed group exploded inside the home of Khalid Tamer, drawing the irreversible attention of the governorate’s intelligence branches and nearby army brigade. Muhammad and another member of the town’s local council went to Tartous to negotiate. Muhammad recalls how the head of Tartous’ Air Force Intelligence Branch – a Sunni from Deir Ez Zor – had begged him “we cannot control the NDF if they enter the town, please just surrender or they will massacre all of you.”
On October 5, 2013, the head of the Tartous Military Intelligence Branch Brigadier Tayseer Kiwan announced to Mitras, “you’ve stalled long enough”. At 6am tanks opened fire from the two hills to the town’s west. For four hours the town was shelled, then local Alawite NDF fighters and soldiers advanced through the cemetery, located on a small hill just outside the town. The opposition fighters met them there, and the intense clashes left at least eight NDF and army soldiers killed. As the fighting died down, one of the NDF commanders called Muhammad and another town notable, Mahmoud Qarajah, demanding “if you do not recover the bodies of our dead we will destroy your town.” Muhammad and Mahmoud drove up to the cemetery, the NDF still firing at them, and began to crawl up the remaining 50 feet to where the bodies of two NDF men lay. Still, the NDF continued to shoot at the men they had ordered onto the hill. Unable to reach the bodies, Muhammad called someone back in town who had the number of one of the NDF commanders. “The commander told us, ‘take off your shirts and wave them above your head and maybe we will stop shooting,’” Muhammad recounts coldly.
At 10am regime officers contacted the village leaders and offered an ultimatum: the remaining armed men would be allowed to settle their status – a process known as taswiya which would become ubiquitous in later years – turning over their weapons and signing documentation of their “crimes” with the intelligence branches in exchange for the bombardment to end. Muhammad and his associates agreed, and the army entered the town for the first time. Most men had fled, but the remaining armed men handed over their weapons and went with the mukhabarat to settle their status. While the army cleared the town, dozens of cars from nearby Alawite villages circled in the hills above, the men inside waving knives out the windows and shouting threats at the inhabitants below. It was a clear reference to the massacre of the Sunni town of Bayda the year before, many of whom were stabbed to death by local Alawite shabiha.
On October 6, the army withdrew and the NDF entered Mitras. “There were a lot of killings, theft, and kidnapping,” Muhammad recounts. “They kidnapped children too,” he says, pointing to the house next to his, “there they took a father and his young children, we have not heard of them since.” The armed group leader Major Oghli was taken that day by the NDF, as well as Khaled Tamer. Oghli was executed in Sednaya a few months later, while Khaled was able to leave prison after seven years and flee to Lebanon. There were no limits to the crimes of the NDF – everyone in the town was their victim. Even pro-regime Alawites inside Mitras were beaten by them.
On October 7, the mukhabarat arrived. Members of the three main directorates – Air Force Intelligence, Military Intelligence, and State Intelligence – swept the town again. They burned down the homes of “terrorists” and executed several people who refused to give up their properties. At one point a retired regime soldier from Mitras tried to negotiate a softer sentence for his brother as he handed the man over to the mukhabarat. But the officers refused, and the argument escalated until both the former soldier and his brother were simply shot dead in the street. Thirteen men were killed inside Mitras during those three days. Later, locals would find four more men executed, their bodies burned, in the fields around the town.
With Mitras firmly under regime control the army and mukhabarat withdrew. In their place they left the local NDF factions, under the command of a man named Basil Braidi. For seven brutal months Mitras suffered under an NDF occupation. “We never slept,” recalls Mahmoud, “At night they would enter our homes and take whatever they wanted.” The NDF fighters – all from the Alawite villages around Mitras – robbed, harassed, beat and kidnapped whoever they wanted. At one point they nearly executed Mahmoud, then serving as head of the Farmer’s Association, when he tried to speak out against the violations. Meanwhile the mukhabarat continued to raid the town, a growing list of men forever disappearing into Assad’s detention matrix. Muhammad somberly describes that period: “During those months, we wished for night to never fall.”
Muhammad and a few other respected men from the town established a council to try and work with the mukhabarat for the taswiya demands and ensure the summoned men would be protected. These council members became prime targets of regular NDF harassment. As the weeks bore on and the men who had left Mitras to settle their status in early October still hadn’t returned, the council began to demand to know their fate. “They told us ‘this wasn’t a taswiya, those men surrendered to us and have been sent to prison’,” says Muhammad. Among them was Yahya, his son who had defected. In April 2014, his family was delivered a death certificate: Yahya had been executed in Sednaya, along with Major Oghli and others.
In May 2014, the NDF commander terrorizing Mitras was himself detained by the mukhabarat over a dispute with some local intelligence officer. His replacement decided to withdraw the NDF forces from the town, instead establishing a checkpoint at the town’s entrance and exit. Here men from Mitras still risked being kidnapped, while everyone had to deal with the typical harassment and extortion behavior of the NDF. By now most men had fled Mitras for Idlib or Europe, leaving only the elderly, women, and children behind. But as boys approached conscription age they too had to either smuggle themselves out of the region or hide in the town to avoid detention. Many locals would seek temporary refuge in the nearby Christian villages in western Homs, moving from there to opposition-held parts of Homs or to Idlib.
Meanwhile, the police commander in the nearby district capital of Safita, Dureid Abbas, ordered all checkpoints on the highway to tax any truck arriving from Mitras carrying charcoal, which was the town’s main trade good. Life continued this way for the next ten years. Twelve more men would be murdered by shabiha and security forces during this time, either during raids in the town or while traveling in the nearby roads. Death certificates from Assad’s prisons would continue to arrive as well, with 44 men confirmed murdered in prison by 2019 and dozens of others remaining missing. Many men from Mitras also continued serving in the regime’s army. Most of these were men who had been conscripted before the war and were unable to escape, others had been captured at checkpoints and forced into the army. In total, 16 locals would die fighting for Assad between 2011 and 2018.
On December 8, 2024, Mitras was liberated along with the rest of Syria. “The night Assad fell the security forces vanished,” says Muhammad, “all the men grabbed our hunting rifles and spread out into the hills looking for Basil Braidi, but we could not find him. It was clear he had already fled Syria.” It is a story that has played out across Syria in the weeks following the regime’s collapse. With the international community’s focus on the topic of transitional justice and amnesty at broad level, it is easy to forget the brutal existence these individual Sunni communities had endured until the hour Assad fled to Moscow. People in towns like Mitras also emphasize the need for legal accountability and community healing – but the scale of violence inflicted on them is overwhelming.
The years of war and layered national and international crises stemming from Syria have obscured the unimaginable events these forgotten communities went through. Now these communities, brutalized by their own neighbors whose regime fueled their greed, fear, and bloodlust, are engaged in their own civil peace initiatives. Two months after Assad, most of the families who had fled to Idlib have returned to Mitras. The town remains impoverished and downtrodden, but young children play freely in the streets while small groups of military-aged men wander into the hills to go bird hunting, unfettered by fears of detention or murder. Muhammad insists the area has returned to a state of calm: “The violations were committed by the NDF, not the Alawite civilians. We don’t hold what we endured against the civilians from the villages around us.” Still, this understanding does not mean that there are post-war dialogues between them and Mitras. The Alawites inside Mitras live in peace with the Sunnis, but as for those in the surrounding villages: “they do not believe their regime has fallen, so there is nothing to discuss with them.”