The Assad regime collapsed late last year, but a recent spate of sectarian violence has left many Syrians worried for the future.
Samir Ismail sat on his knees, his forehead on the ground and hands clasped behind his back. His young nieces and nephews watched — their eyes wide in horror — as he demonstrated how militants lined the nine men up, then shot and killed them.
Samir, 53, drew his hand up, shaking his index finger and thumb in a shooting motion. His relatives were sitting around him in a small cinder block room, part of an old school in the northern Lebanese village of Massaoudiye, where they had called home since fleeing Syria in early March. Mattresses, winter jackets, and suitcases took up most of the space, squishing them into a tightly packed circle, as Samir continued his story.
On the evening of Jan. 31, he said, armed men drove into the Alawite village of Arza, in Syria’s Hama province. They entered three homes on the outskirts of the village, locked the women inside and took away their phones, and dragged the men outside.
The Alawites are a religious minority in Syria, to which the ousted Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, belongs. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni Islamist group, led the coterie of rebels that overthrew Assad in December.
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Since Assad’s overthrow, Alawites around the country have faced a series of “revenge” killings, targeting individuals for acts they may have committed under the regime, but also hundreds of innocent Alawite civilians, who had no role in the regime’s perpetration of violence. The killings escalated in early March. “We could hear the women screaming from the neighboring street,” said Issa Ismail, Samir’s 49-year-old brother.
At the time of the killing, Issa was at home, just about 500 meters (545 yards) away. He said some men from the village came outside to see what was happening, but the vigilantes told them to go back inside. Security personnel, who were manning the checkpoint at the entrance to the village, also went to check on the situation, but returned saying “there was nothing,” he added.
Things escalated quickly. They dragged people out of their houses.Two hours passed, and Issa grew impatient and left home, spotting the nine dead bodies outside. “They’d brought three men from each house, the father and his sons,” Issa said, noting that three of the sons were teenagers. “They were lined up next to each other, in a kneeling position,” he said. “Each received a shot in the head, using a [silencer-equipped] gun.” (Issa didn’t hear the gunshots).
The Jan. 31 killings marked the start of the bloodletting in the village. A little over a month later, on March 7, armed protesters stormed Arze, chanting anti-Alawite slogans while they rounded up men and shot them dead, according to media reports. “When they first entered, they shouted ‘Allahu Akhbar’, and [chants] against the Alawites,” Issa’s sister-in-law, Huweida Ismail, recounted. “Things escalated quickly. They dragged people out of their houses. We couldn’t react in time. We were terrified,” she said. (Issa and Samir had already fled Arze, in the weeks after the Jan. 31 attack.)
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Huweida watched as fighters dragged her uncle, Arze’s mukhtar (the village’s administrative head), who lived across from her, out of his home and shot him. He was one of 23 people, she said, the vigilantes killed in front of her.
Samir said that on March 7, and in the days that followed, gunmen killed 34 people and kidnapped 13, their whereabouts still unknown. One of Samir’s brothers, Sameh Hussein Ismail, was among the kidnapped, Samir said.
Samir and Issa blamed a man named Abu Jaber, a former rebel fighter from the neighboring Sunni-majority village of Khattab, for the killings on Jan. 31 and March 7. Samir said he came from the group Saraya Ansar al-Sunna, a former HTS ally.
In an interview with The National, an English-language Emirati newspaper, Abu Jaber denied he took part in the killings, but confirmed his presence at the massacre on March 7. He said the people of Arza had committed atrocities under the Assad regime and that revenge was inevitable. “Their fathers were killed, their brothers were killed, their sons were killed — what do you expect? To bring flowers and put olive branches on it?” he told the paper.
Issa responded to the accusation that Arze’s residents committed atrocities under Assad, saying that: “The people of Arza village were farmers, many who were not affiliated with the regime.”
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For his part, Issa blamed Syria’s new authorities, most of whom were formerly with HTS, for not stopping the gunmen. “They placed a military checkpoint at our village that consists of about 10 people. It was supposed to be for protection, but they didn’t take action [when the gunmen entered],” he said.
On March 7 — the day of the massacre in Arze — clashes and killings also erupted in other majority-Alawite areas in Hama, Homs, and along Syria’s coast. The trigger for the violent outpour had come a day earlier, on March 6, when Assad loyalists ambushed a local patrol of security forces outside Jableh, a coastal city in Syria’s Latakia province, killing at least 13. Islamist-led forces proceeded to carry out sectarian revenge killings targeting Alawites.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), an independent human rights monitor, documented the extrajudicial killing of at least 1,034 individuals between March 6 and March 15, across Latakia, Tartous, Hama and Homs. Forces affiliated with Damascus killed at least 595 civilians and “disarmed members of the remnants of the Assad regime,” while pro-Assad fighters killed 211 members of government forces and 228 civilians, SNHR said.
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A Tartous-based peacebuilding activist with Karma Center for Human Rights, who is monitoring the attacks on the coast, said the “most prominent reason” for the attacks has to do with “sectarian violence against Alawites, which amounts to genocide.” He said the sectarian nature of the attacks was evident through the use of fatwas (religious edicts) declaring Alawites non-Muslims or deviant groups. He added that calls for jihad (struggle against the enemies of Islam) spread out from mosques, “where the killing of Alawites and the looting of their money and property became permissible”.
The activist pinned responsibility on Syria’s new authorities. “The new authorities bear significant responsibility for the absence of transitional justice mechanisms and their failure to address this issue seriously, which has led some individuals to take revenge on themselves,” he said. He requested to remain anonymous.
Thus far, the violence has pushed 29,079 people to flee Syria into Lebanon, according to an April update from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Lebanon. Now, the majority of refugees are residing in Lebanon’s northern Akkar governorate, particularly the Alawite village of Massaaoudiye.
The village has been busy. On March 25, at the municipality office, aid workers with Doctors Without Borders sat at a desk, taking down names of those who needed medical support. Next store in the mayor’s home, the mayor and his relatives’ were sorting through an ever-growing stack of registration papers for the newly-arrived refugees.
On March 25, the mayor, Ali al-Ali said there were around 1,200 families sheltering in the village, each family with three to ten members. By April, some 2,300 new families had arrived in the village, the mayor said.
- The ongoing violence has continued to push more people to flee. In one of the latest attacks, on March 31, masked gunmen killed four civilians in Haref Nemra, a village in the Baniyas countryside in the coastal Tartous province, the Associated Press reported. The same day, two unidentified gunmen killed six people in the Homs’ neighborhood of Karm al-Zeitoun, including a woman and three of her children, and two Sunni civilians the family was hosting, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).
Jameel Suleilman, 31, walked along a dirt road in Massaoudiye. He arrived in Lebanon on March 10, after fleeing violence in his majority-Alawite village of Sanobar, or “Pine” in English, in Syria’s coastal Latakia province.
Jameel was timid, his voice soft and quivering, as he recounted what saw that day. “They [gunmen] entered from three directions, with black flags and tanks. Any person they’d see on the street was killed, without questions about their sect,” he recounted. “They said, ‘You pigs, we came to slaughter you’.”
For six hours, Jameel said, he hid with his two cousins and one of their young sons behind a sewage tank. Then, when the “continuous shooting” finally ceased, they came out. “The scene outside was horrific. Hundreds of bodies were mutilated and brutally tortured. Women and children were also on both sides of the road,” he described. “My cousin’s son was crying, it was really terrifying — no one could speak or move.”
He saw the body of a beheaded boy, no more than 14 years old. He passed an old woman, who was “protecting the corpses” of her five slain loved ones. “She told us to run and flee, and said, ‘They’re coming back!’” he said.
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Jameel later heard that two of his cousins were killed that day. Their bodies turned under the bushes three days later, with gunshots to the head.
A CNN investigation, based on satellite imagery, survivor testimonies, and footage from the ground, verified at least 84 bodies, killed in Sanobar. The survivors CNN interviewed counted over 200 dead. The Karma Center for Human Rights documented 180 people who died during the violence. Jameel said he believes the death toll is closer to 350 to 400.
CNN also verified that one of the gunmen, who filmed himself parading through the streets of Sanobar over dead bodies, was wearing what appeared to be HTS insignia. Jameel pulled out his phone, opening it to show a video of the same man, which was circulating on social media. He sang as he walked through a home in Sanobar, stepping over a dead body, laying on the balcony.
Jameel then pulled up another video, which he said his friend recorded when he returned to the village on March 10 to help bury the dead. Dozens of bodies covered in plastic cloth sat in a pile beside the roadway. “[This is] my beautiful village and its good people, may God have mercy on them, the civilian victims who were killed,” he said, referring to the photo.
Jameel said that no one was allowed to enter the village until three days after the massacre — the dead left to rot. His friend also visited Jameel’s childhood home, sending a photo of its condition. The home had gone up in flames, and a scatter of charred books and papers was on the floor. “My home, my memories, my childhood dreams, my certificates were burned and stolen,” Jameel said.
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Jameel proceeded down the dirt path, and after a few minutes, arrived at the village’s mosque. Children played outside, beside laundry and shoes left out to dry. Hundreds had been sleeping side-by-side on the mosque’s floor, many for over two weeks.
In the foyer, 10-year-old Hamzeh stood behind his mother. Bandages swaddled his elbow and wrist, beneath them the gunshot wounds he endured while fleeing Sanobar on March 7.
“We struggled to find a safe place to escape to,” his mother, 35-year-old Hadeel said. “They were firing randomly, which created a frantic situation. Everything was chaotic, no matter where we went, we felt we were falling deeper into trouble.”
Hadeel, who didn’t want to use her surname, said her husband had to carry her oldest son, who lives with disabilities — meaning they could not move quickly. While they were sheltering in a forest on the outskirts of the village, gunmen fired into the trees, she said, one of the bullets lodging in Hamzeh’s arm.
“What is this child’s fault?” she said. She peered down at her son. “Is he [remnants] of the regime?”
Hamzeh interrupted his mother, peering out from behind her back to chime in. The 10-year-old had heard of the slaying of a baby the vigilantes claimed “belonged to the regime,” he said.
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Since the incident, Hadeel said Hamzeh has been having regular panic attacks. “We want to be safe at home, but we can’t return safely [because] there’s no security,” Hadeel explained, adding that they now face “the grim reality of returning to death.” She gripped her young son’s shoulders as she finished her sentence.
Back at the old school, now serving as a shelter in Massaoudiye, Samir filtered through a stack of registration papers for refugees residing there. He furrowed his brow and said, “We have a severe shortage of bread.”
Samir — who was also heading the aid organization for the shelter — said there were around 700 people who registered with him, who were staying in the shelter or in the homes nearby. There was no more space for more families, he added.
He said the Alawite villages in Syria were emptying out, listing on his fingers seven villages in the Hama province where he knew almost all Alawite residents had fled. “I believe that every person in this world, regardless of their religion, gender, or race, deserves hope, safety, and a dignified life,” he said. “Unfortunately, as members of the Alawite community in Syria, these essential needs remain unfulfilled for us.”