The Alawi Massacres and the Question of Syrian State Responsibility
A Reuters investigation traces the chain of command to Damascus.
In the evening of 6 March 2025, on the Syrian coast, several checkpoints manned by security forces of the Sunni Islamist government that toppled Bashar al-Asad’s regime in early December 2024 were attacked by what they called “remnants” (felul) of the fallen regime.1 Across the two coastal provinces, Tartus and Latakia, such attacks were replicated. The government declared it was an Asadist uprising and called for a mobilisation of ex-rebels, now reflagged as military units under the Ministry of Defence (MoD). Islamist brigades and Sunni civilians poured onto the coast and for several days rampaged through towns and villages, slaughtering the Alawi residents. The Alawis, an esoteric sect, are despised by jihadists and resented by many Syrians, especially the Sunni majority, because they formed the backbone of the Asad regime.
Syria’s “interim” president, Ahmad al-Shara, known as Abu Muhammad al-Jolani in the years leading Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a jihadist insurgent organisation once loyal to Al-Qaeda, was quick to announce on 9 March the creation of an investigative commission to “hold accountable” those involved in anti-civilian atrocities. “No-one will be above the law and anyone whose hands are stained with the blood of Syrians will face justice sooner rather than later”, Al-Shara said in a nationwide address. That was four months ago. There have been no updates on the progress of the investigation and not one single prosecution for the Alawi massacres.
The question that hung over the carnage on the coast from the beginning was the level of responsibility Al-Shara and his government had. Damascus and its supporters claimed emphasised the incomplete integration of ex-rebels into the MoD chain of command. A lot of blame was affixed to the notorious Turkish proxy groups of what had been the “Syrian National Army” (SNA) and the foreign fighters. This version of events had the benefit of containing considerable truth, and “distancing” Al-Shara from any intentional responsibility for the Alawi massacres: the issue exposed, in this telling, was Al-Shara’s inability to control many of the non-HTS ex-rebel units now nominally answering to the MoD.
The problem with this narrative, as I wrote a week or so after the killing stopped, is that, even on its own terms, it is cold comfort to the Alawis if Al-Shara is merely incapable of preventing the extermination and expulsion they have been expecting since December. There was, however, already reason to suspect that Al-Shara’s responsibility was more direct than that. The killers had “acted in the context of a military operation [Al-Shara] declared”: to have called for a general mobilisation, knowing the SNA and foreign jihadists were the closest forces to hand in Idlib, was criminal negligence at best. Moreover, there was evidence even at that stage of HTS’s General Security Service (GSS)—the intelligence and police agency agreed by all to be disciplined, capable, and under Al-Shara’s tight control—being involved in the murders.
Reuters published an extensive investigation by Maggie Michael on 30 June that made clear just how direct a line there was from Damascus to the Alawi massacres.
THE HARROWING OF THE COAST
The Syrian M1 highway runs from Latakia city, down the Mediterranean coastline, through Jableh, Baniyas, and Tartus city—the four largest urban centres in the two coastal provinces—before diverting east into Homs city. The M4 runs northeast out of Latakia up towards Jisr al-Shughur, forty-five miles away in Idlib province.2 “The massacres that began before dawn on March 7 would mostly follow those two arteries”, Reuters reports.
To give a sense of what happened:
Al-Mukhtareyah, the first village off the M4 … came under attack around 6 a.m. [on 7 March.] Swarms of men, including many in GSS uniforms, broke down doors to pull men outside, forcing some to crawl and dragging others away, eight witnesses told Reuters. The shooting lasted about an hour. When it was over, 157 people were dead—nearly a quarter of Al-Mukhtareyah’s population, according to a list from a community leader that Reuters verified with multiple surviving residents. … [A] woman who lost 17 relatives shared a screenshot from a video verified by Reuters. She pointed to a pile of bodies in the screenshot and said: “This is my family.” The village was all but empty days after the massacre, residents said.
The villages with the most bloodshed were those whose residents belonged to a subset of Alawites called al-Klazyia, according to Ali Mulhem, founder of the Syrian Civil Peace Group, an organization that documents abuses and mediates disputes. The Assad family were al-Klazyia Alawites, as were many of the dictator’s ranking security officials, said Mulhem and a senior Alawite community leader.
Among the places linked to the al-Klazyia sub-sect was Sonobar, a farming community of around 15,000 … The elite HTS force called Unit 400 moved into Sonobar in December, promising that the town would be left in peace under the new leadership, three villagers told Reuters. They described life as tense, but bearable. Early on March 7, the Unit 400 men and hundreds of reinforcements converged and started killing. In all, according to 17 witnesses, nine separate factions attacked. …
In a selfie video from Sonobar, a uniformed fighter shows bodies and proclaims: “[SNA group Sultan] Suleiman Shah [Brigade] defeated the remnants of the former regime. God is great and thanks to God.” The camera later pans to eleven unarmed men in civilian clothes …
Another group identified themselves as fighters for the Jaysh al-Islam militia. Jaysh al-Islam’s media officer posted pictures on Facebook of fighters heading to the coast on March 7. … “There is no safety, no stability in our country except by purging them,” wrote Hamza Berqidar, the media officer. … One woman from Sonobar told Reuters the fighters commandeered her living room. “Do you know who we are?” one asked her. She said she replied: “You’re the army!” No, she said they told her. “We are jihadists from Jaysh al-Islam. We came to teach you Islam.”
Foreign fighters “wearing green headbands” arrived “with a translator” in Sonobar. “You are Alawite pigs”, one woman was told. “You deserve what is happening to you. If you cry you will be shot dead, and your body will be on top of the other dead bodies.” She found her husband “shot in the eyes and heart”. At least 236 residents of Sonobor perished and a message was left scrawled on the walls: “You were a minority, and now you are a rarity.”
In Al-Rusafa, not far from the famous Nizari castle in Masyaf, “a government convoy of around 50 vehicles, including a tank, … set up positions around the village, cut the electricity and started shooting”. Young men were dragged from their homes, made to crawl around and howl like dogs, then shot. “We killed him and cut out his heart,” one father was told. “Come get your son before the dogs eat him.” Sixty Alawis were murdered in Al-Rusafa, according to Reuters: “The youngest was a 4-year-old.” The message left on the walls there read: “Sunni men passed through here. We came to shed your blood.”
On and on it went. “Mosque megaphones across the country sounded calls for jihad” in response to Al-Shara’s mobilisation order, Reuters notes, and the response was enthusiastic. The Alawis in Jableh, a Sunni-majority town, were set upon by HTS’s Unit 400 and the Othman Brigade (another elite HTS outfit), the SNA’s Sultan Suleiman Shah and Hamza Division, and the Uyghur jihadists of the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP)—all units publicly loyal to the MoD. At least seventy-seven Alawis were killed.
There was a flicker of humanity in Jableh when “a Sunni neighbor intervened to help evacuate the mortally wounded husband of [an Alawi woman,] Rasha Ghoson, over the objections of two General Security Service men”. There were other reports of “Sunni neighbors who smuggled [Alawis] to safety or who tried to protect them”, particularly in Baniyas, interestingly, a town where HTS government forces were first attacked on 6 March, and where, in 2013, a horrendous wave of anti-Sunni massacres culminated.3
That said, Baniyas was also one of “the two main sites” where popular killings of Alawis outside the direction of the militias took place. The other main site was Arza, a village home to an ardently pro-Asad Alawi clan, which was the launchpad for one of the anti-Sunni massacres in 2013, against neighbouring Khattab. On 7 March, Khattab residents invaded Arza:
Khattab men brought victims to the main square and asked their leader, Abu Jaber al-Khattabi: “What do you think, Shaykh?” They said if he responded “Allahu Akbar”—which he did in nearly every case—the victim was shot.
“They are all criminals,” al-Khattabi told Reuters. “It’s like the ultimate divine justice. Just as you made us homeless, you will be homeless, and just as you killed us, you will be killed”.
At least two-dozen Arza residents were slain and the other 1,200 fled into the mountains. Sunni villagers from Khattab have moved into Alawi homes in Arza, a complete conquest and colonisation. “Arza is no more”, as Al-Khattabi said.
In Qurfays, north of Baniyas, named for an Alawi religious figure, Ahmed Qurfays, whose shrine is in the centre of town, Alawis were slaughtered outside a farmhouse on 8 March by the Othman Brigade as local notables were inside trying to reason with the marauding invaders, pointing out they harboured no Asadists. Fifty worshippers at the shrine were beaten. “Still, it felt like perhaps they’d escaped the mass death they’d heard about elsewhere”, Reuters notes. No such luck. “A new convoy of 80 vehicles arrived. Someone fired once in the air, and then, as though awaiting a signal, the militia members opened fire. … [One witness] said one of the Unit 400 men told him crying was banned and that the village should be thankful just for being allowed to bury their dead.”
The persistent patterns across geographically separate attack sites—the victims made to act like dogs, the mutilations, the ban on crying—tell of a systematic campaign. And the motivation is no mystery. The survivors all attest to being targeted as Alawis. The slogans on the walls and the desecrated shrines tell the same story, as do the videos of the militiamen chanting “Sunnis, Sunnis” and “rhyming slogans calling for people to ‘slaughter the Alawites’” as they went about their grim work. “The first question arriving fighters asked residents”, Reuters reports, “according to more than 200 witnesses and survivors”, was always the same: “Are you Sunni or Alawite?”
From the foregoing, the presence of the GSS and elite HTS contingents like Unit 400 and the Othman Brigade leading some of the worst atrocities will have been noted.4 There is no need to guess at the level of awareness this indicates Damascus had during the Alawi massacres because Reuters has the chat logs from the Telegram group established by Hassan Abd al-Ghani (Abu Ahd al-Hamawi), the Defence Ministry spokesman, to coordinate the ex-rebel operation on the coast. Informed about the “breaches” in Jableh, Al-Ghani responded in the chat: “May God reward you.”
AFTERMATH
The frenzied pogroms against the Alawis were winding down by 9 March and tapered off on 10 March. The Reuters report does not spell out how this happened, but alludes to the fact that “[m]any Alawite villages and neighborhoods throughout the Latakia, Tartous, and Hama regions emptied out after the attacks”. It may simply have been that the Islamist militias could find no more large concentrations of Alawis to kill. Nonetheless, “The targeting of Alawites continues to this day”, with a steady tempo of abductions and assassinations of Alawi civilians, on the coast, in Hama and Homs, and in Damascus.5
HTS’s Unit 400, Othman Brigade, and GSS were involved “in at least 10 sites, where nearly 900 people were killed”, Reuters documents. Such conduct on the coast is not new for HTS: in August 2013, the group, then-known as Jabhat al-Nusra, partnered with Ahrar al-Sham, the Islamic State, and other jihadists to invade Latakia, murdering about 200 Alawi civilians and taking another 200 as captives, their fate unknown from that day to this. Nobody has ever been held to account for any of this.
The leaders of Jaysh al-Islam (another group with a grisly anti-Alawite history), Sultan Suleiman Shah, and TIP were made Brigadier Generals and their militias declared formal army units in December 2024; they still hold those ranks. The leader of the Hamza Division was promoted to this level after the Alawi massacres. In combination with two other ex-rebel groups, Jaysh al-Ahrar and Jaysh al-Izza, and some of the other foreigners—mostly Russian-speakers (Chechens, Uzbeks, etc.) and some non-Syrian Arabs—these factions were documented at eighteen sites where about 1,500 people were killed.
There were then two sites, Baniyas and Arza, where Sunni civilians did most of the killing, amounting to about 300 deaths, according to Reuters.
This adds up to thirty sites and 2,700 victims. Reuters says its “investigation found 1,479 Syrian Alawites were killed and dozens were missing from 40 distinct sites”. The lower death toll is the named victims, a naturally conservative methodology.6 The reason for the discrepancy on the sites is less clear.
In the days after the hecatomb on the coast, the best estimate was that about 400 Alawi civilians had been killed, and Alawi insurgents had killed 172 MoD-flagged troops and 211 civilians, including the targeted assassination of nine media activists. The apparent rough parity in deaths on the two “sides” allowed those so inclined to draw a moral equivalence, to describe the episode as one where “Alawite pro-regime gunmen turned on rival villages and vice-versa”. This kind of misuse of raw fatality figures is distressingly common. It was perfectly obvious even in March that the worst that could be said of the criminality of the Alawi insurgents was not comparable to what the HTS government troops had done to Alawi civilians. Those still denying this at least no longer have a statistical smokescreen.7 Not that it was ever really needed.
The lack of concern from the “international community” about the Alawi massacres has been remarkable. The United Nations said on 11 March it had “documented the killing of 111 civilians”, admitted this was an undercount, and has not returned to the subject since. The European Union imposed sanctions on three figures from the fallen Asad regime—Miqdad Fatiha, Ghaith Dalla, and Suhayl al-Hasan—in late June for having “formed militias that fueled sectarian tensions and incited violence, which escalated and resulted in the loss of hundreds of civilian lives”.8 Reuters tried asking the EU if perhaps some of the Syrian government units would meet this definition and were rebuffed.
A spokesman for the investigative committee told Reuters at the end of June that its report on the Alawi massacres would be delivered to Al-Shara in two weeks. Whether that has happened, and when the report will be made public, we do not know. It hardly seems relevant now. It might have been expected that Western governments would at least await the publication of the report before engaging Al-Shara any further as a test, however superficial, of his stated commitment to protecting the minorities. Instead, engagement has proceeded without any “decent interval” or show of accountability.
In early May, Al-Shara was invited to Paris to meet French President Emmanuel Macron. Some comments were made about the need to “assure the protection of all Syrians”, but Macron praised the “results” Al-Shara had shown when criticised for inviting a “jihadist” and “terrorist” to the Elysée Palace. A week later, U.S. President Donald Trump met Al-Shara, pronounced himself impressed, and lifted all sanctions on Syria. Trump’s embrace of Al-Shara’s government has only deepened. Earlier this month, the U.S. revoked HTS’s terrorist designation.9 Trump is eyeing a withdrawal of American troops from Syria and strengthening the HTS government is essential to prevent an embarrassing, Afghanistan-style meltdown.
History, it seems, has broken Al-Shara’s way, and those who lose out as this juggernaut proceeds should not expect much, not even much recognition or sympathy.
NOTES
Felool, Fulul, fuloul, falool, etc.: transliterate فلول as you will.
The M4 runs further inland from Jisr al-Shughur until it intersects near Saraqib with the M5, the most important motorway linking Syria’s population centres: turning north at Saraqib, the M5 leads to Aleppo, and turning south it leads to Hama, Homs, and Damascus.
Central to the Asad regime’s survival strategy was deliberately inflaming sectarian hatreds to empower the jihadists who divided the insurgency inside Syria and discredited it abroad, reducing the willingness of outside powers to support the rebellion. The massacres of Sunni civilians in Baniyas and Bayda in May 2013 was orchestrated by the regime but carried out directly by Alawi villagers armed with knives and clubs, as well as guns. The template had begun a year earlier in Houla, then played out in Qubair, Tremseh, Daraya, Thiabiya, Barzeh, and Haswiya: Sunni settlements on the faultline between the Alawi coast and the Sunni interior, or Sunni districts of the capital surrounded by Alawi zones. It was intimate violence by neighbours and friends and it tore apart Syria’s social fabric, derailing any hopes for a united movement against autocracy. The war became a sectarian struggle where popular support shifted to groups promising security, however despotically enforced, and revenge.
Formally, they are “ex”-HTS contingents: Al-Shara nominally dissolved all militias outside the national army in January, and the government’s supporters are rather insistent on the point, as I found out in Syria in March.
The focus of Ms. Michael’s article was the coast and to a lesser extent Hama—understandably, since this was the epicentre of the killings. The atrocities did spread further, though: it was known in real-time that at least some Alawis had been killed in Homs, and Reuters was the first to disclose, at the end of March, that Alawis in Damascus had been murdered.
Al-Qadam, just a few miles south of the presidential palace in Damascus, is a well-known Alawi enclave. In the early hours of 7 March, Islamist gunmen stormed homes in Al-Qadam and abducted at least twenty-five unarmed Alawi men; eight of them were confirmed dead by the time Reuters reported on 27 March. “The rest of the men have not been heard from”, according to Reuters. “Four of the witnesses said some of the armed men who came to al-Qadam identified themselves as members of General Security Service (GSS)”. The Alawis in Damascus had the same problem in trying to get death certificates from the hospitals: they were referred to the local GSS branch, and everyone was to scared to approach them. All the witnesses “said they have not been approached by the fact-finding committee”, and “said they felt under pressure to leave al-Qadam specifically because they were Alawite. Some already had.”
“Reuters counted the dead by gathering local lists of names of victims, many of them handwritten, from community leaders and families of the victims. Villagers also gathered pictures and personal details about the victims. For each list, written in Arabic, Reuters cross-checked the names with activists who are either in the relevant village, run Facebook pages, or in the diaspora and have relatives in the places that came under attack.”
A problem in trying to count the dead is that the organs of the HTS State, such as they are, took immediate steps to prevent an accurate tally, specifically refusing to issue death certificates. One woman, seeking recognition of her husband’s murder, was told flat-out by “a GSS officer in charge of death records [that he] refused to issue a document to an Alawite. ‘He said: “infidel!”’ and walked away, she recalled. … As with most of the massacre victims, there is still no death certificate for [the lady’s] husband.”
While the initial Syrian Network for Human Rights figure for the Alawi civilians massacred in March has risen nearly four-fold by Reuters’ count, it is notable that the initial SNHR figure for the HTS government troops killed (172) has been basically confirmed by Al-Shara, who says 200 MoD troops perished.
SNHR’s updated stats—they use a very conservative methodology—are that 1,200 Alawi civilians were murdered in March, and 445 people (half civilians, half government security forces) were killed by the Alawi insurgents.
This is not the venue to get into the question of whether Suhayl is Suhayl, a mystery that was perhaps buried with the Asad regime.
The two main “former” SNA groups involved in the Alawi massacres are under U.S. Treasury sanctions. They are not on the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organisations (FTO), as HTS was. They were sanctioned for human rights abuses: Sultan Suleiman Shah Brigade for “abductions and extortion”, especially against Kurds in Efrin, and the Hamza Division for “abductions, theft of property, and torture”, as well as the taking of captives for ransom who are “often” subjected to “sexual abuse”. As these sanctions were imposed in 2023, under President Joe Biden, it is an open question whether Trump will repeal these, too.