Syria: 532 Alawite civilians killed by security forces and allied groups, according to the OSDH

The results keep climbing. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) reported more than 500 Alawite civilians killed since Thursday by Syrian security forces and allied groups on Thursday during operations and fighting with the faithful of fallen president Bashar al-Assad in the west of the country.

The OSDH indicated that “532 Alawite civilians were killed in the regions of the Syrian coast and the mountains of Lattaquié by the security forces and affiliated groups” since Thursday. This brings the balance of violence to 745 dead, including 213 members of the security forces and loyal fighters in the Assad clan, according to the same source. A previous assessment reported 300 civilians killed.

These violence are the first of this magnitude since the takeover on December 8 in Syria of a rebellious coalition led by the Sunni Radical Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, HTS. They broke out Thursday after several days of tensions in the Lattaquié region, a bastion of the Alawite Muslim minority, from which the Assad clan came.

“Return to relative calm”

The OSDH, based in the United Kingdom and with a large network of sources in Syria, points to “executions on denominational or regional bases” accompanied “with looting of houses and goods. The NGO reported on Saturday a “relative return to calm” in the area, while specifying that the security forces were continuing their “sweeping in the areas where armed men are entrenched”.

Restoring security is the main challenge for the new Syrian power, after more than 13 years of civil war. The acting Syrian president Ahmed al-Chareh, called on Friday evening the insurgents to “lay down their arms before it is too late”. “We will continue to work on the monopoly of weapons in the hands of the state,” he added in a speech.

The escalation started after a bloody attack by faithful from Bashar al-Assad against security forces in the coastal city of Jabil in the night of Thursday to Friday, according to the authorities. The security forces sent reinforcements the day after and launched major rating operations in the region.

« Exactions »

Testimonies on abuses against Alawite civilians, that AFP has not been able to check independently, multiply on social networks, in particular Facebook, emanating from relatives or friends of the victims.

An activist wrote that her mother and siblings had been “all massacred in their house”, while residents of Banyas in the province of Tartous further south have launched urgent calls to intervention to protect them. Images broadcast by Sana showed on Saturday what she described as a convoy of security forces entering Banyas.

The OSDH and activists have published videos on Friday showing dozens of bodies in civilian clothes stacked in the courtyard of a house, women crying nearby. In another sequence, men in military uniform ordered three people to crawl in line, before shooting them at close range. AFP could not verify these images independently.

A security source quoted by Sana had reported on Friday of “isolated abuses” on Friday, attributing them to “not organized crowds” acting in retaliation for “the assassination of several members of the police and security forces” by “faithful to the old regime”.

The UN calls for “restraint”

The UN Special Envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, said he was “deeply alarmed”, urging all parties to “restraint”, a call also launched by Berlin and several capitals of the region. Moscow, who welcomed his ex-allé Bashar al-Assad, called on the Syrian leaders to “stop the blood bath”.

According to Aron Lund, of the Century International Center for Reflection, the outbreak of violence testifies to the “fragility of the government”, of which a large part of the authority “is based on radical jihadists who consider the Alawites as enemies of God”.

Since coming to power, Chareh has been working to reassure minorities and has called for forces to show restraint and avoid any denominational drift, but this line is not necessarily shared by all the factions that operate under his command, and today form “the army and the police”, according to Lund.