It felt like a fairytale. How else to explain the dramatic fall of the Assads, in the space of days and all without any civilian casualties? Back in December, Syrians had feared that the regime would make a last stand in Lattakia, the heartland of their support and of the Alawite sect from which its top officers emerged. Many also feared there would be a sectarian bloodbath, as traumatised members of the Sunni majority took random revenge on the communities that had birthed their torturers.
None of that happened then — but some has now. On 6 March, an Assadist insurgency killed hundreds in Latakia and other coastal cities. Beyond crushing the insurrection, government forces also committed sectarian atrocities, summarily executing their armed opponents and killing many Alawite civilians. This is the first sectarian massacre of the new Syria, and it casts a fearsome shadow over the future. The revolution was supposed to overcome the targeting of sects for political reasons. Now, many fear the cycle will continue.
The previous regime was a sectarianising regime par excellence, both under Hafez al-Assad, who ruled from 1970, and under his son Bashar, who inherited the throne in 2000. This doesn’t mean that the Assads attempted to impose a particular set of religious beliefs: but they did divide and rule, exacerbating and weaponising resentments between sects (as well as between ethnicities, regions, families, tribes). They carefully instrumentalised social differences for the purposes of power, making them politically salient.
The Assads made the Alawite community into which they were born complicit in their rule — or, at least, to appear to be so. Independent Alawite religious leaders were killed, exiled or imprisoned, swiftly replaced with loyalists. Membership in the Baath Party and a career in the army were promoted as key markers of Alawite identity. The top ranks of the military and security services were almost all Alawite.
In 1982, during their war against the Muslim Brotherhood, Assadists killed tens of thousands of Sunni civilians in Hama. That violence pacified the country until the Syrian Revolution erupted in 2011. The counter-revolutionary war which followed can plausibly be thought of as a genocide of Sunni Muslims. From the start, collective punishment was imposed on Sunni communities where protests broke out, in a way that didn’t happen when there were protests in Alawi, Christian or mixed areas.
The punishment involved burning property, arresting people randomly and en masse, then torturing and raping detainees. As militarisation continued, the same Sunni areas were barrel-bombed, attacked with chemical weapons, and subjected to starvation sieges. Throughout the war years, the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands of dead, and of the millions expelled from their homes, were Sunnis. Alawi officers and warlords were backed in this genocidal endeavour by Shia militants from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, all of them organised, funded and armed by Iran. These militias — with their sectarian flags and battle cries — were very open about their hatred of Sunnis.
The worst of sectarian provocations were the massacres perpetrated in a string of towns and villages in central Syria, particularly in 2012 and 2013. The regime’s modus operandi was that the army would first shell a town to make opposition militias withdraw. From there, Alawi thugs from nearby towns would move in to cut the throats of women and children. It’s important to note that these were not spontaneous outbreaks of violence between neighbouring communities, but rather carefully organised assaults. They were intended to induce a Sunni backlash, frightening Alawites and other minorities into loyalty. This fitted with the regime’s primary counter-revolutionary strategy. Early on, it had released Islamist jihadis from prison while rounding up enormous numbers of non-violent, non-sectarian activists. For the same reason, it rarely fought ISIS — which in turn usually focused on taking territory from revolutionary forces.
Soon enough, Sunni extremist organisations provided the response the regime wanted. For example, an August 2013 jihadist offensive in the Latakia countryside killed at least 190 Alawite civilians, and abducted many more. When they saw such horrors, many members of minority groups, and some Sunnis too, felt they had no option but to fight to preserve the regime.
But in recent years HTS — the de facto authority since December 2024 — seemed to have abandoned the divide-and-rule strategy. The Islamist militia improved relations with non-Muslims in Idlib, while also sending positive messages to Alawites. It also offered an amnesty to all former regime fighters, except senior war criminals. It looked, finally, as if the new Syria might avoid further sectarian conflict. After all, throughout the revolution, many Sunnis had worked for the regime, and many Alawis had opposed it, at enormous cost, from the army officer Zubeida Meeki to the actor Fadwa Suleiman.
Nevertheless, the ingredients for an Assadist insurgency in Alawite areas were present. Men had lost their jobs in the collapsed regime army, and many feared Syria’s new rulers. Iranian funds and Hezbollah organisation provided the support they needed to challenge HTS. That led to the attacks last week, with several coordinated Assadist attacks killing up to 400 members of the new security forces alongside dozens of civilians. Some of the victims were burnt alive, while hospitals and ambulances were targeted too.
“The ingredients for an Assadist insurgency in Alawite areas were present.”
Across Syria, there was a furious popular response. Impromptu demonstrations condemned the insurgency and chaotic convoys of militants and armed civilians headed for the coast. Government fighters and their allies largely succeeded in clearing the rebels from urban areas, but they also committed atrocities. Disarmed Assadist fighters were summarily executed. So too were Alawite civilians, including women and children.
According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the most consistently reliable monitoring organisation, 211 civilians were killed by Assad loyalists, and at least 420 people by Syrian security forces. The latter includes both civilians and disarmed fighters who were killed out of hand. It is difficult to distinguish the two: most Assadist fighters wore civilian clothes. Yet at least 49 women and 39 children are among the dead.
The Assadist assault was never going to restore the old regime — it had totally collapsed, and is widely hated across all parts of society. The true aim of the insurgency’s backers, rather, may have been to provoke a sectarian response. That, after all, was the strategy of the previous decade. If so, the rebels got what they wanted. It seems that most atrocities were perpetrated by the notoriously ill-disciplined Syrian National Army (SNA) factions, and by foreign fighters including Chechens. The extent of official HTS involvement remains unclear. But in a way, that is already irrelevant. The crimes against innocents could now turbo-charge an insurgency, preventing Syria from stabilising, even as it serves the vultures surrounding the country.
Chief among these are Iran — which lost its most important Arab ally, and its route to Lebanon, when Assad fell — and Israel. The Netanyahu government is assiduously working to partition Syria along sectarian lines, trying, without much success, to exploit fissures in Druze and Kurdish politics. For their different reasons, these enemy states share the same desire to keep Syria weak.
Iran and Israel, as well as a range of Western Islamophobes and “Tankies” are seeking to fan the flames with disinformation. Commentators from Elon Musk to George Galloway are helping spread claims that Syrian Christians are being massacred. There is zero evidence of this, but like some of the atrocity stories on October 7, including that Hamas beheaded dozens of Israeli babies, the narrative may become fixed in certain corners of the Western mind.
The next weeks and months will determine if Syria’s future will be something like civil war Iraq, or else something better. President Ahmad al-Sharaa has been doing a good job of giving the impression of stability — stressing that no one is above the law and establishing a committee to investigate the violence. It is now necessary to actually implement real change, not least given Sharaa has yet to bring the opposition militias together under a single disciplined command.
Beyond those crisis measures, Syria urgently requires an independent transitional justice process. After decades of violence, Syrians need to air their grievances, to establish the facts of what happened, and to see justice done. Only then can a national consensus be built on past tragedies and future direction; only then will the lure of vigilante justice be neutralised.
So far, several war criminals have been arrested, but none have yet been put on trial. In some cases, criminals have been released shortly after their arrest. One example is Fadi Saqr. An Assadist commander, and implicated in an infamous massacre in the Damascus suburb of Tadamon, he went walking in the neighbourhood after his release, prompting protests by locals.
Sharaa identified transitional justice as one of the government’s priorities in a 30 January speech, yet on 27 February the authorities prevented a conference on the topic from taking place in Damascus. Organised by the Syrian Centre for Legal Studies and Research, the body is headed by Anwar al-Bunni, the human rights lawyer who contributed to the first ever trial of an Assadist war criminal. The government has yet to explain why it prevented the conference from happening.
There are good reasons for Sharaa to feel he can’t afford genuine transitional justice. For a start, HTS bears its own share of historical guilt. Perhaps in retrospect, one can justify its gobbling up of other opposition militias for the sake of military efficiency. It’s much harder to justify the group’s elimination of revolutionary civil society figures, with some murdered as recently as 2018.
Even if the HTS leadership could be exempted from scrutiny, meanwhile, Sharaa’s stabilisation strategy involves bringing all military factions under one national umbrella. Putting the faction leaders on trial would contradict this effort. But the crimes committed on the coast by SNA militias show that leniency threatens social peace much more than arrests.
The more that Syrian communities are brought into the governance process, the less ability warlords will have to unsettle the country. In this respect, there is still grounds for optimism. On 10 March, al-Sharaa signed a deal with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to integrate that Kurdish-led militia into the national army, and to re-establish central control over northeast Syria. If a deal with the Druze militias follows, Israel will find it much harder to destablise the country. To deprive Iran and the Assadist remnants of their power too, military action must be coupled with efforts to appoint anti-Assad Alawites to administrative positions, both on the coast and in Damascus. In short, then, the government must establish sufficient peace for civil society to get to work. Syrians themselves must be able to do the hard work of addressing and overcoming their trauma.
