Thousands have fled into Lebanon after tensions between Syria’s Alawite minority and forces backing the new government exploded last week.
Syrian refugees cross the river marking the border near Massoudieh, a Lebanese village, on Wednesday. Thousands of largely Alawite refugees have crossed into Lebanon in the past week amid sectarian violence in Syria. (Lorenzo Tugnoli/For The Washington Post)
MASSOUDIEH, Lebanon — The Syrian man was carrying his disabled 7-year-old son on his shoulders as the family arrived at a mosque just inside Lebanon to find shelter, fleeing the sectarian violence that erupted late last week in Syria’s coastal region.
The boy clung to his mother’s hand while his brother, 10, cradled a bandaged arm.
“The bullet went in one side and straight out the other,” the man said Wednesday, not long after reaching Massoudieh, a village less than a mile from the Syrian border. “Monsters,” he said, referring to those whom he accused of executing members of his Alawite minority. He spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals, like most others interviewed for this article.
Thousands of largely Alawite refugees have crossed into Lebanon over the past week after attacks on Syrian security forces by Alawite gunmen affiliated with the ousted regime of Bashar al-Assad triggered a surge of reprisals and sectarian bloodletting.
About 500 families have sought shelter in Massoudieh alone, according to local officials. Many of the refugees had waded across the Nahr el-Kabir river marking the border, hoisting their few possessions overhead.
The wave of killings in coastal Syria has posed the biggest test so far for the country’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, whose forces overthrew Assad in December. He has accused “remnants of the former regime” of trying to drag Syria into renewed civil war and vowed to hold accountable those who have “overstepped the authority of the state.”
Sharaa has not named who was responsible for the violence. It remains unclear how much of the killing was carried out by government forces or loosely affiliated militias or Islamist extremists drawn to Syria during its 14-year civil war.
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Syria has seen a proliferation of armed Sunni Muslim extremist groups that consider Alawites and some other minorities to be apostates, while many Syrians remain aggrieved by Alawites’ support for Assad during his brutal rule. Sharaa, who was formerly affiliated with al-Qaeda, has yet to demonstrate that he is willing or able to control the gunmen who have targeted the Alawites.
Sharaa’s pledge of accountability has done little to reassure the refugees.
“They say, ‘You are safe, don’t worry,’ and then they kill you,” said the man who had carried his son to Lebanon. “It’s impossible to go back.”
He and his family fled their home in the coastal town of al-Sanobar on Friday as masked gunmen approached, he recounted. Residents of a neighboring village had warned that executions had begun.
The family hid in a pine forest surrounding the town. His 10-year-old son was shot when gunmen opened fire into the trees. Local officials in al-Sanobar said they have documented 193 deaths in that town alone.
The fleeing family traveled 70 miles to Lebanon, walking and hitchhiking, avoiding security forces along the roads. “This is from all the walking,” the man said, pointing to the rubber sole peeling off his shoe. He said they are wearing the same clothes in which they fled.
Fadel Abdulghany, director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, said armed groups loyal to the former Assad regime also had targeted civilians. He said these groups had taken control of neighborhoods and villages, and their snipers had targeted vehicles with license plates from Idlib — the governorate that Sharaa and his Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham movement had ruled before capturing the country.
The monitoring group said it has documented 803 deaths as of Wednesday, including 172 members of Syria’s new police, military and other security forces. Members of the Assadist militias are not included in the count, which tallies only killings considered unlawful.
Many refugees in Massoudieh, a largely Alawite village, were reluctant to discuss the attacks by Alawite gunmen that set off clashes between Alawite militias and government forces, prompting a major deployment of security forces to the coast.
A couple from Dahlia, a village in Syria’s Latakia province, where the clashes first erupted, said some people who had lived there were wanted by authorities. So the fighting that erupted was in “self-defense,” said the husband, sitting on the steps of a half-constructed house where his family is sheltering. Plastic film was taped over the unfinished windows to keep out the cold.
His 24-year-old wife was unabashed about her political stance. “We want Bashar al-Assad to come back,” she said of Syria’s former president, whose image still adorns posters hung around her largely Alawite village.
Another man, sitting outside another half-built house, said he had no choice but to flee his village, Kartu, because his name was on a government wanted list of people suspected to be activists in Assad’s Baath Party He dismissed the Alawite insurgency as “individual acts.”
Yet other refugees viewed the violence as an attempt at ethnic cleansing by Syria’s new rulers.
“Why is this happening to us? It’s because we are Alawites,” said a 24-year-old woman from the village of Tanita, where the Syrian government has said there were fierce clashes with armed groups.
She, her husband and their 5-year-old child share a small cinder-block structure erected in the yard of an old school with another family of 10. About 120 people are camped out in the school’s classrooms and yard. Elsewhere in the village, private homes are teeming with refugees, and the local mosque is sleeping 305 families.
Lilian Hussein, 33, one of the few who was willing to be named, said government-aligned fighters who had been dispatched to the coast used the pretext that there were “remnants” of the regime to attack unarmed villagers, Hussein said. “We fled under gunfire,” she said. Her cousin was shot in the back, she said.
The pace of refugees crossing the river has slowed in recent days as the violence abates, according to smugglers who help families make the illegal crossing.
But refugees continued to arrive this week, scrambling from the Syrian side down the river’s steep banks. Some led farm animals through the water. One woman, weak from exhaustion, had to be held up by relatives. A thick plume of smoke rises over Syria’s Tartous province in the distance.
On Wednesday, many of the refugees were from Safita, about 10 miles from the border, and said they’d been unable to flee until now.
“There are a lot of armed men in our town. They didn’t let people go in or out,” said a 45-year-old woman who crossed the knee-high waters with two relatives.
After civil war engulfed Syria following a popular uprising in 2011, Lebanon took in more than 1 million Syrian refugees. The vast majority of the refugees then were Sunni Muslims, who made up much of the movement against Assad. Today, the tides have shifted.
“We welcomed the earlier refugees, and we welcome these,” said Ali Alali, the mayor of Massoudieh. Outside his office, aid workers handed out mattresses and blankets to the newly arrived.
“People have seen their men, women and children slaughtered,” the mayor said. “After they were robbed of gold and money, they ask them, ‘What is your religion?’”
Some Syrians who fled said they had waited in hiding for days for the right moment to cross, fearing government patrols near the border.
“They shoot anybody that’s not a Sunni,” said a man from Safita as he emerged from the river. “It’s sectarian war.”
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