Since March 6, I have been trying to write about the storm that swept through my home region — the Syrian coast. But I keep failing. I try to shut out the images of the dead, yet they force their way into my mind. I try to push through the invisible walls closing in on me, searching for anything to hold myself together, but I fail.
Every day, a single worry consumes me: how to find water for my family while electricity cuts disrupt everything. My neighbor is one of the lucky ones: His grandfather dug a well long ago, and somehow it has come back to life. People crowd around it, rationing the little they can carry for drinking and washing, knowing it won’t last. I think of the Syrians who endured hunger and thirst under siege, back when the Assad regime still ruled. Things here are different, of course — but still, I call a friend from Zabadani, who lived through months of blockade, hoping for advice. He doesn’t answer. Maybe he, too, is gone.
We search for a place to charge our phones, our power banks — anything to stay connected. The internet is our only window to the world, a fragile lifeline. Calls pour in, each one bringing worse news. I hesitate before checking Facebook, afraid to find another obituary — perhaps even for someone in my own family. My sickly mother, in her 80s, sleeps out in the open, in the grasslands. In a single day, social media has turned into a vast wall of death notices, flooded with images and videos of the slain. I know I could end up there too, killed in an “isolated incident” or by a random bullet.
My eldest daughter sobs. Her friend from university was shot and killed by stray gunfire while hiding in her own home.
I pray — just this once — that God might intervene in these affairs of men. But my prayers go unanswered. The line is dead.
A few days after the massacres on the Syrian coast earlier this month, the Latakia governorate announced celebrations to mark victory over “the remnants of the former regime” and the signing of an agreement between Syrian interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa and Kurdish leader Mazloum Abdi. To that end, the governorate summoned two media figures from the new regime — faces of a reemerging shabiha, the thuggish enforcers of the Assad era. Thousands gathered, and the festivities began with great joy.
As they cheered, their neighbors scoured the land for the bodies of their loved ones — slaughtered, executed or simply disappeared in the brutal campaign waged by the forces of the new state along the Syrian coast. Others lay the blame for the bloodletting on remnants of the former regime. It’s likely that both groups are responsible.
Fifteen corpses lay on my street. Five of them later vanished without a trace.
In Dahya, not far from my home, masked and armed men dragged my friend, the Alawite director of the city’s cultural center, out of his house and executed him in the middle of the street. His body lay there for an entire day, untouched. The killers, I was told, were “our Chechen brothers” — foreign fighters who were rumored to have participated in the campaign. I struggle to comprehend it all, but one phrase, famously used by Thomas Hobbes, echoes in my mind: “Homo homini lupus.” Man is a wolf to his fellow man.
The following day, the same officials announced a public funeral for “security forces, soldiers and civilians” — in that order. They concluded with hollow words: “We share the grief of the martyrs’ families and deeply appreciate their sacrifices for the nation.” But in the tangle of this deceptive language, we cannot tell: Do civilians count as martyrs, too?
Far from here, in Qamishli, Hasakah and Sweida, protests erupt, condemning the massacres that unfolded near my home. I recognize the faces of friends among the demonstrators. I turn toward Damascus and see others protesting, too — only for the authorities to scatter them with gunfire into the air.
I receive private messages accusing me of being one of the “remnants of the former regime.” Some of my friends, for the first time, realize that I am Alawite — a discovery of my birth caste that is apparently no less momentous than finding a new galaxy or a habitable planet.
In the distance, I glimpse a flicker of smiles and smell blood in the air. My Palestinian neighbor, the late poet Mahmoud Darwish, consoles me:
“What have we done, mother, to be killed twice?
Once in life, and once in death?”
This is not about blame. Blame is for loved ones; friends are not to be blamed. In the end, they are human — flawed and complex, just like me.
For four months following the fall of the Assad regime, the new government in Damascus — through its most influential media figures — promoted an image of itself as forgiving toward the crimes of the former regime. They echoed the words of the Prophet Muhammad during his conquest of Mecca — “Go, for you are free” — presenting them as the stance of the new leader, al-Sharaa, toward the remnants of Assad’s rule. The new authority vowed to pursue transitional justice and hold perpetrators accountable. Yet no official body was formed for this purpose — not until sectarian massacres erupted along the Syrian coast and a weak constitutional declaration was issued in response.
This selective tolerance for retribution directly endangered the Alawite community, nearly 3 million people, who found themselves collectively burdened with the crimes of a political regime that, in reality, had drawn supporters from across Syria’s sects, including its Sunni majority. While a number of former high-ranking military and security officials were arrested, the new authorities never released a list of those wanted for justice — at least not publicly. Unlike Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, where judicial and police institutions were dismantled and arrest warrants were issued en masse, Syria’s new rulers took a different approach. Major figures from the Assad regime walked freely through the heart of Damascus, untouched — including well-known businesspeople. After all, money has no enemies.
Despite their long-standing sense of marginalization, the Alawites initially welcomed the new order as it began to fill the vacuum left by the old state. They celebrated the downfall of the Assad regime, covering their homes, cars and public spaces with thousands of three-star Syrian flags. On the very day of the regime’s collapse, Alawites descended from the mountain villages surrounding the city to join the celebrations.
They believed they would be part of a new dream. But the dream soon turned into a nightmare.
Systematically, and through what appeared to be orders from above, an undeclared campaign began — one designed to provoke the Alawites. The question asked at every one of the new authority’s checkpoints remains the same: “Are you Alawite?” If the answer is “yes,” it is often followed by the most degrading demand: “Bark like a dog.” There is no shortage of evidence — dozens of video clips document such incidents.
In the days that followed the regime’s fall, kidnappings and killings of Alawite individuals escalated under various pretexts. Meanwhile, as Syria’s black market overflowed with weapons, it was only the Alawites who were ordered to surrender theirs. The message was clear: While the new leader received clerics from every sect and religious group across Syria, the Alawites were excluded entirely. The diversity the new authority claimed to embrace evidently did not extend to them. In the eyes of the state, they were all supporters of the Assad regime.
As part of its restructuring, the new government ceased paying salaries to state employees for months — especially retired military personnel. Thousands of workers were dismissed under the pretext of combating corruption and downsizing bloated institutions. The Syrian coast, in particular, bore the brunt of these layoffs, leaving thousands without the means to afford food or water. The new regime had done more than just exclude them — it had created the perfect conditions for their economic and social collapse. It had laid the groundwork for someone else to step in.
On March 5, two General Security officers were killed near al-Azhari roundabout, close to the neighborhood of al-Datour in Latakia. The attack happened late at night, and the perpetrators were unknown. The two officers had been well regarded locally, which only deepened the outrage over their deaths. The next day, a violent campaign was launched in al-Datour, not far from the crime scene, laced with sectarian rhetoric. At least five people were killed in the crackdown, among them university students. Others were arrested and disappeared into the void.
The second major flashpoint was in the village of Daliyah and its surroundings. Eyewitnesses say that a General Security patrol had arrived in Daliyah to arrest a young man over his Facebook posts. The patrol completed its mission without incident, but as it withdrew, it was ambushed by men now branded as remnants of the regime. The new authorities retaliated with overwhelming force. Civilians were killed; bombs and artillery rained down. The media, led by Al Jazeera in Qatar, framed it as a coup attempt spearheaded by a group of Alawite officers, allegedly backed by Iran, Russia, the Syrian Democratic Forces and Druze fighters from the south. Ironically, these were the same forces with whom the new Damascus government had been negotiating only weeks earlier, in its bid to prevent the country’s partition.
At the heart of this so-called coup was a group of Alawite officers led by Brig. Gen. Ghiyath Dalla, who announced the formation of the Military Council for the Liberation of Syria — not through a press conference or military broadcast, but in a single Facebook post. The post was widely circulated among supporters of the transitional president, but Dalla himself never appeared in any videos, raising doubts as to the veracity of the story.
The second name tied to the operation was Miqdad Fatiha. His alleged involvement was supposedly confirmed through videos of a masked man speaking in an Alawite dialect. Word spread that Fatiha had formed four combat units across Tartous, Latakia and Hama — units that, according to information I’ve gathered, included former Sunni collaborators from Assad’s Military Intelligence Directorate. This was no longer a matter of sectarian conflict. It was something else entirely — a tangled web of intelligence and political maneuvering.
How does a military council in Syria declare its existence without a single verifiable image of its leader, save for one unclear photo? How does Fatiha, supposedly orchestrating this rebellion alongside Dalla, remain just as elusive? These questions will linger unanswered — at least for now.
What we do know is that from March 6 onward, the official narrative of the new Damascus regime overtook all others. The state declared, with absolute certainty, that remnants of the Assad regime had ignited the fires that engulfed the Syrian coast, that they alone were responsible for unleashing the flood, that the Alawites — despite the so-called security guarantees given to them after Assad’s fall — had brought this upon themselves.
For three harrowing days, thousands of Alawites hid in their homes, watching a battle that was never theirs, waiting for the self-proclaimed liberators to come for them. Then came the general mobilization — announced from the mosques of Aleppo, Damascus and Homs. Thousands of armed fighters poured in, even though the new regime had supposedly confiscated all weapons. Among them were foreign fighters — Chechens, Uyghurs, Tajiks. They arrived with a singular goal: to liberate the Alawite regions from their infidel, heretical, traitorous inhabitants. The sectarian rhetoric that infused these calls was recorded in numerous videos posted on social media.
The Alawites had not joined the so-called remnants, yet death came to them regardless — walking right up to their doors, finding them defenseless after surrendering their weapons. They alone were ordered, and continue to be ordered, to disarm, while weapons are now sold openly in the markets of the new Syria. Video after video captures extermination squads riding bicycles, hunting down women, children, the elderly and young men. The only soundtrack these scenes needed was the chorus of sectarian slogans, spat in every dialect of Syrian and classical Arabic.
“You are the ones who started this,” Syria’s Alawites are told. “You are the traitors.” Thousands of Syrians and foreign fighters flood the coast, convinced that the true enemy resides here, not in the Israeli-occupied south — a matter for another day. What matters now is eliminating the remnants who stand in the way of rebuilding the nation. As Israel slowly dismantles Syria’s south, the entire nation is called to mobilize in unity.
The foolishness of these supposed remnants — whose motives remain suspect — was the perfect gift for a new regime seeking legitimacy beyond its revolutionary credentials. Legitimacy built on revolution alone was not enough. It has now been consecrated in the blood of existential enemies, of infidels and rogues, augmented by 13th-century fatwas from the scholar Ibn Taymiyya against the supposed perfidy of the Alawites.
The communal and sectarian rampage claimed over a thousand lives, and these transgressions, interim leader al-Sharaa announced after his morning prayers, would be investigated by a committee formed and managed by the new government. A report would be issued one month after the massacre.
The word “transgressions” might be appropriate when two neighbors argue over a broken window. But when one neighbor, teaming up with foreign fighters, takes up a machine gun and begins slaughtering the entire street, the law books demand a different term altogether.
Only a handful of people have objected to the use of words like “excesses” or “transgressions” to describe the massacres. A few madmen have raised their voices, but they are a tiny minority. To exercise reason in this charged environment is to paint a target on one’s own back.
Some have accused all Alawites — every last one, even those born to political prisoners — of collusion with the Assad regime. That includes over 2,000 Alawite political detainees who spent time in the prisons of their own sect’s dictator.
In Jableh, opposition activist and former Syrian prisoner Abdul Latif Ali was executed along with his two sons — Majd, a painter, and Bishr, a dentist. They were shot in front of Abdul Latif’s wife and Bishr’s wife and young daughter. The masked fighters dragged them all out of their home and into the street. The women and the little girl stood there, screaming as the bullets tore through the men’s chests. When the killing was done, no one dared step forward to move the bodies.
One of the bereaved wives, Bara’a, recounted in a March 8 Facebook post:
Yesterday, at around seven in the evening, an armed group arrived in Jableh. They were part of the convoys that had entered the city to “cleanse it” of what they called remnants of the former regime. They knocked on my uncle’s door.
My uncle opened it and greeted them: “Welcome, young men. We are with you. We just want stability to return to Jableh.”
One of them asked: “Your name?”
“Abdul Latif Ali. And these are my sons, Bishr and Majd.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m retired from a civil job. Bishr is a doctor. Majd is a civil servant.”
“Are you from Jableh?”
“Yes.”
“So you’re Sunni?”
“No. We are Alawite.”
One of them stepped forward and said to me, “Hand over your phone. And any gold you have.” He turned to my uncle’s wife and made the same demand. They took the phones, and we told them, “We don’t have any gold.”
My daughter clung to me, crying. A fighter standing beside her said, “Don’t cry, dear.”
Then they ordered the men out. “You stay here,” they told us. My daughter grabbed onto her father. “Daddy, don’t go!” she sobbed.
The fighter beside her patted her on the head. “Don’t cry. Stay here and don’t follow.”
They took my uncle and Majd outside.
Bishr went to wash his daughter’s tear-streaked face. But the pig — yes, I say this truthfully — the pig who had stolen our phones came storming back inside and barked, “Where’s the other one? Come on. Out!”
They dragged Bishr out, and then we heard the gunshots.
I ran. I saw Majd lying dead in the courtyard. I grabbed Bishr’s hand as he gasped, “Ugh.”
“My love,” I pleaded, “keep your eyes open. I’ll find a car to get you to safety. Just keep your eyes open, my love.”
The “pig” came back. “Shut up and go inside, or I’ll shoot you too.”
Then he stormed into the house again. My daughter clutched me and whispered, “Mama, come. I don’t want you to die like Daddy.”
I picked her up and ran, slipping out the back door to the second floor, then to the roof. I was afraid he would come back for us.
I returned later and heard my uncle’s wife wailing in the street.
The “pig” snarled at her, “Shut up.”
She defied him. “I will not.”
So he shot her.
She stumbled onto the sidewalk, screaming, “They killed my children! Oh, Majd! People, answer me!”
She didn’t realize my uncle had also been killed until she tripped over his body.
They murdered all three of them.
I hid with my daughter in the kitchen shed, afraid they would return to loot the homes of the dead. We stayed there through the night, into the next day.
For three hours, my uncle’s wife lay in the street, crying, pleading for someone to help carry the bodies inside. No one dared to open a window.
Finally, our neighbor, Ammar, ventured out — only after he was sure the fighters had left. He dragged the bodies inside. He did it alone.
In Baniyas, Jableh and the countryside of Latakia, masked strangers entered the villages, spitting sectarian slurs in broken Arabic: “Alawite Nusayri pigs!” That was the extent of their conversation.
In Baniyas, they stormed into the neighborhoods of al-Qusour, then al-Murouj, then the surrounding villages — burning, killing, leaving no room for protest. Entire families were slaughtered, their homes looted — money, gold, furniture, everything taken. As if punishing the land itself, they killed chickens, cows, sheep, even nesting birds. They killed my friend, Black — a dog — perhaps because he, too, was a remnant of the former regime.
The Assad regime took years to reach the peak of its brutality, refining it into a method. The victim, however, needed only three months to surpass the executioner. It is a grim truth: The executioner is often a model, an ideal, for the victim to follow.
One lawyer, a Christian no less, justified the massacres by saying that “unarmed civilians who had suffered under the Assad regime now had the right to commit massacres against unarmed civilians” under the new regime.
Meanwhile, in an effort to sever any goodwill that had formed between the people of the coast and the new state — especially with General Security — targeted assassinations began. Among the security forces were men trained in Idlib, known for their professionalism and respectful conduct toward the people of the Syrian coast. At least 120 of them were killed by regime remnants. Some of these killings were confirmed as deliberate assassinations. Others disappeared into the chaos.
A friend who had helped evacuate his Sunni relatives from Snobar, near Jableh, put it bluntly: “All the good ones have been wiped out.” He named Abu Khattab, Sajid and others who had come from Idlib with pure intentions. When asked who had carried out the killings, his answer was clear: “Armed men, in uniforms, wearing masks.”
Ahmed, another resident, recounted what happened to him on March 8. His mother had called him in terror, gunfire echoing in the background. People were trying to steal their car. If they died, she warned, he should not come looking for them. He promised her he would stay on the phone until he reached her.
He rushed to the Ziraa roundabout in Latakia, warning his family to stay away from the windows. When the taxi driver overheard his conversation, he refused to continue the trip. Ahmed jumped out without paying.
At the roundabout, he found a group from General Security and another agency. He begged them to take him to Snobar, but they refused. It was impossible, they said. He pleaded, telling them his family and neighbors were dying. The sheikh leading them hesitated before responding that he would look for a car, but that they had no orders to move.
Ahmed exploded. “It takes an order to save lives?”
The sheikh looked ashamed. Then, suddenly, a car stopped. The driver agreed to take him to al-Muzairaa Bridge near Snobar. Halfway there, his mother called again. The shooting had stopped. Relief washed over him, but the anxiety remained.
When they reached the bridge, they walked the rest of the way. The silence was unnerving. He realized then that they were being hunted by everyone. The remnants would think they were with the authority. The authority would think they were remnants. The thieves would think they were security. Security would think they were thieves. Even the Shaheen drones of the new government might think they were “remnants” because they were running, and armed.
At last, he reached the village and knocked on the door. His mother opened it, and he told her, “Didn’t I promise you I would reach you?”
He hadn’t even stepped inside before the neighbors rushed to him, begging for help. He vowed not to leave anyone behind. Their Alawite neighbor, Ali, had been hiding in the orchards with his brother and cousins. Ali had once driven Ahmed’s mother to the hospital at 3 a.m., days before the fall of the regime, and had refused to leave until she was safely back home. Now, on the phone, his voice was strained:
“Ahmed, I see you, but I’m afraid of you. Of your cousins. Am I safe?”
“What a shame,” Ahmed told him. “It’s me, Ahmed. Are you afraid of me?”
Ali emerged with his family. He had a Kia truck. Ahmed told him to get everyone in the truck. From his time in military police prison, Ahmed knew how to pack bodies into tight spaces. He squeezed 65 people onto the vehicle — women, children, men.
They asked how he and his cousins would escape. He told them not to worry. He walked ahead, scouting the road — about 875 yards to the main street — when he saw a convoy of civilian cars, led by security vehicles and motorcycles.
Then he saw the sheikh — the same one who had been ashamed when Ahmed confronted him earlier. The sheikh had returned, this time leading civilians from the area.
Their eyes met. Ahmed waved. The sheikh waved back. He wanted to stop, but Ahmed gestured for him to keep going.
The truck, heavy with passengers, moved slowly — but it kept going. They reached the checkpoint. The sheikh had already passed through, so they didn’t stop. They signaled, and the guards let them through.
Those in Snobar who know the incident can confirm it. Those they saved from slaughter were Alawites and Sunnis alike. But in that coastal village, the preliminary count of the dead stood at over 80, entire families wiped out. The official explanation? “An undisciplined faction.”
No rational Syrian can justify the actions of the remnants of a defunct regime that spent decades cultivating corruption under the guise of patriotism and resistance. No rational person can adopt a resistance devoid of logic or public support. And no rational person can believe that trading an abaya for a tie suddenly transforms a man from one hour to the next.
It is equally impossible to believe that the new state lacks the means to track and prosecute the remnants of a fallen regime — one that collapsed overnight — especially with intelligence agencies embedded in every crevice of the new Syria. Yet we are told of “nominal wanted lists.” There are courts, we are assured, designed by those who understand the necessity of justice after every radical revolutionary transformation. This justice is called transitional — and it is supposedly executed by righteous judges.
There is a vast difference between imposing the authority of the new state upon an oppressed population and the state’s apparent indifference to certain atrocities that defy all justification. More than a thousand people — civilians and General Security officers — were slaughtered during the month of Ramadan. Homes already surrounded by the hunger of need and the weight of poverty were reduced to ash.
There are those who, desperate for a justification, weave absurd narratives around the massacres. Yet many of the crimes were documented by the perpetrators themselves.
This is not merely a matter of political calculation. There was a need to release the pent-up vengeance that had been simmering for a decade and a half — hatred directed at the Alawites by the Islamic and rebel fighting factions, whose members had spent years battling the Syrian army, which they saw as an Alawite army rather than a Syrian one. It was simply a matter of timing. Perhaps it was also a matter of finding the right excuse. And there were many.
These massacres will be forgotten. Just like the other massacres that took place in Assad’s Syria. Just like the massacres throughout history. The world will move on, and no one will remember that among the dead were civilians, that among the dead were men from General Security. There will be no trials, no reckoning. No need to prosecute such insignificant crimes — not when the course of nations is determined by interests, not morals.
In the end, al-Sharaa’s investigation committee will produce its verdict: A handful of men will be sacrificed — those whose usefulness has expired. A few minor criminals will be rounded up, their arrests posing no risk to the new leader’s victories or the stability of his rule. And that will be the extent of justice.
Can this bloody memory ever become a force for unity instead of division? Or are we condemned to cycle through history’s tragedies, endlessly repeating them?
All I fear is that the massacres will come again.
Last week, videos surfaced showing rebel fighters setting fire to the last forests on the Syrian coast — Qardaha, Draykish — sending smoke billowing into the city. They claimed they were burning out the remnants.
But this is not the end. This is not the fading of a revolution. This is the final act of a desire still raging — an unfulfilled hunger for slaughter.
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