No-one covers up their war crimes any more. They film them, celebrate them, post them on X. So we have videos from Syria this week showing Islamist fighters making terrified Alawite men get on their hands and knees and howl like dogs. In one video, the victims crawl along a street spattered with blood and gore as a bearded gunman clubs them with a wooden pole. The camera comes to rest on half a dozen bodies. Then we hear rifle shots.
There has been a massacre of Alawites in Syria this past week: hundreds of civilians have been killed. The killings were perpetrated by the militias that put Syria’s new President, Ahmed al-Sharaa –formerly the militia leader known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani – in power. For some, the true face of the country’s new rulers has been revealed. At the very least, whether the guilty men are punished will tell us what kind of country Syria has become after the fall of the Assad dictatorship.
Two of the videos of men being made to crawl to their deaths were filmed at an Alawite village named al-Mukhtariyah. I spoke to a man originally from there, Hussein (not his real name of course). He is afraid that speaking to me will get him killed: ‘These are very, very vengeful people.’ He recognised the streets in the films and the anguished faces of his neighbours.
We spoke about the gunmen’s mixture of anger and glee, joyfully humiliating their victims, no doubt seeing it as a reckoning for the Assad years. Hussein told me that his village had not become rich under the old regime. They were ‘simple’ people who made a poor living as farmers, growing mainly oranges and grape leaves. He thought the worst thing about the video was that it was published without shame: ‘They are proud. That is the horrific thing.’
As soon as rumours reached Hussein of an attack, he started phoning his relatives. At one house, a teenage boy answered, apparently spared because he’s severely disabled. ‘My father and my cousin are dead,’ the boy said, before telling Hussein what had happened. At around 7 a.m. on 7 March, a convoy of cars pulled up on the motorway overlooking al-Mukhtariyah. There was heavy machine gun fire into the village for a long time, ‘just firing, firing, firing’.
Some families fled into the fields. Most hid behind locked doors. Two cars drove down the main street. Armed men got out and shouted: ‘Stay indoors and you won’t be harmed.’ Then the rest of the convoy arrived. They went from house to house, making the men come out.
Hussein’s 31-year-old cousin, a shopkeeper, stepped out at gunpoint. So did the man’s two brothers-in-law, who lived next door. ‘My cousin was killed in front of his house and in front of his pregnant wife. The two brothers of his wife were killed, also in front of their wives and children. They told all of the women: “Don’t touch the bodies, don’t move them, don’t bury them.”’ Hussein also spoke to a woman whose 70-year-old father-in-law was killed. They shot him inside the house and told his wife the same: ‘Don’t move him, and don’t move either, or we’ll make you suffer.’ She sat for hours next to her dead husband, weeping.
Hussein said that any male not shot straight away was made to crawl through the village, past the corpses, getting blows from boots, fists and rifle butts, being forced to make animal noises, until eventually they reached a piece of open ground. There they were all killed. Late in the day, men who had escaped to the fields returned to check on their homes, which had been set alight. Many were killed in a second round of shooting, when the gunmen returned. Hussein lost ten members of his extended family. The village lost 148 people. All were shot at close range, most in the head.
There was one woman among the dead; the rest were male, the oldest in his eighties, the youngest 16.
‘They told all of the women: “Don’t touch the bodies, don’t move them, don’t bury them.”’
The dead could not be moved until two days later, once the regular security forces arrived. They were from the new government of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant (HTS). Hussein wouldn’t speculate about whether the gunmen who did the killing were also members of HTS, or if they were from another armed group – dozens joined together to get rid of Assad and are now part of the ruling coalition.
All he could say was there seemed to be a mixture of Syrians and foreign jihadis. The HTS soldiers watched over the villagers while they buried their dead. There were no shrouds in which to wrap the bodies and no water to wash them. There was time to dig only a mass grave. Afterwards, the men from HTS said they had to go, and told everyone to hide in the fields again. They told them not to take photos or talk to anyone about what had taken place.
That was one of many massacres of Alawites. There are reports that Christians and Druze were murdered, too. The spark for this explosion of violence came last week when a new Alawite rebel group, the Military Council for the Liberation of Syria, launched an armed insurrection. There’s been a growing insurgency in the Alawite homeland of Latakia since the new government took over in December, but this was a dramatic new offensive. It started with an ambush on a convoy of police recruits, killing as many as 20, according to one source I spoke to.
The rebels set up checkpoints, effectively seizing a few small towns and villages. They allegedly fired on ambulances and workers coming to repair power lines. In response, thousands of HTS loyalists poured into Latakia. An aerial photograph of one of the main roads showed a long tailback of pick-up trucks packed with armed men.
You can see the signpost for the turning to al-Mukhtariyah in that photograph. It was the village’s misfortune to be one of the first Alawite settlements on the highway from northern Syria. Many of the Sunni armed groups based in that region are little more than criminal gangs, the dregs of the anti-Assad rebels, rejected by the CIA as too extreme. Instead, they were taken up by Turkey to use against the Kurds. One of these groups is the Suleiman Shah Brigade, named after a founder of the Ottoman empire to please their Turkish paymasters. It is led by a notorious commander named Abu Amsha, whose fighters are known as the ‘Amshat’.
Before the civil war, Abu Amsha was a humble farmworker. Now he is fabulously wealthy. He is under American sanctions, accused of ordering kidnapping, extortion and theft on a scale that brings in tens of millions of dollars a year. One year, he is said to have seized the entire olive crop from Kurdish farmers in the territory he controlled (exporting the oil through Turkey, labelled as Turkish olive oil). Today he’s said to charge the farmers a ‘tax’ for every olive tree. He is known in northern Syria as ‘the chicken thief’ because locals say his men have a habit of stealing chickens from farms. He is also accused of raping the wife of one of his men. He has denied it, but the woman disappeared after making the accusation.
Abu Amsha reportedly ordered his men to Latakia ‘to destroy the remains of the regime’, adding: ‘No filming.’ What seems to be an audio recording of his speech on the eve of the brigade’s departure was posted to Facebook. In it, he tells his troops: ‘Whoever breathes, eliminate him; whoever says a word, eliminate him; whoever has a weapon, eliminate him; whoever demonstrates, eliminate him. Nothing but this can be done to make things right.’
The recording continues: ‘Slaughter the Alawites, and the Druze will lower their flags, the Druze pigs. Either Syria will become all Sunni, or we will burn it.’ If this is authentic, it was not supposed to be taped, let alone made public. But much of the killing and looting has been blamed on the Amshat.
A committee of inquiry into the massacres has been formed by Syria’s interim President al-Sharaa. He should know who to question – the chicken thief, for instance, is hardly a stranger to him. Abu Amsha was at the revolutionary ‘victory conference’ in December that acclaimed al-Sharaa the country’s leader. In turn, the new President appointed him a brigadier-general in Syria’s post-Assad army. Nevertheless, one observer who knows al-Sharaa’s thinking told me he had wanted restraint when he first got reports that ‘three to four thousand’ former regime soldiers had joined the rebels. The source said he had not ordered fighters to Latakia, wanting to avoid a bloodbath.
‘Whoever breathes, eliminate him; whoever says a word, eliminate him; whoever demonstrates, eliminate him’
Though she has lost members of her family, Hala Mansour wants to give her country’s new President a chance. She has fled Latakia to another part of the country. Her family lived in the town of Banyas, which saw some of the worst killing and looting. She sent me a photo of a happy-looking group: her aunt, a dentist; her uncle, a vet; and their sons, one aged 21, at university, the other 16 and still at school. Her aunt and uncle thought they’d be safe when the shooting started. They were not political. They had not supported the regime.
Gunfire started around 4 a.m. A group of Syrian Sunnis and foreign fighters came to their door, firing shots inside the house. They left after setting fire to the family’s car. A different group of gunmen came back later that day. They shot the father on the doorstep. The younger boy ran to help and was shot. The older boy tried to escape by jumping from a balcony and was shot as he ran away. Hala’s aunt was killed too. This account came from a Sunni woman who was their neighbour, married to an Alawite. Their house was badly damaged by a tank shell so they had gone to stay with Hala’s aunt. The woman’s husband and daughter were shot. She was allowed to live because she was wearing a hijab. ‘She’s the only one who survived in that house.’
Hala told me with so many videos showing the faces of the gunmen, she expected to see arrests. And so she wanted to let the inquiry committee do its work: ‘We want justice.’ Hussein too does not want ‘all this blood to go to waste’. But he has already made his judgment, asking how armed groups like the Amshat were allowed into Latakia in the first place. He blames the man he still calls al-Jolani, and doesn’t believe all the earnest assurances about the Alawites’ security: it was as if Jolani had said: ‘I will just close my eyes for a second and let the fighters do what they want. Then I will open my eyes and tell them, “No, don’t do it.”’
In yet another video posted to X – apparently by a government supporter – a Sunni fighter shoots in the air and shouts: ‘Allahu Akbar. We will trample on you, oh Alawite pigs.’ President al-Sharaa will have to purge these men – and men like the chicken thief – if he is to continue to receive the western visitors who politely ignore his well-known past as al Qaeda’s leader in Syria. They sit in the deep armchairs in the presidential palace and nod along respectfully to a man who only recently changed from fatigues to a lounge suit. The British government has given its seal of approval, lifting sanctions and approving a £50 million aid package.
Or perhaps the former militia commander knew exactly what he was doing. That would make the massacre in Latakia a return to the ‘Hama rules’ – a term coined by the New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman. The old regime flattened the city as a warning that rebellion would be met by brutal violence: strike fear into the hearts of your people by letting them know you play by no rules at all. If that is what happened in Latakia, the Syrian people will find they have replaced one Arab strongman with another.
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Written by Paul Wood
Paul Wood was a BBC foreign correspondent for 25 years, in Belgrade, Athens, Cairo, Jerusalem, Kabul and Washington DC. He has won numerous awards, including two US Emmys for his coverage of the Syrian civil war.
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