Attachments
Bloody clashes in parts of Syria have brought communal tensions to a head. If the interim government does not act swiftly to punish the wrongdoers, address Alawite anxieties and better ensure public safety, the country’s transition out of civil war could be in serious trouble.
Syria’s interim government is facing its biggest challenge since the Assad regime fell in December 2024. On 6 March, paramilitaries loyal to the deposed regime staged coordinated attacks on the newly established security forces in Jableh and Baniyas, towns on the Mediterranean coast. The assault prompted a swift, chaotic counteroffensive by the security forces and other armed factions backing the government. Fierce clashes in Latakia, Tartous and Hama provinces left many security personnel dead, along with many members of what appears to be a budding insurgency. While precise numbers cannot yet be verified, reports suggest that hundreds of civilians also perished in shocking atrocities, including summary executions carried out by some of the forces on the government’s side. Nearly all the civilian victims appear to be Alawites, an ethno-religious community with deep roots in coastal Syria, and from which the Assad family originated and recruited much of the core of the old regime’s military, secret police and intelligence services.
It is a perilous moment for a country struggling to emerge from decades of tyrannical rule by the Assad regime and a devastating civil war – and for an interim government that needs to inspire confidence in foreign partners, so that they will lift sanctions that are strangling the economy and help with reconstruction. The new authorities, whose past ties with jihadist groups continue to trouble many Syrians and outsiders, can ill afford to be associated with fresh crimes against the Syrian people. The interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has said his government will hold accountable “anyone involved in spilling civilians’ blood”, adding that “no one will be above the law”. Damascus needs to act swiftly and decisively, removing armed elements credibly accused of atrocities from active duty and ensuring that only its most disciplined forces remain deployed in sensitive areas. It will also need to urgently rein in all armed groups associated with it under strict command; follow through with initial steps to establish a transparent justice process for trying those accused of the most recent killings and any future ones; do the same for crimes committed by the Assad regime and others throughout the war; and create a format for dialogue where Syrians from all walks of life can discuss their concerns and priorities with the authorities and one another. This dialogue should be more credible and inclusive than the one now under way.
Tensions Come to a Head
The eruption of violence on 6 March brought to a head tensions that have been brewing for months along parts of Syria’s coast and in its central areas, where most of the Alawite minority resides. After Bashar al-Assad’s regime collapsed, Alawite leaders pledged support for the interim government, run by Hei’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni Islamist group whose leaders had broken with jihadism in 2016 after having been affiliated with al-Qaeda (and, before that, with ISIS). HTS, in turn, vowed to protect the community from anyone seeking revenge for Assad-era wrongs. Yet many Alawites, who were recruited in disproportionate numbers to join regime forces and were regularly used by Assad as cannon fodder, remain anxious that they will collectively be made to pay the price for the regime’s depredations. They also fear being left out of the country’s new political and economic dispensation.
Prior to the early March violence in Latakia and elsewhere, reports of sporadic attacks on individual Alawites had been circulating on social media. Accounts run by the new authorities’ opponents have made much of these reports, but they are difficult to verify. Some of the posted video footage is obviously recycled from another time or place, and other reports are outright fabrications. That said, clearly some such incidents have occurred. Lack of discipline and command and control are evident among some government forces, particularly those previously affiliated with armed factions outside HTS and which the government now calls its own.
The persistence of these incidents has fostered a sense of insecurity, and even existential threat, among several minority communities who were already on edge following the Assad regime’s abrupt demise. The Alawites have been especially worried, given the role many (though hardly all) of them played in the regime’s military, intelligence and paramilitary forces, which dissolved amid its implosion. Members of those forces are no longer receiving state salaries. The community’s profound anxiety about the government’s intentions has allowed Assad loyalist voices to resonate among its ranks. Some of these loyalists may hope the former regime can stage a comeback, and some former officers and militia leaders maintain connections with armed groups outside Syria, particularly Hizbollah in Lebanon, and foreign states such as Iran. For all these reasons, the conditions for a sustained insurgency are in place, particularly in the mountainous terrain along Syria’s coast.
A New Order Struggles for Stability
The rise of possible organised insurgency threatens HTS’s efforts to consolidate power and stabilise Syria so that the war-torn, impoverished country can be rebuilt. When it swept into Damascus in early December 2024, HTS had around 30,000 fighters, while other rebel groups may have had some 80,000 combined. Most of the latter were part of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, an array of militias with varying levels of discipline and no unified command structure. The interim government recast the groups affiliated with it around an HTS core, calling the new amalgamation General Security. It sought to deploy units from this pool throughout the areas of Syria it controls, while simultaneously enlisting new recruits, and sending home the remnants of the regime’s soldiers and security personnel without pay. The new General Security forces were able to rapidly extend their reach in several parts of the country, especially the capital and central cities like Aleppo and Hama, restoring trust and maintaining calm. But newer troops, with only minimal training, have not been as effective in the areas to which they were dispatched, such as Homs. Additionally, many armed factions have continued to operate semi-independently of the General Security command.
In places where General Security has been overstretched, such as Homs (both the city and the countryside) and the rural hinterlands of Hama, unrest has simmered since Assad’s fall. The civil war left a grim legacy of sectarian violence in these areas, which have a highly diverse population. Today, they have seen numerous revenge killings and kidnappings, sometimes for ransom, creating a pervasive feeling of danger among the public. Not every act of violence has a clear motive, but Alawites have been at the receiving end of most of them, with many taking place along the coast, in Homs or in Hama. Whether due to lack of capacity or lack of concern, the new authorities in Damascus have struggled to restore public safety, contributing to a sense of state persecution among Alawites in particular.
Hovering above the violence is the question of Alawites’ future in the new Syrian state. The interim government’s security forces have sought to ease the community’s fears by presenting themselves as non-sectarian. With their arrest campaigns, they say, they aim to capture only persons who committed crimes on the Assad regime’s behalf. In practice, however, Alawites have reason to doubt these assurances. They remain largely excluded, for instance, from the new political and military structures. The government has offered no plan for integrating discharged soldiers into the new army, citing the deep scars left by the civil war as well as many ex-rebel fighters’ refusal to serve alongside their former enemies. Many among the broader Syrian public are also wary of employing former regime force officers or government officials, who are perceived to have enabled the regime’s extreme violence. Economic insecurity is a huge challenge. While mass public-sector layoffs have hurt the population at large, the half-million in the security sector have hit Alawites particularly hard. Many reportedly also lost their state-provided housing, and security officers’ spouses employed in the public sector have also faced dismissal, having been considered guilty or just unreliable by association.
The resulting grievance and insecurity quickly bubbled over into violence. During the first two months of the interim government’s rule, remnants of the Assad regime who had retreated to mountainous, mostly Alawite, areas near the coast began attacking the new security forces in an apparent attempt to elicit harsh retribution that would sway the local population to their side. On 3 March, for example, insurgents killed two members of General Security in a hit-and-run attack in Latakia’s Datour neighbourhood, prompting the authorities to launch an operation to capture the culprits that reportedly ended up killing four civilians. Overall, efforts to bait General Security and win over the public seem to have had only limited success, with residents of Alawite areas often cooperating with the security forces rather than protecting the insurgents. But the nascent insurgency has nonetheless become more structured, carrying out a rising number of attacks culminating in the 6 March events.
The insurgent attacks prompted a general mobilisation across the country of government forces as well as pro-government armed actors apparently operating outside Damascus’s control. The latter forces responded haphazardly and with great brutality, engaging in firefights with insurgents (whose offensive continued) but also murdering civilians in Baniyas, down the coast from the major port city of Latakia, and Mukhtariya, a village along the Latakia-Aleppo highway, among other places. Damascus-controlled General Security forces took constructive steps in some places, for example, protecting Alawite neighbourhoods in the city of Homs by building a human wall to ward off vigilantes, but elsewhere they failed to prevent massacres committed in the government’s name.
Playing a High-Stakes Hand
Syria’s new order could be in serious trouble if the interim government does not figure out how to deal better with the gathering insurgency. The violence thus far has already taken a toll on the government’s domestic and international standing. Regional powers sceptical of the new authorities, in particular Iran and Israel, which have their own agendas in Syria, will likely see the deteriorating situation as proof that the interim government retains jihadist aspirations and may seek to exploit sectarian divisions. The United States, whose sanctions weigh particularly heavily on the country, may well become even more reluctant to consider rolling those back.
Damascus will have to act with both prudence and urgency. An arbitrary crackdown is liable to boost Assad loyalists’ popular support, prompting them to stage more raids and trapping Syria in a new cycle of repression and violence. Damascus can draw cautionary lessons from neighbouring Iraq. There, after the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the marginalisation of Sunni Arabs, whom the new rulers held collectively responsible for the former regime’s atrocities, led to a decade of instability and violence, including three years of sectarian war. A similar dynamic could emerge in Syria today. Events like the early March atrocities could alienate not just Alawites but also other minorities, such as Christians, Shiites, Ismailis, Druze and Kurds.
But speed is also of the essence. While the insurgents, for now, lack the capacity to pose a serious military threat beyond the coastal mountains, a combination of continued attacks on General Security, possible future backing from external actors like Iran and Hizbollah (which Crisis Group interlocutors have alluded to), and an overstretched military responding with excessive force could cause parts of the country to slip further out of the government’s control. In such a scenario, it would also be harder for the interim government to fold in other groups.
Al-Sharaa appears to recognise the gravity of the moment. After offering general exhortations for the security forces to act ethically in a 7 March speech, he went further in a second address, emphasising accountability, including for those aligned with the government, and announcing the formation of committees, one for fact finding and another for civil peace. The first of these committees will investigate the causes of the unrest, identifying and holding to account those, including on the government’s side, who were responsible for acts of violence against civilians as well as those who attacked the security forces. The second committee is to focus on liaison with communities, listening to their concerns, providing support and protection, and fostering national cohe-sion. In general – and in addition to what it does about the early March violence – the interim gov-ernment needs to act quickly to hold accountable allied armed groups responsible for violence or predation against civilians.
Operationally, the General Security command must take direct charge of the campaign to restore order, ensuring that further retaliation is stopped. Groups and individuals credibly accused of atrocities should be sidelined, pending investigation, with the command seeing to it that only the best-trained units remain stationed in areas like Latakia province that are at greatest risk of further turmoil. The command will also need to corral the various armed groups associated with the interim government, making sure that their leaders follow its orders and checking those who disobey, exceed their authority or worse. The government should also put forward a plan to meaningfully involve Alawites and members of other minorities in efforts to maintain security, by establishing close cooperation with community leaders. It could also enlist vetted members of the old police force, which was largely uninvolved in the Assad regime’s violence.
The question of justice for atrocities during the war is a more complicated one, particularly given the strong demand among Syrians for accountability for regime atrocities. The lack of action on this front so far has likely contributed to vigilantism, which then stokes fear among the communities that fall victim to it. On the other hand, hints by al-Sharaa that he intends to hold former regime officials accountable may well stoke further insurgent resistance. In principle, contentious questions of transitional justice should be left to a national dialogue and a more inclusive government to determine – all the more reason why a more credible dialogue process is important. In the mean-time, if the government does arrest former regime officers it should do so transparently, specifying who is being arrested and on what grounds, and afford due process to everyone it takes into custody.
Perhaps most importantly, the government needs to send clear signals that Alawites have a political and economic future in the new Syria – the best way to demonstrate that they will not be held collectively responsible for what the Assad regime did. An inclusive, participatory national dialogue would be a good start. Syrians of all backgrounds should have a chance to air grievances, including with the post-Assad dispensation, and express their hopes for the years to come. Such measures can help dispel inter-communal mistrust. They are urgent, in the short term, for shoring up Syrians’ trust in the new order and for reassuring Alawites, in particular, that the new government will act on its commitment to ensuring security and equality for all.