Syria’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) declared their military operation against the Alawites over on Monday morning, but the execution of Alawite civilians has not halted. The number of civilians executed before Monday has also been rising further as more are counted.
At least 17 Alawite civilians have been killed along the northwestern coast since Monday, with the largest confirmed incident reported Monday night in Jableh. A witness says militia members aligned with the government entered the Alawite neighborhood, took 10 men from their homes, and shot them in the streets.
The witness said some of the militia members appeared to be Chechen, which is in keeping with reports that HTS has absorb a lot of foreign Sunni Islamists into the security forces and their associated militias. They have been reported by locals as heavily involved in the massacres of Alawites from the beginning. At least five more civilians, possibly as many as 21, were executed in a village just south of Baniyas, and their bodies left on the highway outside of town.
It may or may not be directly related to the ongoing purge of Alawites, but it was also reported that former diplomat Noureddine al-Labbad and his brother were killed by gunmen in the southern town of al-Sanamayn. This area is far outside the field of the mass executions.
Labbad was also an Alawite, and loosely tied to the former Assad government, which is presumably why he was targeted. Yet Labbad had defected from the Assad government way back in 2013, and had since been serving as a representative to the political council of Syrian rebels overseas. He had just returned to Syria from France two weeks prior to his death.
Though Tartus and Latakia Governorates were spared the worst of the violence during the protracted Syrian Civil War that left the HTS is charge, the presence of a large number of Alawites, and the sense they were Assad loyalists, has fueled a lot of resentment, and made them a main target for post-Assad revenge killings.
The massacres started on Thursday, after a group of Alawite militias attacked an HTS checkpoint near Jableh, starting some major battles. In addition to the hundreds of people on both sides killed in the battle, a huge number of civilians were summarily executed, overwhelmingly Alawites in Tartus and Latakia Governorates, but with some spillover into the neighboring Homs and Hama Governorates.
The death toll from Thursday to Monday is still being counted, with the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights putting the present documented figure at 1,383 killed. The Grayzone spoke to aid agencies in the area who told them the actual toll was much higher. They said over 4,000 civilians were killed, thousands more wounded, and around 200,000 people have been internally displaced by the violence.
Over 10,000 Alawites had already reportedly fled into neighboring Lebanon as of Sunday, and more have continued to head into northern Lebanon, despite the difficulty of crossing in an area where no official border crossings exist anymore.
Alawites make up roughly 10% of Syria’s population, meaning between 2 and 3 million people. Most of them live in the northwest. They were founded in the 9th century by Ibn Nusayr as an offshoot from the Shi’ite tradition, and the perception of them as effectively Shi’ites also makes them a target for Sunni Islamist groups.
