March saw the beginning of a violent crackdown against Syria’s Alawite minority in the country’s northwest, with well over a thousand people killed in a very short period of time in the Tartus and Latakia Governorates. The slain were overwhelmingly civilians, dragged out of their homes and summarily executed.
The purge officially lasted only a few days, an operation by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) government against what they called Assad “remnants.” They declared the matter over in mid-March, but the killings never really ended, and violent raids on Alawite neighborhoods across the country seem to be happening regularly, whether official or unofficial.
The last few days saw the violence against the Alawite minority continuing in the city of Homs, where a Sunni tribe was engaged in a seemingly unrelated operation inside a Sunni neighborhood, but then took time out of their schedule to attack nearby Alawite neighborhoods and executed at least 14 civilians.
The al-Fawara tribe in Homs got into a fight with local security forces in al-Bayada neighborhood who were looking for one of their tribal members. After that fighting calmed, the Fawara tribe moved against the Zahra and Nozha Districts of the city, which have an Alawite population, even though the Alawites had nothing to do with the security force conflict.
What happened then was all too familiar. The tribe ended up going through a business district grabbing all the Alawite men they could find, and took them away. They were executed, and their bodies were found on the outskirts of town a few days later. 14 were reportedly killed, and 11 of them were said to be university students. The students showed signs of torture.
Security forces have subsequently cordoned off the Alawite neighborhoods, nominally to protect them, though they also concede that Homs is “too intertwined” and that there’s really nothing they can do to stop such massacres.
And while the tribes are being blamed for this massacre, it’s not clear they’re exclusively responsible. One of the students, Mohammed Saeed al-Waari, was actually arrested by the security forces on a raid against his home, and turned up among the executed just a few hours later.
Mahmoud Hamed Deeb, a university professor, was also shot and killed by security forces in Kafraya, a village just east of Homs. An Alawite from the University of Homs, he was lured to the village for a “geological survey” for a well, and was then executed.
Given the security forces are still actively executing Alawites themselves, it is hardly surprising that their attempts to protect them from a tribe weren’t particularly successful. The HTS initially promised a probe into the March massacres, but has since delayed that for several months. Meanwhile, the killing continues.
