Syrian Alawian community continued to snuggle in fear over the weekend after hundreds were killed by extremists loyal to former al-Qaeda leader Ahmed Al-Sharara's Islamic government.
One militant reportedly posted a Facebook video showing her marching around the abandoned Alawite house, repeatedly chanting “ethnic cleansing.”
Details of the Alawians and other minority massacres on March 7 emerged from survivors despite posting online messages calling for more violence to crush what they described as loyal to the exile dictator Bashar Assad, even if extremists loyal to Sharaa's junta posting online messages.
Reuters It has been reported The March 7th murder was caused by an ambush attack on the junta, but was an even bigger and more brutal operation than initially suspected.
Hundreds of pickup trucks, tanks and heavy weapons, filled with fighter jets, poured major highways towards the coastal heartlands of the minority Alawian denomination to which Assad belonged. They wanted revenge for his loyalty to the exiled president, primarily his Alawian former officer. Some of them are said to have carried out hit-and-run attack spies on new troops to set the stage for a coup against a Sunni Islamic-led government.
Overnight and early on March 7, pro-government fighters fell in the neighborhood of Arcasur in Baniya city, setting fire to a residential building and killing the family of the house, at the first major highway exit. Similar attacks unfold in a series of towns and villages north along the coast, including Al Muktalya, Al-Sil, Al-Silfatier and Balabhushu, where ethnic religion Alawi communities are concentrated.
“I heard the kids scream, the shootings and the father trying to calm them down,” said Hassan Hafush, an Alawyer from Al Kuhur, who now lives in Iraq, on a call with his family before his parents, brother, sister and her two children were shot and killed in town on Friday afternoon, March 7th.
Reuters said the Sharaa government did not respond to requests for comment on the article. This was summarized from the testimony of more than two dozen survivors. Their testimony made it even more difficult to trust Sharaa's excuse The killing was carried out by a few “foreign fighters” who began to unauthorizedly kill Alawis and other minorities without Damascus' permission.
Sharaa told Reuters last week that the massacre began as a legal security response to Assad's loyalist attacks, but it swirled into massive executions as rebels evacuated “year of complaints.”
An independent watchdog group says Assad's loyalists are a true dangerous threat and blame many murders that occurred during a week's bloodshed along Syrian coast. However, survivors said they saw a unit patch of Shara's General Security Services (GSS) wearing fighter uniforms that shot civilians dead.
Monday's CNN Interview The family, where the looted houses were set for masked extremists to film Facebook videos calling for “ethnic cleansing” of the Alawian population. The same extremists posted another video in which he untooked civilians in Araweet: “We've come to you. We've come to you with the taste of death.”
“The swords of the people of Idlib want only you,” he said in the second video. Idlib is a state controlled by Sharaa rebel Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), which was able to ultimately overthrow Assad in December. The masked extremists wore what looked like an HTS patch and insignia to his fatigue.
The family lived in a town called Sanobal. There, “The troops added to the government were stacked in two mass graves, largely unarmed villagers, due to looting, looting, arson and slandering.”
According to survivors, Sanoval was attacked the day after an ambush by Assad's Loyalists caused a wave of revenge killings against Alawis. The Alawites are Shia Islam sects that the Assad family belonged to. Although the numbers are relatively small, they held many important government positions and received other benefits during decades of control of the Assad family.
Witnesses say that the administration's fighters marched through the Sanoval men into the streets, dragging people who resisted and shooting them down. Only a few male residents of the town were spared. Some said they were rescued by “men from Idlib” who opposed the unfair murder committed by their colleagues.
CNN said it will use geolocation and image data to confirm that some of the mass graves described by survivors, including graves excavated near the Arawite Temple in Sanobar, are authentic.
Another Alawian town survivor is called Salhab I said UK Guardian On Saturday, they saw dozens of men dragging them out of their homes and being shot. One of the victims was a 95-year-old “local religious figure,” who was reportedly forced to see the murder of his son before he was executed himself.
Guardian He consulted with experts from the complex hierarchy of a decade-long Syrian rebellion who said he was particularly enthusiastic about killing Alawite civilians, the Sultan Suleiman Shah Brigade and the Hamzat division.
“Both rebels previously partnered with the Turkish-backed Syrian Army (SNA). The faction and its leaders are under US sanctions for alleged serious human rights abuses, including rape and torture.” Guardian It has been reported.
Both of these groups were incorporated into Shara's new Syrian army, replacing many Syrian armed factions with a unified army.
“Now, the integration of SNA factions into the Ministry of Defense only appears to have occurred at a symbolic level. HTS' tools are limited in terms of cracking, as institutional relationships are weak,” said researcher Alexander Mackey. Guardian.
Some international observers who want to facilitate post-war reconstruction and humanitarian aid, keen to benefit from reconstruction, want to give Shala the opportunity to keep his promise to hold the fighters involved in the Alawian massacre accountable.
Like Dr. Michael Mirstein of the Palestinian Studies Forum at Tel Aviv University, last week's massacre revealed the “real intentions” of Shara's administration, saying that Western optimism may have been “misguided.”
Written on Monday at Ynet News, Milshtein Quote Alawian leaders who said the new Syrian regime would cleanse them through “ethnic cleansing” and “Holocaust-like genocide.”
“With a particularly bad twist, this week's jihadist forces were seen dropping barrel bombs in civilian areas.
“The massacre has been slow recently, with pro-government demonstrations taking place in Damascus, and Alshara received an invitation to his first official visit to Brussels. However, these gestures look like mere bandages to the wounds of blessings,” he said.
“Like the past fantasies of Hamas mitigating over time, parts of Israel wanted Syria to be on the cusp of stability. Instead, the region once again demonstrated that sectarian hatred and historical dissatisfaction often outweighed the desire for democracy,” he judged.
