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13-03-2025
DAMASCUS: Entire families, including women and children, were killed during the recent violence in Syria’s coastal region, the UN human rights office says.
A spokesman told reporters that the UN had so far verified the killing of 111 civilians since last Thursday, but that the actual figure was believed to be significantly higher.
Many of the cases were summary executions and appeared to have been carried out on a sectarian basis, with predominantly Alawite areas targeted in particular, he added.
Gunmen supporting the Sunni Islamist-led government have been accused of carrying out revenge killings following a deadly ambush on a security patrol by loyalists of president Bashar al-Assad, who is an Alawite.
A monitoring group has reported that more than 1,200 civilians, most of them Alawites, have been killed in Latakia, Tatous, Hama and Homs provinces.
The UN has welcomed the promise by Syria’s interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa to form an independent investigative committee and to hold those responsible to account.
The violence was the worst in Syria since Sharaa led the rebel offensive that overthrew Assad in December, ending 13 years of civil war in which more than 600,000 people were killed.
Syria’s north-west Mediterranean coast is the heartland of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam to which many of the former Assad regimes political and military elite belonged. Last week, security forces launched an operation in the region in response to a growing insurgency by Assad loyalists.
The violence escalated on Thursday, after 13 security personnel were killed in an ambush by gunmen in the coastal town of Jableh.
Security forces responded by sending reinforcements to the region, who were joined by armed groups and individuals supporting the government.
They stormed many Alawite towns and villages across the region, where residents said they carried out revenge killings and looted homes and shops.
A spokesperson for the UN human rights office, Thameen Al-Kheetan, said on Tuesday that reports were continuing to emerge of the “distressing scale of the violence”.
He said the UN, using strict verification methods, had so far documented the killings of 90 male civilians, 18 women, two girls and one boy.
Initial reports indicated that the perpetrators were members of armed groups supporting the security forces and elements associated with the Assad regime, he added.
“In a number of extremely disturbing instances, entire families including women, children and individuals hors de combat – were killed, with predominantly Alawite cities and villages targeted in particular,” he said, referring to combatants who have been captured, expressed an intention to surrender, or are incapacitated.
“According to many testimonies collected by our office, perpetrators raided houses, asking residents whether they were Alawite or Sunni before proceeding to either kill or spare them accordingly. Some survivors told us that many men were shot dead in front of their families.”
Assad loyalists also raided several hospitals in Latakia, Tartous and Baniyas, according to Kheetan. They clashed with security forces, reportedly resulting in dozens of civilian casualties, including patients and medics, was well as damage to the hospitals.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, said its civilian death toll had risen to 1,225, after another 132 people were reported killed on Tuesday. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
