“A Devastating Tragedy”: 1,000+ People Killed in Syria Amid Reports of Massacres Against Alawites

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We turn now to Syria, where the new government announced an agreement Monday with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, to integrate them into Syria’s new state institutions. The U.S.-backed SDF has controlled a semi-autonomous region in Syria’s oil-rich northeast since 2015.

Meanwhile, the country is still reeling from the worst outbreak of violence since the ouster of former President Bashar al-Assad in December. An estimated 1,300 people have been killed in fighting since last Thursday in Syria’s coastal region, the heartland of the country’s Alawite minority, the sect to which the Assad family belongs. Nearly a thousand civilians have been killed, according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, most of them in massacres by fighters loyal to the new government.

The deadly clashes began Thursday after coordinated attacks by gunmen linked to the former regime killed over 200 members of the security forces. In response, according to reports by Human Rights Watch and The Guardian, Syrian government forces, along with armed groups and individuals, poured into Alawite villages throughout the region. By Friday, reports began to emerge that scores of civilians, including children and the elderly, were being targeted in reprisal attacks. Unverified videos show corpses piling up on the streets and men in military fatigues executing unarmed people. The Syrian Network of Human Rights found the vast majority of civilians were killed by armed groups previously affiliated with Turkish-backed factions fighting the Assad regime. They’re among the many disparate armed groups the new Syrian government is trying to integrate into its army.

Syria’s interim President Ahmed Sharaa said on Monday the deadly violence is a threat to his mission to unite the country. In an interview with Reuters late Monday night, he vowed to punish those responsible for the mass killings.

PRESIDENT AHMED AL-SHARAA: [translated] Syria is, as we have confirmed, a state of law. The law will take its course on all. And we originally fought the regime and reached Damascus to defend the oppressed people. And we won’t accept that any blood be shed unjustly or goes without punishment or accountability, whoever he is. Even if he were among those closest to us or the most distant from us, there is no difference in this matter. Violating people’s sanctity, violating their religion, violating their money, this is a red line in Syria. This is not only a constitutional law, but it is also a moral law.

AMY GOODMAN: Syria’s interim President Sharaa did not respond to questions about the responsibility of his own security forces or foreign fighters and other allied Islamist groups. On Sunday, he announced the formation of an independent committee to probe the killings and bring those responsible to justice.

For more, we go to Boston, where we’re joined by Yasser Munif, a Syrian scholar and sociology professor at Emerson College who specializes in grassroots movements in Syria, the author of The Syrian Revolution, co-founder of the Global Prison Abolition Alliance.

Thanks so much for joining us, Professor Munif. If you can start off by talking about who died in these massacres, the mass number of people who were killed, and who killed them?

YASSER MUNIF: Thank you for having me.

Yeah, it’s a devastating tragedy, so my thoughts are with all who lost loved ones and relatives. According to the reports, there are more than a thousand people who were killed, more than 770 civilians and unarmed fighters, many of whom are Alawite, and there are also Sunni. The clashes started on Thursday night. The Syrian security forces were ambushed by Assad’s loyalists. And the following day, the Syrian government mobilized the population in many cities, Sunni cities, and bused them to the Alawite region, the coastal region. And that provoked sectarian violence, and the security forces, who are, as you mentioned in your report, heterogeneous forces composed of the Turkish-backed militias, who are famous for their corruption and violence against the Kurdish population in the north in the several, five or six, past years, were also sent to those regions. And they are behind most of the killing of the civilian Alawites in that coastal region.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor, could you give our audience a brief history of the Alawite community in Syria and its relationship to the rest of the society?

YASSER MUNIF: So, the Alawites are a small Shia minority, around 10% of the population, 2.3 million people. And the Assad regime family comes from the Alawite sect. And it instrumentalized the sect to control and to govern Syria in the past 50 years. So, the Syrian government used a double discourse. On the one hand, it claimed to be secular and socialist and didn’t really care about religion, but also at the same time it presented itself as the savior of minority, as the only way to control the Sunni-majority population, and scared the minorities, especially the Alawites. It also prevented the Alawites, for the most part, to have any kind of economic independence, meaning that they mostly lived in — and marginalized economically and politically before the rise of the Assad family. And it made sure that many of them joined the Army, security forces and also the public sector. And this dependency to the regime made it very hard for them to be opposed to the regime during the war, the Syrian revolution, in the past 14 years.

So, there are many opponents of the Syrian regime that comes from the Alawite sect, but oftentimes they are severely and harshly repressed and put in prison, killed, assassinated. And there is also a large fragment or section of that population that is silent and neutral. And there is a minority that supported the regime very loudly. But they were not the only one. There were many Sunni and many other sects that supported the Syrian regime. And because of that, the Sunni majority have developed as a reaction a sectarian sentiment against that population, and it perceived what happened on Thursday as a way to take revenge of the massacre that happened in the past 14 years.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the significance of the deal signed this week between the new Syrian government and the Kurdish-led and U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, especially since that area of Syria is so rich in oil?

YASSER MUNIF: Yeah. So, the Syrian regime is facing many, many challenges, political and economic. So, after the fall of the regime, Israel attacked the Syrian Army and destroyed more than 90% of that Army. And it has been trying to govern Syria and create a platform for political participation, but at the same time was unable to get the support of many of the minority, the Kurds in the south and the — sorry, the Kurds in the north and the Druze in the south, and, obviously, the Alawites in the coastal areas.

So, this is a hopeful moment for many Syrians. Many Syrians were celebrating yesterday, because the Kurds have been marginalized historically in Syria and have been oppressed for many, many decades under the Assad rule. But because they were not completely supporting the Syrian revolution, many in the opposition, and now the new government, did not necessarily feel that they were — they should take part in the political process. And so, this is really excellent news. I hope that they are able to build a better future with the Kurdish population and give them political and economic rights that they deserve because of their historical marginalization for many, many decades.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Professor Munif, the interim president has tried to show the international community that he’s not sectarian. But these massacres have spread fear in the minority communities in Syria. Can you talk about what kind of hope there is for the country coming together after 14 years of war?

YASSER MUNIF: So, the interim President Ahmed Sharaa has a long history. He is pragmatic, too. He came from ISIS first and then al-Qaeda. And then he joined the national forces that were fighting against the Syrian regime since 2017, and, after the fall of the Syrian regime, is trying to present a more acceptable image, because his priority is to end the sanctions against Syria and bring funding for reconstruction. There is need for at least $250 billion to reconstruct Syria.

And so, he is trying to be docile with the West, to a certain extent, with the Gulf countries, who are going to give the money, and has been trying to avoid any confrontation with Israel. It will be to be seen if that strategy will work. Israel doesn’t want his government to be successful, has been trying to fragment Syria, has offered some up to $1 billion to the Druze so that they develop some form of autonomy and oppose the Syrian regime, has been also communicating with the Kurdish population in the north. But at the same time, Trump and the West want to end the war in Syria and want the new government to — they want to pull away the new government from Iran and its sphere of influence. So, he is managing all these tensions and contradictions, and it will be quite a challenge for him to succeed. It’s going to be, I think, a major, major challenge, economic, political and geopolitical, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Yasser Munif, Syrian scholar and sociology professor at Emerson College, author of The Syrian Revolution. That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Thanks for joining us.