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Sipping tea on an unusually warm February afternoon on his veranda that overlooked the small Alawite village of Arza, north-west Syria, Mohammed Abdullah al-Ismaili said he trusted the new Syrian authorities to keep him safe.
“We believe what [interim Syrian president Ahmed] al-Sharaa says, but the problem is these unknown groups,” the 62-year-old official in Arza’s municipality told the Guardian on 4 February, four days after a group of masked men raided the village at night and killed eight men on their knees. “The government says the killings are individual cases, it seems like they are unable to control the cases.”
Ismaili was dead a little over a month later. He was killed last Friday alongside 24 of his neighbours by crowds of people from surrounding Sunni villages who chanted anti-Alawite slogans while they rounded up men in Arza’s village square and shot them dead in a rampage that lasted about three hours.
The killings in Arza happened during four days of shocking violence in north-west Syria last week that left more than 1,000 people dead – including at least 745 civilians – in some of Syria’s deadliest days of fighting since the beginning of the country’s civil war in 2011.
The wave of bloodshed three months on from the fall of Bashar al-Assad stunned Syria and brought to light the deep faultlines which threaten to tear the country apart after 14 years of civil war. Widespread revenge attacks against civilians have mostly targeted Alawites, a minority Islamic sect from which the ousted Syrian president hailed, though most Alawites had nothing to do with the previous regime.
The killings ended the jubilant mood which had prevailed over the country after the toppling of Assad on 8 December by a rebel coalition led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which now leads the interim government.
Fighting started after about 4,000 militants loyal to the Assad regime launched a wave of attacks against Syrian security forces on Thursday, attacking more than 30 checkpoints simultaneously across Syria’s coast. Blindsided by the attacks and unable to regain control over the situation, the Syrian government issued an urgent call over Telegram for fighters to head to Syria’s coast.
The call to arms was repeated in mosques across the country and spread like wildfire over social media. Soon, thousands of militia members and armed civilians flooded north-west Syria.
Civilians and factions affiliated with Syria’s government began to massacre mainly Alawite civilians and unarmed prisoners, as well as loot and pillage the villages on Syria’s coast.
Horrific videos began to emerge: men in military uniforms forcing unarmed people to bark like dogs while they beat them and gloating over the corpses of a woman’s children while their mother watched; and women wailing on their knees in front of dozens of bodies piled on top of one another.
According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, 529 civilians and prisoners were killed by armed individuals and Syrian government forces. Two Turkish-backed factions, the Hamzat division and Abu Amsha’s Sultan Suleiman Shah division, which are officially a part of the new Syrian army but not yet under its full command, were responsible for the majority of civilians killed by Syrian government forces, according to SNHR.
In addition, Assad loyalists killed 225 civilians and 207 members of Syrian government forces, the war monitor added.
In Arza, local people say they know who their killers were. Three survivors accused the residents of Khattab, a nearby Sunni village, of being behind Friday’s massacre.
Abu Jaber, a religious notable in Khattab and a former opposition fighter who had returned to the village, described how he and others entered homes, and forced men on to the town’s roundabout, with the purpose of displacing them from the village.
“But then people who had their families killed [by the regime] came, and they opened fire,” he said.
A survivor of the attack described how the killers left the bodies on the roundabout and began to loot houses, killing any men they saw while they pillaged. They said members of the Syrian general security tried to protect town residents, but were quickly overwhelmed.
“They came in the town chanting that they wanted 500,000 Alawites for the people they lost. They came into my house and took my brother and killed him in cold blood,” said a woman who was retrieving her belongings from her looted home, breaking down in tears.
A Guardian reporter saw spent bullet casings and an empty Kalashnikov magazine on the ground at the roundabout during a visit to Arza this week.
An official from the Syrian ministry of information initially denied that anyone was killed in Arza, but then said three people were killed. They insisted that the killings were not motivated by sectarian reasons and said security forces had arrested looters once reinforcements arrived.
While Abu Jaber denied personally killing anyone, he said the people of Arza deserved their fate. He claimed that during the civil war the town’s residents had extorted and abused the residents of Khattab, and so the killings last Friday were merely people “claiming their rights”.
He recalled a time when a regime official from Arza had bludgeoned a Khattab resident to death with a stone – and claimed the whole of Arza had celebrated after the killing. “What would you imagine that the villages that live around Arza, which committed these acts, what should they do? You think we should give them flowers?” he said.
Abu Jaber acknowledged that he did not know if any of the perpetrators of the crimes he listed were still in Arza, but insisted that he thought that most, if not all, of Syria’s Alawite sect were guilty.
His rhetoric echoed that of the Assad regime, which was notorious for its indiscriminate attacks against civilians in opposition areas. He condemned anyone who rebelled against Syria’s new state, using an old Assad-era slogan to praise the country’s new president: “We sacrifice our soul and blood for you, O Sharaa.”
Survivors of the Arza massacre admitted that select regime officials from the town did kill residents of Khattab, but said those officials had fled after the fall of Assad, and those left in the town had nothing at all to do with the previous abuses.
“We also suffered from the regime, the whole world was being attacked by them. But I’m not related to them, how is it my fault?” said a resident of Arza.
Experts have said that for Syria to survive under its new rulers, an urgent, earnest process of reconciliation and transitional justice was key.
“Revenge must not be taken by your own hands, don’t take revenge against perpetrators. For both victims and perpetrators, this is a complex process,” said Fadel Abdulghany, the founder of SNHR.
In his first speech as Syria’s president, Sharaa promised to establish “real transitional justice”, which includes accountability for Assad-era officials who committed human rights violations. He issued a blanket amnesty for all regime employees, with exception for those who were complicit in war crimes.
After last week’s killings, Sharaa set up a committee to investigate the violence on the coast. “We will hold accountable, with full decisiveness, anyone who is involved in the bloodshed of civilians, mistreats civilians, exceeds the state’s authority or exploits power for personal gain. No one will be above the law,” he said.
In Arza, people said they could not imagine returning to live, no matter what the government promised them. Most were thinking of going to Lebanon, joining at least 6,000 Alawites who fled to the neighbouring country last week.
Arza was completely deserted on Wednesday when the Guardian visited, except for a few people coming to retrieve whatever belongings remained in their homes. A building’s roof had collapsed, others had their windows broken and appliances stolen.
“We fled with only the clothes on our back, that’s it. There’s nothing left for me there,” said an Arza resident who planned to smuggle himself to Lebanon over the weekend.
Referring to the displacement of the Alawite residents in the area, Abu Jaber said it was only fair that they should experience dispossession, just as he did during Syria’s civil war. “My advice to the people of Arza: if you are planning to return, think twice about it. We were displaced for 14 years in the north. So, be patient for a year or two years, maybe there will be justice then,” he said.
