On the night of 6 March, Munir, his wife and their two sons, both in their 20s, got no sleep. They huddled together in a small bedroom in their apartment as government troops and militiamen entered their neighbourhood of Qusour in the coastal city of Baniyas and went from house to house. The fighters seemed to be moving through the streets with little coordination. One house might get raided by five separate groups, while others were left untouched. “There was no plan,” Munir said, “just violence and looting.”
The first question the fighters were asking when they stormed into an apartment was: “Are you a Sunni or an Alawite?” The answer decided the fate of the residents. Sunnis were spared – although in some cases their apartments were looted. When the raiders found an Alawite home, some stole what they could carry and left; others had come for revenge and would steal first and then shoot. “If one didn’t kill you, the next one might,” Munir said.
Munir, a committed Marxist, had spent more than a decade as a prisoner in Bashar al-Assad’s brutal prison system. When the regime ended in December last year, he was jubilant. But Munir is from an Alawite family, the sect that had been associated with the Assad regime since the 1970s. Members of the community had been involved in some of the worst atrocities of the civil war that broke out in 2011, including disappearances, imprisonment and torture. Munir knew that this could not be brushed aside.
After Assad’s fall, a climate of fear and uncertainty descended over the countryside around the cities of Homs and Hama, and in the mountain villages. There were daily reports of arbitrary arrests, humiliations at checkpoints, kidnappings and killings. Some of those killed were former regime officers or shabeeha (thugs) accused of past crimes. Others were murdered because of disputes over confiscated lands. In some areas, people displaced by the war returned from years in refugee camps, only to find their homes destroyed and neighbouring Alawite villages thriving. There seemed to be no organised efforts by the forces of the new General Security Service to capture people accused of crimes under the regime. The result was individual acts of revenge, looting and murder by armed gangs.
The attacks in Munir’s neighbourhood and all along the coast were the culmination of a series of tit-for-tat raids and attacks. A few days earlier, government troops in pickup trucks had driven through the streets of Baniyas, firing indiscriminately and terrorising local people. On Thursday 6 March, a General Security unit on its way to carry out arrests in an Alawite village in the Latakia countryside was shot at by armed men. That was quickly followed by a wave of coordinated attacks by Alawite gunmen, who killed scores of security forces, police and civilians, seizing control of neighbourhoods and public buildings. Not far from Munir’s house, they had attacked two General Security checkpoints at the entrance of Baniyas, killing half a dozen men.
Syrian media referred to these gunmen as “foloul” – a term meaning remnants, used initially after the Egyptian revolution of 2011 to describe the vestiges of a defeated regime attempting a comeback. The government mobilised troops and called for reinforcements from armed units elsewhere, before launching a large-scale military operation on the evening of 6 March to regain control.
Munir and his family stayed in the apartment right through that Thursday night and the following morning, listening to the gunfire. At around noon on Friday, he received a phone call. It was his nephew, who lived two streets away. He told Munir that gunmen had been knocking on doors in their apartment building. Munir’s brother had opened the door. He was in his 70s and stooping. The gunmen asked if he had any weapons. He answered no. Then they asked if he was Alawite or Sunni. He told them he was Alawite. They had taken him and his son, along with three men from another apartment, up to the roof, where they shot them. The son alone had survived. He managed to crawl back to his apartment to call Munir.
“From that moment,” Munir said, “we were waiting for our turn.”
Ahmed al-Sharaa, the new ruler of Syria, is tall and eloquent, confident in his new attire of western suits and freshly trimmed beard. At first, he seemed to float on a wave of goodwill. In the early days of his rule, he worked hard to reassure the Syrian people, as well as the outside world, persuade the US to lift sanctions, and start the daunting process of rebuilding the country. He stood before hundreds of rebel commanders, declaring victory and the end of the revolution. He ordered all military factions, including his own, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, to be dissolved and reformed into a new national army, and declared the establishment of a new transitional government. Earlier, reciting words attributed to the prophet Muhammad, he had issued a blanket amnesty to Syrians: “Go, for you are free.”
It seemed to be a promise of safe conduct to the regime’s soldiers and officers who had not resisted the rebels – and also, perhaps, an assurance to the Alawite community that had supplied so many of Assad’s loyal forces that they would not be collectively punished.
In the early weeks of the new government, Munir hosted meetings in his small apartment, travelled to remote villages and attended funerals and weddings, trying to tell people in his Alawite community that now the former rebels were in power, authority rested with them and the best option was to support them. If this new authority collapsed, he told them, no one else had the power to govern Syria. “By engaging with them, we can gradually help shape the direction of the new state,” he would say. “If we can transition from Assad’s hell without a massive bloodbath, then we should be grateful to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.”
But the administration that emerged looked less like a body representing all Syrians and more like a continuation of the tight-knit Islamist group that had ruled the rebel-held areas during the long civil war. After decades of minority rule, the new state was assertive in its Sunni-majority identity. One of the first acts of the transitional government was to purge Alawite employees and workers from state institutions and public services, under the pretext of “eradicating remnants of the former regime”. The army and all security forces, where Alawites held disproportionate influence, were disbanded. Tens of thousands found themselves unemployed, with no source of income.
There were plenty who were in no hurry to forget the sectarianism of Assad’s era. When Assad and his family fled, they left behind a ruined country. The scars of 15 years of wars, compounded by decades of authoritarian rule by Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, then Assad himself, are everywhere to be seen: the rubble of destroyed cities, a ruined economy, the displacement of half of the country’s population, mass graves and cemeteries holding more than half a million killed. Deep scars have been left by sectarian violence, and anguished families are still searching for the tens of thousands forcibly disappeared. To tell those people that their oppressors were free – without offering the promise of justice – was too much for many of them to bear.
In the city of Homs, I met a former prisoner who had spent 13 years in one of Assad’s jails. He was frail and thin, after recurring bouts of tuberculosis contracted in prison. After a long description of the torture and suffering he endured, he grew livid with anger when I asked him about reconciliation.
“What reconciliation? What forgiveness? The massacres the [Alawites] committed in our areas are too horrific to even speak of,” he said. “How can you ask me to forgive? I swear to God, I can’t. I just can’t. If I shake hands with one of them, or sit with one of them, then I would be trading in the blood of my brothers, in the blood of the women they raped and the people they killed and slaughtered.”
Others who have suffered at the hands of Assad and his supporters feel differently. To the north, in the village of Houla, where, in 2012, regime paramilitaries from neighbouring Alawite villages murdered more than 100 people, mostly women and children, I spoke to a woman who sat on the floor, frail from a long illness, as she slowly and painfully recounted how she hid in a barn for eight hours as the militiamen rampaged and killed. When she returned to her living room, she found the bodies of 15 family members – men, women and children – slaughtered.
“Men from our village came to me the other day and told me they had captured a group of men who were among the killers. I told them: what can I do to them? Will killing them bring back my family? What is gone is gone, and God will compensate me for my losses,” she recalled, in a hoarse voice. “Even the other day, when they killed one of the masterminds, I didn’t approve. And why drag his corpse through the street? I am tired. I don’t want to see anyone killed. I don’t want to see one more drop of blood spilled.”
Munir, too, was desperate for an end to the violence – and in the early days of the new government, he had believed that such a thing might be possible. But hiding in his apartment, hearing his nephew tell him that he had been shot and his father killed, he recognised that peace was a long, long way off. All he could do was wait, trying to figure out a way to get his family to safety.
Around six on Friday evening, they heard the sound of doors being smashed. It came from a motorcycle shop in the neighbouring building. “We told ourselves: ‘Good. If they’re busy looting the shops, maybe they’ll leave us alone for a time.” He began making calls, trying to find someone who could help get him and his family out of the area. First, he contacted a family friend in Idlib, the rebel capital before the fall of Damascus, who said he would do what he could. The friend called back not long after, and said a General Security car was on its way to extract him. Hours passed. Eventually, the friend called again and said the car had broken down. Munir suspected they had been caught in clashes on the outskirts of the city.
It was then that he called his friend Anas, a Sunni Muslim from another part of town. He knew that in asking for Anas’s help, he would be asking him to risk his own safety, but he thought that, as a Sunni, Anas had a better chance of negotiating the checkpoints. He also knew that Anas, as much as him, hoped that Syria’s fractured communities could eventually be brought together, and that a fragile, crucial balance between reconciliation and justice could be found. Such a balance, both men knew, would be the only way to determine whether the decades-long cycles of war and trauma could finally come to an end. Such a balance, both men knew, would be the only way to determine whether the decades-long cycles of war and trauma could finally come to an end.
I met Munir early in the summer, at his apartment. Thin and bony, he was dressed in shorts and a shapeless T-shirt. The skin on his face was tightly drawn, and his eyes were alternately wide and glaring, or soft and sad, shielded behind a film of tears, at other times narrowing as he stared into the distance. He pulled strands of coarse yellow local tobacco, tucked them into small rolling papers and rolled them into filterless cigarettes, which he smoked greedily between sips of mate, tipping the ash into an old tin can. A soft breeze from the nearby Mediterranean Sea rustled the curtains beside him. A soft breeze from the nearby Mediterranean Sea rustled the curtains beside him.
I wanted to talk about recent events, but he kept going back in time. I wondered whether, by building an inventory of his generation’s traumas, he was trying to make sense of what happened later.
He was born in 1960, into an impoverished Alawite family in the mountains overlooking the coastal cities of Baniyas and Latakia. For centuries, peasants there had been scraping a living in steep and stony terrain. Most were either smallholders working marginal plots or landless sharecroppers bound to absentee landlords. Over the generations, many had been driven by desperation to the Syrian plains, where they worked for Sunni landowners, despised and discriminated against because of their religious beliefs.
Witnessing the injustices and poverty surrounding him, from a young age Munir was drawn to rebellion. Like many of his generation’s youth, he drifted towards the militant left. A friend from his village who worked as a journalist in Damascus had introduced him to Marxist reading circles, and Munir would trek many miles to the city to attend a clandestine discussion, or obtain a single copy of a Marxist newspaper. He formed his own cell and began distributing leaflets among peasants in the fields and workers at the nearby oil refinery. Many of his comrades were educated Alawites, who, he told me, were a reservoir of the political left, especially those who didn’t own agricultural land. They saw in education and state employment their only means of social advancement. “Their religious background didn’t pose any hindrance to adopting secular or leftist views,” Munir said. “Alawite doctrine is esoteric. There are no rituals or formal institutions, no visible symbols in daily life to mark someone as an Alawite.”
After a short period of democracy in the 1950s, Syria endured two decades of coups and counter-coups. In their struggle for power, a number of military leaders cultivated a patronage network and a circle of loyalists drawn from a particular clan, region, and sect. The rise of Hafez al-Assad, from the Alawite sect, was the culmination of this process. In 1970, he seized power, bringing the Alawites to a position of dominance within the security services and the army.
Munir became a schoolteacher in the late 70s, travelling between remote villages, witnessing the extent of the deprivation of mountain peasants. He was confident that only through class struggle could the situation of the rural poor improve. But for many of the Alawite children he was teaching, it was the state, under Hafez’s leadership, that offered a path out of poverty. Often, while registering attendance at his classes in the morning, Munir would ask, “Where’s so-and-so?”, and the students would laugh and say, “Oh, he volunteered for the Saraya militia”, a group led by Hafez’s brother Rifaat. It began to dawn on him that these boys, aged 14 or 15, were being “indoctrinated, brainwashed and shaped” to become the regime’s enforcers.
Munir met Anas in the late 90s in Baniyas. They were both outsiders within their own communities, where neither man fitted the role ascribed to him by sect and family. Even during the height of the civil war, when Baniyas fragmented along sectarian lines and fighters from both sides were kidnapped and killed, the two men maintained their friendship.
Anas – short, stocky and balding – is a wealthy businessman who hails from a prominent Sunni mercantile family that had owned farmland and warehouses since Ottoman times. For nearly two decades, the two friends met for coffee every day. Around noon, Munir would leave the small apartment that served as his office, crammed with old newspapers, files and boxes; walk down a dim, dank corridor with stained walls and the smell of mould; and enter Anas’s flat, which was larger, neater and filled with sunlight. With a pot of thick Turkish coffee between them, the two men would exchange gossip, discuss books, talk about their sons, or just sit smoking in silence – Anas with his long, slim cigarettes; Munir with his hand-rolled tobacco.
Anas grew up in Baniyas, raised by parents who had attended private, western-style schools. They were raised to dress, speak and behave like the European bourgeoisie, and they brought up their son in the same way. When Anas was a child, Alawites had begun migrating from the mountain to his city, driven by poverty, seeking government jobs and education. He remembered how children in his Sunni neighbourhood would chase away those impoverished Alawite peasants with rocks and taunt them.
In his own family, religion acquired a more dominant role after the 1967 war with Israel. “I know it’s a cliche,” he said, “but after the defeat, people started saying: we tried the left, we tried pan-Arabism; neither managed to defeat Israel. Let’s try Islam.” That same year, one of his aunts began wearing the hijab, something his family had associated with the “backward” and poor peasants.
From the mid-1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood and its military wing, the Fighting Vanguard (al-āli’a al-Muqātila), assumed the mantle of opposition to Hafez al-Assad. The fighting that followed, and Hafez’s brutal repression of the Muslim Brotherhood, resulted in tens of thousands being killed or imprisoned. It culminated in the massacre in 1982, when the regime deployed the army and the predominantly Alawite militias to brutally suppress an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood. In Hama, about 25,000 people were massacred. This dark history kept the mistrust and fear between Sunnis and Alawites fresh, and the regime exploited it.
At 15, Anas was arrested, tortured and sent to jail. To this day, he does not know why. He was not religious; he did not pray or fast. He thinks perhaps someone passed him a book, or maybe he was swept up in the larger crackdown against Sunnis under the guise of fighting the Muslim Brotherhood. “Thousands were arrested just for being from a particular family or Sunni neighbourhood, or because their relative was in the Muslim Brotherhood,” Anas said. “Or for reading a book, saying a word or attending a religious lesson. Being a Sunni made you a suspect.” He was one of 120 people shackled together and seen by a judge for a minute or two before receiving their sentences. He believes that only six or seven were members of the Brotherhood. After a few months in prison, Anas started praying, and in two years, he had memorised the Qur’an and become a staunch believer.
“Don’t be surprised,” he said, “because if you put Richard Dawkins – do you know him? – if you put him in the middle of that bleak prison amongst the believers, he will become a believer,” Anas chuckled. “Because you are in isolation, you have nothing beyond the 0.3 sq metres, that is your space. If a war breaks out, you don’t know; if a prime minister is assassinated, you don’t know; if an earthquake hits a faraway region and hundreds of thousands die, you don’t know. Death was our daily companion. We had tuberculosis, cholera, scabies. I was lucky that when I was tortured and beaten, I didn’t receive deadly blows, just broken ribs. I lost consciousness many times, but I didn’t lose an eye or have a brain haemorrhage.”
By the time he was released in 1992, Anas had become a fully fledged Islamic fundamentalist, refusing to listen to music or watch TV, speaking the language of jihad. But his religious conviction faded with the years. By the time he met Munir, he was more moderate in his thinking.
Munir had been dismissed from his teaching job in the mid-80s. Soon after, he was arrested along with his two brothers for their political activities. Officers searching their house found a schoolbook belonging to their younger sister, in which she had gouged out Hafez al-Assad’s eyes in a photograph. She was arrested too. Even the girl Munir was in love with was detained.
In prison, torture sessions lasted for up to 12 hours. “We wanted death to come quickly, just to end the torture,” Munir recalled. “You weren’t even screaming any more, but some of us were crying out: ‘Oh, mother … I beg you, mother … I beg you, let the pain stop!’ What we experienced was not only physical torture, but a spiritual, political and moral defeat.”
When Munir came out of prison in 1993, he found that Hafez al-Assad’s security regime had not only crushed the intellectuals and political dissidents, but also arrested thousands of university students. The Communist party had died and the Muslim Brotherhood had been dismantled. “There were no more political forces, because when you’re imprisoned for 15 years you’re effectively erased,” he said. Syria entered a state of political desertification, and that, for him, explained a lot of what would happen later.
As we talked, Munir was sitting on an old, threadbare sofa, its wooden armrests smoothed by years of use. He stood up, his figure slightly bent, and walked to the edge of a curtain-covered balcony, which overlooked an intersection marked by a large mulberry tree. Over that weekend in March, he said: “That tree became the gunmen’s main gathering point. From here, we could see them moving around. Sometimes, they’d fire an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] at a storage room door to blow it open, setting the building on fire.”
During Friday prayers, Sunni preachers called for “Faz’a”, a rallying cry to arms, and protesters poured out of mosques in Idlib, Homs, Hama and Damascus, demanding arms and vengeance for slain security personnel. That’s when the next wave of violence descended on Munir’s neighbourhood; it was anyone with a gun – many driven by sectarian rage, revenge and fear, he told me. Some of these armed civilians were from areas that had suffered massacres by the Assad regime, and they were afraid Assad might stage a comeback.
The gunmen broke into shops and ground-floor apartments, firing at civilians and loading their loot into pickup trucks. Munir’s second brother called and told him that his house had been raided. Armed men asked him: “What will you give to save your life?” He gave them his car keys and they left.
Munir took his two sons and made them climb up into a small storage nook under the kitchen ceiling. He begged them to stay in there, whatever happened.
“When the killing started [on 6 March], at first we did not think of leaving the area,” Munir’s wife, Wassan, said as she entered the room, carrying a tray with a pot of Turkish coffee and small cups. She placed it on the table between us and sat on the sofa next to Munir. She wore pink pyjamas under a bathrobe and was calm and serene, with a round face, large glasses and a soft voice. Her manner was the opposite of Munir’s animated, wide-eyed gesticulating.
“Why would we leave?” she added. “We had nothing to do with those attacks on security forces, nor did we have any weapons or anything like that.”
In a quiet voice, she said that during Friday night, as they waited for the fighters to storm into their apartment, she decided to gather all their valuables, and whatever money they had, laying them out on the table. “We thought maybe this way they would think that they don’t need to waste time searching the apartment and hopefully they wouldn’t discover the boys,” she said. “I looked for anything of value, but all I could find was a gold wedding band, a braceletSectarian massacres had happened here before, Munir told me. Again, he seemed compelled to talk about the past. The Syrian uprising that followed a wave of anti-government protest across the Arab world in 2011 had unleashed violent crackdowns. “The Alawites saw the revolution as an existential threat,” he said. They started sending their young men to volunteer for the National Defence Forces – death squads that served alongside the army to crush the uprising.
Before the revolution, Munir had been seen as a member of a harmless leftist opposition. After it, he was perceived as a threat to his community. Playing on historical traumas of past oppressions and massacres, the regime message was clear: if Bashar al-Assad falls, this will be your fate. His neighbours suspected him of plotting with the armed rebels, and assaulted him and his family members. For weeks, he was unable to leave the house for fear of being attacked. “If my son had to go to the corner shop,” he said, “I would hold my breath until he returned.”
A few weeks after the revolution, Munir had to abandon Baniyas and seek shelter in his village, where he felt safer. The houses of his extended family were clustered together, and he was surrounded by brothers and cousins who protected him, even if not all of them agreed with his politics. He stayed for a couple of months, but there, too, he was too scared to leave the house because of death threats, both from regime loyalists and the neighbours.
He knew his name was on a regime detention list, but in May that year he had to return to the city because of the children’s schooling and his wife’s job. Less than an hour after his return, men from the regime’s security service knocked on his door. One of them, holding a rifle, ordered him to come with them. He was taken first to the political security branch, and from there he was transferred to the city’s newly built, but not yet inaugurated, football stadium, which had been converted into a detention centre. Thousands of men, nearly all the male population of the city, were rounded up and herded in there.
What he saw in the stadium still haunts him to this day – not the torture or beatings, but the smell. He dropped his cigarette as he described how the young men were sitting in lakes of excrement. “Everyone was shackled, some for 10 days straight, forced to relieve themselves where they sat, while still handcuffed. There were no toilets, just pools of shit.” He repeated the word a few times. “At night, regime thugs would come torturing and beating the detainees, cursing mothers, sisters, God and religion. They did it simply to entertain themselves.”
He was released a few days later, but was rearrested after his faction of the communist party affirmed its support of the revolution and elected him a member of the political council. This time, he was led into the military intelligence branch, and while he waited for the clerk to register his name and ID, he was beaten with electrical cables until he fell unconscious.
On the evening of Friday 7 March, when Anas got the call from Munir, he had no idea how he could help get him out of the area. The fact he was Sunni gave him some protection, but he didn’t know the men roaming the streets, and they didn’t know him. As the two huddled in their apartments, one in a Sunni and the other in an Alawite part of town, they watched a massacre unfold, on a par with some of the worst days of the war. Anas wondered whether he would ever see his friend again.
On Saturday morning, the sound of gunfire resumed, and Munir began making frantic phone calls. The wife of his second brother, the one whose car had been taken the night before, called to say that a different group of fighters had dragged her husband and his son, a 35-year-old schoolteacher, up to the rooftop along with two neighbours, and shot them all.
Under the mulberry tree in front of the house, the fighters had brought a man and put him up against the wall. “Over there, near the tree,” Munir said, pointing. “They sprayed him with bullets. Then one of them kicked him with his boot to make sure he was dead.”
Early that morning, Anas received a call from his old university professor, pleading for help. “He was a friend. His son was an engineer who had worked in my office. His other son was a judge. Like me, they had liberal, progressive views. He called me at 7.30 or 8 in the morning and asked me for help. By then I had found a route into the area.” Anas called Munir. “Get ready,” he said. “I’ll be right under the building in two minutes.”
Munir and his family were too scared to even look from the balcony to check if the car was there, afraid the gunmen across the street might spot them. “I told my wife and the kids: ‘We’re going to take the risk.’ We went downstairs. When we reached the building entrance, I left them inside and poked my head out, just a little. I saw the car.” Munir yelled at his family to move. “‘Ya Allah,’ we said, and we ran as fast as we could and jumped into the car.”
Anas also sent a car to his professor’s house. He called the professor to tell him. When the professor heard the sound of a car approaching, he and his wife, their two sons and their wives, rushed downstairs and into the street – but it wasn’t Anas’s car. When they realised their mistake, they ran back into the building, but gunmen got out of the car and followed them inside. They shot the professor and two of his sons. The gunmen told the women: “We will spare you so that you die of grief.”
Anas’s car pulled up two minutes later. It picked up the survivors, who arrived at Anas’s house – some in a state of shock, some hysterical. By then, a third family had arrived. They had survived a similar ordeal and were also in a desperate state. Anas begged the more than a dozen people gathering in his apartment to be silent, lest the neighbours hear their cries and denounce them.As far as he knew, he was the only person helping the Alawites escape, and he was scared. “Some families stayed for two or three days, but the professor’s family stayed for 10 days; they were too scared to leave.”
Anas heard the government spokesman announcing on Saturday evening that the situation was back to normal and that the streets were clear of corpses, but he did not believe it. It later came to light that the killing had continued to the end of Sunday. On Monday, Anas drove Munir back to his home and continued to the professor’s house.
The streets were deserted, ground-floor shops were gutted and burnt black cavities spewed faint trails of smoke. Some buildings were still being looted. He found the professor’s body at the entrance to his building, next to those of his two sons. Further down was the body of the professor’s sister, who had been killed a day before him. It was early March and the nights were cold, yet the bodies were beginning to fester and reek. “I walked through the building. There were four apartments. In each, I saw two or three bodies,” Anas said.
He called the Red Crescent. When they arrived, he joined them in collecting the dead, then followed them to the cemetery. “I stayed there until six in the evening, performing the burial rituals, as there were no men from that family present.”
It was an Alawite cemetery, and he was surprised to see that most of the people gathered there were Sunnis, people who had also been sheltering Alawite families and were now helping the survivors bury their dead. “Maybe that’s the only positive thing that came out of this massacre,” Anas said.
I asked him if he was ever scared. Of course I was, he said. “When I brought the families to my building, I told them not to make noise or even turn on the lights. The night before, on the Friday, when I wanted to bring a family and put them up in my brother’s house, the neighbours refused and told me: if you bring Alawites here, we will denounce you.
“By Monday morning, we realised that the whole of Baniyas had been sheltering families. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I told you that 60% of the Alawite neighbourhood was in our neighbourhood.
“Every family around here survived because a Sunni family took care of us,” Munir said.
“I don’t believe all this crap about martyrdom and life after death,” said Anas. “I spent 15 years in jail with the jihadis. Humanity – humanity is the only power that is bigger than fear.”
Anas was sitting on the sofa next to Munir, whose wife had gone to the kitchen to make another pot of coffee. In his pressed short-sleeve shirt and slacks, the man who braved checkpoints to rescue victims of organised violence resembled a bank manager in a provincial town. He spoke in a measured voice, elegant in its Levantine refinement but devoid of emotion, like someone auditing a financial report.
When Hafez al-Assad became the president in 1971, Anas said, he inflicted disaster on the Alawites. He used the sect to enact violence on his opponents, and the sect would take the blame for it. “It was in prison that I realised that they, the Alawites, had been oppressed as a community. They were mistreated as peasants, so they wanted to take their revenge when Hafez came to power, and now the others wanted to take their revenge. If we continue in this cycle, it will be people like me and Munir who will be destroyed.”
On 9 March, in his second address to the nation since the beginning of the massacres, president Sharaa promised a national inquiry to investigate the events of the weekend. On 22 July, the government released its report on the massacres. It identified 1,426 victims – 238 from the security forces and the rest civilians – and promised to “bring the perpetrators to justice”. It said there were 298 suspects. Any attempt toclaim the killings as sectarian in nature were rejected; they were described as acts of revenge, devoid of ideology.
Over the phone in mid-August, Munir told me that intimidation, kidnappings and assassinations of Alawites had not stopped, though attention had moved on. Sectarian fighting had broken out elsewhere.
In mid-July, a feud between a Druze farmer and Bedouin tribesmen in southern Syria spiralled into clashes between the two communities. When government forces intervened, the violence widened into new sectarian battles, including summary executions of Druze civilians. Israel, which had intensified its attacks on Syria since the fall of the Assad regime, intervened on the side of the Druze, bombing Damascus and government positions. The government promised another report.
“Yesterday the Alawites, today the Druze, tomorrow maybe the Kurds,” Munir said. “Without a coherent new social contract for Syria, the killings will continue.”
Munir and Anas are pseudonyms