The Isis threat to Syria hasn't gone away
Just as things were starting to get better in Syria, an attack against the Christian community has shaken the country. In the suburbs of Damascus, a suspected Isis member entered the Mar Elias Church during Sunday mass, opened fire on the Greek Orthodox worshipers and then detonated a suicide vest. So far, the Syrian Health Ministry has confirmed at least 20 dead and 52 injured.
As I arrived at the scene, armed members of the security forces were closing off the premises, trying to herd away the anxious locals who had gathered. Rubble and shattered glass on the streets, inside pools of blood. The Syrian White Helmets were picking through the broken furniture and looking for unexploded ordnance with a dog. A dazed priest was picking up scattered religious items from the floor.
It is a step back for Syria, a grim reminder of the 14-year-long civil war that ravaged the country
'I was at home a few streets down when I heard the attack,' said George, a local living in the area. 'Then I heard the explosion – different from the ones coming from Iranian missiles that are being intercepted in our skies these days. As I arrived, I saw the chaos and smelled the blood. I couldn't go in. I'm Greek Catholic, they are Greek Orthodox, but I'm sure I know the dead, some are probably my relatives. What can I say? Right now I don't feel anything.'
Speculation about the attacker's identity quickly spread among those gathered. 'He was Chechen or some other Caucasian!' exclaimed Maria, another resident in the neighbourhood. 'I know a radical previously came to convert people in this church, and the security threw him out. It must have been a revenge for that.'
Syria's Interior Ministry confirmed that Isis was behind the attack. The police and plainclothes members of the new security, armed with Kalashnikovs, were quick to react, setting up many checkpoints around the city. Cars were searched and pedestrians tapped down.
This was the worst attack that Isis carried out since the fall of Bashar al-Assad. Following the implosion of the previous regime, Ahmad al-Sharaa and his group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), took over the government. Despite coming from a radical Islamist background and once being allied to Isis, the new administration promised to protect minorities, including Syria's sizeable Christian communities. They claim many Isis cells have been busted, planned attacks thwarted, but this one slipped through.
It is a step back for Syria, a grim reminder of the 14-year-long civil war that ravaged the country. The biggest challenge to Interim President al-Sharaa was to unify the countless armed groups of various ideologies, ethnic and religious denominations. Considerable steps have been achieved, like striking deals with the Kurdish-run Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army (SNA). Isis, however, is still a headache and is here to stay.
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Spokespeople for the U.S. State and Treasury Departments did not respond to requests for comment. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are estimated to have been killed since 2011, when Assad's crackdown on protests descended into civil war. He went after any suspected dissidents. But Sunnis, who fielded the most visible of the armed groups arrayed against Assad, were disproportionately targeted. Reuters spoke with over 200 families of victims during visits to massacre sites and by phone, 40 security officials, fighters and commanders, and government-appointed investigators and mediators. Reuters also reviewed messages from a Telegram chat established by a Defense Ministry official to coordinate the government response to the pro-Assad uprising. The news agency's journalists examined dozens of videos, obtained CCTV footage and reviewed handwritten lists of victims' names. Some of the attackers responding to the March uprising carried lists of names of men to target, including former members of Assad militias who had been temporarily amnestied by the new government. Entire families with those surnames would later appear on lists of the dead handwritten by village elders. Multiple survivors described how the bodies of their loved ones were mutilated. The fighters, many of them masked, mustered in the new government's heartland of Idlib, Homs, Aleppo and Damascus. And when armored convoys rolled out to western Syria, the militias' cries of 'Sunnis, Sunnis' rose in the night along with rhyming slogans calling for people to 'slaughter the Alawites,' according to videos verified by Reuters. Many of the videos showed fighters humiliating Alawite men, forcing them to crawl and howl like dogs. Others, some filmed by the fighters themselves, showed piles of bloodied bodies. Among the dead were entire families, including women, children, the elderly and disabled people in dozens of predominantly Alawite villages and neighborhoods. In one neighborhood, 45 women were among the 253 dead. In another village, 10 of 30 killed were children. In at least one case, an entire Alawite town was emptied almost overnight, its hundreds of residents replaced by Sunnis. The first question arriving fighters asked residents was telling, according to more than 200 witnesses and survivors: 'Are you Sunni or Alawite?' Ubaida Shli and his twin brother were the youngest of a Sunni family of nine boys and girls from Idlib, a city in northwest Syria, according to their older sister, Yasmine. The twins traveled to Libya as mercenaries. Two years ago they joined the HTS law enforcement body known as General Security Service in Idlib, where HTS was essentially running its own parallel administration. That was how Shli found himself, at age 23, wearing the black GSS uniform and guarding a checkpoint near the town of Baniyas, according to Yasmine and the WhatsApp voice notes he sent her, which Reuters reviewed. Around sundown on March 6, the checkpoint and other GSS posts across Latakia and Tartous provinces came under attack and dozens of security forces died. According to the new government and residents of the regions, the attackers were led by officers still loyal to Assad. The officers were joined by young men who lost their livelihoods when the new government fired thousands of Alawite employees and dismantled Assad's security apparatus, according to interviews with residents. One community leader described the uprising as a spontaneous decision of desperate people. Shli sent his sister a voice message around 8:30 p.m. to tell her half the men around him were dead. He sounded calm and resigned to his fate. 'He said he was helping find ways to get the bodies of the men out,' she said. She asked why he didn't run away. His response: There is no escape. Yasmine learned her brother was dead two hours later. Pro-Assad forces also staged attacks in Baniyas, the biggest city in Tartous. They seized the main road and hospital and attacked the new government's security headquarters, according to Aboul Bahr, a security official stationed in Baniyas who was spending that night in Idlib. Reuters could not independently verify his account. Al-Sharaa said 200 security forces were killed in the uprising but the government has not released names or an updated tally. The Defense Ministry did not respond to questions from Reuters about an updated number of forces killed or the role of government-affiliated forces in the massacres of Alawites. The EU on June 23 imposed sanctions on three pro-Assad officers, saying they were responsible for leading militias that 'fueled sectarian tensions and incited violence.' Supporters of the fallen leader 'wanted to stage a coup and declare an autonomous region along the coast,' said Hamza al-Ali, the GSS officer in charge of the town of Al-Qadamous, nearly 30 kilometers to the east. The Defense Ministry called for reinforcements from all the factions that had recently joined President al-Sharaa's forces. Mosque megaphones across the country sounded calls for jihad. Mohammed al-Jassim, commander of the Sultan Suleiman Shah Brigade told Reuters he was hospitalized in Turkey for health reasons when the fighting erupted. Reuters could not confirm al-Jassim's location during the massacres. He denied his men had any role in the violence. He said he was soon added to a chat group led by a top Defense Ministry official, whom he said he knew only as Abu Ahd. Abu Ahd al-Hamawi is the pseudonym of Hassan Abdel-Ghani, the Defense Ministry spokesman. Al-Jassim's brigade, which is also known as Amshat, was ordered to reopen the coastal M1 highway linking Latakia and Jableh. He said his militia took up positions outside the city of Jableh. As the massacres of Alawites unfolded, the Defense Ministry spokesman Abdel-Ghani said publicly the operation on the coast was proceeding as planned with the goal of keeping control of the region and 'tightening the noose on the remaining elements of officers and remnants of the fallen regime,' according to the state-run news agency SANA. Behind the scenes, Abdel-Ghani was running the Telegram chat of militia leaders and military commanders that coordinated the government response to the pro-Assad uprising, according to a dozen text and audio messages in an exchange between him and a senior commander from another faction. Two people confirmed the Telegram handle was Abdel-Ghani's and that Abu Ahd is his nom de guerre. Reuters contacted him directly on Telegram at the handle. He told Reuters he has been questioned by the committee investigating the killings but declined to comment further. The messages referred to force locations and movements, including one from Abdel-Ghani at the bridge leading to the village of Al-Mukhtareyah, where massacres were taking place. Nanar Hawach, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, said the killings eroded the new government's legitimacy among Syrians, especially minorities. 'Deploying units known for hostility toward communities they view as adversaries, and with a track record of abuse, led to predictable outcomes,' Hawach said. 'They failed to uphold their basic duty to protect.' In a sign of the government's tenuous control over its own fighters, newly integrated factions faced off in village streets at times, according to witnesses in three different locations who all described seeing one side trying to protect bewildered civilians from uniformed men trying to kill them. The M4 highway leads inland from the Mediterranean Sea. The M1 leads south, paralleling the coastline before veering east near Lebanon. The massacres that began before dawn on March 7 would mostly follow those two arteries. Many of the towns were farm communities, with citrus orchards hanging heavy with lemons and oranges in March and fields of vegetables that grow abundantly year-round in the Mediterranean climate. Al-Mukhtareyah, the first village off the M4 highway connecting Idlib and Latakia, came under attack around 6 a.m. Swarms of men, including many in GSS uniforms, broke down doors to pull men outside, forcing some to crawl and dragging others away, eight witnesses told Reuters. The shooting lasted about an hour. When it was over, 157 people were dead – nearly a quarter of Al-Mukhtareyah's population, according to a list from a community leader that Reuters verified with multiple surviving residents. They included 28 members of the Abdullah family; 14 from the Darwish family; and 11 from the al-Juhni family, according to the lists compiled by survivors and community leaders. 'The bullets were raining down on us, sister. We didn't know where to go and how to escape,' said a woman who lost her father and brothers. Another woman who lost 17 relatives shared a screenshot from a video verified by Reuters. She pointed to a pile of bodies in the screenshot and said: 'This is my family.' She traced an arrow onscreen toward a dead man in a pale jacket and sent it to Reuters. 'This is my husband.' The village was all but empty days after the massacre, residents said. With no one to harvest, oranges rotted on the trees. The villages with the most bloodshed were those whose residents belonged to a subset of Alawites called al-Klazyia, according to Ali Mulhem, founder of the Syrian Civil Peace Group, an organization that documents abuses and mediates disputes. The Assad family were al-Klazyia Alawites, as were many of the dictator's ranking security officials, said Mulhem and a senior Alawite community leader. Among the places linked to the al-Klazyia sub-sect was Sonobar, a farming community of around 15,000 whose homes are interspersed with fields of vegetables. The elite HTS force called Unit 400 moved into Sonobar in December, promising that the town would be left in peace under the new leadership, three villagers told Reuters. They described life as tense, but bearable. Early on March 7, the Unit 400 men and hundreds of reinforcements converged and started killing. In all, according to 17 witnesses, nine separate factions attacked. One young man said he saw Unit 400 fighters opening fire as they entered his house. Eleven relatives died. He survived by hiding in an upstairs pantry. Another faction that attacked was the Sultan Suleiman Shah Brigade, according to survivors who recognized the brigade's badges. The brigade came to prominence as a Turkish-backed militia during the civil war and has been under American sanctions since 2023, accused by the U.S. Treasury Department of 'harassment, abduction, and other abuses.' Al-Jassim told Reuters those allegations were 'fabrications' and described his men as highly disciplined. Spokespeople for the GSS and the Defense Ministry, which oversees Unit 400, didn't respond to questions about the attacks. Turkey, asked to comment on the role of Sultan Suleiman Shah and other Turkish-backed militias in the killings, did not respond. Turkey's government hasn't issued a public response to the EU sanctions imposed on the militias in May. In a selfie video from Sonobar, a uniformed fighter shows bodies and proclaims: 'Suleiman Shah defeated the remnants of the former regime. God is great and thanks to God.' The camera later pans to 11 unarmed men in civilian clothes, lying dead on some of Syria's most fertile soil, now tinged with blood. Among the dead pictured were a motorbike repairman, two students, two farmers and an amnestied policeman, according to relatives of the dead, who identified them by name. Al-Jassim, the commander of Sultan Suleiman Shah, denied that his men were responsible for killings in any of the villages they entered. 'As a commander of a military unit, I know that any order must be obeyed in its entirety,' he told Reuters. 'Commands are carried out verbatim, no more, no less.' In April, the militia – by then rebadged as the 62nd Division of Syria's army – said the man who filmed the video had no connection with Sultan Suleiman Shah and accused him of impersonating a fighter 'to tarnish the reputation of the Division and distort its record.' Reuters could not independently confirm the man's identity or affiliation. Another group identified themselves as fighters for the Jayish al-Islam militia. Jayish al-Islam's media officer posted pictures on Facebook of fighters heading to the coast on March 7. He also posted a copy of an amnesty document he claimed was found on the body of the Assad-era policeman indicating that the dead man had broken the pledge he signed not to take up arms against the new government. 'There is no safety, no stability in our country except by purging them,' wrote Hamza Berqidar, the media officer. The post received 160 likes. One woman from Sonobar told Reuters the fighters commandeered her living room. 'Do you know who we are?' one asked her. She said she replied: 'You're the army!' No, she said they told her. 'We are jihadists from Jayish al-Islam. We came to teach you Islam.' Media officer Berqidar and Jayish al-Islam didn't respond to requests for comment on the violence. In all, 236 residents of Sonobor were killed, according to lists reviewed by Reuters and verified with multiple residents. They were mostly young men, ranging in age from 16 to 40. The injured included a pregnant woman, who miscarried but survived her gunshot wounds. One young mother said her husband was at a neighbor's when her door was smashed down. The gunmen went upstairs and started breaking things, looking for him. The group left and was replaced by another faction, she said. Then a third, whose leader embraced her children and promised they would be unharmed. A fourth faction opened fire on the building. A fifth group of fighters, wearing green headbands, arrived with a translator. They didn't speak Arabic. She didn't recognize their language. 'Three militants came and pointed rifles at my head,' she said. They told her: 'You are Alawite pigs. You deserve what is happening to you. If you cry you will be shot dead, and your body will be on top of the other dead bodies.' All the time, she said, she was trying in vain to reach her husband. After sunset, the woman ventured out. She found him on the ground, shot in the eyes and heart. Witnesses said the fighters stole food to break the Ramadan fast, celebrating outside as terrified women peeked through the windows. A photo from Sonobar, confirmed by two surviving Alawites from the town, showed a message scrawled on the wall of one home: 'You were a minority, and now you are a rarity.' The first group of armed men to arrive Saturday in the town of Al-Rusafa numbered around a dozen. It was a little after 10 a.m. Some wore black fatigues and sneakers. Residents had been trapped inside since the day before, when a government convoy of around 50 vehicles, including a tank, had set up positions around the village, cut the electricity and started shooting, sometimes at people and sometimes at random. Now, on Saturday, this new group of fighters seemed unsatisfied when they peered inside the Saad family home. 'They ordered the boys to lie on the floor, which they did. They dragged them outside,' said Ghada Ali. She watched helplessly as they stepped on the prone body of 17-year-old Saleh, her youngest. 'They told them to howl like dogs while filming them,' she said. After a time, they sent Saleh to his mother, and then one of the fighters asked why she still wept. 'I want my children,' she responded. 'We sent you one back,' she said they told her. As for her elder son, 25-year-old Suleiman Rashid, they said perhaps he'd return soon. Instead, his father Rashid Saad received a phone call. 'We killed him and cut out his heart,' they told him. 'Come get your son before the dogs eat him.' Saad and his brother, who lost four sons that day, grabbed blankets and called on Saleh to help. They carried all five bodies home, and the women buried them in the garden, Saad said. The community leader said the attackers identified themselves as from the Hamza, Sultan Suleiman Shah and Jaysh al-Ezza factions. Representatives of Hamza and Jaysh al-Ezza declined to comment on the violence in the town. Al-Jassim denied his men were ever in Al-Rusafa. In all, 60 Alawites died in Al-Rusafa, according to lists seen by Reuters. The youngest was a 4-year-old. Just as in Sonobar, survivors said the attackers left a message on the walls: 'Sunni men passed through here. We came to shed your blood.' Nearer the coast, the residents of Qurfays despaired. The town and the white-domed shrine at its center are named for Ahmed Qurfays, a revered Alawite religious figure. Forces from the Othman Brigade, along with Unit 400, had taken up positions in the village after Assad's fall, according to two survivors and one person with relatives there. On Friday, with news of the killings spreading around the region, villagers chose four respected residents to mediate with the Othman Brigade fighters. They sat in a semicircle on a farmhouse balcony outside Qurfays, and the villagers tried to persuade the fighters that the town harbored no Assad supporters and there was no need for them to stay and fight. 'They insisted on staying, because they said there was a plan already in place,' said a person familiar with the talks. The sound of automatic weapons and anti-aircraft guns rattled in the distance. The fighters and mediators left the farmhouse and headed back to the village. While they had been talking, a half-dozen men were shot to death there, and their bodies were strewn across the shrine's yard and steps, according to two witnesses. The Defense Ministry, which directly oversees the Othman Brigade and Unit 400, did not respond to requests for comment about the killings in Al-Rusafa and Qurfays. 'None of these men were carrying weapons, and no one was part of the former army. One of the men was mentally ill,' one of the witnesses said. Around 50 worshippers were beaten inside the shrine, said the other witness, who was among the injured. Still, it felt like perhaps they'd escaped the mass death they'd heard about elsewhere. On Saturday morning, the witnesses said, they realized they were wrong. A new convoy of 80 vehicles arrived. Someone fired once in the air, and then, as though awaiting a signal, the militia members opened fire. In all, 23 people died over two days, according to photos of the dead shared with Reuters. Looting continued as Qurfays mourned, said the witness who was beaten inside the shrine. The man said his brother was killed. He said one of the Unit 400 men told him crying was banned and that the village should be thankful just for being allowed to bury their dead. 'I couldn't cry,' the man said. 'I didn't have the courage to cry.' By Sunday, the frenzied killings were subsiding. It was time to bury the dead, fearfully and often in secret. For 48 hours or more, grieving Alawite women had stood guard over the bodies of fathers, brothers, husbands and children. Many families only discovered the scale of the violence when they emerged to streets reeking of death, or tried to beat away dogs ripping apart corpses. In Baniyas, near where the pro-Assad attack on the checkpoint touched off the revenge killings, there were 253 bodies to bury, according to the lists of the dead shared with Reuters. In the town of Jableh, the toll stood at 77 Alawites, according to 30 family members. The town was targeted by Unit 400 and the Othman Brigade, along with Sultan Suleiman Shah, Hamza and the Turkistan Islamic Party, made up of Uyghurs and other foreign fighters, according to six witnesses and one security official in Jableh. Suleiman Shah commander Al-Jassim said his men entered Jableh and left because they saw 'many violations' and did not want to take the blame for killings that weren't their fault. Representatives of the other forces didn't reply to questions. The Telegram chat showed the Defense Ministry's spokesman, Abdel-Ghani, was notified about 'breaches' in Jableh. His response, in the chat: 'May God reward you.' Many survivors, especially in Baniyas, said they had Sunni neighbors who smuggled them to safety or who tried to protect them. In Jableh, a Sunni neighbor intervened to help evacuate the mortally wounded husband of Rasha Ghoson, over the objections of two General Security Service men. With her neighbor's help, an ambulance agreed to take Ghoson's husband to Latakia, but doctors there couldn't revive him. Standing alongside the body in the overflowing morgue, Ghoson said a GSS officer in charge of death records refused to issue a document to an Alawite. 'He said: 'infidel!'' and walked away, she recalled. Her legs and hands trembled as she recounted the ordeal. As with most of the massacre victims, there is still no death certificate for Ghoson's husband. Many Alawite villages and neighborhoods throughout the Latakia, Tartous and Hama regions emptied out after the attacks, and their residents camped by the thousands at a nearby Russian base for fear of new massacres. The targeting of Alawites continues to this day. Between May 10 and June 4, 20 Alawites were gunned down in the Latakia and Hama regions, according to the Syria Observatory for Human Rights. The perpetrators have not been identified. Authorities told the U.N. that dozens of alleged perpetrators were detained, according to Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, chair of the world body's Syria commission, in his report to the U.N. Human Rights council on June 27. No one has been charged in the March Alawite deaths, however. The government has yet to share a tally of the dead, and the U.N. said its own toll of 111 dead was an undercount. In December, three months before the coastal killings, President al-Sharaa issued a series of promotions to try and unify the army. Among those elevated was the head of Jaysh al-Islam, and Sultan Suleiman Shah's leader, al-Jassim, who rose to the rank of brigadier general with command of a formal Syrian army unit. The leader of Unit 400, Aboul Khair Taftanaz, was promoted in December to brigadier general and again in June and is now a general, according to announcements from the Defense Ministry. He assumed responsibility for the Latakia and Tartous regions, according to one of Unit 400's fighters. Sayf Boulad Abu Bakr, the leader of the Turkish-backed Hamza division, was promoted to brigadier general after the killings, according to his Twitter account. The Turkistan Islamic Party, a militia with a large foreign contingent whose fighters were also found by Reuters to have carried out many of the attacks, was fully integrated in May into the army. Its leader was among those promoted in December. On May 30, the Defense Ministry issued a code of conduct prohibiting abuses against civilians, discrimination or misuse of power. The ministry had no comment on the promotions or the alleged links of the commanders' units to the killings. Deliberately targeting civilians is a crime under international humanitarian law, and officers who fail to prevent or punish such attacks are considered accountable under the principle of command responsibility. The village of Arza stands as a grim reminder of the cycle of revenge that the government has yet to address. Arza was used by Assad as a staging ground to attack rebellious communities, such as the neighboring village of Khattab in 2013. And few clans were more prominently pro-Assad than the al-Suleimans. They made up a quarter of the 90-member pro-Assad militia from Arza, notorious for raiding Khattab more than a decade ago to detain rebels. On March 7, men from Khattab led an assault on Arza that left 23 people dead, including members from the al-Suleiman clan, and sent the town's remaining 1,200 residents fleeing, according to four ex-residents and two videos verified by Reuters. The four witnesses told Reuters that the Khattab men brought victims to the main square and asked their leader, Abu Jaber al-Khattabi: 'What do you think, Sheikh?' They said if he responded 'Allahu Akbar' – which he did in nearly every case – the victim was shot. 'They are all criminals,' al-Khattabi told Reuters. 'It's like the ultimate divine justice. Just as you made us homeless, you will be homeless, and just as you killed us, you will be killed.' When asked about his role in the deaths that day, he acknowledged he was in Arza but denied giving orders to kill. The attackers have taken over the abandoned homes. Arza is no more, al-Khattabi said. On Facebook, he posted a photo of the new village sign: 'New Khattab.' ■ A Reuters investigation pieced together how the March 7-9 massacres of Syrian Alawites along the country's Mediterranean coast unfolded, identifying a chain of command leading from the attackers directly to men who serve alongside Syria's new leaders in Damascus. The investigation found 1,479 Syrian Alawites were killed and dozens were missing from 40 distinct sites of revenge killings, rampages and looting against the religious minority, long associated with the Assad government. Reuters counted the dead by gathering local lists of names of victims, many of them handwritten, from community leaders and families of the victims. Villagers also gathered pictures and personal details about the victims. For each list, written in Arabic, Reuters cross-checked the names with activists who are either in the relevant village, run Facebook pages, or in the diaspora and have relatives in the places that came under attack. For each massacre site, Reuters also gathered pictures of victims, and photos and locations of mass graves. On March 11, the U.N. said it had counted 111 deaths but acknowledged it as an undercount. It hasn't updated its death tally since. The most recent count from the Syrian Network for Human Rights, an independent monitoring group, shows 1,334 people killed, including 60 children and 84 women. Of that total, 889 were killed by government forces while 446 were killed by pro-Assad fighters, it said. Of the 446, SNHR said that half were civilians and half were government forces. SNHR did not explain how it confirmed the identity of the perpetrators. Reuters could not confirm the SNHR toll for Alawites killed by Assad loyalists or that for the government forces. On March 17, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, another civil society organization, said it had tallied 1,557 civilian deaths but did not detail how it arrived at the figure. The group also counted 273 dead among government forces and 259 among Alawite gunmen affiliated with pro-Assad forces. President al-Sharaa has said 200 government forces died. The government has not released a tally of the dead among Alawite civilians. ■ On January 29, Ahmed al-Sharaa and more than 12 other commanders from armed factions that joined forces to overthrow Bashar al-Assad gathered in the presidential palace in Damascus in a show of unity among men who had fought each other almost as much as they'd fought Assad. Al-Sharaa was named president and abolished the constitution, along with disbanding the Assad government's army and security apparatus. 'The sun of a new Syria is rising,' he said. Each commander received an army division and a rank, and they pledged to integrate their factions into the new Syrian army. In theory, al-Sharaa dissolved his militia, formerly known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, which was previously al-Qaeda's Syria branch, known as the Nusra Front. A pro-Assad uprising in early March in Syria's coastal regions was the first test of the tenuous unity. A few hours into the insurgency, the new government called for reinforcements to defeat the uprising of remnants of the Assad government, known in Arabic as 'fuloul.' Tens of thousands of vehicles, fighters and weapons flooded the coast. The defense ministry divided the coast into sectors, placing them under the command of a top official to coordinate movements and positions, according to three security sources, including Mohammed al-Jassim, commander of the Sultan Suleiman Shah Brigade, also known as Amshat. Five major groups were involved in the mass killings in Alawite towns and neighborhoods, many of which were struck by multiple groups over three days: These include Unit 400, the Othman Brigade, and its main law enforcement body, known as the General Security Service. Reuters found their involvement in at least 10 sites, where nearly 900 people were killed. Before Assad fell, the GSS was the main HTS law enforcement arm in the province of Idlib under its control. It is now part of Syria's Interior Ministry. In 2020, the U.N. described 'deeply troubling' reports of executions and abuses at the hands of HTS law enforcement authorities. Human Rights Watch documented how HTS, then known as the Nusra Front, killed 149 Alawites in summary executions in Latakia in 2013. Unit 400 is mentioned in a handful of online posts, none of them from official Syrian government accounts. Several of them posted in early December, using identical language, say Unit 400 fighters were being deployed to western Syria. The posts describe Unit 400 as "among the strongest units" in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, having received "high levels of training and equipped with the most modern weaponry." Unit 400 was moved to the coastal regions after Assad's falll, according to multiple witnesses and a member of the unit. A foreign intelligence source said the unit set up its headquarters in the former Syrian naval academy and answers only to the top levels of the Defense Ministry. Over the past decade, Turkey launched military incursions in Syria and backed rebels there to oppose both Assad and Kurdish forces it deems a threat. These factions were part of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, Syria's second largest opposition coalition. SNA factions have a track record of abductions, sexual violence and widespread looting, according to Human Rights Watch and other rights groups. Among those Turkey backed during the civil war were the Sultan Suleiman Shah Brigade and the Hamza division. In the Alawite killings, Reuters found the involvement of those two groups in at least eight different sites where nearly 700 people were killed. On his Facebook page, a militiaman affiliated with the Sultan Suleiman Shah division posted: 'Turn off cameras. Kill every male. Their blood is as dirty as pigs.' These include the anti-Assad rebel forces of Jayish al-Islam, Jayish al-Ahrar and Jayish al-Izza. Reuters found they were present in at least four sites where nearly 350 people were killed. In 2013, Jayish al-Islam captured a number of Alawite women and men and put them in large metal cages to use as human shields from Syrian and Russian airstrikes in Damascus. The group is also blamed by rights groups for the disappearance of prominent activists during the revolution. These include the Turkistan Islamic Party, or TIP, Uzbeks, Chechens, and some Arab fighters in six sites where Reuters found nearly 500 people were killed. Sectarian bitterness stemming from years of civil war and Assad's abuses led people to attack neighboring villages and neighborhoods of Alawites, a minority linked to the Assad family. Reuters found the two main sites of these revenge killings were the village of Arza and in the city of Baniyas, where a total of 300 people were killed. ■
