March 9, 2025 - 2:00pm
The news from Syria is grim. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) has accused Government forces of killing at least 745 Alawite civilians in the coastal regions of Latakia and Tartous. So far, there are reports of about 30 massacres. Former President Bashar al-Assad and his family were Alawites, an offshoot of Shiism that makes up around 10% of Syriaâs population. It looks a lot like payback.
More than 1,000 people have reportedly died in the past 48 hours, making it the worst violence in Syria since Assad fell last December. The BBC reports that the death toll also includes 125 security forces loyal to the Islamist-led government and 148 former regime loyalists, who have clashed for several days.
The extreme violence poses a serious threat to the stability of the nascent Syrian state, especially as regards confidence in former al-Qaeda leader-turned-Islamist-turned-statesman Ahmed al-Sharaa. When I visited Syria a few weeks ago, Damascus bore the clear signs of 13 years of war and decades of autocracy. But the people were also positive; they hoped for a better future.
And so, tentatively, did the watching world. No Western politician or diplomat I spoke to thought that the end of Assad meant that things would now be rosy for Syria. But they felt they had to give things a chance. Talk of lifting sanctions began â a vital necessity if the new government is to have any chance at all of rebuilding the shattered country.
The US decided to lift the $10 million bounty it had on Sharaaâs head (albeit under his previous nom de guerre, al-Jolani). The general feeling was that Sharaa is sincere in his desire to govern fairly and in his abandonment of Jihad (even if only for pragmatic reasons â heâs intelligent enough to understand that it doesnât lead anywhere good). The question was always of course whether those around him felt the same.
Perhaps that question is now starting to be answered.
Yesterday I spoke to an Alawite on the ground. âIn the city of Banias alone, which is 12 km from my village, about 100 civilians were killed yesterday, including about 30 women, children and elderly people,â he told me. âToday we hear about the names of other dead. In other areas, the numbers are greater. No movement is allowed. Any Alawite who moves is executed, and it is forbidden to remove the bodies or treat the wounded. Civilian hospitals are reserved only for the attackers.â
Reports are surfacing online that much of the violence is from pro-Assad loyalists determined to undermine the regime. But even if true, no one denies the massacres of civilians, including children, and at any rate the footage online (while some of it may well be old masquerading as new) confirm the extent of the incontinent murder.
Apart from the pointless waste of life and the return of the worst type of brutality to a country that has had its fill, the violence is instructive. Syria is a multi-ethnic and religious state. Beyond the Sunni majority, it has large numbers of Christians, Alawite and Kurds. Any settlement that seeks to impose a hegemony, be it Sunni, Alawite, Christian or Kurd, will end in violence. Syriaâs future must be, if not an avowed federation, then a settlement based around compromise that accommodates all. And the (understandable) desire for revenge must be stamped out.
If not, then the violence we are seeing will become the norm, and the country will return to the chaos of Assad, only this time it will be worse. Alongside the horrors will be the pain of a missed opportunity that, had it been approached correctly, might well have led to real change.
David Patrikarakos is UnHerd‘s foreign correspondent. His latest book is War in 140 characters: how social media is reshaping conflict in the 21st century. (Hachette)
dpatrikarakos
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeA sober assessment, but the last line leaves a gaping question:
How should it be approached correctly?
Does the author know? Does anyone, al-Sharaa included, know?
There is no method to madness.
We in the West are crippled by anxiety over how to approach the madness that is the Islamic Middle East. Israel on the other hand has the proper approach. Many would say that they have had much luck since the October 2023 atrocities but one makes one’s own luck. The Golan now lies to the south and west of Israel’s influence in Syria via the Druze. Prior to these times it was on a disputed border. Inch by inch Israel asserts it’s superiority over those who would harm it. There are lessons there for us. Pick your allies well and strike when the opportunity arises.
I’m not sure.
‘Israel’ or her nascent proxies in the Haganah and Irgun lustily participated in just this sort of ‘madness’ when they needed to. Deir Yassin and Balad Al Sheikh being the epitome of the genre. Killing adult males and terrorising dependants into fleeing disputed territory.
Now Israel is a modern and succesful nation-in-arms sitting beneath her Iron Dome but when Jews in Palestine hostorically had to fight for their lives with small arms against their next-door-neighbours they showed no apparent reluctance in using the time-honoured tactics of massacre, revenge and expulsion.
As David Ben Gurion said of the Al-Khisas Raid and massacre of Arabs in 1948 –
“The question is not if there is a necessity to retaliate … We need strong and harsh retaliation … we must be merciless in hitting them; including women and children, or our retaliation will not be efficient. No need to differentiate … between the guilty and the innocent.”
Sounds familiar.
“the watching world….hoped for a better future…”?
The only members of “the watching world” who may have been hopeful were the “experts” in the governing class of various Western countries.
Insofar as the ordinary people in “the watching world” even thought about it, they realise that leopards don’t change their spots and expect nothing in or from the Middle East except death and destruction. And they don’t want it in their own countries…but they’re getting it.
Yet again the “experts” have created a total clusterf**k which they’ll try to represent as an improvement on what was there before. It won’t be, it never is. And yes,,there will be “blowback” one way or another.
Not at all surprising.
This is what Labour and Conservatives want for the UK too.
In place of a homogeneous, mostly harmonious society, weâll have feuding savages.
Western âcentristsââ leftistsâ think their âvaluesâ are so supreme that any outsider who enters their radius will immediately be overwhelmed and adopt their way of thinking. Itâs a bizarre form of supremacy mixed with cowardice.
So we now have definitive evidence to draw some conclusions about the long term results of the “Arab Spring” initiative: a gift to Islamic extremists, a nightmare for those stuck living with the results.
The only way peace is going to happen is by carving up the country, Majority Kurdish areas (in the North and East) to the long-awaited Kurdistan, the East coast to the Alawites and finally (perhaps) the Golan given to Christians under an Israeli protectorate. The last of these is the least likely to happen and to be honest the Christians will get whatever they are given – asylum in Israel perhaps, or the West; Hungary has a policy of taking in non-Western Christians who are persecuted.
It’s hard to know what’s true anymore. There’s so much propaganda from every side. What we do know is that ordinary Syrians continue to suffer. Challenge yourself, improve your skills, and see if you have the patience to beat snake game.
That looks along the right lines.
Only idiots and Guardian-reading âcentristsâ, comfortably settled in their regime-approved worldview and listeners of the âRest is Politicsâ podcast, could have hoped for anything different. These people are consistently wrong about everything, which is exactly why they must be removed from every lever of power in Western societies.
I listened to a report from Syria today that said some 3,000 Alawites had been massacred and the slaughter continues. One mother was forced to watch the beheading of all but one of her sons. Horrific and obscene brutality seems to be the modus operandi.
Really? Nothing in the Guardian..
Shocking. Shocking I say. Perhaps they didnât have any room left after all of the Ttrump is crazyâ articles and the pro-Palestinian rants. The only thing that has made sense recently is Trumpâs plan for Gaza. How many years of âhope for the futureâ must these poor people live and die through before someone does something about it, other than hand wringing, navel gaveling and pearl clutching?
No matter how much the new regime wants no reprisals (assuming they which does appear to be the case at least on the surface) there are going to be a very large number of ethnic groups who will have long memories of being treated brutality by the Alawite minority who ruled Lebanon.
I don’t condone their actions but part of me has a degree of understanding.