As Alawites mark one year since the massacres in Syria’s coastal regions, residents of Baniyas say fear persists, wounds remain unhealed and political demands unmet. The post One year after Syria’s coastal massacres, justice remains elusive appeared first on Syria Direct.
As Alawites mark one year since the massacres in Syria’s coastal regions, residents of Baniyas say fear persists, wounds remain unhealed and political demands unmet.
11 March 2026
BANIYAS — On the morning of March 7, the thick scent of incense wafted through the sea air at the Sheikh Hilal Cemetery in Syria’s seaside city of Baniyas. Seagulls flew overhead as dozens of mourners laid flowers and greens on the stone graves of loved ones lost during a wave of massacres along the Syrian coast one year ago.
Primarily between March 7 and March 10, more than 1,400 people—mostly from Syria’s minority Alawite community—were killed by government forces and allied armed groups in Baniyas as well as dozens of other communities along the coast and in neighboring Hama last year.
The violence began after armed insurgents loyal to the ousted Assad regime attacked, captured and killed hundreds of members of the new government’s security forces on the afternoon of March 6. Over the course of the multi-day security operation and house-to-house raids that followed, mass killings took place in more than 30 Alawite-majority communities.
A subsequent United Nations report described the violence as “widespread and systematic,” including “targeting based on religious affiliation, age and gender, and collective executions,” while it found “no evidence of a governmental policy or plan to carry out such attacks.”
Some of the worst violence was in and around Baniyas, where hundreds were killed in Alawite neighborhoods and nearby villages over the span of three days. In 2013, the city’s Sunni Ras al-Nabaa neighborhood and the neighboring village of Bayda were also the site of mass killings by Assad regime security forces and pro-regime militias against hundreds of civilians.
One year after the latest killings, members of the Alawite community in Baniyas continue to grapple with deep grief and traumatic memories. “We went through hell, it was a bloodbath in both speed and monstrosity,” Jaber Aboud, 70, told Syria Direct at his home in Baniyas. His niece and her husband were both killed on March 7, 2025.
Starting the night of March 7, Aboud’s home was raided by five separate groups of armed men, he recalled, including a group of foreign fighters he believed to be Uyghurs and Uzbeks based on their appearance and accents.
“My brother and I faced death five times. One group entered the house, turned it upside down, asked me if we were Alawite or Muslim, then called us ‘Alawite dogs.’ They held guns to our heads—we were waiting for the time of our execution,” he said.
Jaber Aboud stands in front of his sweets shop in downtown Baniyas, 7/3/2026 (Karam Alhindi/Syria Direct)
Aboud was opposed to the former Assad regime and participated in protests during the revolution, for which he was one of the first people in Baniyas to be arrested and tortured by regime security forces. Then, in 2013, he helped one of his Sunni employees at his sweets shop flee to opposition-controlled areas after sheltering him for two months in his home, he said. The young man went on to join the opposition faction Jabhat al-Nusra in Idlib, which later became Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
On the night of March 6—hours after the attack on government security forces—the same young man came to Aboud’s home and told him the situation was dangerous and he should leave, saying he could not protect him if he stayed. The following day, the man took Aboud’s wife, son and 10 other family members to his own home for their safety, but Aboud and his brother chose to stay. “As an opponent of the Assad regime, I didn’t expect to be targeted,” he said.
In the following days and weeks, Aboud and his neighbors collected corpses and brought them to the cemetery. “I saw entire families that had been killed, including children—many of the bodies were unrecognizable,” he said. “Those who were killed were simple, educated, cultured and kind.”
“Fear is dominating our lives, there are no assurances that something won’t happen [again],” Siba, 27, said, asking to be identified only by her first name. She lost dozens of friends and neighbors during the massacres. “We knew everyone who died.”
She escaped thanks to a Sunni neighbor, who brought her and some of her female relatives to the home of another family member. He gave them scarves to cover their hair and “told the armed men at the checkpoints—who asked us if we were Sunni or Alawite—that we were his sisters and daughters,” she recounted. “He showed them his identity card that says he was born in [the former opposition-controlled area of] Ghouta, and we passed through the checkpoint.”
Siba sits in her pharmacy in downtown Baniyas, 7/3/2026 (Karam Alhindi/Syria Direct)
While a year has passed, “the pain has remained as is because killings have continued on a daily basis, especially in Homs and Hama,” said Adnan Hassan, 61, a lawyer and longtime opponent of the Assad regime who lives in Baniyas. He escaped the violence last March because a neighbor told men who came to the building that it was empty except for her, he said.
Over the past several months, a pattern of motorcycle ride-by killings has been documented in Homs and Hama, concentrated in Alawite areas, according to media and human rights reports. In Homs, at least 30 civilians have been killed in similar attacks since the start of the year.
“The government calls them ‘individual cases,’ implying they’re not systematic. Is it possible that they haven’t been able to catch a single killer over the span of a year and a half?,” Hassan asked.
Few arrests have been made in connection with the pattern of what are sometimes referred to as “mobile killings.” In one recent case, the February 12 killing of Wasim al-Ashqar in Homs city, Syrian security forces arrested suspects the following day. A source at the Ministry of Interior later told Syrian news site Enab Baladi that the detainees confessed to killing al-Ashqar to steal his car.
Hassan was previously a member of the Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau) and Communist Labor Party, both of which were outlawed under Hafez al-Assad. During the revolution, he provided legal assistance to members of the opposition and was interrogated by the intelligence branches multiple times.
Aboud voiced similar concerns, saying “there’s no feeling of security, there’s more than despair—we are living under the rule of revenge.”
Still, Aboud and Siba acknowledged that the security situation has improved on the coast over the past year. “Today, general security is protecting us,” Siba said. “In Qadmous, where my family is from, they are very polite and professional—they’re calming down the social situation and holding dialogue with community leaders.”
“Security is better than at first, but crime is rising due to the economic situation,” Aboud said. The Syrian coast has been disproportionately affected by the dissolution of the former army and layoffs of hundreds of thousands of public sector employees. In addition, pensions for military personnel who served during the war have been stopped until cases can be reviewed on an individual basis to identify those who committed crimes.
“It will create a huge problem—economic and social problems will spread, with a risk of provoking renewed violence,” Aboud warned.
A mourner at Sheikh Hilal Cemetery prays over the grave of a loved one lost during the March 2025 killings in Baniyas, 7/3/2026 (Karam Alhindi/Syria Direct)
Last November, the Syrian government launched its first trial for suspects accused of committing violations during the violence on the coast last March, marking the first step towards legal accountability.
Among the 298 pro-government perpetrators and 265 pro-Assad perpetrators referred for prosecution by a Damascus-appointed fact-finding committee last July, seven from each side are being tried.
Three court sessions have been held so far, but no rulings have been made yet. Siba, Aboud and Hassan dismissed the hearings as “pure theater.”
“We need to know who gave the orders to carry out the massacres—the officers must be tried, rather than the rank-and-file,” Siba said. Last September, a joint investigation by Human Rights Watch, Syrians for Truth and Justice and the Syrian Archive “did not uncover direct orders to commit violations.”
At the same time, the report underscored that the killings unfolded amid a “centrally coordinated military operation overseen by the Ministry of Defense” and held that “the scale, duration, and consistency of the documented abuses make clear they were not isolated incidents.”
The UN Commission of Inquiry’s report released the previous month detailed similar findings while calling on the Syrian government to “pursue accountability for all perpetrators, regardless of affiliation or rank.”
Last Friday, the Commission applauded Damascus’s “positive engagement” over the past year, stressing that “transparency, accountability, security sector reform and engagement with impacted communities is key to upholding the rule of law, the rights of victims and building trust.”
Syria Direct reached out to the Syrian Ministry of Interior during the course of this reporting, but received no response by the time of publication.
Seagulls fly along the shore in Baniyas, a city in Syria’s coastal Tartous province, 7/3/2026 (Karam Alhindi/Syria Direct)
After the Assad regime fell in December 2024, Siba, Aboud and Hassan were among dozens of activists who created civil society initiatives to carry out intercommunity dialogue and issue demands for the transitional period, which largely collapsed following last year’s killings.
“There were no political activities under the regime, when it fell we were very optimistic,” Siba recalled. “We advocated for transitional justice for all sects, administrative reforms, and pluralism.”
In January 2025, Aboud met with the interim governor of Tartous, Anas Ayrout. “I told him only the state can protect Alawites, not external backers. If the state can be built, Alawites will be with them,” he said. “However, they are men with no experience in the state—the country needs a lot of help to build the state. We want a state that we feel represents us.”
Integral to state-building is the building of democratic institutions, Siba said. “I don’t feel represented at all—there haven’t been elections for me to elect someone who represents me.”
Last October, Syria held an indirect vote to select two thirds of the members of parliament, with the remaining third yet to be appointed by President Ahmad al-Sharaa. The single representative selected from Baniyas, Amjad Akram Ali, is Alawite.
“Those they appointed to parliament only represent themselves—there’s no meaningful representation of Alawites, even of those of us who were against the regime,” Hassan echoed. “No one took our opinion—it was a decision made from above, we don’t know how they chose candidates.” Elections to appoint members of parliament were indirect, with little transparency regarding how the list of final candidates were selected.
Transitional justice efforts have seemingly stalled since the Assad regime fell more than a year ago. “The state is not serious about transitional justice—it’s catastrophic for the state and society. You don’t bring the big heads and make settlements with them,” Hassan said.
A series of multi-million dollar settlements have been made between the Syrian government and prominent regime businessmen in recent months—including with sanctioned figures such as Muhammad Hamsho and Samer Foz—although criminal charges can still be brought against them. In the absence of transitional justice, “they’ve opened the door for revenge,” Hassan stressed.
“The National Commission for Transitional Justice is only ink on paper, they’re only conducting consultations,” Hassan said, adding “they must include crimes committed after the regime’s fall.” Syria’s de facto constitution, the 2025 constitutional declaration, only explicitly references crimes committed by the Assad regime.
Residents have also called for increased integration of Alawites into the government’s forces. “We need members of all communities to be represented in the security forces,” Hassan said. “The army still operates as factions, there is only symbolic nor real integration.”
Local sources from the Internal Security Forces (also known as general security) told Syria Direct that of the 400-450 members of the Internal Security Forces serving in Baniyas, 50 of them–between 11 and 12 percent—are newly integrated Alawite members who previously served under the Assad regime’s security forces.
A total of 1,000 Alawites are set to integrate the security forces across Tartous province, the same sources said. Until now, no former members of the Assad regime army—from any community—who were active during the war have been reintegrated, they added. “Members of the army who are clean, who didn’t hurt or kill anyone, should be brought back,” Siba said
Hassan also described last year’s National Dialogue Conference as “theatrical.” In February 2025, the one-day conference developed a series of recommendations for Syria’s transitional government, including on the topic of transitional justice. However, the event was widely critiqued for being too short.
“It should have lasted up to three months. The government must revisit national dialogue as there was exclusion, even the Sunni elite was not represented,” he said. “The political system must come out of the national dialogue—if there is no return to national dialogue, there will not be a vision for the future that expresses the most basic needs and ambitions of the people.”
“Democratic reforms will give people energy, allowing them to feel they are part of the state,” Hassan added.
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