By Tuesday, the volume of violence and killings that befell the Alawite community on the west coast of Syria over the past few days started to emerge from the fog. So far, the UN human rights office has documented the killing of 111 civilians and expects the real toll to be significantly higher, UN human rights office spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan told a Geneva press briefing.
Of those, 90 were men; 18 were women; and three were children, he added. The office added that entire families, including women and children, were killed in Syria’s coastal region as part of a series of sectarian killings by the army against an insurgency by loyalists of Bashar al-Assad.
The West breathed a large sigh of relief when the oppressive regime of Assad was toppled in December by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its leader and current Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa.
A Syrian fact-finding committee investigating the clashes said on Tuesday that no one was above the law and it would seek the arrest and prosecution of any perpetrators.
Whether this is lip service or genuine remains to be seen, but what must be scrutinized and criticized is the way these violent clashes were treated by the media. Syria has a bloody sectarian history; these clashes were not an exception but part of a sad pattern.
Sharaa signed a deal on Monday with the Kurdish-led, US-backed group Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in eastern Syria, in an effort to unite a wide array of political, religious and social groups. The SDF controls much of Syria’s northeast and is viewed by Turkey as a terrorist organization because of links to Kurdish militants. Turkey said it was “cautiously optimistic” about the SDF agreement. An agreement between Syria and the Druze in Suwayda in the south is looking to be on its way.
Let’s be clear: 111 people were killed in an ethnic cleansing rampage, and there was barely any international noise about it. That is a problem because the attention to violence has to be equally distributed.
The attacks were reportedly carried out by Sharaa’s forces against the minority Alawite community, the same sect that Assad belongs to. The anger is understandable; the act is inexcusable. “The situation is disastrous,” E., an Alawite civilian contractor from the area of Jableh in the coastal region of Syria, told the Post’s Ohad Merlin.
“They are killing children and women. There is an ethnic cleansing going on here, they leave nothing behind, they kill everyone, and it’s all documented on video,” he added. E. described the situation across the coastal region as a set of ghost cities and towns, some blocked by the new regime’s loyalists.
“We need someone to save us – to support us, to help us, to protect our people. Our cities are burning and the people cannot speak. Before this, with the old regime, we lived in extreme poverty; and today we live in terror and catastrophe. The Alawites were always a peaceful people,” he said.
This is exactly the kind of violence that should have international media splashing over, but it didn’t get the attention it deserves. Perhaps because the international community is still waiting to see what Sharaa’s moves are, still collecting data on this new leader, or perhaps because it is easier to turn the other cheek when the leader is a man who shook all the hands needed in the Western arena.
Let’s hope the fact-finding committee yields results. “No one is above the law, the committee will relay all the results to the entity that launched it, the presidency, and the judiciary,” the committee’s spokesperson Yasser Farhan said in a televised press conference. In the meantime, caution remains necessary towards our northern neighbors.
'Artificial discourse'
On Monday, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said, “The discourse on the transition of governments in Syria is artificial. This is not a democratically elected regime but rather a Jihadist group that ruled the Idlib enclave and seized additional territories in Syria by force, including the capital, Damascus.”
Israel needs to keep its cards close to its chest, and the international community must remain wary – something it didn’t do properly with the Alawite clashes.