Hundreds of civilians have been killed in Syria in the last 48 hours, according to a war monitoring group, in the deadliest eruption of violence since the fall of the Al-Assad regime in December.
According to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), more than 700 civilians have been killed in what the organization has called “massacres.”
It is currently unclear which groups are involved in the killing of civilians, and much remains unknown about what is unfolding in Syria. Interim Syrian President Ahamed Sharaa called for peace on Sunday, amid reports of executions, firing squads, and bodies piled into the streets.
Clashes between Syrian government forces and fighters loyal to the deposed dictator, Bashar al-Assad, has also led to hundreds more deaths on both sides.
The violence has been concentrated in the coastal areas of Tartus and Latakia, the home of the Alawite community, a small Islamic sect to which the Assad family belongs. According to the SOHR, the vast majority of the civilian dead appear to be Alawites, which NBC News has not independently confirmed.
As the nation grapples with this surge in violence, here’s what we know about what’s happening on the ground, and what could it mean for Syria’s future.
What do we know about what is happening on the ground?
Syria’s rugged Mediterranean shore was a stronghold of the Assad family’s brutal regime, which lasted 53 years before a rebel alliance led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) ousted Bashar al-Assad three months ago in a lightning-fast offensive that swept across the nation and led to HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa becoming the new government’s interim president.
However, Syria’s northwest coast remains a fractured battleground, with armed Assad loyalists holding on to villages and remote pockets of territory.
Al-Sharaa’s government has deployed armed forces to the region in a bid to assert control, but fierce clashes erupted last week which have left hundreds dead.
Video footage posted on social media and verified by NBC News showed dozens of bodies piled on a blood-soaked street in Latakia, the Alawite heartland and Assad stronghold. Women gathered around the bloodied corpses. One can be heard sobbing, “My dad, my brother, oh, God.”
Other verified videos showed military vehicles moving through the countryside amid explosions and gunfire, while another showed soldiers indiscriminately dropping bombs from a helicopter over Latakia’s rural areas.
The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) is a prominent information office dedicated to documenting human rights abuses in Syria.
SOHR said that the vast majority of people killed in the current clashes were from Assad’s minority Alawite sect, and that women and children were executed by firing squad in the countryside near Tartus, another Assad stronghold.
NBC News has not independently verified the death toll or methods of execution.
SOHR also reported that 125 government security forces and 148 militants from Assad-affiliated armed groups were among the dead.
Who are the Alawites?
The Alawites are a tight-knit Islamic sect to which the Assad family belongs. Under Assad, Alawites were appointed to key positions in the military and security forces, positioning them as the elite within Syria’s state bureaucracy and security apparatus.
But the rise of HTS, led by a former al-Qaeda affiliate with an extremist past, raised deep concerns among the Alawite community as it took power.
Sunni dominance has inflicted deep scars on the region, and minorities like the Alawites, as well as Christians, Druze, and Yazidis, all have reasons to fear the rise of extremist governance.
Sharaa had tried to quell such fears, telling CNN in December, “No one has the right to erase another group.”
But the recent surge in violence suggests a different story. The Associated Press reported that revenge killings were initiated Friday by Sunni gunmen, perhaps loyal to the government, with residents saying Alawites were being killed in the streets or at the gates of their homes, and their houses looted and set on fire.
The violence undermines Sharaa’s claim that his interim government would protect all groups and foster stability.
What does this mean for Syria?
Unifying Syria’s diverse ethnic and religious groups has been one of the major challenges of a post-Assad Syria. A significant escalation of violence could threaten the country’s fragile stability, and at worst threaten to tip the country back into civil war should the interim government lose control of some areas.
Sharaa has actively sought to rebrand himself from this hardline religious past to a unifier willing to put down his previous extremist affiliations. For a time, this strategy appeared successful, generating a surge of goodwill and optimism.
In February, a video surfaced showing Sharaa waving from the sunroof of a black vehicle, surrounded by a jubilant crowd during his first visit to Latakia, where he appeared receive a hero’s welcome.
Internationally, the rise an explosion of violence may derail the Sharaa has made in reassuring Western leaders that he envisions a Syria free of threats to the West.
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