More than 1,000 people have died in two days of clashes and revenge killings in Syria as the country’s security forces allegedly killed hundreds of civilians belonging to the Alawite religious minority, a war monitoring group said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said about 745 civilians were killed on Friday and Saturday in ongoing violence along the country’s coast, along with 125 members of government security forces and 148 fighters from armed groups linked to ousted Syrian leader Bashar Assad.
Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa called for national unity on Sunday, saying the country “has the characteristics for survival” and that what is happening in Syria now is “within the expected challenges.”
“We must preserve national unity and internal peace, we can live together,” Sharaa said in a video quoted by Reuters, speaking at a mosque in his childhood neighborhood of Mazzah in Damascus.
The clashes erupted on Thursday and marked a major escalation in the challenge to the new government led by Sharaa’s movement Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, three months after the insurgents took over following the removal of Assad from power.
Assad was ousted last December after decades of dynastic rule by his family, marked by severe repression and a devastating civil war. Alawites, however, had been a large part of Assad’s support base for decades.
Authorities blamed the Alawite-targeted summary executions and deadly raids on unruly armed militias who came to help security forces and have long blamed Assad’s supporters for past crimes.
Clashes continued overnight in several towns, and a security official told Reuters that pro-Assad insurgents were now escalating their campaign, staging hit-and-run attacks on several public utilities in the past 24 hours.
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