Hundreds of people were killed in Syria after clashes between the government and the Pro Assad Armed Forces escalated to sectarian violence and angrily condemned the country’s new leaders from the USA.
Many of these targeted were Alawites, members of a minority sense to which the former president Bashar al-Assad Heard and who dominated the top races of the security forces of the former regime.
Violence is the greatest threat to the country’s stability since Assad was displaced in December. The Ministry of Defense said that clumps were held in parts of the west coast on Sunday morning.
While the estimates were different, the war reported to monitor the Syrian observatory for human rights that more than 1,000 people were killed on Sunday, the majority of them civilians. The Financial Times could not check the numbers independently.
The US Foreign Minister Marco Rubio said Washington convicted “the radical Islamist terrorists, including foreign jihadists who murdered people in West Syria” and stood by the country’s minorities.
“Syria’s preliminary authorities have to blame the perpetrators of these massacres against the Syrian minority communities,” said Rubio.
The United States describes the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaas Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a former al-Qaida daughter who plunged Assad as a terrorist unit.
Sharaa, who waived his connections to Al-Qaida a decade ago and promised to protect minorities and form an integrative administration, called for peace on Sunday.
Sharaa, shot in a mosque in Damascus, said what happened, was one of the “expected challenges” and demanded coexistence. “We can live together in this country, God wants to,” said Sharaa, who has been committed to the United States and other western governments to facilitate sanctions.
The turbulence began on Thursday after armed factions were loyal to Assad Assad Hochburg.
This escalated to inter-municipal violence and sectarian murders, as forces that the provisional government loyal loyal, from outside the coastal area in order to crush the Pro Assad Armed Forces, according to the residents and legal groups.
Many of the former rebel fractions, which are now responsible for security in the context of the new provisional administration, resolved the Assads Army, accused Alawites together with former regime forces for atrocities that took place during the more than 13-year civil war in Syria.
The residents of Alawites informed the FT that they protect in their houses, killed relatives and neighbors or fled for fear of further attacks or fled them out.
Anas Haidar, an Alawite translator from Baniyas, a city south of Latakia, said that he had learned from his aunt that armed factions had brought his 69-year-old uncle to the roof of his residential building on Friday and executed him together with other men living in the building.
“We thought the noises we heard shot in the air or in celebrations, but no: all these shots were among people,” he said, adding that his uncle had been a long -time opponent of the Assad regime.
On Saturday, when Haidar prepared for the flight, he received a call from another aunt who asked him to help her son, who bleed the roof after the shot and had died later. Haidar left the neighborhood in the car of a Sunni friend who protected him and other families for the night.
The escalation represents one of the most serious threats to the legitimacy of the Transitional Government of Syria.
It also underlines the extent of the challenge with which the association and decision of the nation are faced with, in which several sects and weapons and armed factions, including unemployed former soldiers from Assad Regime, are housed.
Around the time of the first attacks, a group, who named himself as a military council for the liberation of Syria, gave a statement that promised to put down the government. The group is led by a former commander of the brutal fourth division of the Assad Army, which was once led by Bashar’s brother Maher.
In the absence of a uniform national security forces, Sharaa started a patchwork armed opposition factions under the roof of the Ministry of Defense at the beginning of this year, but coordination, training and ideology varies greatly.
Mohammad Salah Shalati, a Sunni sheikh from Latakia, said that there are widespread frustration of the lack of lack of accountability for those who have worked for the former regime.
“We told the government:” This person or this person used to work against us for the regime. “We know who they are, but they ask for evidence,” he said. “The new government tells us that we are patient. But sunnites were suppressed for 60 years. . . After March 6th, people no longer want forgiveness – they all want to be accountable. ”
Residents of coastal areas that spoke to the FT emphasized the difference between the behavior of what they described as extremist groups and the more disciplined HTS forces, but said that it was due to the new authorities to keep everyone in line.
The factions are not illegal gangs. Technically speaking, they are the law, the military, ”said Haidar. “These were groups that were supposedly in the meeting with Ahmed al-Sharaa and agreed to be part of the Ministry of Defense.”
