Syria is teetering on the brink of all-out civil war, once again, as fighting rages between the new regime in Damascus and fighters loyal to the deposed President Bashar al-Assad. The last few days have seen heavy fighting in the coastal region, with reports of dozens of the Alawite minority having been executed by Syrian security forces.
The current violence in Syria is the worst since the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) brought down the Assad regime in December and installed an Islamist transitional government.
The fighting has been centered in the cities of Latakia and Tartus, in the coastal region, where curfews have been imposed. The first reports of fighting were in the town of Jableh, in Latakia province, where Assad-loyalist militants ambushed Syrian security forces.
The violence against the Alawites has now intensified, including apparent revenge killings.
The SNHR says that in the town of al-Mukhtariya, in Latakia province, around 40 civilians were executed together in a single location. Videos — which have not been independently verified — show bodies dressed in civilian clothes piled on top of one another as well as gunmen executing seemingly unarmed men.
The Syrian interior ministry has admitted that some “individual violations” have taken place. This, they say, is the result of people heading toward the villages being attacked by Assad loyalists. The ministry has not claimed responsibility for any of the alleged executions.
There was always a major risk that more intense fighting would break out again after the fall of the Assad regime, and it’s not a surprise that, now that it’s happened, the focus is on the coastal region.
However, there are problems elsewhere in the country, too.
In recent days, there have been growing reports of violence in the south of Syria, where government forces have clashed with Druze forces. The young Syrian regime’s tensions with other rebel factions, such as the Kurds, remains an issue too, among a litany of others. Complex alliances also complicate things further. Turkey, who strongly backs the new government and is outright hostile to the Kurds, and the U.S., who has backed Kurdish forces, makes the situation even more murky. Israel is also occupying more land in Southern Syria for its buffer zone, as it is becoming increasingly wary of the new government.
There is also now a question of whether Russia or another power might step in to try and help the new regime in Damascus militarily. Turkey is already engaged in these efforts, but not anywhere near fully using the might of its regular forces.
For now, it remains unclear exactly how substantial the ex-regime factions in Syria actually are and whether they could eventually threaten the integrity of the new government. There are other flashpoints, too, including in the southeast, which has seen an incursion by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as part of wider Israeli military efforts against Syria.
