This investigation examines a pattern of violence that began to take shape in Syria following the fall of the Assad regime and the rise of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham to power as a “transitional government.” The primary victims of this violence were members of the Alawite community, and later the Druze community, who were targeted in massacres bearing genocidal characteristics on the grounds that they constituted the Assad regime’s “supportive environment.” As a result, they also became the target of repeated incitement campaigns and various forms of violence, including killings, kidnappings, and the confiscation of land and property.

After Bashar al-Assad fled the country, Alawites along Syria’s coast were subjected to a large-scale massacre, while sectarian, political, and social tensions toward the Alawite community deepened, as they came to be viewed as “the sect that sheltered the fallen Assad regime.” This was preceded by armed movements involving some of Assad’s loyalists and attacks targeting the General Security forces.

As a result, the position of Alawites within the new ruling order, and the mechanisms through which they are being dealt with, cannot be understood through a single framework. Yet certain patterns have clearly emerged, including repeated cases of extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, kidnappings, humiliation, dismissal from public sector jobs, and the confiscation of homes.

By tracing these incidents across multiple regions, it becomes possible to outline how the daily lives of this community have been transformed inside Syria. A very limited segment of Alawites has been incorporated into the so-called “Civil Peace Committee,” most notably Khaled al-Ahmad, who was previously close to Bashar al-Assad and is now close to Ahmad al-Sharaa. Others, meanwhile, have been cast into positions of hostility, such as Sheikh Ghazal Ghazal.

Neither figure truly represents Syria’s Alawites. However, the new authorities appear to be managing religious and ethnic minorities through a sectarian-tribal system of representation, treating communities as unified blocs to be controlled, rather than as individuals with independent political identities.

Descending from the Mountain

Alawites in Syria are a religious minority that has historically made up around 9 percent of the population, or approximately 1.7 million people, primarily concentrated along Syria’s coastal region and in parts of Homs and Hama. However, the rule of Hafez al-Assad and later Bashar al-Assad made this minority appear, in the eyes of many, as “the sect that ruled.” This was not because all Alawites actually held power, but because the regime tied significant parts of the military, security apparatus, and networks of privilege and loyalty to the community’s name and symbols. It then governed the country through this systematic conflation between the survival of the regime and the survival of the sect itself.

The tragedy today is that this legacy is being reinterpreted through the lens of collective punishment. Instead of confining responsibility to the structures of authoritarianism, its security apparatuses, and the individuals who committed crimes, Alawites are at times being treated as a pre-accused collective, burdened with responsibility for the actions of a regime that claimed to rule in their name.

Human rights organizations and international agencies documented identity-based killings and violations targeting Alawite civilians during the transitional period, including individuals with no connection to any repressive apparatus. Many Alawites today therefore, find themselves trapped between two harsh realities: they were not all equal participants in power, yet they are at times treated as though they were equal participants in the regime’s crimes. This is precisely what makes the shift from holding the regime accountable to seeking revenge against an entire community such a dangerous slide, one that threatens any prospect of genuine justice in Syria.

This investigation is based on interviews with thirteen Alawite figures in Syria and Lebanon, including families and victims from Latakia, Tartous, and Homs. It also draws on seven interviews conducted in Lebanon with Alawite families who fled Syria after the regime’s fall, in addition to audio recordings documenting illegal financial negotiations aimed at pressuring individuals into surrendering ownership of property or vehicles.

Engines of Death

Across the countryside of Homs, Tartous, and rural Latakia, the same story repeats itself in slightly different forms. A speeding motorcycle carrying two gunmen opens fire and disappears. A car passes through a side road or a wide street in a village, sprays bullets, and flees. Elsewhere, killings are carried out quietly inside homes or small shops.

The stories keep multiplying: a teacher murdered, two brothers killed, an entire family targeted, a doctor assassinated. Meanwhile, the list of victims continues to grow, with no clear or final death toll.

Syrian authorities say they have attempted to curb this pattern through various measures, including restricting motorcycle movement in Homs and banning their circulation at night, or setting up checkpoints following specific killings in Latakia. Yet the murders have not stopped, revealing the limits of administrative measures and the authorities’ inability to turn them into effective deterrents without a broader political framework and a clear process of transitional justice in the country.

What Is the Fate of the Detainees?

In the Datur neighborhood of Latakia, Wafaa, the wife of (A.N.), rehung a photograph of her husband in military uniform on the wall. During the first months after the regime’s fall, the picture had disappeared. Wafaa says fear drove them at the time to get rid of anything linked to his military service. “At first, we burned his photos. He burned them himself because he was afraid they would cause us problems.”

But after more than a year of his disappearance, the family printed a new photograph and hung it once again inside the house.

Her husband was an officer who graduated from the Air Force Academy and worked in the communications division of Syria’s air defense forces. A few days after the regime fell, armed men came to the house and arrested him. “They did not present any arrest warrant,” his wife says. “They only said they were taking him in for questioning.”

From that day on, the family began a long search. “We contacted General Security and went to court, but no one gave us a clear answer. Every authority says it has no information.”

His wife says she participated in several protest vigils in Latakia demanding answers about the fate of detainees, carrying her husband’s photograph among the demonstrators. Latakia and Jableh have indeed witnessed repeated protests since January 2025, calling for information about those detained. The same demands resurfaced during protests along the coast in November 2025, including calls for the release of detainees and clarification of their fate.

She adds that she struggled to reach the governor’s office in hopes of obtaining any information about her husband’s fate. “I wasn’t asking for anything except to know where he is.” But, according to her, people close to the governor’s office advised her to stop asking questions. She says one official told her: “Forget the matter… don’t ask about your husband. Maybe he’s in Idlib.”

The statement only deepened the family’s fears, especially amid widespread accounts of prisons run by armed groups in Idlib.

In an attempt to understand the fate of this officer and other detainees whose whereabouts remain unknown, the reporter contacted employees within the Ministry of Justice, who provided two parallel accounts. The first states that there is a specialized committee handling the cases of former regime detainees and individuals implicated in violations, and that the committee has investigated several of them and released some detainees.

The second account suggests that gangs and armed groups became active during the initial period following the regime’s fall, selectively arresting certain officers while also seizing their cars and property.

According to the same sources, these incidents took place during the first weeks after the regime collapsed, before the new authorities were able to establish control and stabilize the security situation.

For the family of (A.N.), however, nothing has changed. To this day, they do not know where he is being held or which authority is detaining him. The father’s uncertain fate has had direct consequences on the family.

His disappearance was not the family’s only ordeal. His wife, Wafaa, who holds a nursing degree and worked as a nurse at the National Hospital in Latakia, was later dismissed from her job as part of mass layoffs targeting public employees after the regime’s fall. She says she was told the reason for her dismissal was that she had been “hired through connections.”

Their daughter, Amira, a fifth-year architecture student, was forced to take a job at a clothing store to help support the family. She also stopped attending university after being subjected to sectarian bullying by some classmates because of her father’s military service during the former regime.

“All we want is to know where he is,” Wafaa says. “If there is an investigation, let it be clear. But for a person to simply disappear like this… that is the hardest thing.”

The Extended State of Exception: When Killing Becomes Pre-Justified

From the very first month following the regime’s fall, assassinations targeting Alawite figures began to emerge. Many of these crimes were quickly framed through two ready-made narratives: either as “acts of communal revenge” or as retaliatory killings targeting individuals associated with the former regime.

These justifications coincided with a growing spread of hate speech against Alawites, whether through religious sermons or videos circulating across social media platforms. This atmosphere of tension preceded the coastal massacre of March 8, 2025, and continued afterward. Security and judicial responses were not serious enough to contain the emergence of a violent retaliatory mood directed at Alawite communities.

Violence appeared less as a new crime requiring an independent investigation and more as an extension of a preexisting conflict. As a result, interest in judicial accountability gradually gave way to ready-made political and social explanations, and killings came to be interpreted as acts already understood in advance rather than crimes demanding investigation and accountability.

This was reflected in repeated statements by figures associated with the authorities, many of whom tended to downplay the significance of these crimes, portraying them as isolated acts of personal revenge rather than as part of a broader and escalating pattern.

Fear as a Structure Organizing Daily Life

Cases involving the killing of young Alawite men have been repeated across several regions, but they appear with particular intensity and visibility in the city of Homs. The city, much like Baniyas and parts of the countryside of Hama and Latakia, carries a deeply vertical sectarian divide that cannot be understood merely as a historically organic social distribution.

The policies of Hafez al-Assad during the 1980s played a major role in shaping this reality. Through resettlement policies and the creation of Alawite pockets, villages, and clusters around major cities, the regime produced this charged coexistence as part of a broader political and security-driven engineering of space, rather than as a random urban development.

As military and administrative employment expanded, Alawite families from rural areas and the coastal region were encouraged to move into neighborhoods inside and around the city. Part of this new presence became tied to the regime’s networks of loyalty and protection. Over time, geographically adjacent neighborhoods emerged that were psychologically and security-wise separated, while some Alawite areas came to resemble fortified enclaves inside a mixed city.

As a result, neighborhoods may appear geographically connected, yet remain divided by invisible psychological and security boundaries. These boundaries resurfaced and became contested again with the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in 2011.

At that point, Bashar al-Assad did not attempt to dismantle these divisions but rather militarized them. Young Alawite men, particularly the unemployed, were mobilized into the shabiha militias and the National Defense Forces, while siege tactics, bombardment, and forced displacement were deployed against opposition neighborhoods in Homs. Demographic sorting thus became an instrument of governance rather than merely a consequence of war.

The violence unfolding in Homs today is therefore not simply a product of the current moment, but a delayed consequence of a long political and security architecture that made sectarian fault lines perpetually vulnerable to ignition whenever the state order begins to collapse.

For this reason, the repeated crimes in Homs are not perceived merely as isolated acts, but as part of an atmosphere that both enables and reinterprets them. Alongside weak deterrence mechanisms, a justificatory propaganda has emerged, seeking to attach many assassinations to ready-made narratives: an old vendetta, revenge against a former “shabiha” member, or a natural consequence of the city’s social composition and history.

In this way, the impact of the crime is not simply erased; it is reframed within a discourse that explains it in advance and softens the urgency of accountability, or even the need to pause and confront it.

The effects of violence are visible not only in the moment of killing, but also in the way it reorganizes the daily lives of residents. Women and girls in Homs in particular are experiencing the consequences of this climate of fear and sectarian assassinations. After each killing, families tend to further restrict their daughters’ movement outside the home, and ordinary daily activities become governed by caution and anxiety.

The pressure does not always appear through explicit decisions or formal rules, but rather through invisible networks of fear, social judgment, and stigma. Society gradually turns inward and becomes increasingly cautious, while the search for refuge outside the city emerges as a recurring option.

In Homs, a woman who preferred not to reveal her name, and who is the mother of a 27-year-old daughter, described how fear is no longer tied to a specific incident but has become embedded in everyday life.

“My daughter leaves the house every day. But her cousin was killed in a mobile phone shop during the first month of the year. Since then, there’s no such thing as a normal day anymore.”

She adds that she sent her son to Lebanon to avoid the dangers of rising tensions in Homs, but she was unable to convince her daughter to leave.

“She tells me: ‘I want to work. I want to live.’”

The family tries to take precautions by changing the routes they use when leaving and returning home, altering schedules, and limiting the areas where they move around.

With the spread of kidnappings targeting Alawite women and girls across several regions, the mother tried to convince her daughter to wear the hijab, but the daughter refused.

“It’s become known that girls who are not veiled, or who move around in certain ways, are Alawites,” the mother says.

She summarizes her days in a single sentence: “Every day I wait for her to come back home… and I pray that she returns.”

Anyone tracing the stories of these families and the way their daily lives have changed under the new security reality quickly notices that the impact of violence is not limited to its direct victims. Killings, acts of revenge, and kidnappings are reshaping decisions related to work, education, and housing, while movement within the city itself has become a carefully calculated matter, where security concerns intertwine with the social and sectarian divisions that deepened throughout the years of war and in its aftermath.

Housing and the Redrawing of Neighborhoods

The impact of violence and arrests is not limited to personal security or daily movement. It also extends to housing and the social composition of neighborhoods. In Homs, as in parts of Syria’s coastal region, visible changes have begun to emerge in property ownership and population distribution within neighborhoods.

Al-Nuzha, Karm al-Loz, Wadi al-Dhahab, New Akrama, and Al-Zahra are among the most prominent Alawite residential neighborhoods in Homs. For years, these areas formed what resembled an urban belt surrounding Sunni neighborhoods that had risen up against the regime. They are geographically adjacent areas with clearly defined demographic boundaries.

The sectarian division of housing did not begin with the war, but it deepened significantly from the 1980s onward and became even more pronounced after 2011. In recent years, neighborhoods have ceased to be merely residential spaces and instead have become zones of identity and boundaries of belonging.

In Wadi al-Dhahab, cases of looting targeting homes belonging to Alawite families have been documented. The reporter conducted interviews with three displaced individuals who had recently returned from Lebanon to Homs. One of them, a man in his late thirties, explained that he had returned to the city but could not afford to rent a house in the market area. He says people suggested he move into the home of an Alawite officer who had left the city.

He eventually rented the house without any official contract. The property was handed over to him through a local intermediary, and he pays monthly rent to a “sheikh” presented as the person responsible for the area. There is no formal lease agreement and no clarity regarding the legal status of the property.

The young man says, “We live there, and we pay. We don’t want any problems.”

In the neighborhood of New Akrama, (H.M.), a 42-year-old Christian man previously displaced from the outskirts of the Hamidiyah district in Homs, described his experience in a house he had rented there years ago after his displacement. The owner of the property, an Alawite man who had formerly served in the National Defense Forces, had legally owned the house for years. The ownership was not recent, nor the result of a recent seizure.

But the situation changed suddenly after the owner was detained. The tenant was forced out of the house, and the question of whether he could stay or leave became tied to security decisions entirely beyond his control.

In the same neighborhood, similar stories and reports have circulated about homes emptied following arrests, while others were abandoned out of fear, only to later be occupied by returning families or newcomers from other areas.

Hundreds of homes once belonging to Alawite residents have either been abandoned by their owners or emptied after they were forced out. Today, they are inhabited by strangers to the neighborhood or by returnees with no other housing options.

The transformation is visible not only in property ownership, but also in the very composition of the neighborhoods themselves: new faces, shifting demographics, and a growing mutual sense of uncertainty over who belongs, who remains, and who now controls everyday life.

In the Grip of the “Emir”

We spoke with a Syrian doctor (A.Q.), a 66-year-old Alawite currently living in Canada, who told us that his home in Latakia had been seized by one of the local “emirs.” The term “emir” has become increasingly common in Syria following the regime’s fall, amid the growing influence of armed religious figures formerly associated with Jabhat al-Nusra, whose networks are now part of the governing authorities.

When (A.Q.) attempted, through relatives, to report the seizure to the police, he found himself forced into a long process of waiting and negotiation with the group occupying the house, as well as with the local police station and certain General Security officials, before he was finally able to recover the property.

When the house was eventually returned to him, it had been completely emptied.

The doctor says he fears the home could be seized again at any moment. According to him, many Alawites in these areas no longer feel able to leave their homes even for short periods, fearing that their properties could be occupied, confiscated, or claimed by others in their absence.

From a security standpoint, despite the administrative redeployment of conventional state forces, testimonies from residents suggest that the hierarchy of authority still relies heavily, at least in part, on local actors who operate beyond effective oversight or accountability.

As this parallel security role expanded, an informal yet highly influential system of control began to emerge, intertwining security authority with local and religious influence.

Following the regime’s fall, forces affiliated with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham assumed administration over certain coastal cities during the initial phase and announced the formation of what they described as independent committees tasked with managing the confiscation of movable and immovable property belonging to officials and officers from the former regime.

According to the official narrative, the purpose of these committees was to deal with the assets of figures connected to the regime’s military and security institutions, as part of efforts to manage the legacy of the former regime and hold those implicated in violations accountable.

However, interviews we conducted with residents from Syria’s coastal region point to a far more complex reality.

In the city of Latakia, several witnesses told us that members of the regime-loyal National Defense Forces had, during the war years, seized homes belonging to Turkmen fighters or to opponents of the regime. After the regime’s collapse, commanders of armed groups linked to the new authorities entered some of these neighborhoods and returned a number of those houses to their former owners. Yet at the same time, they seized homes belonging to members of the National Defense Forces, including houses that had belonged to their families for decades.

In several cases, these homes were forcibly emptied, and the families of fighters were expelled, including the wives of men killed during the war.

The confiscations were not limited to residential property. They also included vehicles belonging to army officers or members of their families.

The incidents we documented point to a far more complicated process behind the management of this file. In cases reviewed by the reporter, the seizures were not the result of official confiscation orders issued by authorities or specialized legal committees. Instead, they were carried out through initiatives taken by armed group commanders or local actors who exploited the security vacuum during the first phase after the regime’s fall.

According to testimonies gathered from residents and affected property owners, local intermediaries and influence networks played a central role in consolidating or negotiating many of these seizures.

Families close to former military figures also spoke of unofficial financial settlements that allowed some owners to retain part of their property.

During interviews conducted in Lebanon with members of two families, one connected to army leadership and the other to customs authorities, in addition to the family of a high-ranking security figure close to Ali Mamlouk, the interviewees said that local intermediaries had suggested the possibility of paying money to field commanders or local officials in exchange for freezing certain confiscation decisions.

According to testimonies and audio recordings obtained from a member of a family that held influence during the former regime, a figure close to the Assad government acknowledged negotiating over properties belonging to one of his relatives, a former official in a Syrian security agency. He said the official surrendered an entire villa in exchange for being allowed to keep another property, as well as several family homes in the countryside of Qardaha and Jableh.

Members of the (A.A.) family also stated, in interviews and recordings reviewed during this investigation, that they paid nearly $200,000 in order to preserve part of their movable and immovable assets.

We were unable to independently verify all of these claims or obtain an official response from the relevant authorities regarding them.

At the same time, more than fifty testimonies gathered during this investigation in Latakia, Homs, and Tartous reveal a very different reality for Alawites who lack influence networks or connections to intermediaries capable of intervening in such cases.

Many of them were expelled from their homes, including military housing units where they had been living, homes registered in their wives’ names, or properties inherited through family lineage, all without any clear legal process and without the kinds of settlements that appeared in other cases.

In many instances, the measures extended beyond real estate. We documented the confiscation of large numbers of vehicles and gathered testimonies regarding the seizure of cars in Tartous, Latakia, and Homs belonging to former army personnel, former police colonels and brigadier generals, and military commanders, often alongside the seizure of their family homes.

In some cases, however, the confiscations focused primarily on vehicles, a pattern that appeared especially common among former military personnel.

Based on two interviews conducted in Lebanon with a former colonel and brigadier general who had fled Syria, both of whom had worked at the Military Social Institution responsible for vehicle distribution, part of these confiscations took place during what became known as the “settlement phase.” At the time, centers were established to collect military and security identification cards immediately after the regime’s fall, as part of what the new Syrian authorities described as a process to “settle the status” of former military personnel.

But the reality, according to the testimonies collected, was that many cars and properties were seized forcibly during raids on streets and homes. In some cases, fighters would directly ask residents: “Are there any officers’ houses here?”

This disparity reveals a dual pattern in the management of confiscations: a negotiated form of confiscation in cases where property owners possess influence networks or access to intermediaries, and a coercive form of confiscation targeting more vulnerable groups that lack such connections.

These transformations are not only reshaping the distribution of residents, but also redrawing the social map of entire neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are no longer fixed entities; instead, they have entered a continuous process of restructuring, deepening the sense among many communities that their presence in these spaces is fragile and potentially replaceable.

Within such an environment, responsibility itself becomes increasingly ambiguous: Who decides? Who guarantees? And who has the authority to confiscate, oversee, and hold others accountable?

Hybrid Security and the Invisible Borders of Cities

After the coastal massacres of March 8, 2025, which targeted Alawites and killed around 1,700 people, a profound psychological barrier took shape across many of these regions. Fear was no longer tied to isolated incidents. Instead, it became embedded in the everyday perception of movement and survival within the country.

In the countryside of Latakia, Homs, and Hama, many residents are now confronted with a simple question after the massacres: “Did you try to file a complaint?”

More than ten relatives of victims from the coastal massacres told the reporter that police officers or security committees sometimes arrive at crime scenes, conduct brief investigations, and then leave without producing any clear results.

In many areas, there are insufficient surveillance cameras, limited investigative tools, and no clear capacity to track perpetrators or reach decisive conclusions. But the weakness of these investigations does not appear to be merely technical.

What emerges instead is a form of what could be described as hybrid security, where multiple armed actors simultaneously participate in maintaining order. Alongside the official police forces, there are local factions, armed groups, and religious or military figures who hold influence within neighborhoods.

This multiplicity does not create clarity in authority, but rather the opposite. When power is dispersed among different actors, responsibility itself becomes difficult to define: Who investigates? Who has the authority to arrest? And who ultimately decides the fate of these cases?

As a result, a form of structural ambiguity has emerged within the security system. There is no clear chain of command, no precise boundary separating the civilian from the military, nor the official from the local. Security appears visibly present through checkpoints, armed actors, and patrols, yet this presence does not necessarily produce a genuine sense of stability.

In cities divided along sectarian lines, invisible borders also begin to emerge. These borders are not drawn on maps, but they are deeply embedded in the everyday consciousness of residents. People know which neighborhoods can be crossed, which roads should be avoided, and which places may become dangerous at specific times.

These undeclared boundaries make it easier to target individuals within certain areas while simultaneously weakening solidarity across sectarian communities. When someone is killed in a neighborhood known for its sectarian identity, the incident is no longer perceived merely as an individual crime, but as part of a fragile balance between opposing districts.

Anxiety here no longer remains a temporary reaction to a specific incident. Instead, it evolves into a permanent condition. Security forces are visibly present, but that presence itself is unstable and fluid, a hybrid mixture of civilian and military authority that fails to provide any clear sense of protection or reassurance.

This is why life in many areas feels unstable even on days when nothing visibly happens. Violence manifests not only in the moment of the crime itself, but also in the atmosphere that makes such crimes possible and repeatable.

In the end, security during this phase does not appear to function as a comprehensive project aimed at rebuilding society after conflict. Rather, it resembles a temporary management of tension. It asserts its presence during moments of crisis, yet fails to address the social and legal conditions that allow violence to return or prevent its recurrence.

What is happening in Syria today cannot be measured solely by what Alawites themselves are enduring, but by what has become possible to happen again and again, at any moment, without generating enough public shock to alter the existing reality.

This is where the danger lies. The issue is no longer merely a security matter, but one that is profoundly political and ethical. The threat does not stem only from the authorities’ inability to prevent killings, but also from the growing willingness of the public sphere itself to redefine certain groups of people as killable.

This is not entirely new. Rather, it is an extension of a normalization process that has been taking root since 2011, when the public sphere was reorganized in ways that made the acceptance of killing possible. Today, that acceptance has simply returned in new forms.

At this point, the question is no longer only: Who is doing the killing? But also: What kind of state is being formed when all of this is allowed to become a normalized reality, we merely continue to document and write about?