Personnel of the Syrian Government’s General State Security at a checkpoint in Homs city, January 8, 2025 (Omar Haj Kadour/AFP)
An Uncertain Return to Liberated Damascus
As Syria’s post-Assad Government tries to establish its authority and the US announces the lifting of sanctions, Syria Direct’s Natacha Danon reports on the killings of civilians in Homs city.
The violence in late April followed that in western Syria, slaying hundreds of people, in March and accompanied clashes between armed factions near Damascus.
Residents describe masked and armed men, dressed in away, taking away relatives from their homes.
In some cases, they asked for men by name. In others, they asked if those at home were Alawites, the religious sect of which Bashar al-Assad and many in his regime were members.
Sometimes the raiders said they were part of Damascus’s security forces. In other cases, they gave no clue to their identity.
Some families discovered, after long searches, that their relatives had been shot and killed. At least 20 civilians were slain over six days.
The murders included both “targeted assassinations of individuals previously affiliated with the Assad regime” and “random killings suspected to be driven by sectarian and retaliatory motives,” assessed the Syrian Network for Human Rights.
Between January and the end of April, there were extrajudicial killings of at least 361 civilians in Homs and Hama provinces, said SNHR. Most were in areas inhabited by Alawites.
One relative of a seized man says:
We were optimistic about an amnesty, equal justice, and supposed democracy. All this talk isn’t true.
As Alawites, we suffered in the time of Bashar al-Assad, and we’ve suffered with the current regime.
Another speaks of how water engineer Mahmoud Hamed al-Dib, 69, went to work one day and did not return.
There was no reason to target him. We want to know who the killer is, who is causing these problems. Even the civil defense who brought the body did not say where they brought it from. What is the reason for the secrecy?
In January, President Ahmad al-Sharaa said the Government was “seeking transitional justice and preventing revenge attacks”. In February, he pledged to establish a transitional justice body, but it has yet to be announced. An independent commission is investigatng the killings in western Syria; however, its initial 30-day deadline has been extended to early July.
