• Middle East and North Africa

Editor’s note: This story contains a graphic image showing a burned body.

TARTUS GOVERNORATE, Syria—In early March, militias associated with the ousted regime of Bashar al-Assad launched a coordinated armed uprising along the country’s coast. Syria’s new leadership in Damascus quickly ordered a general mobilization of its security services, and several other factions rallied behind the government.

Thousands of these fighters flooded into the region, and according to a recent report from the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Syria, 1,400 people—mostly civilians—were killed in the ensuing sectarian violence.

The coastal region is home to most of Syria’s Alawites, a religious minority group that makes up 10 percent of the population in the Sunni-majority country. The Assad family hails from the Alawite minority, along with much of the former regime’s leadership and security apparatus.

Syria’s ethnic divisions have been a flashpoint since Assad’s fall. In July, clashes between Bedouin tribes and the Druze minority in the southern Suwayda region spiraled into violence and led to Israeli intervention purportedly on behalf of the Druze. In Syria’s northeast, simmering tensions between the government and the Kurdish-majority Syrian Democratic Forces have sparked low-level clashes.

An armed man stands outside the national hospital of Baniyas on Aug. 20

The U.N. report found that along the coast, forces associated with both the former Assad regime and the current government committed “acts that likely amount to crimes, including war crimes,” in March, describing the violations as “systematic” and “widespread.”

At the time, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the massacres. In July, Rep. Mike Lawler, the chair of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, introduced the Syria Sanctions Accountability Act to update conditions for lifting sanctions on Syria, including that “the Syrian government is not engaged in the targeting or extrajudicial detention of religious minorities.”

Meanwhile, Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa had announced an independent committee to investigate those responsible for the violations on March 9. The committee presented its findings to Sharaa in July, but the full report has not been made public. More than six months after the violence, Alawite communities are still waiting for accountability for what they suffered.

Amina and her husband, Mounir, were initially unaware of the unfolding violence, but it quickly reached their neighborhood. They took their daughter to stay with their Sunni neighbor while groups of armed men came to their apartment building to loot the homes of Alawite residents, Amina said.

On the morning of March 8, more gunmen entered the building. Mounir had gone to check on his father, who lived across the hall. Hearing shouting, Amina emerged to find men in military fatigues marching Mounir and his father to the roof with three other Alawite men from the building. Not long after, Amina heard shots ring out. All five men were executed while lying down with their hands on their heads, she said.

“I just can’t imagine what he felt in those moments. He was just a teacher, a peace giver, someone who wanted to teach his students how to live in peace with each other,” Amina said.

Among those killed alongside Mounir was Hamza, a lawyer. Samar, his mother, lives a couple of floors below Amina. In August, she sat in her apartment adorned with old family photos. Samar and her two daughters wore black, still mourning the loss of Hamza and his father, Ahmed, a cancer patient who was killed in their home by the same group of gunmen.

Though thousands of Syrians have returned from abroad since Assad’s fall, tens of thousands fled to Lebanon in the wake of the March violence, according to the U.N. refugee agency. Among those Alawites who remained, fear of further violence was palpable. Samar said she now distrusts her Sunni neighbors—a sentiment that she did not feel throughout Syria’s 13-year civil war. “We are not sleeping. We are so scared. Every night, we hear shooting, people shouting Allahu akbar,” she said. “I feel like any moment they [could] just come and kill us.”

Amina is also fearful. “The idea of Syria is dead. I don’t care about it anymore. This room is my nation now. This girl is my only nation,” she said, pointing to her daughter.

Regional security chief Abu al-Bahr in his office in Baniyas on Aug. 20.

During an interview in July, Abu al-Bahr, the region’s security chief, sat behind his desk flanked by the new Syrian flag. “Things are calm now—there is no real problem between the communities, and I think we have created trust between us and [the Alawites],” he said.

GSS forces suffered losses during the initial uprising by Assad-aligned fighters in March; according to the coastal fact-finding committee, 238 members of the security services were killed during the fighting. “We were deployed here to keep the region safe, and suddenly we were under attack,” Bahr said.

In June, Reuters reported that units belonging to the GSS were involved in the massacres of Alawites. There are no direct allegations against individuals under Bahr’s command. “In fact, we attempted to stop violations from occurring,” the security chief said. According to the U.N. report, GSS forces organized buses to take Alawite residents to a school for food and shelter. On March 9, the school was attacked, and GSS forces fought to protect those inside.

Bahr displays a photo he took dated March 8 of a burned colleague.

Who should be held accountable for the violence remains cloudy. Speaking in a press conference in July, Yasser al-Farhan, the spokesperson for the government’s fact-finding committee, said the investigation had concluded that government commanders did not give orders to kill and sought to stop the massacres. The U.N. report similarly found “no evidence of a governmental policy or plan to carry out such attacks.”

“Whilst some committed horrific atrocities, others acted respectfully, [which] led the committee to believe that although the violations were widespread, they were not systematic but rather driven by multiple motives,” Farhan told Foreign Policy. The state’s control during the violence was “partial or at times absent,” he added.

For Bassam Alahmad, the executive director of Syrians for Truth and Justice, an NGO documenting human rights violations in Syria, this conclusion is problematic. “Ultimately, [the armed groups] were deployed to the region under the orders of the government, so the government is responsible for ensuring their conduct,” he said. Under international law, the failure to prevent war crimes is sufficient for criminal responsibility, Alahmad added.

A view of the coastal town of Baniyas on Aug. 20.

The lack of transparency could have profound consequences, said Nanar Hawach, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, because the perception that the government is failing to hold people to account “only increases the risk of violence in the long run in Syria.”

First, she said, those who committed abuses could do so again; the government’s failure to stop such violations despite condemning them points to entrenched sectarianism. Second, impunity could cause targeted communities to turn to armed resistance to ensure their safety. Despite Bahr’s claim that the region is “stable and secure,” low-level attacks against officers continue.

Sustainable reform may require a broader social shift. According to Hawach, to rebuild trust between the security services and civilians in the coastal region would first require Syria’s leadership to ensure justice for those responsible and to adopt an inclusive approach to governance that genuinely integrates minorities.

Despite Sharaa’s pronouncements that it is the government’s duty to protect minorities, the violence against Alawites and other groups has shaken the new rulers’ public image.

Noor stares out the window of her house in Baniyas on Aug. 20.

Rows of graves at the cemetery in Baniyas on Aug. 20.

As the sun set in Baniyas in August, the shadows of cedar trees lengthened across rows of graves in a new cemetery, and Samar’s daughter Noor wept. Her brother and father were buried there, amid long rows of graves dug hastily for those killed in the March massacres. “I don’t trust anyone,” Noor said. “There is no committee that I would be willing to speak to and no government that I could trust.”

Shaza Al Salmoni contributed to this story.