At the foot of a building in the Al-Qusour district, in the Syrian coastal town of Baniyas, a dozen men crowded around a neighbor. The neighbor mimed a summary execution, one of the many that bloodied the Alawite neighborhood between March 6 and 9. Al-Qusour slowly came back to life on Wednesday, March 12. The survivors returned, reassured by the withdrawal of the Sunni Islamist factions accused of the massacres and the redeployment of the General Security forces, the paramilitary police of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). They discovered the scale of the killings. They described the hell they had lived through. Together, they counted the dead.

Each building had its own tragedy. At the very foot of the building where the small group had gathered, an old man suffering from cancer was executed in cold blood. His son and three of his neighbors were shot in the head on the roof of the building where they had taken refuge. In the photos taken by local woman Oum Fadi (names have been changed for security reasons), her husband and son, aged 69 and 38, were bathed in blood. Their contorted bodies indicated that they were kneeling during the execution.

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