The number of deaths of two days of confrontation between the security forces and the loyalists of the Syrian president ousted Bashar al-Assad and the murders of revenge who followed reached more than 1,000, including nearly 750 civilians, said a war surveillance group on Saturday, which makes it one of the most dead of violence of violence since the conflict of the Syrian began 14 years ago.
The Syrian Observatory based in Great Britain for Human Rights said that in more than 745 civilians, 125 members of government security forces and 148 activists with armed groups affiliated to Assad were killed.
The observatory also said that electricity and drinking water had been cut in supermarkets around the coastal city of Latakia and numerous bakeries have been closed.
The clashes, which broke out on Thursday, marked a major climbing of the challenge to the new government in Damascus, three months after the insurgents took authority after having withdrawn Assad from power.
The government said they were responding to Assad’s remains of the forces and blamed the “individual actions” for rampant violence.
“The bodies were on the streets”
The murders of revenge that started on Friday with Sunni Muslim armed men loyal to the government against the members of the Alawite minority sect of Assad are a major blow to Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, the faction which led the overthrow of the former government. Alawites was a large part of Assad’s support base for decades.
Residents of the villages and allawite cities spoke to the Associated Press murders during which armed men fired on the Alawites, the majority of men, in the streets or the gates of their houses. Many Alawites houses were looted and then set fire to different areas, two residents of the Syria coastal region said at the AP of their hiding places.
They asked that their names are not made public for fear of being killed by armed men, adding that thousands of people fled to neighboring mountains for security reasons.
The residents of Baniyas, one of the cities most affected by violence, said that the bodies were scattered in the streets or left without being buried in the houses and on the roofs of the buildings, and nobody was able to recover them. A resident said that armed men had prevented residents for hours from removing the bodies from five of their neighbors killed on Friday at close range.
Ali Sheha, 57, a Baniyas resident who fled with his family and neighbors a few hours after violence broke out on Friday, said that at least 20 of his neighbors and colleagues in a district of Baniyas where the Alawites lived, were killed, some of them in their stores or their homes.
Sheha described the attacks on “revenge killings” of the Alawite minority for the crimes committed by the government of Assad. Other residents said that armed men included foreign fighters and militants from villages and neighboring towns.
“It was very very bad. The bodies were on the street” while fled, said Sheha, speaking by phone almost 20 kilometers from the city. He said that the armed men gathered less than 100 meters from his building, shooting at random on houses and residents and, in at least one incident, he knows, asked residents their identity document to check their religion and their sect before killing them. He said that armed men had also burned houses and stole cars and stolen from houses.
Rami Abdurrahman, head of the Syrian Human Rights Observatory, said the murders of revenge stopped early on Saturday.
“It was one of the greatest massacres of the Syrian conflict,” said Abdurrahman about the killings of the Allawites civilians.
The initial assessment given by the group was more than 200, which was then updated to more than 600. No official figures were published.
Alawite residents flee
The state news agency of Syria cited an official of the ministry of defense without name saying that government forces have regained control of a large part of the areas of Loyalists of Assad. He added that the authorities closed all the roads leading to the coastal region “to prevent violations and gradually restore stability.”
On Saturday morning, the bodies of 31 people killed in revenge attacks the day before in the central village of Tuwaym were buried in a serious mass, residents said.
The people killed included nine children and four women, said residents, sending the photos with the bodies draped in white fabric while they were bordered in the mass grave.
The Lebanese legislator Haidar Nasser, who has one of the two seats allocated to the Alawite sect in Parliament, said that people were fleeing Syria for security in Lebanon. He said he had no exact figures.
Nasser said that many people were attacked at the Russian air base in Hmeimim, Syria, adding that the international community should protect Allawites who are Syrian citizens loyal to their country. He said that since the fall of Assad, many Alawites have been dismissed from their work and that some former soldiers who have reconciled with the new authorities have been killed.
Under Assad, Alawites held the best positions in the army and security agencies. The new government has blamed its loyalists for attacks on the country’s new security forces in recent weeks.
The most recent clashes began when government forces tried to hold a sought after person near the coastal city of Jableh and were caught by the Loyalists of Assad, according to the observatory.
