Syrian chief Ahmed Al-Sharaa called for peace on Sunday after hundreds were killed in coastal areas in the worst community violence since the fall of Bashar Al Assad.
“We must preserve national unity and domestic peace, we can live together,” said Al-Sharaa, the acting president, while clashes were continuing between the forces linked to the new Islamist leaders and the Alawite sect of Assad.
“Rest assured of Syria, this country has the characteristics of survival,” said Al-Sharaa in a broadcast video, speaking in a mosque in his Mazzah childhood neighborhood in Damascus. “What is currently happening in Syria is in the expected challenges.”
Syrian security sources said that at least two hundred of their members had been killed in clashes with former army staff due to allegiance to Assad after attacks and coordinated ambushes on their forces that were conducted on Thursday.
The attacks have been transformed into murders of revenge when thousands of supporters armed with the new leaders of Syria across the country have descended to coastal areas to support the besieged forces of the new administration
The authorities have blamed the summary executions of dozens of young people and deadly raids to houses in villages and cities inhabited by the minority formerly leader of Syria on unruly armed militias who came to help the security forces and have long blamed the supporters of Assad for past crimes.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war instructor based in the United Kingdom, said on Saturday that two days of fighting in the Mediterranean coastal region have been some of the worst violence for years in a 13-year civil conflict.
The clashes continued at night in several cities where armed groups shot security forces and stretched an ambush on highways leading to main cities in the coastal area, a Syrian security source said on Sunday.
