December 31, 2025
No armed resistance was present in the village.
Within hours, at least 149 Alawite civilians – almost all men and teenage boys – were dead. Government statements issued the same day claimed the operation targeted “remnants of the regime” following violent clashes.
However, survivor testimony, video footage filmed by accompanying journalists, and posts by officials present at the scene contradict that account. While violent clashes took place between government security forces and Alawite insurgents elsewhere on 7 March, a closer look at events in Mukhtariyah reveals that the “violent clashes” in the village were fabricated, giving government forces a pretext to carry out the pre-planned massacre of unarmed men and boys on the basis of their religious identity as Alawites.
The atrocities in Mukhtariyah were part of a broader series of massacres carried out by Syrian government forces in dozens of locations across the Syrian coast between 7 and 10 March, leading to the deaths of at least 1,600 Alawite civilians.
A massacre justified in advance
On the evening of 6 March, units from the Syrian military’s Unit 400 were stationed at the Mukhtariyah checkpoint. According to survivors, the troops began firing toward the village in the early evening and continued intermittently through the night.
“They were shouting sectarian slogans,” Fadi, a survivor of the massacre, tells The Cradle. “They said: ‘Patience, Alawites, we have come to slaughter you.’ But no one fired back. No one resisted.”
Three of his brothers were executed during the massacre. Another brother was shot in the leg but survived.
A government security source acknowledges that “individual violations” against residents of the village had taken place, but said these were carried out by unorganized crowds that headed to the coast.
"We are working to stop these violations," the security source claims.
These claims seem to be reinforced by video reports from Gulf media allegedly showing the clashes.
However, testimony from survivors of the massacre in Mukhtariyah and a close review of video reports show that no Alawite insurgents were present in the village. Instead, the “violent clashes” were fabricated, giving highly organized government forces a pretext to carry out the massacre.
Evidence from social media shows that Hasan Abo Kasrah, an influential member of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), was present in Mukhtariyah at the time of the massacre, providing logistical support. He is also the cousin of Syrian Minister of Defense Murhaf Abu Qasra.
The fabricated clashes, false media reports, and involvement of a powerful HTS member with close ties to the country’s defense minister suggest the massacre in Mukhtariyah was premeditated and planned in advance.
That night, Syrian authorities initiated a large-scale mobilization of Ministry of Defense formations, General Security forces, and armed civilians toward the coastal region. Defense Minister Murhaf Abu Qasra issued directives calling on all military formations to move toward the coast with “strict orders to the military to crush the remnants of the regime and make an example of them.”
Amid the preparations, soldiers posted videos on social media saying they were coming to kill Alawites. In one video, a soldier says, “Sunnis, Sunnis, we will exterminate the Alawites.”
Authorities also issued calls for Jihad from mosques across the country to encourage armed civilians to accompany the formal military units.
Mobilizing ‘jihad’, manufacturing consent
Hasan Abu Qasra, the defense minister’s cousin, helped with the mobilization. Abu Qasra, himself a high-ranking HTS member, was appointed head of the state-owned SADCOP petroleum company after the government of Bashar al-Assad was toppled.
Due to the strategic value of fuel in wartime, SADCOP played a key role in supporting HTS military operations along the coast.
As the mobilization on the evening of 6 March was underway, Abu Qasra made a thinly veiled reference to the upcoming killings.
“The dogs want to feast on meat at suhoor tonight,” he wrote on Facebook, making a reference to the pre-dawn meal eaten by Muslims during Ramadan.
Another video circulated online showed a Syrian soldier discussing “The best way to eat the meat of Alawites and Shia.”
Later in the evening on 6 March, Abu Qasra again foreshadowed the killings.
“The fools gave us a golden opportunity, and we are making full use of it,” he wrote in another social media post, making reference to Alawite insurgents who were lured into attacking General Security forces elsewhere in the coastal region, in Jableh.
Around 4:00 am the next day, on 7 March, military convoys carrying thousands of additional troops from the Ministry of Defense, General Security, and armed civilians began arriving at Mukhtariyah.
A survivor of the massacre speaking with Human Rights Watch (HRW) recalled seeing the first convoys arriving on the M4 Highway from Idlib and Aleppo.
“The convoys had a beginning but no end,” he said.
Fire without cover: staging the clash
“They sprayed the village in an unimaginably brutal and insane manner,” Fadi recounts to The Cradle. A tank shell hit Fadi’s brother’s house, demolishing two of its walls.
SADCOP head Abu Qasra confirmed his presence at the time of the attack, posting a picture of troops on the highway adjacent to Mukhtariyah with the phrase, “Good morning.”
Another photo shows him on the highway, carrying a light weapon, next to a man in camouflage military clothing.
Footage taken by journalists accompanying government forces confirms Fadi’s claims that Abu Qasra’s troops fired wildly into the village and that no Alawite insurgents were present or fighting back.
A video from Al-Jazeera channel shows some government troops firing into Mukhtariyah from the M4, while others casually stand around, not even bothering to take cover behind their vehicles.
A separate video from Al-Hadath channel shows a journalist filming a selfie to document the “clashes.” He does not bother to take cover; instead, he stands completely exposed in the middle of the road as he films. He is calm, and there is no indication of incoming gunfire.
“There was no resistance to the factions that entered our village. They were inventing an excuse to kill us,” a survivor of the massacre tells The Cradle. “They filmed everything. The factions fired randomly at the village to create propaganda.”
However, such media reports caused Reuters to wrongly claim that government forces entered Mukhtariya and killed male residents to “crush a nascent insurgency by fighters from Bashar al-Assad's Alawite sect.”
House-to-house executions
After the gun and tank fire ended, large numbers of fighters entered the village in their vehicles. They began going from house to house, demanding that the men from each family come out.
A young woman, Lena, informs The Cradle how her husband and his three brothers were taken from their home and murdered.
When the attack began, they decided not to flee. "Let them search our homes,” they thought. “We don’t have any weapons.”
They were gathered in the hallway of the house when members of the armed factions began banging violently on the door.
"We want the men!” the masked men yelled.
“After that, they took our young men with them,” Lena states.
Lena and the other women and the children were left alone in the house. They huddled together in fear, staying away from the windows amid the constant sound of gunfire.
“Until sunset in the evening, we waited, praying for the return of our men and young men, but no one came back.”
Mustapha and his two teenage sons
Another survivor of the massacre, Mustapha, describes to The Cradle how his two teenage sons were murdered.
Around 7 am, government troops came to his home, claiming they were looking for weapons. But the family had none.
“They just took whatever gold, money, and cell phones they could lay their hands on. They took the gold bracelet from my wife’s hand,” Mustapha explains.
The men were masked and wearing all black uniforms, suggesting they were members of the General Security.
Without saying a word, they took Mustapha and his three sons out onto the street. They threw them onto the street, forcing them to lie face down on the asphalt. Four of Mustapha’s neighbors were also taken from their homes and forced to lie next to them.
A sheikh commanding the troops arrived. He let Mustapha’s youngest son, just 11 years old, go back inside the house.
Then he ordered his men to execute the seven others.
"Ready, Fire!" the sheikh said. The soldiers sprayed them with bullets.
Multiple bullets struck Mustapha, leaving him critically injured. Because he lost consciousness, the executioners believed he was dead.
After the soldiers left, his family came to retrieve the bodies. When they realized he was alive, they begged their neighbor, who is Sunni, to take him to a hospital.
The neighbor was terrified but agreed to help.
“If they had known he was helping me, they would have killed us both. If a Sunni helps an Alawite, he would be killed,” Mustapha explains.
“As for my sons, I learned the truth when my brother told me, ‘May God have mercy on them.’”
Victims dressed in military clothing
Mustapha tells The Cradle that before the mass execution, “They wanted to force us to change into military uniforms to make us look like regime remnants. But they were too rushed for time.”
Days later, Rami Abdul Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) described similar efforts to hide the killings in Mukhtariyah and elsewhere,
“There was a removal of bodies from the streets after the military operation ended in the cities, and it was essentially a cleanup of the crime scene in Baniyas, Jableh, Sanoubar Jableh, the Latakia countryside, Qardaha, and the Masyaf countryside,” the rights activist said.
“People were forbidden from approaching the bodies, and now they have disappeared from the streets and been moved to an unknown location. Some bodies have even had their clothes changed in certain areas … Some bodies were dressed in military uniforms and vests in the Al-Shir area of the Latakia countryside and in Al-Mukhtariyah.”
These bodies disappeared amid calls from HTS officials to exterminate Alawites and throw their bodies in the sea.
This included Ows Mustafa, who was appointed by the Ministry of Media as director of the Sham FM radio station.
“Throw them in the sea so the fish don’t go hungry in the land of the Umayyads,” he posted on WhatsApp on 8 March.
A month later, bodies believed to be victims of the Syrian coastal massacres washed up on Lebanese shores.
The warehouse
The organized nature of the massacre was also illustrated by the way many of the victims were systematically gathered into large groups before their mass execution.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic documented the killing of at least 27 men who were all executed together in an open-sided storage warehouse in Mukhtariya.
The UN Commission confirmed that at least 34 others were killed in a group close to the main square of the village.
Another 32 men and boys were reportedly killed inside homes, and in the street, the UN Commission added, including older men, twin boys aged approximately 13, the mukhtar (mayor) of the village, and a disabled man.
Residents of Mukhtariyah tell The Cradle that when troops began firing on the village the night before, the mukhtar, Zakaria Muhammad Shaaban, contacted the soldiers to say there were no weapons in the village. He offered to stay overnight with them at the checkpoint to ensure no one from the village would attack it. But they refused.
When the soldiers entered the village the next morning, the mukhtar went out to greet them. “Welcome, young men,” he said, offering them water to drink.
But they immediately shot him in the head, blowing a hole in his brain. They also executed his brother.
Barking like dogs
The Cradle spoke with one young man, a university student named Hamza, who survived the massacre:
“When the factions entered the village, they shot at the door, came in, and dragged us all out. They took our phones, ordered us to kneel, and began beating us with their rifle butts.”
“Then they forced us to crawl in the street. They started climbing on our backs, cursing us and our religion.”
Hamza witnessed one man, a former soldier who had turned in his weapon and completed the settlement process with the new authorities, being beaten to death.
“One of the men had a military settlement card, so they put him in a barrel, and one of them kept hitting him with the butt of his rifle until he died in the barrel.”
“Though I could barely move from the beatings, I kept crawling. Then I heard gunfire. Someone came to shoot me in the head, but the bullet grazed my head and didn't kill me. I was bleeding, so they thought I was dead.”
However, Hamza’s older brother, who was also a university student, and his younger brother, a high school student, were killed along with their father.
A video circulated on social media showing soldiers beating two dozen men as they crawl to the place of their execution in the manner Hamza described.
Another video that circulated online shows three young Alawite men crawling on a dirt path as government troops walk alongside them. Without notice, the troops open fire with Kalashnikov rifles, killing all three.
In yet another video, a soldier is seen viciously beating the men with a long stick as they crawl past bloodied corpses strewn in the street. Other soldiers are standing around laughing, including one who kicks a crawling man. The soldier then looks at the camera and raises his finger to boast about the killings.
According to pro-government Telegram pages, the soldier’s name is Ammar Abdu al-Al. These pages claimed he was arrested and imprisoned for his role in the killings.
However, Alawite activist Wahid Yazbek confirmed that Abdu al-Al is living freely. He was seen in November at the office of Mulhim al-Masri, who owns a car dealership in the Zahraa neighborhood in Homs.
Um Khadr’s testimony
An Alawite woman, Um Khadr, describes to The Cradle how her four sons were taken from her home and executed in the street.
She tried to hide her youngest son among the girls, but they found him and took him too.
Um Khadr begged them not to take them. “My sons haven't done anything. What did they do wrong?"
"If they have nothing against them, they will return,” the gunmen responded.
“They ordered them to howl like dogs, but the young men disobeyed and refused. So they immediately shot them,” Um Khadr says.
After they left, she and the other women went outside to search for her sons. She found them among a heap of corpses.
A video from Mukhtariyah circulated online showing another woman desperately searching for her sons. Other women sit among the bodies, weeping.
The widows were not allowed to move the bodies of their husbands and sons for three days. They were then placed in the back of trucks and taken to the place of burial on the outskirts of the village.
“We only had two hours for the burial. They dug the graves with bulldozers and excavators, and they buried them in a mass grave,” Um Khadr says.
Looting, arson, and the after-wave
After the killing ended, the first armed faction left, but were replaced by others who looted and burned the village.
“One faction kills, another steals, another burns,” Um Khadr reveals.
Lena, whose husband was murdered, tells The Cradle that images of burned houses and land from Mukhtariyah were then shown in the media as a pretext to claim that there had been violent clashes between the government forces and “regime remnants.”
In one such media report, a journalist speaks from the M4 while showing pictures of a burning house.
“We see the ongoing clashes in the neighborhoods of Mukhtariyah in Latakia, the clashes and arrest raids on the part of the Ministry of Defense and the General Security on the bases and positions of the deposed regime remnants belonging to Iran,” he claims.
By this time, the massacre of unarmed Alawite men was underway.
The journalist then turns to a commander from the Ministry of Defense to ask if his men were facing “a lot” of resistance from the regime remnants.
The commander at first says, “There is a little resistance.” But quickly realizing the answer he is supposed to give, he states in the very next sentence, “There is resistance, yes. There is strong resistance.”
The journalist then turns to the village, pointing to the burning home as evidence that clashes are taking place.
Who did they kill and why?
Within two hours on the morning of 7 March, government forces killed 149 men and boys, and one woman, in Mukhtariyah.
They made no effort to determine if those they executed were “regime remnants,” as was claimed. Instead, they killed any Alawite men and teenage boys they found.
“They had orders to kill only the men,” Um Khadr states.
One woman was killed, but only because she recognized one of the killers. He had come to Mukhtariyah the day before, selling glassware. When he realized that she recognized him, he shot her immediately.
Residents inform The Cradle that most of the soldiers were from Deir Ezzor, Aleppo, and Idlib. They knew this from their accents. But they also recognized many who were armed civilians from nearby Sunni towns such as Samandil and Al-Haffah.
When Um Khadr later confronted a soldier, asking why he had killed her sons, he answered that killing Alawites was in accordance with the religious rulings of the medieval religious scholar, Ibn Taymiyyah.
One man from the village was spared after convincing the gunmen that he was Sunni. When they came to his home, they asked him, “Are you Alawite?"
“There is only the Sunnah of our Prophet Muhammad,” he answered, convincing them he was Sunni.
“They killed a useful, educated generation. The majority of those they killed knew nothing about Bashar al-Assad, his army, or the war,” one resident from Mukhtariyah tells The Cradle.
“Why did they kill a 26-year-old doctor? A 25-year-old engineer? Why did they kill an 85-year-old man? A 13-year-old boy?” he asks.
Where is justice?
While the individual soldiers who carried out the massacre have not been brought to justice, neither have those who gave the orders to carry it out.
On 10 March, Defense Ministry spokesman Colonel Hussein Abdul Ghani announced the end of the so-called military operation against “remnants of the regime,” mentioning Mukhtariyah by name.
Abdul Ghani claimed his forces had been successful in “achieving their goals,” even though by this time, many details of the massacre in Mukhtariyah were known.
Hasan Abu Qasra, the SADCOP head and cousin of Defense Minister Murhaf Abu Qasra, also expressed no remorse.
On 12 March, he made a social media post glorifying the orgy of killing he had helped organize in Mukhtariyah.
“This is us joking – imagine when we're serious. Ask the remnants [regime loyalists] about us,” he wrote alongside a video of armed men in a military vehicle speeding toward the coast.
A few days later, Abu Qasra took to social media again to mock the widows of the men his troops had slaughtered. “130 mm cannons are turning the women of the Rawafid into widows — the mut'ah prostitutes,” he wrote.
Abu Kasrah’s boast, the fabricated “clashes” with “regime remnants, and the well-organized mass slaughter of Mukhtariyah’s civilian men all suggest the massacre was pre-planned in Damascus.
Testimony and footage from
Mukhtariyah challenge official claims, showing how false 'security' narratives
in March turned the small Syrian village into the site of mass civilian
killings. Testimony and footage from the village of Mukhtariyah on the Sy'rian
coast show how government security forces fabricated claims of 'violent
clashes' with Alawite insurgents, giving them the pretext to carry out a
pre-planned massacre
At approximately 7:30 am on 7
March 2025, Syrian government forces opened fire on the village of Mukhtariyah
from the M4 highway in the Latakia countryside. Heavy weapons were used,
including 23mm cannons, PKC machine guns, Kalashnikov rifles, and a tank.
No armed resistance was present in the village.
Within hours, at least 149 Alawite civilians – almost all men and teenage boys – were dead. Government statements issued the same day claimed the operation targeted “remnants of the regime” following violent clashes.
However, survivor testimony, video footage filmed by accompanying journalists, and posts by officials present at the scene contradict that account. While violent clashes took place between government security forces and Alawite insurgents elsewhere on 7 March, a closer look at events in Mukhtariyah reveals that the “violent clashes” in the village were fabricated, giving government forces a pretext to carry out the pre-planned massacre of unarmed men and boys on the basis of their religious identity as Alawites.
The atrocities in Mukhtariyah were part of a broader series of massacres carried out by Syrian government forces in dozens of locations across the Syrian coast between 7 and 10 March, leading to the deaths of at least 1,600 Alawite civilians.
A massacre justified in advance
On the evening of 6 March, units from the Syrian military’s Unit 400 were stationed at the Mukhtariyah checkpoint. According to survivors, the troops began firing toward the village in the early evening and continued intermittently through the night.
“They were shouting sectarian slogans,” Fadi, a survivor of the massacre, tells The Cradle. “They said: ‘Patience, Alawites, we have come to slaughter you.’ But no one fired back. No one resisted.”
Three of his brothers were executed during the massacre. Another brother was shot in the leg but survived.
A government security source acknowledges that “individual violations” against residents of the village had taken place, but said these were carried out by unorganized crowds that headed to the coast.
"We are working to stop these violations," the security source claims.
These claims seem to be reinforced by video reports from Gulf media allegedly showing the clashes.
However, testimony from survivors of the massacre in Mukhtariyah and a close review of video reports show that no Alawite insurgents were present in the village. Instead, the “violent clashes” were fabricated, giving highly organized government forces a pretext to carry out the massacre.
Evidence from social media shows that Hasan Abo Kasrah, an influential member of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), was present in Mukhtariyah at the time of the massacre, providing logistical support. He is also the cousin of Syrian Minister of Defense Murhaf Abu Qasra.
The fabricated clashes, false media reports, and involvement of a powerful HTS member with close ties to the country’s defense minister suggest the massacre in Mukhtariyah was premeditated and planned in advance.
That night, Syrian authorities initiated a large-scale mobilization of Ministry of Defense formations, General Security forces, and armed civilians toward the coastal region. Defense Minister Murhaf Abu Qasra issued directives calling on all military formations to move toward the coast with “strict orders to the military to crush the remnants of the regime and make an example of them.”
Amid the preparations, soldiers posted videos on social media saying they were coming to kill Alawites. In one video, a soldier says, “Sunnis, Sunnis, we will exterminate the Alawites.”
Authorities also issued calls for Jihad from mosques across the country to encourage armed civilians to accompany the formal military units.
Mobilizing ‘jihad’, manufacturing consent
Hasan Abu Qasra, the defense minister’s cousin, helped with the mobilization. Abu Qasra, himself a high-ranking HTS member, was appointed head of the state-owned SADCOP petroleum company after the government of Bashar al-Assad was toppled.
Due to the strategic value of fuel in wartime, SADCOP played a key role in supporting HTS military operations along the coast.
As the mobilization on the evening of 6 March was underway, Abu Qasra made a thinly veiled reference to the upcoming killings.
“The dogs want to feast on meat at suhoor tonight,” he wrote on Facebook, making a reference to the pre-dawn meal eaten by Muslims during Ramadan.
Another video circulated online showed a Syrian soldier discussing “The best way to eat the meat of Alawites and Shia.”
Later in the evening on 6 March, Abu Qasra again foreshadowed the killings.
“The fools gave us a golden opportunity, and we are making full use of it,” he wrote in another social media post, making reference to Alawite insurgents who were lured into attacking General Security forces elsewhere in the coastal region, in Jableh.
Around 4:00 am the next day, on 7 March, military convoys carrying thousands of additional troops from the Ministry of Defense, General Security, and armed civilians began arriving at Mukhtariyah.
A survivor of the massacre speaking with Human Rights Watch (HRW) recalled seeing the first convoys arriving on the M4 Highway from Idlib and Aleppo.
“The convoys had a beginning but no end,” he said.
Fire without cover: staging the clash
“They sprayed the village in an unimaginably brutal and insane manner,” Fadi recounts to The Cradle. A tank shell hit Fadi’s brother’s house, demolishing two of its walls.
SADCOP head Abu Qasra confirmed his presence at the time of the attack, posting a picture of troops on the highway adjacent to Mukhtariyah with the phrase, “Good morning.”
Another photo shows him on the highway, carrying a light weapon, next to a man in camouflage military clothing.
Footage taken by journalists accompanying government forces confirms Fadi’s claims that Abu Qasra’s troops fired wildly into the village and that no Alawite insurgents were present or fighting back.
A video from Al-Jazeera channel shows some government troops firing into Mukhtariyah from the M4, while others casually stand around, not even bothering to take cover behind their vehicles.
A separate video from Al-Hadath channel shows a journalist filming a selfie to document the “clashes.” He does not bother to take cover; instead, he stands completely exposed in the middle of the road as he films. He is calm, and there is no indication of incoming gunfire.
“There was no resistance to the factions that entered our village. They were inventing an excuse to kill us,” a survivor of the massacre tells The Cradle. “They filmed everything. The factions fired randomly at the village to create propaganda.”
However, such media reports caused Reuters to wrongly claim that government forces entered Mukhtariya and killed male residents to “crush a nascent insurgency by fighters from Bashar al-Assad's Alawite sect.”
House-to-house executions
After the gun and tank fire ended, large numbers of fighters entered the village in their vehicles. They began going from house to house, demanding that the men from each family come out.
A young woman, Lena, informs The Cradle how her husband and his three brothers were taken from their home and murdered.
When the attack began, they decided not to flee. "Let them search our homes,” they thought. “We don’t have any weapons.”
They were gathered in the hallway of the house when members of the armed factions began banging violently on the door.
"We want the men!” the masked men yelled.
“After that, they took our young men with them,” Lena states.
Lena and the other women and the children were left alone in the house. They huddled together in fear, staying away from the windows amid the constant sound of gunfire.
“Until sunset in the evening, we waited, praying for the return of our men and young men, but no one came back.”
Mustapha and his two teenage sons
Another survivor of the massacre, Mustapha, describes to The Cradle how his two teenage sons were murdered.
Around 7 am, government troops came to his home, claiming they were looking for weapons. But the family had none.
“They just took whatever gold, money, and cell phones they could lay their hands on. They took the gold bracelet from my wife’s hand,” Mustapha explains.
The men were masked and wearing all black uniforms, suggesting they were members of the General Security.
Without saying a word, they took Mustapha and his three sons out onto the street. They threw them onto the street, forcing them to lie face down on the asphalt. Four of Mustapha’s neighbors were also taken from their homes and forced to lie next to them.
A sheikh commanding the troops arrived. He let Mustapha’s youngest son, just 11 years old, go back inside the house.
Then he ordered his men to execute the seven others.
"Ready, Fire!" the sheikh said. The soldiers sprayed them with bullets.
Multiple bullets struck Mustapha, leaving him critically injured. Because he lost consciousness, the executioners believed he was dead.
After the soldiers left, his family came to retrieve the bodies. When they realized he was alive, they begged their neighbor, who is Sunni, to take him to a hospital.
The neighbor was terrified but agreed to help.
“If they had known he was helping me, they would have killed us both. If a Sunni helps an Alawite, he would be killed,” Mustapha explains.
“As for my sons, I learned the truth when my brother told me, ‘May God have mercy on them.’”
Victims dressed in military clothing
Mustapha tells The Cradle that before the mass execution, “They wanted to force us to change into military uniforms to make us look like regime remnants. But they were too rushed for time.”
Days later, Rami Abdul Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) described similar efforts to hide the killings in Mukhtariyah and elsewhere,
“There was a removal of bodies from the streets after the military operation ended in the cities, and it was essentially a cleanup of the crime scene in Baniyas, Jableh, Sanoubar Jableh, the Latakia countryside, Qardaha, and the Masyaf countryside,” the rights activist said.
“People were forbidden from approaching the bodies, and now they have disappeared from the streets and been moved to an unknown location. Some bodies have even had their clothes changed in certain areas … Some bodies were dressed in military uniforms and vests in the Al-Shir area of the Latakia countryside and in Al-Mukhtariyah.”
These bodies disappeared amid calls from HTS officials to exterminate Alawites and throw their bodies in the sea.
This included Ows Mustafa, who was appointed by the Ministry of Media as director of the Sham FM radio station.
“Throw them in the sea so the fish don’t go hungry in the land of the Umayyads,” he posted on WhatsApp on 8 March.
A month later, bodies believed to be victims of the Syrian coastal massacres washed up on Lebanese shores.
The warehouse
The organized nature of the massacre was also illustrated by the way many of the victims were systematically gathered into large groups before their mass execution.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic documented the killing of at least 27 men who were all executed together in an open-sided storage warehouse in Mukhtariya.
The UN Commission confirmed that at least 34 others were killed in a group close to the main square of the village.
Another 32 men and boys were reportedly killed inside homes, and in the street, the UN Commission added, including older men, twin boys aged approximately 13, the mukhtar (mayor) of the village, and a disabled man.
Residents of Mukhtariyah tell The Cradle that when troops began firing on the village the night before, the mukhtar, Zakaria Muhammad Shaaban, contacted the soldiers to say there were no weapons in the village. He offered to stay overnight with them at the checkpoint to ensure no one from the village would attack it. But they refused.
When the soldiers entered the village the next morning, the mukhtar went out to greet them. “Welcome, young men,” he said, offering them water to drink.
But they immediately shot him in the head, blowing a hole in his brain. They also executed his brother.
Barking like dogs
The Cradle spoke with one young man, a university student named Hamza, who survived the massacre:
“When the factions entered the village, they shot at the door, came in, and dragged us all out. They took our phones, ordered us to kneel, and began beating us with their rifle butts.”
“Then they forced us to crawl in the street. They started climbing on our backs, cursing us and our religion.”
Hamza witnessed one man, a former soldier who had turned in his weapon and completed the settlement process with the new authorities, being beaten to death.
“One of the men had a military settlement card, so they put him in a barrel, and one of them kept hitting him with the butt of his rifle until he died in the barrel.”
“Though I could barely move from the beatings, I kept crawling. Then I heard gunfire. Someone came to shoot me in the head, but the bullet grazed my head and didn't kill me. I was bleeding, so they thought I was dead.”
However, Hamza’s older brother, who was also a university student, and his younger brother, a high school student, were killed along with their father.
A video circulated on social media showing soldiers beating two dozen men as they crawl to the place of their execution in the manner Hamza described.
Another video that circulated online shows three young Alawite men crawling on a dirt path as government troops walk alongside them. Without notice, the troops open fire with Kalashnikov rifles, killing all three.
In yet another video, a soldier is seen viciously beating the men with a long stick as they crawl past bloodied corpses strewn in the street. Other soldiers are standing around laughing, including one who kicks a crawling man. The soldier then looks at the camera and raises his finger to boast about the killings.
According to pro-government Telegram pages, the soldier’s name is Ammar Abdu al-Al. These pages claimed he was arrested and imprisoned for his role in the killings.
However, Alawite activist Wahid Yazbek confirmed that Abdu al-Al is living freely. He was seen in November at the office of Mulhim al-Masri, who owns a car dealership in the Zahraa neighborhood in Homs.
Um Khadr’s testimony
An Alawite woman, Um Khadr, describes to The Cradle how her four sons were taken from her home and executed in the street.
She tried to hide her youngest son among the girls, but they found him and took him too.
Um Khadr begged them not to take them. “My sons haven't done anything. What did they do wrong?"
"If they have nothing against them, they will return,” the gunmen responded.
“They ordered them to howl like dogs, but the young men disobeyed and refused. So they immediately shot them,” Um Khadr says.
After they left, she and the other women went outside to search for her sons. She found them among a heap of corpses.
A video from Mukhtariyah circulated online showing another woman desperately searching for her sons. Other women sit among the bodies, weeping.
The widows were not allowed to move the bodies of their husbands and sons for three days. They were then placed in the back of trucks and taken to the place of burial on the outskirts of the village.
“We only had two hours for the burial. They dug the graves with bulldozers and excavators, and they buried them in a mass grave,” Um Khadr says.
Looting, arson, and the after-wave
After the killing ended, the first armed faction left, but were replaced by others who looted and burned the village.
“One faction kills, another steals, another burns,” Um Khadr reveals.
Lena, whose husband was murdered, tells The Cradle that images of burned houses and land from Mukhtariyah were then shown in the media as a pretext to claim that there had been violent clashes between the government forces and “regime remnants.”
In one such media report, a journalist speaks from the M4 while showing pictures of a burning house.
“We see the ongoing clashes in the neighborhoods of Mukhtariyah in Latakia, the clashes and arrest raids on the part of the Ministry of Defense and the General Security on the bases and positions of the deposed regime remnants belonging to Iran,” he claims.
By this time, the massacre of unarmed Alawite men was underway.
The journalist then turns to a commander from the Ministry of Defense to ask if his men were facing “a lot” of resistance from the regime remnants.
The commander at first says, “There is a little resistance.” But quickly realizing the answer he is supposed to give, he states in the very next sentence, “There is resistance, yes. There is strong resistance.”
The journalist then turns to the village, pointing to the burning home as evidence that clashes are taking place.
Who did they kill and why?
Within two hours on the morning of 7 March, government forces killed 149 men and boys, and one woman, in Mukhtariyah.
They made no effort to determine if those they executed were “regime remnants,” as was claimed. Instead, they killed any Alawite men and teenage boys they found.
“They had orders to kill only the men,” Um Khadr states.
One woman was killed, but only because she recognized one of the killers. He had come to Mukhtariyah the day before, selling glassware. When he realized that she recognized him, he shot her immediately.
Residents inform The Cradle that most of the soldiers were from Deir Ezzor, Aleppo, and Idlib. They knew this from their accents. But they also recognized many who were armed civilians from nearby Sunni towns such as Samandil and Al-Haffah.
When Um Khadr later confronted a soldier, asking why he had killed her sons, he answered that killing Alawites was in accordance with the religious rulings of the medieval religious scholar, Ibn Taymiyyah.
One man from the village was spared after convincing the gunmen that he was Sunni. When they came to his home, they asked him, “Are you Alawite?"
“There is only the Sunnah of our Prophet Muhammad,” he answered, convincing them he was Sunni.
“They killed a useful, educated generation. The majority of those they killed knew nothing about Bashar al-Assad, his army, or the war,” one resident from Mukhtariyah tells The Cradle.
“Why did they kill a 26-year-old doctor? A 25-year-old engineer? Why did they kill an 85-year-old man? A 13-year-old boy?” he asks.
Where is justice?
While the individual soldiers who carried out the massacre have not been brought to justice, neither have those who gave the orders to carry it out.
On 10 March, Defense Ministry spokesman Colonel Hussein Abdul Ghani announced the end of the so-called military operation against “remnants of the regime,” mentioning Mukhtariyah by name.
Abdul Ghani claimed his forces had been successful in “achieving their goals,” even though by this time, many details of the massacre in Mukhtariyah were known.
Hasan Abu Qasra, the SADCOP head and cousin of Defense Minister Murhaf Abu Qasra, also expressed no remorse.
On 12 March, he made a social media post glorifying the orgy of killing he had helped organize in Mukhtariyah.
“This is us joking – imagine when we're serious. Ask the remnants [regime loyalists] about us,” he wrote alongside a video of armed men in a military vehicle speeding toward the coast.
A few days later, Abu Qasra took to social media again to mock the widows of the men his troops had slaughtered. “130 mm cannons are turning the women of the Rawafid into widows — the mut'ah prostitutes,” he wrote.
Abu Kasrah’s boast, the fabricated “clashes” with “regime remnants, and the well-organized mass slaughter of Mukhtariyah’s civilian men all suggest the massacre was pre-planned in Damascus.
No comments:
Post a Comment