Human rights group sounds alarm after massacre of over 1,000 Alawite Muslim civilians by pro-government militias.
The de facto national flag of Syria since December 2024
Media release
Today, Christian Solidarity International has issued a Genocide Warning for the Syrian Arab Republic.
“Conditions for genocide continue to exist in parts of Syria controlled by Ahmed al-Sharaa’s HTS (Organization for the Liberation of the Levant),” the group warned. “Over 1,000 civilians, mainly from the Alawite religious minority, have been massacred in recent days in an orgy of targeted killings, accompanied by dehumanizing hate speech.”
The warning comes three months after a coalition of rebel groups headed by HTS overthrew Syria’s dictatorship, headed by President Bashar al-Assad, himself an Alawite Muslim, following 13 years of civil war.
According to media reports, on the night of Thursday, March 6, the interim Syrian government, headed by President Ahmed al-Sharaa, called for a mobilization of volunteers to fight “remnants of the regime” on the Syria coast, after clashes between pro-Assad fighters and government security forces.
Forces allied to the government began large-scale massacres of Alawite civilians in Latakia and Tartous province the next day, Friday, March 7. By the evening of Sunday, March 9, the civilian death toll was over 1,000 – with some local estimates placing it much higher.
Numerous eyewitnesses report that, in religiously-mixed areas, pro-government forces went door to door, demanding to know the religious identity of the residents, and killing Alawite men and sometimes whole families.
The French Syria specialist Fabrice Balanche reports that killings are continuing today, March 10, in the area of Qadmous.
In its statement, CSI argued that there is an ideological component to the killings: “According to HTS’s jihadist ideology, Alawites – an ancient heterogenous religious sect – are outside any protection offered by traditional Islamic law.”
CSI urged “the member states of the United Nations, especially the member states of the Security Council, to fulfill their obligations under international law to prevent genocide in Syria, and to protect those in danger of perishing as a result of genocide.”
CSI’s statement cited U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s condemnation of “murders” by “radical Islamist terrorists, including foreign jihadis,” and asserted that, “It is now time to go beyond rhetoric and to act to prevent and protect according to the Genocide Convention, the Right to Protect, and other international human rights instruments.”
