Over a few brutal days in March, as sectarian violence and revenge killings tore through parts of Syria, two friends from different communities tried to find a way to survive. On the night of 6 March, Munir, his wife and their two sons huddled together in their apartment as government troops and militiamen entered their neighbourhood of Qusour in Baniyas, going house to house. The fighters seemed to move with little coordination, with some houses raided by five separate groups while others were left untouched. “There was no plan,” Munir said, “just violence and looting.”
The first question the fighters asked when storming an apartment was: “Are you a Sunni or an Alawite?” The answer decided the fate of the residents. Sunnis were spared, though their apartments were often looted. When raiders found an Alawite home, some stole what they could and left; others came for revenge, stealing first and then shooting. “If one didn’t kill you, the next one might,” Munir said. Munir, a committed Marxist, had spent over a decade as a prisoner in Bashar al-Assad’s brutal prison system. When the regime fell in December, he was jubilant, but he is from an Alawite family, the sect associated with the Assad regime since the 1970s. Members of his community had been involved in atrocities during the civil war, and Munir knew this could not be brushed aside.
After Assad’s fall, a climate of fear descended over the countryside around Homs, Hama, and the mountain villages. There were daily reports of arbitrary arrests, humiliations at checkpoints, kidnappings, and killings. Some victims were former regime officers or shabeeha accused of past crimes; others were murdered over land disputes. Displaced people returning from refugee camps found their homes destroyed while neighbouring Alawite villages thrived. There seemed no organised effort by the new General Security Service to capture those accused of crimes under the regime, resulting in individual acts of revenge, looting, and murder by armed gangs.
The attacks in Munir’s neighbourhood and along the coast were the culmination of tit-for-tat raids. Days earlier, government troops had driven through Baniyas firing indiscriminately. On 6 March, a General Security unit was shot at while heading to an Alawite village, triggering a wave of coordinated attacks by Alawite gunmen who killed scores of security forces and civilians, seizing control of neighbourhoods. Syrian media called these gunmen “foloul” – remnants of the defeated regime. The government mobilised troops and launched a large-scale military operation on the evening of 6 March to regain control.
Munir and his family stayed in their apartment through the night and following morning, listening to gunfire. At noon on Friday, his nephew called to say gunmen had knocked on doors in their building. Munir’s 70-year-old brother opened the door. When asked if he was Alawite or Sunni, he said Alawite. The gunmen took him and his son, along with three other men, to the roof and shot them. Only the son survived, crawling back to call Munir. “From that moment,” Munir said, “we were waiting for our turn.”
