LATAKIA: Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa called for national unity and peace on Sunday (Mar 9), after hundreds of civilians were reportedly killed along the country’s Mediterranean coast in the worst violence since the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.
Clashes between the new security forces and loyalists of the former government erupted on Thursday in the heartland of the Alawite minority to which Assad belongs, and have since escalated into reported mass killings.
“We must preserve national unity (and) civil peace as much as possible and, God willing, we will be able to live together in this country,” Sharaa said from a mosque in Damascus.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor has reported that 745 Alawite civilians were killed in the coastal Latakia and Tartus provinces.
The Britain-based Observatory said they were killed in “executions” carried out by security personnel or pro-government fighters and were followed by looting.
The fighting has also killed 125 members of the security forces and 148 pro-Assad fighters, according to the Observatory, taking the overall death toll to 1,018.
The interior ministry said on Sunday that government forces were conducting “sweeping operations in Qadmous and the surrounding villages” in Tartus province to “pursue the remnants of the toppled regime”.
State news agency SANA quoted a defence ministry source as saying there were violent clashes ongoing in Tanita, another Tartus village.
An AFP photographer in the city of Latakia reported a military convoy entering the Bisnada neighbourhood to search homes.
In Baniyas, a city to the south, resident Samir Haidar, 67, told AFP two of his brothers and his nephew were killed by armed groups that entered people’s homes, adding that there were “foreigners among them”.
Though himself an Alawite, Haidar was part of the leftist opposition to the Assads and was imprisoned for more than a decade under their rule.
Defence ministry spokesman Hassan Abdul Ghani said on Saturday the security forces had “reimposed control” over areas that had seen attacks by Assad loyalists.
Source: CNA
