When forces loyal to ousted President Bashar al-Assad launched attacks along Syria’s coast last week, it appeared to realise a fear that had gripped the country since his fall: that former regime loyalists would rise up.
A shadowy new armed group headed by a former Assad army commander, the Military Council to Liberate Syria, announced an insurgency against the country’s new rulers, calling on Syrians to join its fight against the government led by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which toppled Assad in December.
Though the group’s role was unclear, the violence triggered the greatest crisis so far for the government of interim president and HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa. Allied factions launched ferocious counter-attacks, leading to a spiral of sectarian violence that killed hundreds of people, mostly civilians.
“This was the first real internal test the authorities had. They failed,” said Nanar Hawach, a Syria analyst at International Crisis Group. “The legitimacy of the new authorities is fraught right now.”
The main targets were members of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam to which Assad belongs and who dominated his military and regime. Mostly Sunni fighters loyal to Sharaa’s government posted videos online calling for Alawites’ “cleansing”, with rights groups and residents reporting dozens of massacres.
Sharaa’s government now faces a reckoning. It must both stop the nascent insurgency from spiralling into a long-term threat, and rein in the sectarian violence that has marred its image in the eyes of many Syrians — especially minorities — and governments from whom they are seeking sanctions relief.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, reported that more than 1,000 people had been killed as of Sunday, the majority of them civilians. Another group, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, said it documented the killing of 642 people.
In the months since the fall of the regime, when thousands of former Assad army members abandoned Damascus and retreated back to their villages, small insurgent groups have formed in Syria’s Alawite and Assad strongholds in coastal provinces like Latakia and Tartous, according to Hawach, as well as in Homs and Hama.
While the newly created pro-Assad military council did not claim the attacks on security forces, analysts believe the timing of its announcement suggested at least a degree of co-ordination. It is led by Ghiath Dalla, an influential Alawite brigadier general in the former army’s Fourth Division, once headed by Bashar’s brother Maher. Dalla is still believed to be in Syria.
The new government’s decision to disband the army and stop paying salaries also left thousands of former fighters unable to make ends meet.
“They are ready to jump on any ship that has come to save them from their reality,” said a military expert with Etana, a Syrian policy research organisation, speaking anonymously. He said the coast is “fertile ground” for pro-Assad groups to mobilise, including with help from regime loyalists overseas.
“From the moment the regime fell, there has been a nonstop propaganda campaign by pro-Assad accounts,” said Gregory Waters, a Syria researcher and armed groups expert, adding that this online campaign likely had help from outside Syria. “These pages are purely designed to instil fear.”
Analysts say the vengeful, sectarian response by HTS-allied factions could leave many Alawites, even those whom welcomed the fall of the regime, fearing for their future and fuel support for groups claiming to protect their interests.
Sharaa has tried to draw a line under the violence. In a speech on Sunday, he blamed remnants of the former regime for seeking to create “strife and drag our country into a civil war”. While he did not condemn any specific allied factions, the government announced the creation of an investigative council that will look into the crimes committed since Thursday.
One of Sharaa’s central challenges is the absence of a disciplined national military force. While analysts believe his own HTS fighters — who make up the majority of the ministry of interior’s black-clad General Security forces — are better trained than others, the country is home to myriad armed groups and fighters eager to avenge Assad’s atrocities during the 14-year civil war.
Among those believed to be involved in the sectarian violence were parts of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, an umbrella of rebel factions that operates primarily in the north.
Analysts said that bringing the rebel factions who hold sway in various parts of Syria under the full control of the Ministry of Defence is essential to long-term stability.
Sharaa has called on them to disband. But experts say that as long as the cash-strapped government cannot afford to pay their salaries, it will struggle to integrate factions into the military or mobilise a professionalised national force to maintain peace across the country.
But for this they will require money, which depends in part on mending ties with the west and securing relief from Assad-era sanctions — something that, at least for now, appears a more distant prospect.
Western countries such as the UK, which have taken steps to ease restrictions in return for the protection of minorities, have condemned the violence.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio, which still has sanctions on Syria, denounced on Sunday what he called “the radical Islamist terrorists, including foreign jihadis, that murdered people”.
“It creates quite a vicious circle,” said HTS expert Jerome Drevon, explaining how sanctions have prevented donor countries like Qatar from financing the underfunded new Syrian military.
“You can’t pay money for the army, so the army is not really being restructured — it remains weak. So then the government can’t really tackle the issue of these armed groups.”
