'Things Got Out of Control' - an investigation into massacres on Syria's coast

In March of 2025, after at attempted uprising by armed groups loyal to the Assad regime, forces of the Syrian Transitional Government poured into Syria’s coastal region, home to the country’s Alawites, a minority sect to which the deposed president belonged. Armed factions and civilians who responded to a call for a general mobilisation took revenge on Alawite civilians in a spate of sectarian violence. More than a thousand civilians were killed, many summarily executed after pro-government gunmen entered their homes and asked “Are you Alawite?”. Men who answered in the affirmative were taken to the street or the rooftops of their apartment buildings and shot.

For Drop Site News, I reported on the killings in one village in the coastal mountains, publishing a lengthy investigation based on interviews with victims and government security officials, including photographs. In Al-Rusafeh, 63 civilians were killed. Houses were looted and burned. Among the victims were four children under ten, shot dead in the living room of their grandfather’s home.

“Curse your soul,” says a voice behind the camera. Someone next to him fires a shot into the body of a man lying on the ground, who is unarmed and wearing striped tracksuit pants. The gunman shoots again: two, three—a total of eleven times. “You pig,” the voice says, as a third kicks the lifeless body off the edge of an embankment. The body rag dolls to the ground below, leaving a red stain on the concrete.

The man killed, Haidar Bassam Assad, was 30 years old. He worked as a woodcutter in the village of Al Rusafa, Syria, bringing in between 15 and 30 thousand Syrian pounds (roughly £2) a day for his wife and two children. He is among more than a thousand civilians who were killed during a weekend of extreme sectarian violence last March. Like most of them, he was Alawite, a member of the same minority sect as Syria’s deposed dictator Bashar Al-Assad. Under the old regime, the family promoted Alawites to senior positions in the security services responsible for the brutal repression of the population, deepening sectarian divides. When Al-Assad fled, many of these senior officers also left the country. Those who couldn’t retreated to their villages in the coastal mountains of Syria and went into hiding.

On March 6, gunmen loyal to the old regime launched a series of coordinated attacks on the country’s new security forces. The failed insurgency sparked a wave of retaliatory violence against civilians. In Alawite neighborhoods and villages, across the coastal cities and mountains, fighters and armed individuals roamed for days—looting, burning, and summarily executing civilians.