“They arrived without warning and began killing people based on a single question: ‘Are you Sunni or Alawite?’ If you answered Alawite, you were dead.” Nine months on, Samir, 68, still struggles to talk about what happened last March in Baniyas, a town on Syria’s Mediterranean coast where hundreds of people were killed—almost all from the Alawite community, which until a few months earlier had been the Assads’ core base of support. Across the wider region, at least 1,500 people were killed.
Samir’s eyes are wet, his gaze heavy with pain—more than enough to convey his state of mind. He welcomes us with one of his two sons and immediately admits that when he talks about last March, he often feels faint. “I might even pass out,” he says. After a couple of cigarettes, he seems to have steadied himself.
Samir, if one can put it that way, is among the few lucky ones: he and his family survived. They lived through the bloodiest episode of violence in post-Assad Syria.
“We stayed hidden in the house, in silence, for 24 hours. Outside, we could hear screams and gunfire. It wasn’t hard to imagine what was happening,” he says. “On the morning of the second day, I called a friend—he’s Sunni, by the way—and asked if he felt able to come and get us by car. As soon as he arrived, we ran downstairs, jumped into the vehicle, and managed to escape right in front of a group of armed men,” he recalls. “There were bodies lying on the ground.”
In today’s Syria, as in yesterday’s, ethno-religious identity matters. Under the dictatorship (1970–2024), the Assad family guaranteed Alawites—a small minority with Shiite roots—the best positions within the state bureaucracy and the military: loyalty to the regime in exchange for a job. Not great wealth—many Alawite families remained poor—but a set of privileges granted at the expense of the Sunni majority.
In December 2024, the balance shifted. Today, the new authorities, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, represent the Sunni community. Add to this thirteen years of civil war and more than half a century of dictatorship—leaving the country on its knees, with destruction everywhere, millions of refugees, hundreds of thousands of disappeared, mass graves, and cemeteries that in just a few years have taken in half a million dead—and it is easy to see why hatred and a thirst for revenge are widespread, especially in the absence of a state capable of delivering justice.
All of this forms the backdrop to what happened last March in Syria’s Mediterranean region.
“Many of the armed men who came here to kill us,” Samir continues, lighting yet another cigarette, “were wearing the uniforms of the new security forces. The new state is responsible for this massacre.” In those days, Samir lost two brothers. The son of one of them—his nephew—comes over and sits down to listen to our conversation.
Murat, 35, also looks worn down by exhaustion, with deep dark circles under his eyes. He tells us how painful it is to remember and to speak, but that at the same time he feels compelled to do so. He asks us to walk with him to his home, just a few hundred meters from his uncle’s house. When we arrive, Murat motions for us to follow him up to the roof—five flights of stairs.
“They brought us right here—me, my father, and our neighbors. They tied our hands, and the oldest militiaman ordered the youngest to shoot us,” Murat recalls. “After I was struck hard in the back, I passed out. When I came to, everyone else was dead.”
Like other survivors, Murat is convinced that many of the militiamen were members of the new security forces. “In the months that followed, I saw those same two men again at an army checkpoint. Thank God they didn’t recognize me—otherwise they would have tried to kill me again.”
The account given by the new security forces is different, though not entirely so.
We go to the police headquarters in Baniyas. It is immediately clear from their accents that none of the officers are local. Almost all of them are from Idlib, which until the fall of the old regime was a stronghold of the armed opposition and of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham itself—the group from which Syria’s new leader, al-Sharaa, emerged.
After asking us several questions, the commander, Amer al-Madne—a thick, carefully groomed black beard—agrees to answer ours. “In March, remnants of the old regime attacked us,” he explains, “killing seventeen of our men. To restore order, reinforcements arrived from Damascus and other parts of the country. But along with them, individual armed civilians also showed up on their own initiative. Some did not follow our orders—that’s where the violence and the deaths came from.”
When we relay what some survivors told us, Amer al-Madne limits himself to saying that the state is not hiding anything and that “some soldiers are under trial.” He then adds that they are here “to protect everyone, regardless of ethno-religious identity.”
But after what happened, Alawites have no trust whatsoever in the new security forces or in the new state. They are not even asking for justice. Yet without justice and reconciliation, it is impossible to imagine a future for Syria.
This becomes painfully clear when speaking with the families of the hundreds of thousands of people who disappeared under the dictatorship and later during the civil war—most of them members of the Sunni majority. The Assads took everything from them, even their dignity.
In Damascus we visit the offices of the Association of Detainees of the Syrian Revolution, which supports people who survived the prisons of the old regime as well as the families of the disappeared.
“My brother was a peaceful person. He never carried a weapon—he was only involved in humanitarian work. The first information we had about him came thanks to what we do here: tracing missing people through the memories of those who encountered them in prison.” Leena, 30, has been working at the association for several months. She helps others who have suffered—and who are still suffering deeply—while at the same time trying to find the strength and energy to carry on herself. Her brother was arrested in 2014, and the last information about him indicates that until 2023, a year before the fall of the old regime, he was being held in the notorious Sednaya prison, not far from Damascus.
It is difficult to be precise about the number of missing people, but estimates range from 150,000 to 300,000 Syrians who were arrested and then disappeared before and during the civil war.
Leena introduces us to Malak, who is also searching for her brother. He was arrested more than ten years ago while he was helping evacuate the wounded from Douma, one of the towns around Damascus that remained under siege for years and, in 2018, was the target of one of the largest chemical attacks of the war.
“I don’t know whether he’s still alive, but I have the right to know. I want justice. They gave me a death certificate,” she explains, “but some people who later got out of prison told me they had seen him after the date listed on that document.”
Malak speaks in front of a gate covered with photographs of hundreds of people who vanished into the black hole of the old regime. In Damascus, and across Syria more broadly, there are many places like this.
The families of the disappeared are trying to keep their loved ones’ memory alive, to support one another, and in some way to exert pressure on the new government to find those who are missing and bring those responsible to justice.
Given the scale of the crimes—and the fact that the Assad family itself has fled to Moscow—it is hard to imagine how this could happen. A Syrian lawyer who, during the war, collected more than a million documents on the atrocities of the old regime explained to us that, as things stand, there are not even adequate laws in place to investigate and prosecute all those responsible. Some believe that the new government itself may be unwilling to go all the way, for fear of deepening existing divisions.
The search for an extremely fragile balance between reconciliation and justice may be the only thing that could—perhaps—break the vicious cycle of hatred and violence.
The cover photo was shot by Emanuele Valenti. All reproduction rights are reserved.
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