On the night of March 6th, Munir, his wife, and their two sons—both in their twenties—couldn’t sleep. They gathered in a small bedroom of their apartment as government soldiers and militiamen entered their neighborhood of Qusour in the coastal city of Baniyas, going from house to house. The fighters seemed disorganized, moving through the streets with little coordination. Some homes were raided by multiple groups, while others were left alone. “There was no plan,” Munir said, “just violence and looting.”
When the fighters burst into an apartment, their first question was: “Are you Sunni or Alawite?” The answer determined the residents’ fate. Sunnis were usually spared, though their homes were sometimes looted. But if the raiders found an Alawite family, some would steal what they could and leave; others came for revenge, stealing first and then shooting. “If one didn’t kill you,” Munir said, “the next one might.”
Munir, a committed Marxist, had spent more than ten years as a prisoner in Bashar al-Assad’s brutal jails. When the regime fell in December, he was overjoyed. But Munir came from an Alawite family, the same sect that had been closely tied to the Assad regime since the 1970s. Many Alawites had been involved in some of the worst atrocities of the civil war that began in 2011, including disappearances, imprisonment, and torture. Munir knew this history couldn’t be ignored.
After Assad’s fall, fear and uncertainty spread across the countryside near Homs and Hama, and in the mountain villages. Daily reports told of arbitrary arrests, humiliations at checkpoints, kidnappings, and killings. Some of those killed were former regime officers or shabeeha (thugs) accused of past crimes. Others were murdered in disputes over confiscated land. In some areas, people who had been displaced by the war returned from refugee camps only to find their homes destroyed and nearby Alawite villages thriving. The new General Security Service made little effort to systematically arrest those accused of crimes under the old regime. Instead, armed gangs carried out revenge killings, looting, and murder.
The attacks in Munir’s neighborhood and along the coast were the peak of a cycle of tit-for-tat raids. A few days earlier, government troops in pickup trucks had driven through the streets of Baniyas, firing randomly and terrifying locals. On Thursday, March 6th, a General Security unit heading to make arrests in an Alawite village in the Latakia countryside was ambushed by armed men. This was quickly followed by coordinated attacks by Alawite gunmen, who killed dozens of security forces, police, and civilians, taking control of neighborhoods and public buildings. Not far from Munir’s home, they attacked two General Security checkpoints at the entrance to Baniyas, killing six men.
Syrian media called these gunmen “foloul”—a term meaning “remnants,” originally used after Egypt’s 2011 revolution to describe members of a defeated regime trying to make a comeback. The government mobilized troops and called for reinforcements before launching a large-scale military operation on the evening of March 6th to retake control.
Munir and his family stayed in their apartment through that Thursday night and into the next morning, listening to the gunfire. Around noon on Friday, he got a call from his nephew, who lived two streets away. His nephew said gunmen had been knocking on doors in their building. Munir’s brother—a man in his seventies, slightly stooped—had answered. The gunmen asked if he had any weapons. He said no. Then they asked if he was Alawite or Sunni. He told them he was Alawite. They took him, his son, and three men from another apartment up to the roof, where…They had been barely scraping by in steep, rocky terrain. Most were either small farmers working poor land or landless sharecroppers tied to absentee landlords. Over generations, many had been driven by desperation to the Syrian plains, where they worked for Sunni landowners and faced discrimination because of their religious beliefs.
From a young age, Munir was drawn to rebellion by the poverty and injustice he saw around him. Like many young people of his generation, he gravitated toward leftist militancy. A friend from his village, who worked as a journalist in Damascus, introduced him to Marxist reading groups. Munir would walk for miles to the city to attend secret discussions or get hold of a single copy of a Marxist newspaper. He started his own cell and began distributing leaflets among peasants in the fields and workers at a nearby oil refinery.
Many of his comrades were educated Alawites who, he told me, formed a strong base for the political left—especially those without agricultural land. They saw education and government jobs as their only path to social mobility. “Their religious background didn’t get in the way of adopting secular or leftist views,” Munir said. “Alawite doctrine is esoteric. There are no rituals, formal institutions, or visible symbols in daily life that mark someone as Alawite.”
After a brief period of democracy in the 1950s, Syria went through two decades of coups and counter-coups. In their struggle for power, military leaders built networks of patronage and loyalty based on clan, region, and sect. The rise of Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite, marked the peak of this process. In 1970, he seized power, placing Alawites in dominant roles within the security services and the army.
By the late 1970s, Munir had become a schoolteacher, traveling between remote villages and witnessing the deep poverty of mountain peasants. He believed that only class struggle could improve the lives of the rural poor. But for many of the Alawite children he taught, it was the state—under Hafez’s rule—that offered a way out of poverty. Often, when taking attendance in the morning, Munir would ask, “Where’s so-and-so?” and the students would laugh and say, “Oh, he joined the Saraya militia,” a group led by Hafez’s brother Rifaat. It began to dawn on Munir that these 14- or 15-year-old boys were being “indoctrinated, brainwashed, and shaped” to become enforcers for the regime.
Munir met Anas in the late 1990s in Baniyas. Both were outsiders in their own communities, not fitting the roles expected of them by sect or family. Even at the height of the civil war, when Baniyas split along sectarian lines and fighters on both sides were kidnapped and killed, the two men maintained their friendship.
Anas—short, stocky, and balding—was a wealthy businessman from a prominent Sunni merchant family that had owned farmland and warehouses since Ottoman times. For nearly twenty years, the two friends met for coffee every day. Around noon, Munir would leave his small, cluttered office apartment filled with old newspapers, files, and boxes; walk down a dim, damp hallway with stained walls and the smell of mold; and enter Anas’s flat, which was larger, tidier, and filled with sunlight. With a pot of strong Turkish coffee between them, they would share gossip, discuss books, talk about their sons, or simply sit smoking in silence—Anas with his long, slim cigarettes, Munir with his hand-rolled tobacco.
Anas grew up in Baniyas, raised by parents who had attended private, Western-style schools. They were brought up to dress, speak, and behave like the European bourgeoisie, and they—They raised their son in the same way. When Anas was a child, Alawites began migrating from the mountains to his city, driven by poverty and seeking government jobs and education. He remembered how children in his Sunni neighborhood would throw rocks and taunt those impoverished Alawite peasants, chasing them away.
In his own family, religion took on a more central role after the 1967 war with Israel. “I know it’s a cliché,” he said, “but after the defeat, people started saying: we tried the left, we tried pan-Arabism; neither managed to defeat Israel. Let’s try Islam.” That same year, one of his aunts began wearing the hijab, something his family had previously associated with the “backward” and poor peasants.
From the mid-1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood and its armed wing, the Fighting Vanguard, led the opposition to Hafez al-Assad. The fighting that followed, and Hafez’s brutal crackdown on the Brotherhood, resulted in tens of thousands killed or imprisoned. It culminated in the 1982 massacre, when the regime deployed the army and mostly Alawite militias to crush a Brotherhood uprising. In Hama, around 25,000 people were killed. This dark history kept the mistrust and fear between Sunnis and Alawites alive, and the regime took advantage of it.
At 15, Anas was arrested, tortured, and sent to jail. To this day, he doesn’t know why. He wasn’t religious—he didn’t pray or fast. He thinks maybe someone gave him a book, or perhaps he was caught up in the broader crackdown on Sunnis under the pretense of fighting the Brotherhood. “Thousands were arrested just for being from a certain family or Sunni neighborhood, or because a relative was in the Brotherhood,” Anas said. “Or for reading a book, saying a word, or attending a religious lesson. Being a Sunni made you a suspect.” He was one of 120 people shackled together, each seen by a judge for a minute or two before being sentenced. He believes only six or seven were actual Brotherhood members. After a few months in prison, Anas began praying, and within two years, he had memorized the Quran and become a staunch believer.
“Don’t be surprised,” he said, “because if you put Richard Dawkins—do you know him?—if you put him in the middle of that bleak prison among the believers, he will become a believer,” Anas chuckled. “You’re in isolation, with nothing beyond the 0.3 square meters that is your space. If a war breaks out, you don’t know; if a prime minister is assassinated, you don’t know; if an earthquake hits a faraway region and hundreds of thousands die, you don’t know. Death was our daily companion. We had tuberculosis, cholera, scabies. I was lucky—when I was tortured and beaten, I didn’t receive deadly blows, just broken ribs. I lost consciousness many times, but I didn’t lose an eye or have a brain hemorrhage.”
By the time he was released in 1992, Anas had become a full-fledged Islamic fundamentalist, refusing to listen to music or watch TV, and speaking the language of jihad. But over the years, his religious conviction faded. By the time he met Munir, his thinking had become more moderate.
Munir had been fired from his teaching job in the mid-80s. Soon after, he and his two brothers were arrested for their political activities. Officers searching their house found a schoolbook belonging to their younger sister, in which she had scratched out Hafez al-Assad’s eyes in a photograph. She was arrested too. Even the girl Munir was in love with was detained.
In prison, torture sessions lasted up to 12 hours. “We wanted death to come quickly, just to end the torture,” Munir recalled. “You weren’t even screaming anymore, just—”Some of us cried out: “Oh, mother… I beg you, mother… please, make the pain stop!” What we endured was not just physical torture, but a spiritual, political, and moral defeat.
When Munir was released from prison in 1993, he discovered that Hafez al-Assad’s security forces had not only crushed intellectuals and political dissidents but had also arrested thousands of university students. The Communist Party had collapsed, and the Muslim Brotherhood had been dismantled. “There were no more political forces left,” he explained. “When you’re imprisoned for 15 years, you’re effectively erased.” Syria entered a state of political emptiness, and for Munir, that explained much of what would follow.
As we spoke, Munir sat on an old, worn-out sofa, its wooden armrests smoothed by years of use. He stood up, slightly stooped, and walked to the edge of a balcony covered by curtains, overlooking an intersection marked by a large mulberry tree. He recalled that over a weekend in March, “That tree became the gunmen’s main gathering point. From here, we could see them moving around. Sometimes, they’d fire an RPG at a storage room door to blow it open, setting the building on fire.”
During Friday prayers, Sunni preachers called for “Faz’a,” a rallying cry to arms, and protesters poured out of mosques in Idlib, Homs, Hama, and Damascus, demanding weapons and revenge for slain security personnel. That’s when the next wave of violence hit Munir’s neighborhood—anyone with a gun, many driven by sectarian rage, revenge, and fear, he told me. Some of these armed civilians came from areas that had suffered massacres by the Assad regime, and they feared Assad might make a comeback.
The gunmen broke into shops and ground-floor apartments, firing at civilians and loading their loot into pickup trucks. Munir’s second brother called to say his house had been raided. Armed men asked him, “What will you give to save your life?” He handed over his car keys, and they left.
Munir took his two sons and made them climb into a small storage space under the kitchen ceiling. He begged them to stay there, no matter what happened.
“When the killing started on March 6th, at first we didn’t think about leaving,” said Munir’s wife, Wassan, as she entered the room carrying a tray with a pot of Turkish coffee and small cups. She set it on the table between us and sat on the sofa next to Munir. She wore pink pajamas under a bathrobe and was calm and serene, with a round face, large glasses, and a soft voice. Her demeanor contrasted with Munir’s animated, wide-eyed gestures.
“Why would we leave?” she added. “We had nothing to do with those attacks on security forces, and we had no weapons or anything like that.”
In a quiet voice, she explained that on Friday night, as they waited for fighters to storm their apartment, she gathered all their valuables and whatever money they had, laying them out on the table. “We thought maybe this way they wouldn’t waste time searching the apartment and hopefully wouldn’t discover the boys,” she said. “I looked for anything of value, but all I found was a gold wedding band, a bracelet, and 300,000 Syrian pounds—about 20 dollars.” She laughed with embarrassment, like someone who had failed to offer proper hospitality to guests.
Munir told me that sectarian massacres had happened there before. Again, he felt compelled to talk about the past. The Syrian uprising, which followed a wave of anti-government protests across the Arab world in 2011, had unleashed violent crackdowns. “The Alawites saw the revolution as an existential threat…””He’s a potential threat,” he said. They began sending their young men to volunteer for the National Defence Forces—death squads that worked with the army to suppress the uprising.
Before the revolution, Munir was viewed as part of a harmless leftist opposition. Afterward, he was seen as a danger to his community. The regime played on historical fears of past oppression and massacres, sending a clear message: if Bashar al-Assad falls, this will be your fate. His neighbors suspected him of conspiring with armed rebels and attacked him and his family. For weeks, he was too afraid to leave the house, worried he might be assaulted. “If my son had to go to the corner shop,” he said, “I would hold my breath until he came back.”
A few weeks into the revolution, Munir had to flee Baniyas and take shelter in his home village, where he felt safer. His extended family’s houses were close together, and he was surrounded by brothers and cousins who protected him, even if they didn’t all share his political views. He stayed for a couple of months, but even there, he was too scared to go outside due to death threats from both regime loyalists and neighbors.
He knew his name was on a regime detention list, but in May that year, he had to return to the city for his children’s schooling and his wife’s job. Less than an hour after he got back, men from the regime’s security service knocked on his door. One of them, holding a rifle, ordered him to come with them. He was taken first to the political security branch, then transferred to the city’s newly built but not yet opened football stadium, which had been turned into a detention center. Thousands of men—nearly all the male population of the city—were rounded up and forced inside.
What he saw in the stadium still haunts him to this day—not the torture or beatings, but the smell. As he described how young men sat in pools of excrement, he dropped his cigarette. “Everyone was shackled, some for ten days straight, forced to relieve themselves right where they sat, still handcuffed. There were no toilets, just pools of shit.” He repeated the word several times. “At night, regime thugs would come to torture and beat the detainees, cursing mothers, sisters, God, and religion. They did it just to entertain themselves.”
He was released a few days later but was arrested again after his faction of the communist party declared support for the revolution and elected him to the political council. This time, he was taken to the military intelligence branch. While waiting for a clerk to register his name and ID, he was beaten with electrical cables until he lost consciousness.
On the evening of Friday, March 7, when Anas got the call from Munir, he had no idea how to help him escape the area. Being Sunni offered Anas some protection, but he didn’t know the men patrolling the streets, and they didn’t know him. As the two huddled in their apartments—one in a Sunni neighborhood, the other in an Alawite part of town—they watched a massacre unfold, as bad as some of the worst days of the war. Anas wondered if he would ever see his friend again.
On Saturday morning, gunfire started up again, and Munir began making frantic phone calls. The wife of his second brother—the one whose car had been taken the night before—called to say that a different group of fighters had dragged her husband, his son (a 35-year-old schoolteacher), and two neighbors up to the rooftop and shot them all.
Under the mulberry tree in front of the house, the fighters brought a man and stood him against the wall. “Over there, near the tree,” Munir said, pointing. “They sprayed him with bullets. Then one of them kicked him with his boot to make sure he was dead.”
Early that morning, Anas…I received a call from my old university professor, pleading for help. He was a friend—his son had been an engineer in my office, and his other son was a judge. Like me, they held liberal, progressive views. He called me around 7:30 or 8 in the morning, asking for assistance. By then, I had already found a way into the area. I called Munir and said, “Get ready. I’ll be right outside your building in two minutes.”
Munir and his family were too frightened to even peek from the balcony to check if the car had arrived, afraid the gunmen across the street might see them. I told my wife and kids, “We’re going to take the risk.” We went downstairs. At the building entrance, I left them inside and cautiously looked out. I spotted the car. I yelled for my family to move. “Ya Allah,” we whispered, and we ran as fast as we could, jumping into the car.
I also sent a car to my professor’s house and called to let him know. When he heard a car approaching, he, his wife, their two sons, and their daughters-in-law rushed downstairs into the street—but it wasn’t my car. Realizing their mistake, they tried to run back inside, but gunmen got out of the vehicle and followed them in. They shot the professor and two of his sons. The gunmen told the women, “We will spare you so you die of grief.”
My car arrived just two minutes later. It picked up the survivors, who reached my house in shock, some hysterical. By then, a third family had also arrived, having survived a similar ordeal and in desperate shape. I begged the more than a dozen people gathered in my apartment to stay quiet, worried the neighbors might hear their cries and report us.
As far as I knew, I was the only one helping Alawites escape, and I was scared. Some families stayed for two or three days, but the professor’s family remained for ten—they were too afraid to leave.
On Saturday evening, I heard the government spokesman announce that the situation was back to normal and the streets were clear of bodies, but I didn’t believe it. It later turned out the killings continued through Sunday. On Monday, I drove Munir back to his home and then went to the professor’s house.
The streets were empty. Ground-floor shops were gutted and burned, with faint trails of smoke still rising. Some buildings were still being looted. I found the professor’s body at the entrance of his building, next to his two sons. A little further lay the body of his sister, killed a day earlier. Though it was early March and the nights were cold, the bodies had already begun to rot and smell. I walked through the building—there were four apartments, and in each, I saw two or three bodies.
I called the Red Crescent. When they arrived, I helped collect the dead and followed them to the cemetery. I stayed until six in the evening, performing burial rituals since there were no men from the family left to do so.
It was an Alawite cemetery, and I was surprised to see that most people gathered there were Sunnis—people who had also been sheltering Alawite families and were now helping the survivors bury their dead. “Maybe that’s the only positive thing to come out of this massacre,” I said.
When asked if I was ever scared, I replied, “Of course I was. When I brought families to my building, I told them not to make noise or even turn on the lights. The night before, on Friday, when I tried to shelter a family in my brother’s house, the neighbors refused and warned me, ‘If you bring Alawites here, we will report you.'”
“By Monday morning, we realized that all of Baniyas had been sheltering families. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said 60%…”The Alawite neighborhood was part of our own area.
“Every family here survived because a Sunni family protected us,” Munir said.
“I don’t believe any of that nonsense about martyrdom and the afterlife,” Anas added. “I spent 15 years in prison with jihadists. Humanity—humanity is the only force stronger than fear.”
Anas sat beside Munir on the sofa while Munir’s wife went to the kitchen to brew more coffee. Dressed in a crisp short-sleeved shirt and slacks, Anas looked more like a small-town bank manager than someone who had risked his life crossing checkpoints to save victims of organized violence. He spoke calmly, his Levantine accent refined but detached, as if he were reviewing a financial statement.
Anas explained that when Hafez al-Assad became president in 1971, he brought disaster upon the Alawites. He used the sect to carry out violence against his opponents, ensuring they would bear the blame. “It was in prison that I understood the Alawites had been oppressed as a community,” Anas said. “They were mistreated as peasants, so when Hafez took power, they sought revenge. Now others want revenge against them. If this cycle continues, people like me and Munir will be the ones destroyed.”
On March 9, in his second national address since the massacres began, President Sharaa promised an official inquiry into the weekend’s events. The government released its report on July 22, identifying 1,426 victims—238 security personnel and the rest civilians—and vowing to bring the perpetrators to justice. The report named 298 suspects and rejected claims that the killings were sectarian, describing them instead as acts of revenge with no ideological basis.
When Munir and I spoke by phone in mid-August, he said that intimidation, kidnappings, and assassinations of Alawites had not stopped, even though public attention had shifted. Sectarian violence had flared up in other areas.
In mid-July, a dispute between a Druze farmer and Bedouin tribesmen in southern Syria escalated into broader community clashes. When government forces stepped in, the conflict expanded into new sectarian violence, including the execution of Druze civilians. Israel, which had increased its attacks on Syria since the fall of the Assad regime, intervened on behalf of the Druze, bombing Damascus and government positions. The government promised another report.
“Yesterday it was the Alawites, today the Druze, tomorrow maybe the Kurds,” Munir reflected. “Without a clear new social contract for Syria, the killing will go on.”
Munir and Anas are pseudonyms.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about What reconciliation What forgiveness in the context of Syrias deadly reckoning
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What does reconciliation mean in the context of the Syrian conflict
It refers to the complex process of trying to rebuild trust coexistence and a shared society after over a decade of brutal war where communities were torn apart by violence displacement and atrocities
2 And what is meant by forgiveness here
Forgiveness is the deeply personal and collective act of victims or their families choosing to let go of resentment and the desire for revenge against those who harmed them In a conflict of this scale its an incredibly difficult and controversial concept
3 Why is reconciliation so difficult in Syria
The scale of the suffering is immense Hundreds of thousands were killed millions were displaced and horrific war crimes were committed by all sides There is no agreedupon truth of what happened and the regime that many hold responsible is still in power making genuine reconciliation nearly impossible for many
4 Who is pushing for reconciliation and why
The Syrian government and its allies often use the term reconciliation to describe their military victories and the process of forcing opposition communities to surrender and accept regime rule again often without any justice for past crimes
5 Are there any examples of reconciliation efforts happening now
Some local communityled initiatives exist often focused on practical coexistence rather than political forgiveness However largescale official efforts are largely seen as imposed by the government and are not viewed as genuine by many Syrians
Advanced Deeper Questions
6 Can there be reconciliation without justice
This is the central dilemma Many victims and human rights organizations argue that true reconciliation requires accountability for war crimes through trials and truthtelling Without it reconciliation can feel like forced amnesia and a betrayal of the victims
7 What is the difference between coexistence and reconciliation
Coexistence is a practical reality where people who were once enemies simply live alongside each other again often in a state of tense silence Reconciliation is a deeper process that involves a shared understanding of the past acknowledgment of wrongs and a voluntary move toward a shared future
8 What role do truthtelling processes play
They are considered essential by many This involves creating a formal
