On March 8, Ibrahim was abducted in front of his two boys and wife by fighters who had stormed into the coastal city of Jableh, Latakia.

The fighters, nominally aligned with Syria’s new government, had descended on the region and were looking for Alawites –  a religious minority to which Syria’s former leader Bashar al-Assad belongs – and Ibrahim was Alawite.

Al Jazeera’s authentication unit, Sanad, found, assessed and verified a video identifying Ibrahim’s body. Mazen*, Ibrahim’s cousin who did not wish to give his surname, said many other people he knows were killed, too.

“The [fighters] killed my friend who was pregnant and her three-year-old daughter … They killed another friend who was a pharmacist and her husband who was a doctor. They also killed my cousin and her mother-in-law, who was 80 years old,” Mazen told Al Jazeera.

“Why didn’t anyone stop [the killing]?” he added.

Manufacturing sectarianism

In 2011, the Assad regime crushed a popular uprising, prompting men across the country to pick up arms, some to defend their families and others to try and bring down the government.

Al-Assad smeared the opposition as “terrorists” and claimed – to foreign and domestic audiences – that his regime was the only one that could protect religious minorities in Syria. The rhetoric caused many Alawites to fear that if the Assad regime fell, they would be attacked in retribution for being “associated” with him.

At the same time, most Alawites didn’t want anything to do with a regime that brutally repressed fellow Syrians, disproportionately targeting the Sunni Muslim majority.

During al-Assad’s rule, he used barrel bombs and chemical weapons against civilians, wielded starvation as a weapon of war and killed and disappeared hundreds of thousands of people in his labyrinth of torture chambers and dungeons.

The regime’s atrocities and rhetoric manufactured and fuelled sectarian violence. Many Alawites still recall one incident of reprisal, when opposition fighters killed 190 people on Syria’s coast in 2013, according to HRW.

When opposition fighters finally toppled the regime in December 2024, Syria’s now-interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa promised to protect minorities.

The tentative period of calm after al-Assad fell led many Alawites to believe they would be safe.

But after the killings on Syria’s coast in early March, trust that al-Sharaa can protect Alawites is now irreparably damaged, several Alawites have told Al Jazeera.

The violence on the coast

On March 6, armed al-Assad loyalists launched a wave of attacks that killed hundreds of security forces and civilians, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR).

For the next four days, violence raged across Syria’s coastal region, prompting the country’s new security forces to deploy to repel the pro-Assad fighters.

An unknown number of armed men – some who expressed sectarian sentiments on video  – also descended and are believed to have carried out hundreds of revenge killings against Alawites, according to survivors, local monitors and analysts.

The affiliation of all the gunmen remains murky, what’s clear is that as of March 17, SNHR said at least 639 people were extrajudicially killed in reprisals on the coast, which violate international law and could amount to war crimes.

“A lot of the [counter] attacks were illegitimate which targeted civilians or targeted fighters after they were [disarmed],” Fadel Abdul Ghany, the founding director of SNHR told Al Jazeera.

“The main perpetrators are [two nominally state aligned] armed groups … who joined the security forces. The security forces also committed violations but not as much,” he added.

Abu Yasser Bara, the spokesperson for Syria’s Ministry of Defence, told Al Jazeera that authorities are still investigating the allegations.

“A committee has been formed to investigate these rumours and it will publish its findings publicly,” he told Al Jazeera.

The bloody events raise questions about whether al-Sharaa can rein in armed factions with a history of human rights violations and who have not fully consolidated into the Defence Ministry after al-Assad was toppled.

In the disorder that followed al-Assad’s overthrow in December, Syria remained fragmented and heavily militarised.

It was never fully clear how many fighters across the country joined the push by al-Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to take Damascus – Turkish-backed opposition groups, lone wolf fighters and smaller contingents of foreign fighters were all present across Syria.

Even if al-Sharaa succeeds in bringing all groups under central control, he could struggle to win back the trust of Syria’s Alawites.

“We don’t know who to trust right now,” said Maryam*, an Alawite from Latakia. “We don’t know if this was intentional [from the government] or if they simply lost control [of] some of the savages in these factions.”

Maryam said fighters had stormed the homes of several of her friends asking if they were “Sunni or Alawi”.

In one instance, Maryam’s sister was about to be killed with her family until one of the fighters recognised that she was married to his childhood friend.

“Can you imagine their luck,” Maryam told Al Jazeera, in disbelief. “When the fighter realised who her husband was, they just left.”

Out of control?

After al-Assad loyalists began their attack, a Telegram channel that coordinated between Syrian opposition groups during the operation against al-Assad issued a call for civilians and armed factions to mobilise and help security forces crush the al-Assad loyalists, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). 

HRW said the call was quickly rescinded, yet many gunmen and armed factions had already arrived at the coast.

SNHR’s Abdul Ghani said a small component of foreign fighters was involved in the revenge killings, but singled out the Suleiman Shah Brigade (Amshat) and the Hamza Division Brigade (Hamzat), as being particularly implicated.

The two factions – sanctioned by the US State Department in August 2023 for reportedly committing atrocities in northwest Syria – operate under the umbrella of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, a coalition of rebel groups who opposed al-Assad’s regime.

SNA factions are nominally aligned to the transitional Defence Ministry, but maintain a de facto separate chain of command, according to Jerome Drevon, an expert on Islamic-oriented armed groups with the International Crisis Group (ICG).

The inner circle of al-Sharaa’s trusted factions – who fought under the umbrella of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to topple al-Assad in December – are significantly more disciplined fighters than SNA factions, he added.

In order to impose similar, full control over all armed factions, Drevon said, Syria would need an injection of funding to be able to pay wages that would attract armed groups to join a single chain of command.

The debilitating Western sanctions on Syria, originally imposed to weaken al-Assad, are hurting the new government’s ability to do that, he said, adding: “If the Syrian government can’t pay fighters a salary, then it won’t be able to create an army and the situation [in Syria] will further decay.

“We’ll end up seeing armed groups control large parts of the country.”

Al Jazeera asked Syria’s Defence Ministry spokesperson Abu Yaser Bara whether the government was struggling to consolidate control over armed factions and if Western sanctions were thwarting its ability to do so.

Abu Yaser Bara had not responded by the time of publication.

Security and accountability

Syria’s new authorities could blame future security incidents on “rogue elements” or “extremists” to attract Western funding to “fight terrorism”, but pouring money into Syria’s security sector will not stabilise the country, Joseph Daher, an expert on Syria’s economy, said.

“Nobody is denying that Syria needs international investment, but that investment needs to be directed to productive sectors in the economy such as special manufacturing and agriculture,” he told Al Jazeera.

“If more money goes to just a future army, then it will dominate the new Syria,” he added.

Daher elaborated by saying that more young men will gravitate to join – and possibly balloon – the security forces if there are no alternative livelihoods.

What’s more, rights groups, experts and victims stressed that Syria’s new authorities must address previous abuses from the civil war and mitigate future ones, beginning by punishing those who perpetrated atrocities in Syria’s coastal region in March.

Al-Sharaa has already announced the formation of two independent committees: the first will look into the March 6 attacks and sectarian violence and the second will aim to regain the trust of the Alawite community.

Crisis Group’s Drevon agreed that al-Sharaa needs to ensure that human rights violators are held accountable and that Alawites are given adequate opportunities to be fully integrated and help rebuild Syria.

“[Al-Sharaa] also may need to reach out to the Alawites, who have been excluded from the security structures by the new government and this policy may have to change,” he told Al Jazeera.

What the future will bring

SNHR has expressed support for al-Sharaa’s decision to launch two investigative committees following the violence that unfolded in the coastal region.

However, it stressed that the committees should include independent human rights monitors, as well as members from the Alawite community to boost public trust in their work and conclusions.

Al Jazeera sent written questions to Syria’s media ministry to ask whether the government was considering some of SNHR’s suggestions, but no response was received by the time of publication.

Several Alawites from Syria told Al Jazeera the trust deficit between the new authorities and their community may be too wide to bridge.

Mazen insisted that he and his family were always against al-Assad, who he blamed for impoverishing Alawites and engineering sectarian divisions in the country.

But now, he fears they could suffer a far worse fate if what he describes as “extremists” are allowed to attack Alawites with impunity.

Since the reprisal killings in the coastal region, thousands of people, including many Alawites, have sought refuge at a nearby Russian base and fled over the border into Lebanon’s northern Akkar region.

Many Alawites believe Syria’s new authorities won’t risk civil conflict by cracking down on the factions that perpetrated sectarian violence and other human rights violations.

“They don’t trust anyone to protect them any more,” Mazen told Al Jazeera, just days after the bloodshed.

“They don’t believe there is any future in Syria for them.”

* Names changed for the individual’s protection