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Civilians from the Alawite religious minority continue to be targeted in Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) warned on April 15.
The London-based monitoring group said that since the end of Ramadan on March 30, at least 42 Alawites lost their lives due to sectarian violence blamed on the forces of the Islamist-led interim government, with incidents occurring from Latakia to Tartus and extending to Hama and Homs.
The Alawites are Syria’s largest religious minority group. The family of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad belong to the group.
Rami Abdurrahman, the head of the SOHR, noted that while the scale of the violence has shifted to individual acts, the killings have not ceased.
“The killings did not stop, but now they are individual acts,” he said, highlighting the persisting threat to the minority community.
In addition to the killings, the SOHR reported a troubling rise in enforced disappearances and kidnappings, with at least 17 women and minors reported missing in recent weeks.
More than 1,600 civilians, mostly Alawites, were killed during a government crackdown on the coast that began on March 6. After facing international pressure, the government announced that all operations on the coast were over by March 10 and formed an investigation committee. However, war monitors and activists have repeatedly warned since then that Alawite civilians were still being targeted by government forces.
The violence has so far displaced nearly 50,000 Alawites to northern and eastern Lebanon with around 10,000 others taking shelter at Russia’s Khmeimim Air Base near the city of Jableh in the southern countryside of Latakia. The numbers of refugees continue to grow.
The Syrian government is yet to hold anyone accountable for the killings or ease security measures in Alawite-majority areas. As a result of this, the group appears to have lost all trust in the government.
Earlier this month, Sheikh Ghazal Ghazal, head of the Supreme Alawite Islamic Council in Syria and Diaspora, and several other prominent leaders of the group renewed calls for international protection.
While no foreign power has yet picked up on the Alawites’ cry for help, this could soon change as the government has so far failed to build strong relations with key international powers, like the United States, Russia and China.
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