No one covers up their war crimes any more. They film them, celebrate them, post them on X. So we have videos from Syria this week showing Islamist fighters making terrified Alawite men get on their hands and knees and howl like dogs. In one video, the victims crawl along a street spattered with blood and gore as a bearded gunman clubs them with a wooden pole. The camera comes to rest on half a dozen bodies. Then we hear rifle shots.
There has been a massacre of Alawites in Syria this past week: hundreds of civilians have been killed. The killings were perpetrated by the armed groups that put Syria’s new President, Ahmed al-Sharaa –formerly the militia leader known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani – in power. For some, the true face of the country’s new rulers has been revealed. At the very least, whether the guilty men are punished will tell us what kind of country Syria has become after the fall of the Assad dictatorship.
Two of the videos of men being made to crawl to their deaths were filmed at an Alawite village named al-Mukhtariyah. I spoke to a man originally from there, Hussein (not his real name of course). He is afraid that speaking to me will get him killed: ‘These are very, very vengeful people.’ He recognised the streets in the films and the anguished faces of his neighbours. We spoke about the gunmen’s mixture of anger and glee, joyfully humiliating their victims, no doubt seeing it as a reckoning for the Assad years. Hussein told me that his village had not become rich under the old regime.
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