Recent violence shows Syria's struggle to unite military: NYT report
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The recent wave of violence in Syria has killed thousands of Alawites and displaced tens of thousands, in the bloodiest day since the ousting of former president Bashar al-Assad.
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Syrians wave their new national flags as they shout slogans to show their solidarity with the government security forces during a protest in Damascus, Syria, on Friday, March 14, 2025. (AP)
A newly published report by the New York Times discussed how the recent wave of violence across the Syrian coast brings one of the many challenges Syria faces to light.
Following the massacres that killed thousands of men, women, children, and elderly of the Alawite sect, Syria faces the reality of the many obstacles it faces as it tries to rebuild and create a unified army and integrate numerous separate armed groups into it.
How the massacres unfolded
The Syrian government mobilized its security forces across the Tartus and Latakia provinces, two Alawite majority provinces, in tandem with armed civilians who joined the governmental forces, NYT said citing witnesses, human rights groups, and analysts who kept up with the violence.
According to the rights groups cited, fighters spread across Tartus and Latakia Provinces, allegedly targeting suspected insurgents opposing the new authorities however, the fighters shelled civilian houses, looted shops, burned cars, and carried out summary field executions of many civilians of the Alawite minority group.
NYT linked the issue to the Syrian government and the fighters in its security forces being overwhelmingly Sunni, while the civilian victims in the wave of violence were mostly Alawites, the sect to which the ousted President Bashar al-Assad belongs to, leading Sunnis to associate Alawites with Assad's regime.
A clearer understanding of the events will take time to develop due to their widespread nature, the large number of fighters and victims, and the challenges in identifying them and determining their affiliations. the report said, noting that the March massacres were the deadliest few days since former President Bashar al-Assad was ousted.
According to NYT's correspondent, The Syrian Network for Human Rights, a conflict monitor, reported last week that militias and foreign fighters linked to the new government but not officially integrated into it were the main perpetrators of this month's sectarian and mass killings motivated by vengeance.
The report stated that the government's weak control over its forces and affiliated fighters, along with their failure to adhere to legal regulations, were major factors in the growing violations against civilians, adding that as the violence escalated, some of these operations rapidly turned into large-scale acts of retaliation, leading to mass killings and looting carried out by undisciplined armed groups.
On Saturday, the network increased its documented death toll since March 6 to over 1,000, with many victims being civilians, while another war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, reported on Friday that the total number of deaths had reached 1,500, mostly Alawite civilians.
Al-Sharaa responds to the events
The government itself has stated that it founded an investigative committee to probe into the violence that took place and promised to hold those responsible accountable for their atrocities against civilians.
In an interview with Reuters published last week, al-Sharaa claimed, “Syria is a state of law,” emphasizing that “the law will take its course on all.”
He accused armed forces connected to the Assad family and supported by an unnamed foreign power of being responsible for triggering the violence, but admitted that “many parties entered the Syrian coast, and many violations occurred,” adding that the fighting eventually turned into “an opportunity for revenge” following the long and bitter civil war.
Throughout the war, which claimed the lives of tens of thousands according to estimates, numerous rebel factions emerged to oppose al-Assad, with some eventually joining forces with al-Sharaa's extremist rebel group in the final battle that led to the former regime's downfall.
A group of Syrian rebel leaders appointed al-Sharaa as the interim President of the new Syrian administration, and since then, he vowed to combine all the country's former fighter groups into one single army, however, in less than a month since his appointment, the massacres along the Syrian coast took place.
“The unity of arms and their monopoly by the state is not a luxury but a duty and an obligation,” al-Sharaa stated in front of hundreds of delegates at a recent national dialogue conference.
The challenge of unification
According to NYT, having fought fiercely during the civil war to establish their territories, many groups remain unwilling to relinquish control, while the conflict left Syria’s economy in ruins and burdened the new Syrian president with a bankrupt state lacking the funds to rebuild its military, and with international economic sanctions still in place against the former regime, efforts to secure foreign aid continue to face significant obstacles.
All of these factors play a role in the little progress in achieving the integration of all the armed groups into one unified army.
“The unification is all fluff. It’s not real...the existing command structure is weak," Rahaf Aldoughli, an assistant professor at Lancaster University in England who researches Syria’s armed groups said.
Experts stated that the foundation of the new security forces consists of former fighters from Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, the Sunni Islamist rebel group led by Ahmad al-Sharaa for years, who operate under a unified command structure overseen by him but lack the necessary manpower to control the entire country.
Large parts of Syria remain under the control of powerful factions outside the national security forces, including Druze militias that continue to dominate a region southeast of Damascus, while the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have agreed to integrate into the Syrian army but have not yet done so.
Aldoughli stated that while other rebel groups allied with the current Syrian president have formally agreed to merge into the new national force, they have yet to follow through, with most having received neither training nor salaries from the government and continuing to pledge loyalty to their commanders. Additional armed groups remain with no ties to the government, alongside civilians who took up arms for self-defense during the war.
When the unrest broke out on March 6, fighters from various groups quickly joined in with differing motives, as some aimed to suppress the alleged insurgency while others sought revenge for past violations committed during the civil war, with much of the violence taking on a deeply sectarian nature.
In videos shared online, numerous fighters used derogatory language toward Alawites and portrayed attacks against them as acts of retribution, with one unidentified man stating, “This is revenge” in a verified video showing groups of fighters looting and burning homes believed to belong to Alawites, according to The New York Times.
