"Opportunity For Revenge": Abduction And Massacres, 1000s Of Syrians Flee To Lebanon (File image @@karenalainehunt)

Damascus, Syria: The “lawlessness” in Syria is getting out of hands. Kidnapping and massacres are taking over the newly “freed” country, suggest media reports. Residents fear leaving their homes at night, since the fall of President Bashar al-Assad, said The New York Times. After the fall of decades of Assad regime, and the ascendancy of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by former al-Qaeda member Ahmed al-Sharaa, a significant security vacuum observed in Damascus. It has led to the fleeing of thousands of Syrians into Lebanon.

HTS, the former Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, took power in December. Sharaa dismissed all the government police and security officials and emptied the country’s prisons, both political prisoners and criminals. The new government’s efforts to replace former security officials and train new police officers have not succeeded in filling the void.

As per the NYT report, kidnapping is going wild. The report mentioned that Sami al-Izoo, a Syrian local who witnessed his brother being forced into a truck with dark-tinted windows by six masked men. The kidnappers sent Sami a video of his 60-year-old brother, Abdulrazaq, with his hands tied and a black bag over his head, screaming as he was hit with a stick.

The kidnappers are demanding Sami pay a ransom of $400,000, an impossible sum for him to raise. “If I sell everything I have, I won’t reach that amount”, he said, as quoted by the report.

Also Read: Qatar To Support Rehabilitation Of Syria, Calls Israel To Withdraw

The Syrians are demanding more police officers and checkpoints in the streets to restore security. Sami told the outlet that he had repeatedly asked the new local security forces for help, but they had taken no action. Al Sharaa dismissed the the problems and casted the blame on ousted al-Assad regime during an interview given to Syria TV.

“Today there is security, though there are small incidents here and there.” Decades of “bad policies can’t be undone in a matter of days or weeks”, he said.

The severe electricity shortage also add to the security issues in Syria, leaving the neighborhoods in complete darkness at night. Many Syrians refuse to leave the house after dark, in particular young women who fear being kidnapped.

Reportedly, the attack were majorly aimed at Syria’s religious minority Druze, Christian, and Alawite communities.

Carolisse Nahleh, a young woman from the Damascus suburb of Jaramana, was abducted while on her way to take the bus to her university in the Mezzah district of the capital in February. Nahleh is from the Druze minority sect and is originally from Qurayya village in Suwayda in south Syria.

According to Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), eight other Syrian young women and girls were abducted across the country, during the first two weeks of February.

Also Read: ‘Election Could Take Up To Four Years’: Syria’s De Facto Leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa

The Shadood brothers, Amjad, 25, and Mohammad, 26, from the Alawite religious minority, were abducted while walking home at night from their restaurant jobs, reported NYT. Their mother saw a large van stopping in front of them as they near their home. “My sons didn’t resist at all, but I could see them shrink away,” Mrs. Shadood said. “I ran toward them. All I saw was a hand reaching out, grabbing and dragging my younger son into the van” before her older son got in as well, said the report.

While like Sami’s brother’s case, the kidnappers never contacted the family asking for ransom. But, a week later, their bodies were found by the side of a highway in a neighboring province, said the report.

Thousands of Syrians from the Alawite minority have crossed the border into north Lebanon over the past several days after fleeing from the massacres carried out by the new government’s forces in Syria’s coastal cities and towns, reported The Cradle.

“Around 10,000 Alawites have crossed from Syria to Lebanon in the last five days. They have settled in Tripoli and nearby areas, creating a sensitive situation across Lebanon. The feeling now is that things could explode in the north at any moment,” Lebanese security sources told The National.

“State forces have deployed a security belt around the predominantly Alawite Jabal Mohsen area. There have been several confrontations, and the situation remains very fragile”, the report quoted the source.

According to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA), over 1,400 families have entered the country. Speaking to the news agency, Akkar governor Imad Labaki said that around 6,000 people, including members of 40 Lebanese families, have resided in the Akkar Plain and parts of the Dreib region.

Also Read: ‘Riyadh Meetings On Syria’ Held, Saudi Arabia Urges Lifting Sanctions

United Nations agency UNRWA said on Monday that 6,078 people have arrived in several villages in northern Lebanon’s Akkar region.

The Syrian Defense Ministry announced the end of its brutal security operation against cells affiliated with Syria’s former military, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), earlier this week. Heavy clashes erupted last week after security forces entered two villages near the coastal city of Jableh and were ambushed by SAA cells. Al-Sharaa’s government mobilized reinforcements to be deployed across the coastal regions of Latakia and Tartous, marking the start of the widescale operation.

Members of different extremist factions that have been integrated into the HTS-led Ministry of Defense and armed forces went door to door, killing civilians, including women and children. Many of the massacres were documented on video by the militants themselves, reported The Cradle.

Ahmad al-Sharaa addressed the recent mass killings of Alawite Muslims, saying that such violence threatens national unity and claiming he would hold those responsible accountable during an interview with Reuters. “Syria is a state of law. The law will take its course on all,” he told the news agency from the presidential palace in Damascus.

“We fought to defend the oppressed, and we won’t accept that any blood be shed unjustly or goes without punishment or accountability, even among those closest to us,” he claimed.

Also Read: Syria: Interim Government Promises “New Era” Of Justice, Security, Jobs

According to Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based war monitoring group, as of Sunday night (March 9), as many as 973 Alawite civilians had been killed in revenge attacks.

As per the report, many of the killers were foreign extremist fighters from Chechnya, Uzbekistan, and China, who Sharaa welcomed into the ranks of the Syrian state’s new security forces after he took power in Damascus in December.

Sharaa acknowledged that “many parties entered the Syrian coast, and many violations occurred”. “It became an opportunity for revenge”, he said.

“Sharaa declined to answer whether foreign jihadist fighters and other allied Islamist factions or his own security forces were involved in the mass killings, saying these were matters for the investigation”, Reuters reported.

Local sourced told The Cradle that it is clear that official Syrian security forces, as well as affiliated armed factions, took part, as social media was flooded with videos showing the killing of unarmed Alawite men and women.

“We’ve seen videos, and we’ve seen pictures where there are obviously members of the General Security, or Al-Amin al-Aam, who are involved in the killings. They are in their uniforms. And there are members of the Ministry of Defense who have also been involved in the killings. It’s obvious in the videos. The general security, the ones who wear blue, are shooting at people. We can also see and hear members of other nationalities”, the reported quoted sources.

“The shocking thing is that in the videos of the killing we’ve seen, they are being filmed by themselves, not other people. It’s not regular people who are filming them. No, it’s them. It is the people who are doing the killing who are filming”, the report said.

(With inputs from the agencies)