By Iliana Tevouna
Within three months, President Ahmed al-Saraa has shown that he struggles to play the role of the moderate politician assigned to him.
From clashes in Latakia
In the bloodbath of hundreds of Alawites in the province of Latakia and the outskirts of Tartus, unleashed at dawn on Friday, March 7, by the new security forces, the mask of the supposedly “moderate” new President of Syria, Ahmed al-Saraa, has fallen.
The man who led as the former head of the jihadist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and was accepted as the new “transitional” President of Syria, after much fanfare and not only by his political-military guardian, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, but also by almost all Western governments (USA, EU countries, and NATO, including Greece…), has shown who he really is three months after the collapse of the government of his predecessor Bashar al-Assad (December 8, 2024): A ruthless jihadist leader who struggles to play the role of the “moderate politician” assigned to him.
This is the… moderate leader with whom dozens of foreign leaders and Foreign Ministers have been meeting for the past few months.
Thus, the rookies of the “new Syria” of President Ahmed al-Saraa, who terrorized for a quarter the Alawites of the province of Latakia and the cities of Tartus and Homs, bloodied from dawn until late Friday night the western coasts of Syria, causing successive bloodbaths in cities and villages.
Jihadists of the HTS organization in the role of… new security forces
Executions of males over 14 years old…
In their sights were not only Alawites – “supporters of the former Assad regime” as most international media and news agencies were proclaiming early on Friday. Hundreds of Alawite families were found, members of which were executed or bombed from land and air in cold blood.
In countless videos circulating since the morning of March 7 on social media platforms, including platform X, chilling images – a punch in the stomach – show dozens of bodies of boys and men of all ages filling the streets of cities and villages in the province of Latakia. Eyewitnesses told journalists that the new “security forces” of President Saraa’s government executed in cold blood, either individually or in groups, any Alawite over 14 years old. The manhunt against them was unleashed not only in the streets of cities and villages but also from house to house…
SCG forces storm neighborhoods and conduct mass arrests of military-age males, in what some say amounts to collective punishment
Rami Abdulrahman (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights) said 38 Alawites had been killed execution-style in al-Mukhtareyah town [pictured] pic.twitter.com/FoAsm2Zx1r
— Rojava Information Center (@RojavaIC) March 7, 2025
According to the latest data from the “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,” based in London and with well-informed sources since the start of the war in Syria in March 2011, the number of victims of the clashes that began on the evening of Thursday, March 6, has exceeded 200 in the last two days.
These clashes began on the evening of March 6 after a surprise attack by Alawites (including former high-ranking military officer Suhail al-Hassan, who was among the close allies of the former President Assad) who took up arms after three months of continuous intimidation of the western coastal areas of Syria by the jihadists of the HTS organization, who flooded the area from the province of Idlib, taking on the role of “security forces.”
Among the hundreds of victims of the bloodbaths and mass executions carried out on Friday, March 7, in the outskirts and the city of the province of Latakia were, according to initial information, 13 women and at least five children.
These developments occur with tragic irony near the 14th anniversary of the start of the war in Syria in March 2011.
Ignition of clashes and tensions on three fronts
They demonstrate that the country is not only not at the end of the devastating multi-year war but faces a new, serious risk of general ignition on three basic fronts:
On the western coasts, where the Alawites are rising against the jihadists of the new President after a quarter of a barrage of terrorism, humiliating challenges, and violent retaliation.
In the southern part, where the Druze are forming new armed organizations to stand up to the new masters of power in Damascus and also to the Israeli invasion forces that conquered new Syrian territories from the first day of the collapse of the Assad government and demand complete demilitarization of the Syrian south.
In the northeastern part, where the Kurds of the “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF) (who collaborated for years with the American military against the jihadists of the “Islamic State”) and their autonomous administrative structures are receiving, to this day, continuous attacks not only from the Turkophile mercenaries of the so-called (and supposedly dissolved) “Syrian National Army” but also from the Turkish military, which never abandoned the territories of northern Syria it occupied after three military invasions.
In a tragic way, under the current fluid regional and international geopolitical environment, both Syria and Libya (victims of multi-year interventions by Western countries and wealthy Gulf monarchies) are not only at the center of the redistribution of the deck of significant hydrocarbon deposits and other mineral wealth. They are also on the maps of drawing new, competitive trade routes (e.g., the Indo-Israeli corridor IMEC and Chinese modern silk roads through the “One Belt and One Road” initiative, Belt and Road Initiative).
Until the deck is redistributed, much more blood will be shed…
* Iliana Tevouna knows and “defines” the world from childhood based on international developments. She observes that the world is changing dramatically, although in some things it remains unalterably the same.
Published by Kosmodromio.gr transkalted by Christian Haccuria
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