Armed groups and foreign fighters linked to the government but not yet integrated into it were primarily responsible for sectarian massacres in Syria’s coastal region over the past week, a war monitoring group said in a new report.
The U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said on Wednesday that the U.S. would “watch the decisions made by the interim authorities” after hundreds of civilians were killed in just several days in areas dominated by the country’s Alawite religious minority. He added that Washington was concerned by “the recent deadly violence against minorities.”
The ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad was an Alawite and some members of his minority community enjoyed a privileged status under his rule.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights, which monitors the country’s civil war, said in a report released late on Tuesday that the violence in recent days “included extrajudicial killings, field executions, and systematic mass killings motivated by revenge and sectarianism.”
The clashes erupted almost a week ago in Latakia and Tartus Provinces — the Alawite heartland of Syria — between fighters aligned with the new government and Assad loyalists. The new government is led by Islamist former rebels who fought Mr. al-Assad in a 13-year civil war.
The violence was triggered when pro-Assad militants ambushed security forces last Thursday and killed more than a dozen of them. The government then poured security forces into the coastal region.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights monitor said armed groups and foreign Islamist fighters aligned with the government “but not organizationally integrated into it” were “primarily responsible” for the sectarian and revenge-driven mass killings. Thousands of foreign fighters poured into Syria amid the civil war, many of them joining Islamist rebel groups opposed to the Assad dictatorship
The Syrian government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
Another war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, has said that more than 1,300 people have been killed since Thursday, adding on Tuesday that more than 1,000 civilians were among the dead. Most of the killings took place in Latakia and Tartus Provinces.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights has not been providing tolls for the overall number of dead since the violence began. But the group said more than 800 people were killed from Thursday to Monday — both civilians and combatants — in “extrajudicial killings.”
It said that “non-state armed groups” loyal to Assad were responsible for nearly half of those deaths, including almost 200 members of state security forces. It added that it had not documented deaths of those non-state armed group members themselves during clashes.
The group also said in its report that the large number of groups involved in the conflict and the confusion over their exact roles during this transitional period makes it “extremely difficult to determine individual legal responsibility” for the violence.
The figures provided by both war monitors could not be independently verified and it was not immediately clear why there were discrepancies. But the situation has been murky and exact numbers of civilians and fighters killed have been hard to pin down during the chaos of recent days.
The U.N. Human Rights Office said on Tuesday that it had documented the killing of 111 civilians so far, but it was still verification the figures and the actual number is “believed to be significantly higher.”
The United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, urged the government on Tuesday to ensure that the investigations are “prompt, thorough, independent and impartial.”
Syria’s new government has ordered a complex web of armed groups across the fractured country to dissolve, and several prominent militias have agreed to work with the new authorities. However, the security situation has remained unstable and it appears that all the militias have yet to be fully integrated into a single national army.
The interim Syrian president, Ahmed al-Shara, said on Sunday that the government was forming a fact-finding committee to investigate the violence and to bring the perpetrators to justice. Syrian officials have blamed Assad loyalists for the unrest, and have not acknowledged any responsibility for the bloodshed.
A small number of gunmen have been arrested by government security forces in recent days after videos spread across social media showing civilians being killed.
Mr. al-Shara’s government is under intense pressure to bring stability to the country after more than a decade of civil war. But sectarian tensions are threatening to undermine his pledges to unite the nation and protect Syrians of all ethnic and religious backgrounds.