DAMASCUS: Close to midnight on March 6, as a wave of sectarian killings began in western Syria, masked men stormed the homes of Alawite families in the capital Damascus and detained more than two dozen unarmed men, according to a dozen witnesses.
Those taken from the neighbourhood of al-Qadam included a retired teacher, an engineering student and a mechanic, all of them Alawite – the minority sect of toppled leader Bashar al-Assad.
A group of Alawites loyal to Assad had launched a fledgling insurgency hours earlier in coastal areas, some 200 miles (320 km) to the northwest. That unleashed a spree of revenge killings there that left hundreds of Alawites dead.
Syria’s interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa told Reuters he dispatched his forces the next day to halt the violence on the coast but that some fighters who flooded the region to crush the uprising did so without defence ministry authorisation.
Amid fears of wider sectarian conflict across Syria, Sharaa’s government took pains to emphasize in the wake of the violence that the killings were geographically limited. It named a fact-finding committee to investigate “the events on the coast”.
The accounts by the dozen witnesses in Damascus, however, indicate that sectarian violence unfolded in the southern edges of Syria’s capital, a few kilometres from the presidential palace. The details of the alleged raids, kidnappings and killings have not been previously reported.
“Any Alawite home, they knocked the door down and took the men from inside,” said one resident, whose relative, 48-year-old telecoms engineer Ihsan Zeidan, was taken by masked men in the early hours of March 7.
“They took him purely because he’s Alawite.”
