‘We were tricked’

On​ 6 March, a unit of the Syrian state police conducted a ‘combing operation’ in a village near the coastal city of Jableh. They were searching for local commanders loyal to the former regime of Bashar al-Assad, who they suspected were hiding out in the hills. When they got back to Jableh, the police were ambushed and at least sixteen killed. In response, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham – the Islamist movement that ousted Assad last December – brought in armoured vehicles and helicopters, and conducted missile strikes in the villages around Jableh. Hundreds of Alawite men poured into the streets carrying whatever weapons they could find: hunting rifles, metal pipes, sticks, rusted pistols. They attacked troops and patrol cars, and seized strategic locations along the coast. It was the first time since Assad’s overthrow that the new regime had lost control of part of the country.

Ali, who lived with his father in a small apartment in Jableh, got hold of a gun in case the fighting came close. As an only son, he had been spared military service. ‘I had never held a rifle before,’ he told me. ‘But we were going to die anyway.’ Foreign observers and political analysts argued that the attacks on the police and security forces were part of a co-ordinated campaign by ‘remnants of the regime’, with a ‘high level of planning and organisation’, perhaps supported by Iran. But Ali, who now lives in hiding in Lebanon, thinks this is a misrepresentation of what happened. ‘Those who say we were all Assad loyalists and former soldiers forget that Alawites dropped their weapons and didn’t fight for Assad in his final hours. Jumping to their ready-made story about us – to assume that we rebelled against the new government out of nostalgia or loyalty for Assad – is easier than admitting that what came after Assad’s overthrow was what made us choose to fight.’

For many Alawites, Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, had been a symbol of their survival. He was one of them, born in 1930 in Qardaha, a poor Alawite village in the hills, ten miles from the coast. Although the Ottoman Empire had fallen a decade before his birth, Hafez came of age at a time when the mistreatment and scars of centuries of humiliation under the empire were still fresh. When Syria was under French colonial rule between 1920 and 1946, Alawites – along with other minorities – were recruited into the military as part of a strategy to undermine the Sunni majority. Four years after Syria gained independence, Hafez joined the air force and rose quickly up the ranks. After the Ba’athist military coup of 1963 he became increasingly powerful, as head of the air force and then minister of defence. In 1970, he staged a bloodless coup from within the ruling military committee, which he called the Corrective Movement. After consolidating power, he exiled or imprisoned many of those who had helped him get to the top.

For Alawites, the way Hafez seized power wasn’t important. What mattered was that one of them was president. In the early years of his rule, Alawite villages were transformed: oil lamps gave way to electric light; dirt tracks became paved roads. Buses began to reach isolated mountain villages – buses that soon carried sons into the military, intelligence services and state bureaucracy. The geography of Syria shifted, as coastal towns like Jableh – once dominated by Sunni merchants with a small Christian enclave – became magnets for Alawite families from the surrounding hills. Ali’s family was among them. His father opened a smoke shop in a working-class neighbourhood, and Ali attended one of the newly built schools. These were like shrines to Hafez: there were posters of the president on the walls and the pupils memorised his speeches. ‘Our leader for ever: Hafez al-Assad,’ Ali and his classmates recited every morning. Pupils were told stories about Hafez’s tough childhood to emphasise how lucky their generation was.

When Hafez died in 2000, the grief in Alawite neighbourhoods rapidly turned to panic. Families fled back to the mountains: now that the man who had secured their place in the city was gone they no longer felt safe. But in an attempt to maintain the existing power structure the Syrian parliament had amended the constitution, lowering the minimum age the president could be from 40 to 34 so that Hafez’s son, Bashar, could succeed him. Bashar was different: soft-spoken, London-educated, married to a Sunni – being an Alawite wasn’t central to his image. Yet joining the army or getting a government job was still what most Alawite men aspired to.

As a teenager, Ali would spend evenings with his friends on the promenade in Jableh, a short walk from his house. The air smelled of roasted nuts. Families strolled along the seafront. People lingered in cafés. Women dressed up, their hair stiff with hairspray to combat the heavy humidity. Cars with no numberplates and tinted windows cruised slowly through the streets: officers home from Damascus for the summer. Girls were encouraged to aim to marry men like them. These cars meant access, wealth, protection.

Boys like Ali and his friends knew they didn’t stand a chance with these girls – not yet – but seeing the cars, knowing that many of their sect held high-level positions, reminded them that such power was within reach, but only because one of their own had risen to the top. As a result, when opposition to Assad spread with the Arab Spring early in 2011, many Alawites – rich and poor – saw it solely as a threat to their hard-won access to the halls of power.

In March that year, after protests took place in the Sunni areas of Jableh, calls to boycott Sunni-owned shops began to circulate. Checkpoints sprang up overnight. Shopkeepers shuttered their stores at sunset instead of midnight. On state TV, analysts insisted that the unrest was a foreign plot. Out of love for their country, people were urged to boycott all channels except the state broadcaster. In Jableh, Al-Jazeera’s yellow logo appeared on bins. Rumours spread that pills sent by Qatar and Israel were being slipped into sandwiches, causing hallucinations and hatred of the president.

As protesters across Syria were shot, detained and tortured – many bodies were later dumped in mass graves – the Alawites of Jableh remained unaffected. For the first few months, ‘love rallies’ took place every day. On the corniche, circles of dancers celebrated what they thought was victory. There seems to have been a genuine belief that the unrest was a foreign conspiracy they had heroically resisted by not believing ‘enemy channels’. But soon Assad’s opponents took up weapons. Many of the soldiers killed in the subsequent fighting came from Jableh and the surrounding villages. Funeral processions passed through the city – sirens wailing, women throwing rice from balconies, muezzins calling out from the minarets. State TV captured it all: mothers crying, fathers collapsing over flag-draped coffins. The footage played on a loop.

The funerals were reminders that when the country was under attack it was usually Alawite soldiers who died defending it. They were, as people often said, ‘giving back’ to the regime that had lifted them out of poverty and isolation. To serve was an honour. ‘Whenever an ambulance passed through Jableh,’ Ali said, ‘trailed by gunfire – either in mourning or to clear the road – my mother would lift her hands to the sky and whisper: “Thank God I have only one son. I won’t have to grieve him.”’

Military service was mandatory for most Syrian men. Deferral could be granted only to those going to university or who paid a fee of $3000 – the average monthly salary was $60. Most of the boys who had hung out by the corniche were conscripted. Suliman, who grew up in the same neighbourhood as Ali, was one of them. He was the middle child in a large family, with eight sisters and one brother, and had dropped out of school at thirteen to help support his parents, getting a job at a local restaurant. In 2013, when he turned eighteen, Suliman was drafted into the army and assigned to a unit in Damascus. There, he was tasked with guarding a leafy square where senior officials lived behind rose-coloured walls. It was considered a good posting – far from the fighting.

As the conflict continued, many of Suliman and Ali’s childhood friends were killed. The faces of the dead were plastered on walls, lampposts and school gates; Jableh came to be called the Capital of the Martyrs. Those who survived often returned maimed, abandoned by the state. Occasionally, Assad and his wife would make a brief, staged appearance with the wounded. They would smile for the cameras and leave. Many soldiers, disenchanted, decided to take what they could. At checkpoints, corruption flourished: cars were stopped and money demanded. Homes were looted. ‘I begged him to do what the others were doing,’ Suliman’s brother, who completed his military service before the war, told me. ‘Some of his friends were making $100 a day from bribes. But Suliman wouldn’t.’

He stayed at his post. His salary often only lasted for the first week of the month. When his family in Jableh couldn’t send him money, he borrowed – eventually falling hundreds of dollars into debt. He dreamed of being discharged so he could get a job, repay his loans and support his parents. But even when the fighting died down and Assad’s forces regained lost ground, Suliman was not allowed to leave the army. When he visited Jableh, he saw the long queues for bread. Mothers were denied even their $40 monthly martyrs’ stipend. There was electricity for two hours a day, if at all. The government insisted that all of this was caused by Western sanctions. But Suliman had seen the neighbourhoods in Damascus where elite members of society lived in luxury. ‘We were tricked,’ he told his siblings.

As the economy worsened, those who hadn’t been conscripted looked for a way out. Many went to the UAE or Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan – places where a Syrian passport was still an asset. Ali decided to go to Turkey. Someone recommended the route through Afrin, a rebel-controlled city near the northern border, and put him in touch with a people smuggler. It was supposed to be a quick journey: one night in Afrin, then Turkey, then – he hoped – into Europe. But one night turned into four months. Ali was arrested by anti-Assad forces and held in a windowless room where the only light came from the torch on his captor’s phone, which was used to film ransom videos that were sent to his father in Jableh. In one video, Ali is on his knees, his back to the camera, with red welts across his back. His hands are cuffed behind him. A sudden gunshot is heard. In the next clip he faces the lens, blindfolded, blood running down his right arm. ‘My family,’ he says, ‘this bullet was in my arm. The next will be in my head.’

The captors demanded $300,000 – an outrageous amount. But it revealed the assumption that anyone from Jableh who was an Alawite must have access to money, or know someone who did. His father sold the smoke shop and the family house, and they moved to a cheap place on the outskirts, one of the many built by corrupt contractors who bypassed safety inspections. Ali’s father could only raise $30,000. The captors eventually agreed to this price, but when Ali returned home he became the object of suspicion. The security forces in Jableh didn’t care that he’d been held captive for four months. What mattered to them was that he had tried to leave Syria through rebel-held Afrin. That, to them, was treason. He was interrogated again and again: who did he meet? What was he planning? People kept their distance, afraid that being seen with him would make them seem guilty too. Then came the final warning: the next round of questioning would take place in Damascus. His mother begged him to leave the country. Ali chose Erbil. He had friends there and could find work, but Jableh – and his mother – were hard to stay away from. In December 2022, he returned home.

Just over a month later, on 6 February 2023, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake with its epicentre in southern Turkey struck just before dawn. In Jableh, Ali and his parents scrambled down the stairs of their cheaply constructed building. Halfway down, the floor shifted violently and the building folded in on itself. No rescue teams arrived, so people dug with their bare hands and kitchen pans. Ali and his mother were trapped under the rubble for nearly an hour. By the time neighbours reached them, it was too late for his mother. She was one of the three hundred confirmed deaths that day. His father survived, but with a brain injury.

The aftermath of the earthquake stripped away what little loyalty to Assad remained in the city. Aid trickled in, sporadic and insufficient. People fought over food and basic supplies. For years, the people of Jableh had told themselves that the bribes they had to pay at checkpoints were a necessary evil: the police were their protectors, and they needed the money. People looked away because they believed that the system, though corrupt, was still essentially in their favour. But when the police started looting earthquake aid, it was clear that they had been deluding themselves. Volunteers delivering aid were forced to surrender the few supplies they had: baby formula, antibiotics, fuel. Nothing reached the victims until the police had taken their share. The anger that had simmered for years – after Assad sent their sons to the front and then abandoned their families – boiled over. People vented about corruption on social media and many were detained.

Suliman no longer wanted to serve in Damascus. Through a network of relatives and neighbours he secured a post in Jableh, serving a local commander. His duties were domestic: chauffeuring the commander’s wife on shopping trips, delivering groceries to his mother, driving the children to and from school. The post came with flexible hours, which allowed Suliman to work in the evenings. He went back to the restaurant where he had worked before he was drafted. ‘I was heartbroken when he came back and asked for his old job,’ the restaurant owner told me. ‘By then, we all knew who had looted in the army, who had taken bribes and clawed their way out of poverty. Part of me admired him for being so honourable – but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for how naive he was. This man had spent eleven years in military service, and he came back not just in debt, but right back to where he’d been in seventh grade.’

Ali and his father had moved to a rented flat even further away from the city centre. Ali had started dealing motorbikes – anything to stay afloat. Sometimes, he would see Suliman at the old spot on the corniche. In the summer months there was still a procession of cars with tinted windows: perhaps even more of them than before. The war had created a whole new elite. Millions were flowing into Syria through the trade in the stimulant Captagon, turning the country into the world’s biggest narco-state. The profits were funnelled to the tight circle around the president. Their children posted videos from beach resorts and foreign cities; there were Instagram posts about luxury weddings. The cars, once symbols of aspiration, were now reminders of the unattainable. Young men like Suliman had spent more than a decade protecting the lifestyles of the elite. It was now clear that they had always been expendable.

In late November​ 2024, after Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham launched its surprise offensive on Assad’s bases and checkpoints, entire army units vanished when the group offered an amnesty to conscripts. In a last-ditch attempt to slow the exodus, Assad reached for the only thing he had left: money. He announced a 50 per cent salary increase for those who stayed in the army. But few ordinary Alawites still had any belief in the cause. Commanders began targeting university students who had deferred military service. According to a student at Latakia University, the usual destination for school-leavers in Jableh, buses were stopped every day and university IDs checked. One day, an officer got on the bus and shouted: ‘Come on, boys, we need your strength. If you stay cowards, there won’t be a university left for you.’

By now, government troops were in full retreat. On 8 December, Assad boarded a plane from Hmeimim Air Base, three miles from Jableh, after securing asylum in Russia for himself and his family. He left behind his inner circle. Many of them later expressed outrage that he hadn’t taken them with him. When rebel forces entered Assad’s residence, they found it untouched by urgency or fear. Family photos were still on show. Bashar’s notebooks lay open on the desk. The Assads had been convinced, until the very end, that the tide would yet again turn in their favour. Although Assad was brought down by the rebel forces that had once held him prisoner, Ali felt something unexpected: hope. ‘There was genuine excitement,’ he told me. ‘It felt like things were finally going to change.’

The new government extended its amnesty: soldiers and officials were invited to turn in their weapons and identity cards in order to receive temporary protection from arrest while a background check was carried out and then a new civilian ID. Queues formed before dawn and stretched for blocks: it took Suliman three days to reach the front. Some people didn’t wait: in cities all along the coast, rifles appeared in bins and alleyways.

Outside Alawite-majority areas like Jableh, the excitement surrounding the new regime wasn’t just about economic survival. More than half a million lives had been lost during the war; more than six million people had been forced to leave Syria and more than seven million had been internally displaced. For a long time, it had seemed that Assad might outlast everything. Then, almost overnight, it was over. And with his fall came the possibility, however fragile, of accountability. In the weeks after the regime collapsed, the families of the disappeared poured into former intelligence compounds. Files were lying there for all to see: stacks of death certificates, blurry morgue photos, lists of judges who had decided on executions. People thought the new government might bring them justice.

But its priorities lay elsewhere. It focused on rebranding Syria’s new leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa – who until recently had been subject to a $10 million bounty from the US. As al-Sharaa lobbied for sanctions to be lifted and for international legitimacy, foreign journalists and European envoys were welcomed to the country. Debra Tice, the mother of the American journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared into Assad’s prisons in 2012, was granted a meeting with the authorities before the requests of any Syrian families were even acknowledged. High-ranking officials from the Assad regime – men who were responsible for innumerable detentions and deaths – remained untouched.

One of them was Muhammad Hamsho, known across Syria as the ‘rubble king’. He had built his fortune by stripping bombed-out neighbourhoods for scrap. In Qaboun, once an opposition stronghold, his crews collected steel rods from ruined houses. The steel fed his factories. Hamsho also financed some of the regime’s most brutal militias. Yet he remained protected, apparently as a result of ties with Qatar through his sister’s marriage. There were many others like him. Fadi Saqr, the militia commander accused of overseeing the 2013 Tadamon massacre, in which 41 people were executed in a pit in eastern Damascus, was seen attending meetings with the new government. With the architects of violence shielded, rage was directed at those who were accessible: neighbours who were suspected of having been informants for the Assad regime, for example. In one video, a supposed informant is tied to a car bonnet. A hammer is slammed into his skull.

Two buildings away from where Suliman lived, five cars arrived in a show of force. HTS had come for a man who ran a gym where local people sent their children to martial arts classes. He was accused of having stockpiled weapons. According to eyewitnesses, he didn’t resist: he simply asked to be taken quietly, not in front of the children or his neighbours. He was promised amnesty, but was held in detention for 24 days before being released when no evidence was found. Two weeks later, another HTS car pulled up. He was in the middle of a class. They asked him to step outside – just for a few questions. According to his students, he wasn’t even given time to put on his shoes. He hasn’t been seen since.

Not long after, the government announced a crackdown on what it called ‘ghost jobs’ – where salaries were paid to people who didn’t actually show up for work. But in places like Jableh, where public-sector jobs had long been the only lifeline for many Alawite families, the term was an affront. The people I spoke to were clerks, janitors, school staff, earning less than $35 a month. Suddenly, they were all laid off.

Videos circulating online showed soldiers who had surrendered and officially been amnestied being forced to crawl on all fours. ‘Bark,’ one masked man shouted. ‘Alawite pigs,’ another said, striking the men with the butt of his rifle. Some of these incidents were acknowledged as unacceptable by the interim government, but only after they went viral. Investigations were promised. Journalists aligned with the new regime either downplayed the sectarian nature of the violence or reframed it: we went through this, now it’s your turn.

In the absence of meaningful justice, shadowy groups started spreading reports of violence against Alawites. Social media accounts later traced to Iran and Iraq claimed to be bravely exposing government-tolerated abuses. To make themselves seem credible, they began with real incidents, verifiable footage, but followed this with AI-generated images, recycled clips of IS soldiers abusing prisoners and fake news designed to incite panic. They told Alawites not to surrender their weapons and accused those who had of cowardice, while spreading wild promises: that Russia was coming to their support (a video that appeared online on 6 March seemed to show a Russian jet trailing an HTS helicopter near the site of the ambush and forcing it to retreat), and France, and, incredibly, Israel.

That last rumour, bizarre as it seemed, had some basis in reality. Since 8 December, the Israeli air force had been bombarding military bases across southern Syria to prevent extremist groups, especially Hizbullah, from taking advantage of what was happening. Benjamin Netanyahu declared the 1974 Israel-Syria disengagement agreement null and void, announcing that Israeli forces would enforce the demilitarisation of the south. Though Syria’s new leadership promised that attacks on Israel would not be permitted from Syrian territory, Israeli ground forces crossed into the UN-monitored buffer zone, seizing key locations including the Syrian side of Mount Hermon and establishing forward military posts.

Counterintuitively, for many Alawites this sparked false hope. Feeling they had no one else to turn to, they pleaded for Israeli intervention. In Haaretz, Zvi Bar’el quoted a message he had received from a correspondent in Syria: ‘I am contacting you on behalf of millions of members of the Alawite minority. We need your help and know that you are our hope. Come to us; there will be millions waiting and standing by your side. We need your protection because terrorists control Damascus, and they will attack Israel one day.’ Some Alawites even proposed the creation of an autonomous coastal canton under Israeli protection. ‘If you leave us alone, Iran will be the one to extend a hand to us. But we all hate Iran. Don’t let it spread its influence here.’ Across social media, there were posts asking how to claim asylum in Tel Aviv.

The​ young Alawite men who took to the streets in and around Jableh on 6 March killed around 140 HTS personnel. They seem to have believed the misinformation they’d read online, that other countries were about to intervene. The next day, government reinforcements arrived in large numbers. Ali disappeared into a quieter part of the city. Suliman had no urge to pick up a weapon again, not even in defence, and stayed indoors with his siblings, doors locked, curtains drawn. ‘No one knew what was really happening,’ his sister told me. ‘Just that it was near. All we could hear were gunshots, shouting – and that we had to disappear.’

The brigades began going building by building. From that point, survival became a matter of luck. Some soldiers searched rooms carefully, returning items to their places. Others barged in, demanding cash, gold, anything they could carry. It was the logic Ali had encountered years earlier when he was held by anti-Assad forces: the assumption that anyone from Jableh, any Alawite, must have money hidden somewhere. Then there were those who asked only one question: ‘Alawi?’ An ID card listing a birthplace away from the coast meant you were probably safe.

The brigade that entered Al-Farwi Street were there not to search but to punish. Ali and others had mounted fierce resistance the day before – gunfire had echoed into the night, and a number of police had been killed. Suliman hid under a bed. When the soldiers kicked down the door, one of them seized his 16-year-old sister. ‘Where are the men?’

‘There are no men here,’ she said.

He hit her with the butt of his rifle.

Suliman emerged. He couldn’t stay hidden while his sister was humiliated. The soldiers marched him outside and shot him.

For the next two hours, witnesses said, the brigade moved down the street, from building to building, killing 34 people. These weren’t the men who had taken up arms, but the ones who had stayed behind.

Soldiers imposed a curfew for the next two days. Suliman’s body lay in the street. The bullet had entered one side of his head and exited on the other, bending the metal pole beside the entrance to the building. His siblings hadn’t dared to drag his body inside. He stayed there until the Red Crescent arrived and took the bodies to a nearby hospital.

When Suliman’s family went to retrieve his body, it had vanished. Later, they learned it had been buried by mistake – handed to the wrong family. ‘To honour the dead,’ his sister told me, ‘is to bury them.’ But now Suliman was buried in a village that wasn’t theirs and they were too afraid to visit: there were checkpoints on the road, and being stopped could mean interrogation, or worse. Funerals in Alawite communities had always been grand occasions, shows of loyalty and pride. But now there were no processions. ‘We accept condolences over the phone and on social media,’ families posted – to gather in public would have been an invitation for new violence.

As news of the killings spread, there were people who doubted that the massacre had happened at all. Some of the phrases seemed to have been lifted straight from the old regime’s playbook. The lines used to deny Assad’s sarin gas attacks in Ghouta in 2013 were now being used by ordinary people, echoing the propaganda that had once been employed against them. ‘They were armed.’ ‘They were agents of foreign powers who wanted chaos.’ Many argued that the dead had deserved it. Some opponents of Assad chose to ignore these latest killings. They were turning away from atrocities not because they had stopped seeing them, but because they had learned their lesson: don’t speak out.

Ali fled to Lebanon with some of the other men who had joined the fighting – and many who hadn’t. Shortly after his arrival, his father died. Ali couldn’t go back to bury him. In the days that followed, major media outlets and human rights organisations published extensive reports about the killings. The UN Security Council issued a formal condemnation. Rumours about federalisation and international protection began to circulate again.

Ali followed the news closely. He told me he was sure his exile would be brief. He talked as if protection, federalisation and an autonomous Alawite region were inevitable. He genuinely believed that if those in power were massacring a group of people – and if it was publicly documented – then someone, somewhere, would intervene. His certainty revealed something more than a misunderstanding of geopolitics. It showed how effectively the regime’s propaganda machine had worked on him and other Alawites. This was their first real encounter with mass violence. They believed that Assad had never carried out any massacres, that such things had never happened in Syria. They had spent the past decade completely shielded from the international media, UN Security Council meetings and human rights reports. They didn’t know that what happened on the coast was only the latest chapter in a much longer story. And once again, the world would move on.

Between March and July, sanctions on Syria were lifted by the US, the UK and the European Union. President al-Sharaa met with Donald Trump in Riyadh, where Trump described him to reporters as a ‘young, attractive guy’. Delegations from the Gulf arrived with reconstruction pledges. Investment deals were signed. Diplomatic photo ops and statements about ‘stability’ and ‘moving forward’ filled the news cycle. When asked about the massacres, officials mentioned a planned government investigation as proof that they were taking the matter seriously.

In mid-July, the results of the four-month investigation were published. At least 1426 people had been killed, most of them civilians; 31 arrests had been made and hundreds of suspects referred to the judiciary. The commission emphasised that field commanders had issued orders to halt the violence, not to incite it. Although the report confirmed the scale of the killings, it framed the story as beginning on 6 March, when Assad loyalists launched an attack, killing security personnel. But to start the story then is to ignore the reasons those who had surrendered and welcomed a new government had taken up arms again.

The report made no mention of the abductions of women that have been taking place. Since February, at least 36 Alawite women and girls – aged between three and forty – have been kidnapped in Latakia, Tartus, Homs and Hama. In nearly every case, the police and security officials failed to investigate. On 22 July, the commission that examined the massacre claimed it had received no reports of female abductions. Amnesty International contradicted this with verified documentation and eyewitness testimony. No arrests have been made.

Just as the report was published, violence erupted in Suwayda, a majority-Druze city in the south. A roadside robbery spiralled into full-scale clashes between Druze militias and armed Bedouin groups. Government forces deployed military units to restore order and impose a ceasefire, but, as in Jableh, these units carried out widespread abuses, including looting and other acts of collective retaliation against the Druze. Soon after, Israeli airstrikes targeted Damascus and nearby military sites, citing a mission to protect Druze civilians. These strikes gave the new administration a pretext to brand Druze fighters as Israeli agents, fuelling further escalation. The Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn’t at first allow international humanitarian organisations into Suwayda and restricted access for international journalists. Videos taken in the city showed armed men, some in uniform, carrying out execution-style killings and mocking the dead. In one video, a soldier forces three unarmed young Druze men to jump from a balcony, shooting at them as they fall – an almost identical scene to one in the Tadamon massacre. When the UN was finally granted access, it said the situation was ‘critical’, with more than 175,000 people displaced across the province. Governments that had embraced the new Syrian leadership issued statements acknowledging the atrocities before swiftly reiterating their support for the new regime. In the new Syria, as in the old, it seems that those who commit violence can count on rehabilitation, so long as they frame the alternative as chaos.