Assad fled Syria after an Islamist-led offensive wrested from his control city after city until Damascus fell on December 8, ending his clan’s five-decade rule.
Rooted in Syria’s branch of Al-Qaeda, a Sunni Muslim jihadist group, HTS has moderated its rhetoric and vowed to ensure protection for minorities, including the Alawite community from which Assad hails.
On Thursday, state news agency SANA said security forces launched an operation against pro-Assad militias in the western province of Tartus, “neutralising a certain number” of armed men.
It comes a day after 14 security personnel of the new authorities and three gunmen were killed in clashes in the same province when forces tried to arrest an Assad-era officer, according to the Observatory.
Hate or revenge
The fate of tens of thousands of prisoners and missing people remains one of the most harrowing legacies of his rule.
In central Damascus, relatives of some of the missing have hung up posters of their loved ones, in the hope that with Assad’s ouster, they may one day learn what happened to them.
But some members of the Alawite community fear that with Assad gone, they may be at risk of attacks from groups hungry for revenge or driven by sectarian hate.
The Observatory said that one demonstrator was killed and five others wounded “after security forces... opened fire to disperse” a crowd in the central city of Homs.
The transitional authorities appointed by HTS said in a statement that the shrine attack took place early this month, with the interior ministry saying it was carried out by “unknown groups” and that republishing the video served to “stir up strife”.
In one of Wednesday’s protests over the video, large crowds chanted slogans including “Alawite, Sunni, we want peace”.
In Homs, where the authorities imposed a nighttime curfew, 42-year-old resident Hadi reported “a vast deployment of HTS men in areas where there were protests”.
In coastal Latakia, protester Ghidak Mayya, 30, said that for now, Alawites were “listening to calls for calm”, but putting too much pressure on the community “risks an explosion”.
“But they’re obviously also contending with what seems like a real desire on the part of some of their constituents for what they would say is accountability, maybe also revenge, it depends on how you want to characterise it,“ he said.
A delegation from Iraq met with the new authorities Thursday to discuss “security and stability needs on the two countries’ shared border”, Iraqi state media said, while Lebanon, which has a fraught history with Syria, said it hoped for better ties with its neighbour going forward.
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