Syria’s Struggle to Unify Military Was Evident in Outburst of Violence

Sectarian-driven killings of civilians this month displayed the government’s weak control over both its own forces and affiliated fighters, experts said.

Syria’s new president has spoken often about the urgency of merging the many armed groups that fought to topple the strongman Bashar al-Assad into a unified national army.

But the spasm of violence that erupted this month in northwestern Syria, which killed hundreds of civilians, made it clear just how distant that goal remains. It displayed instead the government’s lack of control over forces nominally under its command and its inability to police other armed groups, experts said.

The outburst began when insurgents linked to the ousted Assad dictatorship attacked government forces on March 6 at different sites across two coastal provinces that are the heartland of Syria’s Alawite minority. The government responded with a broad mobilization of its security forces, which other armed groups and armed civilians joined, according to witnesses, human rights groups and analysts who tracked the violence.

Groups of these fighters — some nominally under the government’s control and others outside of it — fanned out across Tartus and Latakia Provinces, killing suspected insurgents who oppose the new authorities, the rights groups said. But they also shelled residential neighborhoods, burned and looted homes and carried out sectarian-driven killings of Alawite civilians, according to the rights groups.

The leaders of the new government and the fighters now in its security forces are overwhelmingly from Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, while the civilian victims of this wave of violence were overwhelmingly Alawites, a minority sect linked to Shiite Islam. The Assad family is Alawite, and during its five decades ruling Syria, it often prioritized members of the minority community in security and military jobs, meaning that many Sunnis associate the Alawites with the old regime and its brutal attacks on their communities during the country’s 13-year civil war.