The wave of violence that has killed hundreds of civilians across Syria reached the major cities of Damascus and Aleppo on Monday, hours after interim leader Ahmed al-Sharaa vowed to bring those responsible to justice.
The reported fighting in the capital Damascus and the second city of Aleppo marked the first such clashes there since the fall of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The short-lived violence in the capital followed days of clashes concentrated in former-Assad strongholds along Syria’s Mediterranean coast.
More than 1,300 people were killed in Syria in the three days to late Sunday, with civilians comprising 973 of the dead, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said in a statement. The death toll as of early Monday was not immediately clear.
“We must acknowledge the truth that the fallen regime left deep wounds during its rule,” Sharaa said in a speech late Sunday in which he called for peace and he vowed to hold to account those responsible amid reports of executions and firing squads.
“Syria, with all its components, will remain united by the determination of its people,” he said, adding that he had formed “a fact-finding committee to investigate the events in the coastal region, to bring the perpetrators to justice, and to reveal the truths to the Syrian people, so that everyone knows who is responsible.”
As of late Sunday, most of the fighting was concentrated in the coastal areas of Latakia, where at least 545 civilians were reported to have been killed, and Tartus, where at least 252 civilians were killed, according to SOHR. Both areas are home to Syria’s Alawite community, the small Islamic sect to which the Assad family belongs, and have been a focus of security concerns amid Sharaa’s rise to power.
According to the SOHR, the vast majority of civilians killed in the outbreak of violence over the past few days have been Alawites. NBC News has not been able to independently verify this or the broader casualty figures.
By Monday, Syrian state radio channel SHAM FM reported intense clashes between security forces and former regime members in the affluent Mazzeh neighborhood of Damascus that homes embassies, hotels and government departments. The Al-Watan newspaper said security forces had repelled an attack by unknown assailants on a checkpoint.
While NBC News was not immediately able to independently confirm the clashes, they would represent the first fighting in the capital Assad was swept from power in December.
Meanwhile, Syrian Defense Ministry spokesman Col. Hassan Abdul Ghani told Syrian state news agency SANA that military units had repelled an attack and “inflicted losses” in Aleppo on the Syrian Democratic Forces — the U.S.-allied Kurdish-led force that he said had launched the attack.
The violence of recent days marked a grim turn of events, Ahmed Bayram of the Norwegian Refugee Council charity said in a phone interview on Monday morning.
“It’s worrying,” Bayram said. “The scale of what’s happening has not been seen even during the battles to oust the last government.”
The outbreak of violence raises the question of whether Sharaa can deliver on his promise to lead a more unified and inclusive nation representative of the country’s myriad religious and ethnic groups. The recent clashes may even undermine his progress in reassuring Western leaders that his vision for Syria poses no threat to the Syrian people.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday condemned the violence, saying in a statement that “the United States stands by the religious and ethnic minorities in Syria” as he called on the country’s interim leadership to “hold accountable the perpetrators of these massacres against the country’s minorities.”
For many Syrians, the fighting will be an unpleasant reminder of the violence they hoped had ended with the rule of Bashar al-Assad.
Bayram said there was a risk that the eruption could hinder efforts to administer humanitarian aid across the country.
“You don’t want this to drag on,” he said, “and you don’t want to go back to cycles of violence, death and destruction and displacement.”
