Syrian leader Ahmed Sharaa called for peace on Sunday after hundreds of people were killed in the deadliest violence in the 13 years of civil war, pitting supporters of ousted President Bashar al-Assad against the country’s new Islamic rulers.
The clashes, which a war monitoring group said had resulted in 1,000 deaths, mostly civilians, continued for the fourth day in the Assad supporters’ stronghold.
A Syrian security source said the pace of fighting had slowed around the cities of Latakia, Jabla, and Baniyas, as security forces controlled the surrounding mountain areas where around 5,000 pro-Assad fighters were hiding.
Interim President Sharaa urged Syrians not to let sectarian tensions further destabilize the country.
“We must preserve national unity and peace in the country, we can live together,” said Sharaa in a video, speaking from a mosque in his childhood neighborhood of Mazzah in Damascus.
“Be assured for Syria, this country can survive… What is happening now in Syria is an expected challenge,” he added.
The United States condemned “radical Islamic terrorists, including foreign jihadists” for the violence and called on Syria’s interim authorities to hold accountable those responsible for “massacres against Syria’s minority communities.”
“The United States stands with the religious and ethnic minorities of Syria, including its Christian, Druze, Alawite, and Kurdish communities, and offers condolences to the victims and their families,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.
Rebels led by the Sunni Islamic group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which Sharaa supports, overthrew Assad’s government in December. Assad fled to Russia, leaving behind some of his closest advisors and supporters, while Sharaa’s group appointed an interim government and took control of Syria’s armed forces. The overthrow of Assad ended decades of rule by his family, characterized by harsh repression and a devastating civil war that began as a peaceful uprising in 2011.
The war — in which Western countries, Arab nations, and Turkey supported the rebels, while Russia, Iran, and Tehran’s loyal militias backed Assad — became a battleground for armed factions with different loyalties and agendas. It has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and displaced millions of Syrians.
After months of relative calm following Assad’s overthrow, violence escalated this week as forces aligned with the new Islamic leaders launched an offensive against a growing uprising by Assad’s Alawite sect in the Mediterranean provinces of Latakia and Tartous. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in the UK, reported on Saturday that more than 1,000 people had been killed in two days of fighting.
It said 745 were civilians, 125 were members of the Syrian security forces, and 148 were Assad loyalist fighters.
Rami Abdulrahman, head of the organization, said the civilians included Alawite women and children. Abdulrahman told Reuters on Sunday that the death toll was among the highest since a chemical weapons attack by Assad’s forces in 2013, which killed about 1,400 people in a suburb of Damascus.
The European Union, whose officials have held talks with Sharaa since he became Syria’s de facto leader, condemned “all violence against civilians” and “any attempt to undermine stability and prospects for a sustainable peaceful transition in Syria.”
