The gunfire began at dawn on Friday in the town of al-Haffa on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.
At first, Wala, a 29-year-old resident of the town, leaped off her bed to the corner of the room in her first-floor apartment, flattening herself as the rat-a-tat of gunshots sounded outside her bedroom window.
When the commotion grew louder, she said, she crept to the window and peeled back the curtain. Outside, dozens of people were fleeing down the road, many in their pajamas, as four men in forest green uniforms chased them. Then, the uniformed men opened fire. Within seconds, four of the fleeing people crumpled to the ground.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was terrified, terrified,” said Wala, who asked to be identified only by her first name for fear of retribution.
The attack in her town was part of the unrest that has shaken Syria’s coast over the last four days and has killed more than 1,000 people, the war monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said early Sunday. It was the bloodiest outbreak of violence since rebels ousted the longtime dictator, Bashar al-Assad, in early December, then sought to assert their rule over a country fractured by nearly 14 years of civil war.
The violence broke out on Thursday when armed men loyal to Mr. al-Assad ambushed government security forces in Latakia Province, where al-Haffa is located. The ambush set off days of clashes between Assad loyalists and government forces.
The Observatory, which is based in Britain and has monitored the Syrian conflict since 2011, said early Sunday that about 700 civilians were among the more than 1,000 dead, most of them killed by government forces.
At least 65 civilians were killed in al-Haffa, according to the Observatory.
Another war monitoring group, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, had not yet updated its figures on Sunday, but it reported on Saturday that government security forces had killed an estimated 125 civilians.
None of the claims of numbers killed could be independently verified.
Officials with the new government rejected accusations that its security forces had committed atrocities. But they said they were committed to investigating accusations and holding anyone who had harmed civilians accountable.
Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Shara, called for unity as he moved to reassure the nation after the deadly clashes.
“We must preserve national unity and civil peace,” he said on Sunday at a mosque in Damascus, according to video that circulated online. “We call on Syrians to be reassured because the country has the fundamentals for survival.”
The violence has raised the specter of a larger sectarian conflict in Syria and stoked panic in the coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus. The region is the heartland of Syria’s Alawite minority, which dominated the ruling class and upper ranks of the military under the Assad government, and included the Assad family itself. The new government was formed from a coalition of rebels led by an Islamist Sunni Muslim group.
The Observatory said most of the civilians killed in recent days were Alawites.
On Saturday, the highway leading from the capital, Damascus, into Tartus was nearly empty as the authorities tried to seal off all traffic into the coastal region. Government security forces set up checkpoints along the main roads into and throughout Tartus city, the provincial capital, where most shops were closed and many residents were hunkering down in their homes.
Shadi Ahmed Khodar, 47, sat by the highway leading from Tartus north to Latakia, watching as the occasional ambulance or government vehicle sped by. The streets of his neighborhood had emptied as violence raged in recent days, turning Tartus into a ghost town, he said. He is an Alawaite but like many in the city, he said he does not support the Assad loyalists who have taken up arms against Syria’s new authorities.
But he was also terrified that security forces with the new government would no longer distinguish between armed Assad loyalists and people like him — a crane operator who had worked for the Assad government.
“Maybe they will just come here and say we are against them and kill us,” he said.
The country, he feared, was barreling toward more conflict. The violence had yet to subside by late Saturday afternoon and, down the road from where he stood, government forces at a checkpoint were warning drivers that gunmen were ambushing cars driving up the coast toward Latakia.
“We’re just in the shallow water,” Mr. Khodar said. “We haven’t reached the depths yet.”
In the nearby countryside of Latakia Province, armed Assad loyalists were holding dozens of government security personnel hostage after seizing control a day earlier, residents said. In other areas, local residents had taken up arms and stationed themselves outside their homes to protect their families, after hearing reports about government forces killing civilians.
In Baniyas, a town on the northern tip of Tartus Province, armed men who appeared to be with the government had stormed into the town’s predominately Alawite neighborhoods late Thursday night, according to four residents.
Ghaith Moustafa, a resident of Baniyas, said he had spent most of Friday and Saturday huddling with his wife, Hala Hamed, and their 2-month-old son behind their front door — the only place in their small apartment that was not near any windows.
Early Friday morning, he said he heard the patter of shooting grow louder as armed men reached his building. Then he heard men shouting, gunfire and screams coming from the apartment below his. He later learned that his downstairs neighbors had been killed.
“I was so scared for my baby, for my wife,” Mr. Moustafa, 30, said in a telephone interview. “She was so afraid. I didn’t know how to not show her that I was also afraid for us.”
When the gunfire subsided around 2 p.m. on Saturday, Mr. Moustafa said he and his family fled their apartment and sought shelter at a friend’s house in a nearby neighborhood that had been spared much of the violence. Driving away from home, he was horrified.
Every two or three meters, a body lay on the ground, he said. Blood stains were smeared across the pavement. Storefronts windows were shattered and many shops appeared to have been looted, he said.
The Syrian Observatory said on Saturday that at least 60 civilians, including five children, were killed in the violence in Baniyas.
“I’m shocked, I’m just shocked,” said Mr. Moustafa, a pharmacist. By Saturday evening, all he could think about was leaving. “We have to get out of here as soon as possible,” he added. “It’s not safe, not at all safe.”
Mr. Moustafa was among hundreds of people who fled Baniyas on Saturday, according to residents. Many sought shelter with friends who were not Alawite in the hope that their neighborhoods would avoid the brunt of any more violence.
Wala, the al-Haffa resident who said she saw men in uniforms shooting at people as the fled, was taking cover with friends and family in her apartment when security personnel knocked down the front door, about an hour after government forces had entered her town. A friend visiting from the northwestern region of Idlib, where the rebels who overthrew Mr. al-Assad came from, pleaded with them not to shoot.
“She said, ‘I am from Idlib. All my family is from Idlib. Please don’t do anything to these people. They are peaceful family,’” Wala recounted in a phone interview.
The men demanded that the friend hand over her phone and yelled at Wala to open her safe, which she did. They demanded that Wala’s mother give them her gold necklace and earrings, Wala said.
Before they left, the men issued a stern warning: Don’t leave the house. She and her relatives rushed back to her bedroom, terrified.
But about an hour later, as the gunfire subsided, they defied that order to try to help someone they could hear pleading from the street.
Outside, Wala said she found two men who had been shot. One was covered in blood and asked her in a weak voice to lift his head a bit from the ground. The other, shot in the thigh, begged for water.
Before long, gunfire rang out again and Wala ran back inside. By Saturday evening, she said, she did not know whether either man had survived.
Raja Abdulrahim contributed reporting.
