Armed groups and foreign fighters linked to the government but not yet integrated into it were primarily responsible for the sectarian violence in Syria’s coastal region over the past week, a war monitoring group said in a new report.
The U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said on Wednesday that the United States would “watch the decisions made by the interim authorities” after hundreds of civilians were killed in just several days in Latakia and Tartus Provinces, areas dominated by the country’s Alawite religious minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. He added that Washington was concerned by “the recent deadly violence against minorities.”
The ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad was an Alawite, and some members of his minority community enjoyed a privileged status under his rule. The new government is led by Sunni Muslim former rebels who fought Mr. al-Assad in a 13-year civil war.
The clashes erupted almost a week ago when Assad loyalists ambushed government security forces, prompting a harsh crackdown that devolved into sectarian attacks on civilians, according to the United Nations and groups that monitor Syria.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights, one of those groups, said in a report released late on Tuesday that the violence in recent days “included extrajudicial killings, field executions, and systematic mass killings motivated by revenge and sectarianism.”
The group said that armed groups and foreign Islamist fighters aligned with the government “but not organizationally integrated into it” were “primarily responsible” for the sectarian and revenge-driven mass killings.
The group did not give specifics on the armed groups or foreign fighters. But thousands of Islamist fighters poured into Syria during the civil war, some establishing armed groups of their own opposed to the Assad dictatorship. Though the number has declined in recent years, analysts said many still remained in Syria, including Uyghurs from Turkey and China, along with Chechens from Russia, despite the overthrow of the regime.
Jerome Drevon, a senior analyst on jihad and modern conflict with the International Crisis Group, said that the interim Syrian president, Ahmed al-Shara, had managed to rein in those foreign fighters when he ruled over a pocket of rebel-held territory in the northwestern region of Idlib. But that may have changed since his rapid ascent to power in Damascus.
“Now, it is much more difficult because the government has to rule a larger part of the country,” Mr. Drevon said.
The Syrian government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights. (The New York Times could not independently corroborate the findings.)
The Syrian Network for Human Rights also said in its report that the large number of groups involved in the conflict and the confusion over their exact roles during this transitional period made it “extremely difficult to determine individual legal responsibility” for the violence.
Syria’s new government has ordered a complex web of armed groups across the fractured country to dissolve, and several prominent militias have agreed to work with the new authorities. However, the security situation has remained unstable and it appears that all the militias have yet to be fully integrated into a single national army.
“The whole process is ongoing,” Mr. Drevon said, adding that “integration will take months.”
The Syrian Network for Human Rights has not been providing daily tolls since the violence began. But the group said on Tuesday that more than 800 people — both civilians and combatants — were killed from Thursday to Monday, when the violence appears to have peaked.
Another war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, reported on Wednesday that more than 1,300 civilians had been killed, a vast majority of them Alawites, as more bodies continued to be discovered. Most of the killings took place in the coastal Latakia and Tartus Provinces.
The figures provided by both war monitors could not be independently verified, and it was not immediately clear why there were discrepancies. But the situation has been murky and exact numbers of civilians and fighters killed have been hard to pin down during the chaos of recent days.
The U.N. Human Rights Office said on Tuesday that it had documented the killing of 111 civilians so far. But it was still verifying the figures, it said, and the actual number was “believed to be significantly higher.”
Mr. al-Shara said on Sunday that the government was forming a fact-finding committee to investigate the violence and to bring the perpetrators to justice. Syrian officials have blamed Assad loyalists for the unrest, and have not acknowledged any responsibility for the bloodshed.
A small number of gunmen have been arrested by government security forces in recent days after videos spread across social media showing civilians being killed.
The United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, urged the government on Tuesday to ensure that the investigations were “prompt, thorough, independent and impartial.”
Mr. al-Shara’s government is under intense pressure — both at home and abroad — to bring stability to the country after more than a decade of civil war. But sectarian tensions are threatening to undermine his pledges to unite the nation and protect Syrians of all ethnic and religious backgrounds.
“We call on Syrians to be reassured because the country has the fundamentals for survival,” he said on Sunday.
