Syrian Inquiry Says Military Leaders Did Not Order Sectarian Killings in March

New York Times

5 days ago

A Syrian commission of inquiry released its findings on Tuesday in the killings of more than 1,400 people in sectarian violence earlier this year, concluding that the bloodshed was 'not organized' and that the country's military leaders did not directly order the attacks.
But some human rights experts called the fact-finding committee's failure to hold commanders accountable deeply problematic. The findings of the committee — established by President Ahmed al-Shara — were released more than four months after the March killings — and just days after a new eruption of sectarian violence in another part of Syria claimed more than 1,100 lives.
Repeated waves of violence involving minority groups have raised serious questions about whether the former Islamist rebels who now lead the country can secure and stabilize all of Syria and protect its diverse ethnic and religious groups. Syria's new leadership has sought to reassure minorities that they are safe. But periodic eruptions of unrest have undermined those assurances and deepened mistrust of the central government in Damascus.
The inquiry concluded that more than 1,426 people were killed over a few days in March in two coastal provinces, most of them civilians. That toll broadly aligned with those tallied by independent monitoring groups.
An investigation by The New York Times found evidence that government soldiers had participated in at least some of the killings in Latakia and Tartus provinces in March. Syrian rights groups said armed groups nominally affiliated with the government were largely behind the killings of Alawites, the minority which the ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad's family belonged to.
The committee's findings showed that after Assad loyalists launched the initial assault in early March, about 200,000 armed fighters from all across Syria moved into the coastal region, the committee's spokesman, Yasser Farhan, said at a news conference in the capital Damascus.
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