An NGO reported on Sunday 35 summary executions, for the majority of former army officers of Bashar al-Assad, in the past three days in the Homs region, in central Syria, by coalition fighters Islamist in power, who said he had arrested several authors of violence.
The new authorities accused members of a “criminal group” who took advantage of “the campaign against outlaws” on Friday to commit violence against the inhabitants, “by pretending to be members of the services security ”, according to the official Syrian agency Sana.
They announced that they had arrested people suspected of violence in western villages of the Homs region.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH), these arrests arise after “summary executions that have cost 35 people in the last 72 hours, as well as humiliations inflicted on dozens of members of minorities religious ”.
Most of the victims are officers of the Assad regime who had regularized their situation in the centers provided for this purpose by the new authorities, according to the NGO.
“Dozens of members of local armed groups who are under the warden of the new Sunni Islamist coalition in power and participated in security operations in the villages of the north and west of the region were arrested,” said the NGO.
-These groups “led reprisals and settled with old accounts with the members of the Alawite minority from which Bashar al-Assad came, taking advantage of the state of chaos, the proliferation of weapons and their proximity to the new authorities”, According to the OSDH.
The NGO quotes “massive arbitrary arrests, attacks on religious symbols, mutilations of corpses, summary and brutal executions targeting civilians and revealing an unprecedented level of cruelty and violence”.
Civil Peace Group, a group of civil society, also reported in a statement of civilian victims in several villages in the region and “condemned unjustified violence”, including the murder of unarmed men.
The new authorities have tried several times to reassure the minorities by assuring them that they would not be victims of persecution, but the Alawites fear reprisals as a religious minority and because of their proximity to the Assad family.
