Sectarian mass killings in Syria have been going on for over a week at this point. Armed men affiliated with self-declared President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s security forces (Jolani’s HTS/AQ-linked militants) have killed thousands of Alawites and in some cases Christians.
Reports from last week also said Jolani’s radical Sunni gangs are burning fields and forests in order to smoke out Alawite families in hiding, literally hunting down the Alawite minorities. Thousands are still taking shelter at a Russian airbase on the coast, afraid to return to their homes.
Apparently this genocide doesn’t matter to Germany’s leaders, who on Monday declared they are pledging an additional €300 million ($326 million) in aid, much of which will go to the government – though not all.
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said at a press conference ahead of an EU-led donor conference in Brussels that over half of it will bypass the interim government of Jolani, to be distributed through NGOs and UN agencies.
“As Europeans, we stand together for the people of Syria, for a free and peaceful Syria,” she declared. But noticeably absent was a full-throated condemnation of the Jolani regime for these massacres.
Estimates of the dead have ranged from over 1,000 to several thousand to as many as ten or fifteen thousand, according to some independent sources. The London based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) has documented that at least 1,557 Alawite civilians were killed and executed by members of Syria’s Ministries of Interior and Defense and allied groups.
Bodies have been photographed and filmed strewn about streets in locales around Latakia, near the coast, and Syrian authorities are digging mass graves before UN teams can arrive.
