Violence in Syria Shows Difficulty in Unifying Armed Forces

Syria’s new president has spoken often about the urgency of merging the many armed groups that fought to topple the strongman Bashar al-Assad into a unified national army.

But the spasm of violence that erupted this month in northwestern Syria, which killed hundreds of civilians, made it clear just how distant that goal remains. It displayed instead the government’s lack of control over forces nominally under its command and its inability to police other armed groups, experts said.

The outburst began when insurgents linked to the ousted Assad dictatorship attacked government forces on March 6 at different sites across two coastal provinces that are the heartland of Syria’s Alawite minority. The government responded with a broad mobilization of its security forces, which other armed groups and armed civilians joined, according to witnesses, human rights groups and analysts who tracked the violence.

Groups of these fighters — some nominally under the government’s control and others outside of it — fanned out across Tartus and Latakia Provinces, killing suspected insurgents who oppose the new authorities, the rights groups said. But they also shelled residential neighborhoods, burned and looted homes and carried out sectarian-driven killings of Alawite civilians, according to the rights groups.

The leaders of the new government and the fighters now in its security forces are overwhelmingly from Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, while the civilian victims of this wave of violence were overwhelmingly Alawites, a minority sect linked to Shiite Islam. The Assad family is Alawite, and during its five decades ruling Syria, it often prioritized members of the minority community in security and military jobs, meaning that many Sunnis associate the Alawites with the old regime and its brutal attacks on their communities during the country’s 13-year civil war.

It will take time for a clearer picture of the events to emerge, given their geographic spread, the number of fighters and victims involved and the difficulty of identifying them and their affiliations. But the violence on the coast represented the deadliest few days in Syria since Mr. al-Assad’s ouster in December, showcasing the chaos among the country’s armed groups.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights, a conflict monitor, said in a report last week that militias and foreign fighters affiliated with the new government, but not integrated into it, were primarily responsible for the sectarian and revenge-driven mass killings this month.

The government’s weak control over its forces and affiliated fighters and the failure of those forces to follow legal regulations were “major factors in the increasing scale of violations against civilians,” the report said. As the violence escalated, it added, “some of these operations quickly turned into large-scale acts of retaliation, accompanied by mass killings and looting carried out by undisciplined armed groups.”

On Saturday, the network raised the number of killings it had documented since March 6 to more than 1,000 people, many of them civilians. Another war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, on Friday put the overall death toll at 1,500, most of them Alawite civilians.

No direct evidence has surfaced linking the atrocities to senior officials in the new government, led by interim President Ahmed al-Shara. And the government said it had created a fact-finding commission to investigate the violence and vowed to hold anyone who committed abuses against civilians to account.

“Syria is a state of law,” Mr. al-Shara said in an interview with Reuters published last week. “The law will take its course on all.”

He accused insurgents linked to the Assad family and backed by an unnamed foreign power of setting off the violence but acknowledged that “many parties entered the Syrian coast, and many violations occurred.” He said the fighting became “an opportunity for revenge” after the long and bitter civil war.

During that war, which killed more than a half million people, according to most estimates, many rebel factions formed to fight Mr. al-Assad. Some of them allied with Mr. al-Shara’s Sunni Islamist rebel group in the final battle that ousted the dictator.

Then in late January, a group of rebel leaders appointed Mr. al-Shara president, and he has since vowed to dissolve the country’s many former rebel groups into a single national army. But he had been in office for little more than a month when the unrest in the coastal provinces erupted.

“The unity of arms and their monopoly by the state is not a luxury but a duty and an obligation,” Mr. al-Shara told hundreds of delegates at a recent national dialogue conference.

But he faces tremendous challenges in uniting Syria’s disparate rebel groups.

Many fought hard during the civil war to carve out fiefs that they are reluctant to give up. The conflict devastated Syria’s economy, and Mr. al-Shara inherited a bankrupt state with little money to build an army. And international economic sanctions imposed on the former regime remain in place, hobbling efforts to solicit foreign aid.

So the effort to integrate the armed groups has made little concrete progress.

“The unification is all fluff. It’s not real,” said Rahaf Aldoughli, an assistant professor at Lancaster University in England who studies Syria’s armed groups. “There is a weak command structure in place.”

At the core of the new security forces are former fighters from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Sunni Islamist rebel faction that Mr. al-Shara led for years, experts said. They have a cohesive command structure that Mr. al-Shara oversees but lack the manpower needed to secure the entire country.

Large parts of Syria are still controlled by powerful factions not yet integrated into the national security forces, such as a Kurdish-led militia that dominates the northeast and Druse militias that hold sway in a region southeast of the capital, Damascus.

Other rebel groups allied with Mr. al-Shara have officially agreed to merge into the new, national force but have yet to actually do so. Most have received no training or salaries from the government and remain loyal to their own commanders, Dr. Aldoughli said.

Other armed groups also remain that have no connection to the government, as well as civilians who armed up to protect themselves during the war.

“There has not been much effort to improve the discipline or even the structures of those armed factions,” said Haid Haid, a consulting fellow who studies Syria at Chatham House, a London think tank. “What we have seen is an example of how fragmented and poorly trained those forces are.”

When the unrest erupted on March 6, fighters from many of these groups rushed to join in, with a variety of motives. Some wanted to put down the insurgency, while others sought revenge for violations committed during the civil war.

Much of the violence had a deeply sectarian cast.

In videos posted online, many fighters denigrated Alawites and framed attacks on them as retribution.

“This is revenge,” an unidentified man says in a video shared online that shows groups of fighters looting and burning homes believed to belong to Alawites. The video was verified by The New York Times.

In recent days, the government has announced the arrests of fighters seen committing violence against civilians in videos posted online. It was a positive step toward accountability, Mr. Haid said, but he wondered whether the government would track down and punish fighters whose crimes had not been caught on camera.

“It does not seem that the military forces have the internal mechanisms to identify who did what during those operations and take the appropriate measures,” he said.