WATCH: Who Killed the Hundreds in Syria—and Why?

Syria has just witnessed its deadliest bloodshed since the ouster of Bashar al-Assad last December. In just four days, between March 6 and 10, more than 800 people were killed in the coastal provinces of Tartus and Latakia, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR).

But who killed them, and why? As graphic videos of the atrocities flooded social media, so did misinformation. Tucker Carlson falsely claimed Christians had been slaughtered—an assertion denied by Syrian Christian leaders themselves. But while Christians weren’t massacred, another religious minority was—the Alawites.

Through our partnership with the Center for Peace Communications (CPC), The Free Press obtained exclusive footage and spoke to survivors, eyewitnesses, and analysts to piece together what actually happened on Syria’s northeast coast.

It all began March 6, when remaining Assad loyalists launched coordinated attacks against the new government’s security forces in the coastal region, killing dozens. In response, tens of thousands of government forces and armed groups rushed to the coast to quash the insurgency, according to Syrian Network for Human Rights founder Fadel Abdulghany.

What followed was a mass slaughter. Abdulghany told The Free Press that of the 803 deaths his organization recorded, the overwhelming majority were civilians and disarmed combatants, including women and children. Many of them were executed on the spot. And most of these atrocities, he said, were perpetrated by the very forces that had arrived to put down the insurgency.

“The question is: Who were those who headed to the coast?” Abdulghany said.

To answer that, it’s worth looking at who lives there. While ethnically mixed, Syria’s coastal provinces are predominantly Alawite—the same sect that the Assad family is part of. Alawites had been deeply embedded in Assad’s regime, perpetrating some of the worst atrocities during Syria’s 14-year civil war, CPC’s Michael Nahum explained. After Assad’s fall, the new government, headed by Ahmed al-Sharaa and attempting to bridge sectarian divides, sought to avoid outright vengeance.

“This has generated an enormous reservoir of sectarian ill feeling that has been looking for an outlet ever since the fall of the regime on December 8,” Nahum said. To put it bluntly, many Syrians were not moved by al-Sharaa’s desire for reconciliation. They wanted revenge.

The March 6 clashes were the match that lit the fuse. The scale of violence was staggering. Alawite villages were decimated. Entire families were wiped out.

“So far, I’ve lost 23 relatives,” one man said, choking back tears. “We don’t know what to say. We all might be killed.”

Another Alawite told us his father and uncle were among dozens executed in a village called Al-Shalfatiyah in the Latakia countryside.

“An unknown group entered their house and opened fire on them without mercy,” he said. “No mercy for an elderly man and a sick man.”

The perpetrators of these killings came from multiple factions. The government has acknowledged the presence of “unruly elements” within its forces—fighters who defied strict orders not to attack civilians. There were also “foreign factions and individuals who picked up arms,” SNHR’s Abdulghany said. But some of the worst atrocities, according to human rights monitors and eyewitness testimonies, were perpetrated by the Syrian National Army (SNA), a coalition of Sunni militias notorious for human rights abuses.

The government is now scrambling to contain the fallout. President al-Sharaa has formed an independent investigative committee and vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice. “We affirm that we will hold accountable, firmly and without leniency, anyone who is involved in the bloodshed of civilians,” he said in a March 11 address, his first since the massacre.

Arrests have already begun, with security forces detaining fighters who filmed themselves committing atrocities.

But the underlying tensions remain. “The long-term drivers of that fighting are still there,” CPC’s Michael Nahum warned.

“These Assad remnant militias, which appear to be backed by both Iran and Hezbollah, seem to have had as their main goal to inspire a sectarian overreaction, which in fact they did.”

Iran has denied involvement, but Syria’s Defense Ministry claims Hezbollah supplied weapons to Assad loyalists. Stoking sectarian violence has long been part of the Iranian playbook, Nahum added: “It creates a vacuum that they can fill.”

“May God make it stop. Let us reach a point where innocents no longer have to die,” the man who lost 23 relatives implored. “We ask the rational people in Syria in general to stand together, and to act as brothers. Please deliver this message. Please, please, please, I beg you.”

To watch our video of this report, click above.