The new president of Syria has often spoken of the urgency to merge the numerous armed groups that fought to overthrow the strong man Bashar al-Assad in a unified national army.
But the spasm of violence that broke out this month in the north -western Syria, who killed hundreds of civilians, clarified how far that goal is. Instead, he showed the lack of control of the government on the forces nominally under his command and his inability to supervise other armed groups, the experts said.
The explosion began when the insurgents linked to the extracting dictatorship of Assad attacked the government forces on March 6 in several sites in two coastal provinces that are the heart of the Alawita Syrian minority. The government responded with a wide mobilization of its security forces, that other armed and civil groups armed, according to witnesses, groups for human rights and analysts who monitored violence.
Groups of these fighters – some nominally under the control of the government and others outside of it – got up through the provinces of Tartus and Latakia, killing suspicious insurgents that oppose the new authorities, said the groups for rights. But they also blocked the residential neighborhoods, burned and sacked and carried out sectarian killings of Alawiti civilians, according to the rights groups.
The leaders of the new government and fighters now in his security forces are overwhelmingly overwhelmed by the Sunni Muslim majority of Syria, while the civil victims of this wave of violence were overwhelming Alawiti, a minority sect linked to Shiite Islam. The Assad family is Alawite and during its five decades that governs Syria, he has often given priority to members of the minority community in security and military work, which means that many Sunnis associate the Alawites with the old regime and his brutal attacks on their communities during the country’s 13 -year civil war.
It will take time to emerge a clearer picture of the events, given their geographical diffusion, the number of fighters and victims involved and the difficulty of identifying them and their affiliations. But the violence on the coast represented the most fatal days in Syria from the expulsion of Mr. Al-Assad in December, showing the chaos among the armed groups of the country.
The Syrian network for human rights, a monitor of conflicts, has declared in a report of the last week that the militias and foreign fighters affiliated to the new government, but not integrated in it, were mainly responsible for the sectarian mass murders and based on revenge this month.
The weak control of the government on his forces and on affiliated fighters and the inability of those forces to follow the legal regulations were “the main factors in the growing scale of violations against civilians”, says the report. While violence intensified, he added, “some of these operations quickly turned into large -scale retaliation acts, accompanied by mass murders and looting conducted by unruly armed groups”.
Saturday, the network increased the number of killings that had documented over 1,000 people from 6 March, many of them civilians. Another group of war monitoring, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, on Friday put the overall death balance at 1,500, most of whom Alawite civilians.
Direct evidence has not emerged that connect the atrocities to the high officials of the new government, led by the President Ahmed Al-Shara. And the government claimed to have created a research commission of the facts to investigate violence and promised to take into account anyone who has committed abuse against civilians.
“Syria is a state of law,” said Al-Shara in an interview with Reuters published last week. “The law will take its course above all.”
He accused the insurgents related to the Assad family and supported by a foreign power without name to unleash violence but recognized that “many parts entered the Syrian coast and many violations occurred”. He said the fights have become “an opportunity for revenge” after the long and bitter civil war.
During that war, which killed more than half a million people, according to most estimates, many rebellious factions were formed to fight Mr. Al-Assad. Some have allied themselves with the Sunni Al-Al-Shara rebel group in the final battle that ousted the dictator.
Then at the end of January, a group of rebellious leaders appointed the president of Al-Shara and since then promised to dissolve the many former rebellious groups of the country in a single national army. But he had been in office for just over a month when the disorders broke out in the coastal provinces.
“The unit of weapons and their monopoly by the state is not a luxury but a duty and an obligation,” said Al-Shara to hundreds of delegates in a recent national conference for dialogue.
But he faces huge challenges in unwinding disparate rebel groups of Syria.
Many fought hard during the civil war to carve out the fact that they are reluctant to give up. The conflict devastated the economy of Syria and Al-Shara inherited a bankruptcy state with little money to build an army. And the international economic sanctions imposed on the former regime remain in place, limping efforts to solicit foreign aid.
So the effort to integrate armed groups made few concrete progress.
“The unification is all hands. It is not real, “said Rahaf Aldoughli, assistant professor at Lancaster University in England who studies the armed groups of Syria.” There is a weak command structure in progress. “
At the center of the new security forces there are former Hayat Tahrir al-Sham fighters, the Sunni Islamist rebel faction that Mr. Al-Shara has guided for years, said the experts. They have a cohesive control structure that is supervised by the supervision but does not have the workforce needed to protect the entire country.
Much of Syria are still controlled by powerful factions not yet integrated in national security forces, such as a Kurdish-guide militia that dominates the North-East and Druse militias that hold in a region south-east of the capital, Damascus.
Other rebellious groups allied with Mr. Al-Shara have officially agreed to merge into the new national force, but they still have to do it. Most have not received training or salaries from the government and remains faithful to their commanders, said dr. Aldoughli.
Other armed groups also remain that they have no link with the government, as well as the civilians who have armed to protect themselves during the war.
“There have been not much efforts to improve the discipline or even the structures of those armed factions,” said Haid Haid, a consultant who studies Syria in Chatham House, a Think Tank in London. “What we have seen is an example of how fragmented and scarcely trained those forces.”
When the disorders broke out on March 6, the fighters of many of these groups rushed to join, with a variety of reasons. Some wanted to lay the insurrection, while others were looking for revenge for violations committed during the civil war.
Much of the violence had a deeply sectarian cast.
In videos published online, many fighters have denigrated Alawiti and attacks framed on them as punishment.
“This is revenge,” says an unidentified man in a video shared online that shows groups of fighters and burn houses that are believed to belong to the Alawites. The video was verified by the New York Times.
In the last few days, the government has announced the arrests of fighters seen to commit violence against civilians in video published online. It was a positive step towards responsibility, Haid said, but he wondered if the government would have traced and punished the fighters whose crimes had not been captured by the camera.
“It does not seem that military forces have the internal mechanisms to identify those who did what during those operations and adopt the appropriate measures,” he said.