Survivors from Brabishbo and Zobar insisted to The Cradle that the responsibility for the massacres in their villages lies primarily with the General Security forces, as well as members of the Syrian Army’s Division 400, which manned a nearby checkpoint.
The General Security forces set a trap for the men in the village by promising they would be safe if they returned from the forests and then allowing the armed factions to freely massacre them right after they did.
“If everyone had believed the promises of safety from the General Security and returned from the forests, not one man would have remained alive in the village,” one survivor from Brabishbo stated.
On 10 March, one day after the massacres in Brabishbo and Zobar, Ministry of Defense spokesman Colonel Hussein Abdul Ghani announced the end of military operations across multiple locations on the coast, including in the “Zobar area.”
This means that the General Security and affiliated armed factions were operating in Brabishbo and Zobar under orders from the Ministry of Defense as they went door to door killing Alawite civilians. The end of military operations was only announced after the massacre was complete.
One woman whose husband was executed during the events told The Cradle, “For this government, all Alawites are ‘remnants of the regime.’ They want to kill us all.”
🔹The cover-up
The village was later visited by investigators from a government-appointed fact-finding committee who spoke with residents and collected information about what happened.
However, survivors of the massacre say that when they blamed the General Security, the investigators became angry and demanded to know what their proof was.
One survivor who spoke to the fact-finding committee told The Cradle that its message was clear: “We could blame whoever we wanted, such as Al-Amshat and Al-Hamzat [Turkish-backed armed factions], but we could not mention HTS or General Security.”
When the committee’s report was completed in July, it sought to exonerate President Sharaa, the former Al-Qaeda commander, and other top government officials, claiming that “Syrian commanders did not give orders to commit violations and, in fact, gave orders to halt them.”
The violations, which included killings, theft, and sectarian incitement, were “widespread but not organized,” the committee claimed.
But how could the General Security and factions affiliated with the Ministry of Defense kill at least 1,557 Alawite civilians across 58 locations, as reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), if the killings were not “organized” and if orders were given to “halt” the massacres, rather than perpetrate them?
Even if no explicit orders were issued to massacre civilians, such an outcome was predictable when clerics appointed by Sharaa’s HTS issued calls for jihad from mosques and mobilized armed civilians across the country.
According to the religious rulings of the medieval religious scholar, Ibn Taymiyyah, who is revered by Sharaa and the HTS members filling the ranks of his security forces, Alawites are apostates who should be killed.
In 2015, Sharaa gave an interview to Al Jazeera,saying all Alawites should be killed unless they convert to Sunni Islam.
In a video from January 2025, Syria’s Defense Minister, Marhaf Abu Qasra, is seen smiling and holding hands with a bearded militant who is brandishing a sword and reciting a poem praising the killing of Alawites.
As one young man who survived the massacre in Brabishbo explained to The Cradle, “For them, the price of a human being is the price of a bullet. Human life has no value. I am an Alawite, so killing me is permissible.”
“What do you expect from such terrorism, that they convince themselves that if they kill us, they will go to heaven?”
An Alawite activist, Mohammad, shared with The Cradle photographs of the victims.