Syrian interim president Ahmed Sharaa yesterday called for peace after hundreds were killed in some of the deadliest violence in 13 years of civil war, pitting loyalists of deposed president Bashar al-Assad against the country’s new rulers.
The clashes, which a war monitoring group said had already killed 1,000 people, mostly civilians, continued for a fourth day in al-Assad’s coastal heartland.
A Syrian security source said the pace of fighting had slowed around the cities of Latakia, Jabla and Baniyas, while forces searched surrounding mountainous areas where an estimated 5,000 pro-al-Assad insurgents were hiding.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Sharaa urged Syrians not to let sectarian tensions further destabilize the country.
“We have to preserve national unity and domestic peace, we can live together,” Sharaa said in a circulated video, speaking at a mosque in his childhood neighborhood of Mazzah, in Damascus.
“Rest assured about Syria, this country has the characteristics for survival... What is currently happening in Syria is within the expected challenges,” he said.
Rebels led by Sharaa’s Sunni Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group toppled al-Assad’s government in December last year. Al-Assad fled to Russia, leaving behind some of his closest advisers and supporters, while Sharaa’s group led the appointment of an interim government and took over Syria’s armed forces.
Al-Assad’s overthrow ended decades of dynastic rule by his family marked by severe repression and a devastating civil war that began as a peaceful uprising in 2011.
The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions of Syrians.
After months of relative calm following the ouster of al-Assad, violence spiraled last week as forces linked to the new rulers began a crackdown on a growing insurgency from al-Assad’s Alawite sect in the Mediterranean provinces of Latakia and Tartous.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor, on Saturday said that more than 1,000 people had been killed in the two days of fighting.
It said 745 were civilians, 125 members of the Syrian security forces and 148 fighters loyal to al-Assad.
Observatory founder Rami Abdulrahman said the civilians included Alawite women and children.
He yesterday said that the death toll was one of the highest since a chemical weapons attack by al-Assad’s forces in 2013, which killed about 1,400 people in a Damascus suburb.
The EU, whose officials have met Sharaa since he became de facto leader of Syria, condemned “all violence against civilians” and “any attempts to undermine stability and the prospects for a lasting peaceful transition” in Syria.
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