The new Syrian president often spoke about the urgency of the merger of many armed groups that fought to overthrow the powerful Bashar Al-Assad into a unique national army.
But the spasm of violence that broke out this month in northwestern Syria, in which hundreds of civilians were killed, made it clear how much the goal remained. Instead, he showed a government lack of control over forces nominally under his command and the inability of the police of other armed groups, experts said.
The outburst began when the rebels associated with the worn dictatorship of Assad attacked government forces on March 6. At various places in two coastal provinces that are the heart of the Syrian Alawita minority. The government responded with a wide mobilization of its security forces, which was joined by other armed groups and armed civilians, according to witnesses, groups for human rights and analysts who accompanied violence.
Groups of these fighters – some nominally under government control and others beyond it – they broke through Tartus and Latakia provinces, killing suspicious rebels who opposed the new authorities, said groups for rights. But they also shelled the residential districts, burned and plundered the houses and carried out the Alawite civilian murders, according to the rights of the rights.
The leaders of the new government and fighters who are now in his security forces are mostly from Syrian Sunni Muslim majority, while the civilian victims of this wave of violence were prevalent Alawites, a minority sect associated with Shiite Islam. The Assad family is Alawita, and over five decades ruling Syria, it is often a priority priority for members of the minority community in security and military affairs, which means that many Sunni associate Alawites with the old regime and its brutal attacks on their communities during the 13-year-old civil war.
It will take time for a clearer image of events, given their geographical expansion, the number of fighters and victims and difficulties in identifying them and their affiliation. But the violence on the coast was the most deadly few days in Syria since Mr. Al-Assad kicked out in December, showing chaos among armed groups of the country.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights, a conflict monitor, stated in the report last week that militia and foreign fighters are associated with the new government but not integrated into it, primarily responsible for the sectasy and revenge mass murder of this month.
The weak control of the Government over their forces and related fighters and the failure of these forces to follow the legal regulations were “the main factors at the increasing range of civilians violations,” the report said. As the violence escalated, he added, “some of these operations quickly turned into large acts of retribution, followed by mass killings and robbery carried out undisciplined armed groups.”
On Saturday network raised The number of murders he documented from March 6 to more than 1,000 people, many of whom are civilians. Another war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, set a total number of fatalities on Friday at 1,500, most of which are Alawite civilians.
Direct evidence of ceremony with senior officials in the new government, at the helm Temporary President Ahmed al-Shara. And the Government announced that she had created a committee to determine the facts that she would investigate violence and vowed that anyone who committed the abuse against civilians on accounts would be committed.
“Syria is a state of law,” Mr. Al-Shara said in an interview with Reuters last week. “The law will go to everything.”
He accused the rebels associated with the Assad family and supported by an unnamed foreign force of launching violence, but admitted that “many parties entered the Syrian coast, and many violations occurred.” He said the fighting became a “opportunity to revenge” after a long and bitter civil war.
During this war, in which more than half a million people were killed, according to most estimates, many rebel fractions were formed to fight Mr. Al-Assad. Some of them in the last battle connected with the Sunni Islamist group of Mr. Al-Shara, which was a dictator.
Then at the end of January a group of rebel leaders Appointed Mr. Al-Shara PresidentAnd since then he has vowed to dissolve many of the former rebel groups of the country into a national army. But he was in power for a little over a month when riots broke out in coastal provinces.
“The unity of weapons and their monopoly by the state is not a luxury, but a duty and obligation,” Mr. Al-Shara said hundreds of delegates at a recent conference on national dialogue.
But he faces huge challenges in combining different rebel groups of Syria.
Many fought strongly during the Civil War to cut the feuss that are reluctant to give up. The conflict devastated the Syrian economy, and Mr. Al-Shara inherited the bankruptcy state with a little money to build an army. And international economic sanctions imposed on the former regime remain in force, and efforts to seek foreign help.
So the effort to integrate armed groups has achieved some concrete progress.
“The unification is all fluffy. That’s not real,” said Rahaf Aldoughli, an assistant professor at Lancaster University in England, who studies armed groups of Syria. “There is a weak command structure in the place.”
At the core of the new security forces, former Hayata fighters are taching al-Shama, the Sunni Islamist rebel faction that Mr. Al-Shara has been leading for years, experts said. They have a cohesive command structure that Mr. Al-Shara monitors, but he lacks the workforce to secure the whole country.
Large parts of Syria are still controlled by powerful fractions that have not yet been integrated into the national security forces, such as the militia led by Kurd, which dominates the northeast militia and the societies that hold in the region southeast of the capital, Damasca.
Other rebel groups related to Mr. Al-Shara officially agreed to connect into a new, national force, but they have not yet done so. Most did not receive training or salary from the Government and remained loyal to her own commanders, said Dr. Aldoughli.
There are other armed groups that have nothing to do with the government, as well as the civilians who armed themselves to protect themselves during the war.
“It was not much effort to improve the discipline or even the structure of these armed fractions,” said Haid Haid, an advisor studying Syria at Chatham House, a London research center. “What we have seen is an example of how fragmented and poorly trained these forces are.”
When the unrest broke out on March 6, fighters from many of these groups rushed to join, with various motives. Some wanted to delay the rebellion, while others sought revenge for violations committed during the Civil War.
Much of the violence played a deep sectative role.
In the videos posted online, many fighters denied Alavite and framed the attacks on them as retribution.
“This is revenge,” says an unidentified man in a video shared on the network showing groups of fighters who rob and burning homes believed to belong to Alawites. The video was confirmed by the New York Times.
In recent days, the Government has announced the arrests of fighters seen as violence against civilians in videos posted on the network. It was a positive step towards responsibility, Mr. Haid said, but wondered if the government would observe and punish fighters whose crimes were not caught in front of the camera.
“It does not seem that military forces have internal mechanisms to identify who did what he had done during these operations and did appropriate measures,” he said.
