How Syria’s victorious rebels are taking horrifying revenge, revealed in DAVID PATRIKARIKOS’s special investigation

The car drives over the body as if going over a speed bump. Its tyres roll through the smears of blood left by two corpses lying by the side of the road in the Syrian city of Latakia.

In the background, a man can be heard urging on the driver. ‘Reverse! Reverse! Reverse!’ he roars with excitement.

As the video ends, I hear a faint noise of what sounds like laughter.

Death has come to Syria once again. UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports that around 830 Alawites, a minority sect of Shia Islam whose adherents are spread across the country, were killed in massacres over the weekend.

Fighting also broke out between Syrian security forces and those loyal to former president Bashar al-Assad, himself an Alawite, bringing the death toll to 1,311.

The video was one of a number sent to me over the weekend by an Alawite contact on the ground.

Others showed Alawite civilians being savagely beaten and cursed as ‘haywan’ (animals) by uniformed militants who forced them to crawl along the ground and men being dragged out of their homes and shot at point-blank range with assault rifles.

I have not been able to independently verify the authenticity of the videos but they are, he assured me, yet more examples of regime violence against the Alawite community in the country’s coastal areas.

David Patrikarikos with soldiers in Damascus

‘I am worried about my family,’ he said. ‘My father is sick and cannot escape. The factions of the New Syrian Army that committed massacres over the past two days have begun to storm villages in the countryside and mountains using heavy weapons, and randomly shelling homes inhabited by women and children.’

Syria’s new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has vowed to hold accountable all those responsible for killing civilians. It will be the latest challenge for a man who has, so far, done the seemingly unthinkable.

It was only in late 2024 that a former Al Qaeda leader called Abu Mohammad al-Jolani and around 1,000 of his followers charged south from the city of Idlib all the way to Damascus.

The world was stunned at how quickly Assad fell. Al-Jolani was stunned at how quickly Assad fell. Nonetheless, he quickly set up a functioning government.

He also dropped his nom de guerre and reverted to his birth name: Ahmad al-Sharaa.

Meanwhile, the US removed him – and the $10million price on his head – from its list of the world’s most-wanted terrorists.

Had change finally come to Syria or was it all too good to be true? I went to Damascus to find out.

Driving through the city, I am struck by the absence of Assad. His image once dominated the cityscape – adorning billboards and lampposts, buildings and roundabouts. 

David Patrikarikos with Aslan, a child who still lives in Syria

Now his gangly frame, elongated neck and weak chin have been scrubbed clean from the city like blood from a surgical knife.

But if Assad’s image is gone, his legacy is everywhere. Damascus is a city hollowed out by autocracy. 

Buildings lie half-ruined, electricity cables dangle from balconies. In the old city I exchange a handful of hard currency for a brick of Syrian pounds, a legacy of the hyperinflation Assad wrought.

In Umayyad Square, the city’s central point, three soldiers – all holding automatic rifles – are out on patrol. They stand and pose for photos with excited children.

They fought with al-Jolani, they tell me, as he took Syria back from Assad. One wears a bucket hat and a mask that goes up to just below his eyes, like a villain in a western. The other’s face is almost completely covered by a black bandana – only his eyes are visible. 

On his chest is a black patch inscribed with Arabic calligraphy that spells out the Shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith: ‘There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.’

If they fought with al-Jolani, they are likely to have been part of his group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which emerged from Jabhat al-Nusra, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. Now they have been integrated into the new state’s armed forces. 

The most pressing challenge facing the nascent government is the rebuilding of the state. One afternoon, I drive to the suburb of Darayya, about five miles from central Damascus.

David and a young child gesture a heart hand signal to one another in Darayya, Syria

 In the early days of the Arab Spring, Darayya was a site of massive anti-government protests, which culminated in the Darayya Massacre of 2012 that left 700 dead. When war broke out late last year, heavy fighting between Assad’s forces and the rebels took place here.

Soon after I enter the suburb, my fixer Hassan* points toward an expanse of reddish dirt and mounds of rubble. ‘This was all buildings once. The regime obliterated everything,’ he says, his voice tinged with sadness.

The scene gets worse as we move further into the centre. All around us are the shells of buildings – the concrete intestines of what was once a community of almost 150,000 people.

In the street I meet Aslan, who lives in a badly bomb-damaged house with his family. He tells me he is nine – although he’s so slight, he looks younger.

Across the street I meet Hend Sadiq, who lives with her daughter in another ruined apartment with a destroyed car outside.

‘We have no electricity, and we have to bring water in by car. But we have nowhere else to go,’ she tells me. Two of her sons died during the war. One was walking in the street when a regime sniper decided to shoot him for no reason. The other was killed by a barrel bomb, a particularly grotesque weapon consisting of an oil drum or similar filled with high explosives and metal fragments.

As we leave, I ask her age – 52, she tells me. I thought she was in her late 60s. Darayya is a place where the children look younger, and the adults look older.

It’s not just brutalised cities the government is facing, but brutalised people. Trauma is everywhere.

David walks around Darayya, Syria

A few streets away I sit and have tea with Rishdie, a meek, smiling man who works as a waiter. He told me he spent years in Assad’s prisons, simply because he is from Darayya and was therefore a de facto object of suspicion.

The worst experience he had was at the airport intelligence branch prison, which housed a room called ‘the sauna’. ‘It was four metres by four metres,’ he recalled, as we sat in the small courtyard of his house. ‘But in it there were around 75 people. You could not sleep. There was no air to breathe. Every five minutes someone died.

‘They kept screaming at me to confess that I was an armed rebel. But I hadn’t done anything so what could I say?’ After days of fruitless attempts to get him to confess, they tried another tactic.

‘We got you a beautiful surprise,’ they said before producing a photo of his mother.

They told him she was in the next room, and then the screams began. Rishdie began to smash his head against the wall, trying to kill himself. The screams stopped and the guards came to him. ‘Don’t worry,’ they told him. ‘We’ll kill you. We’ll do you this favour.’

Then they told him to go to say goodbye to his mother because she was already dead. They even took him to a room with a body in it and told him it was his mother.

When he checked the corpse’s face, he discovered it was not. But by then he was broken. He signed whatever they wanted.

This is post-Assad Syria: the people are happy the dictator has gone, but they are scarred by what he did. That evening, I met Mohamad at Cafe Rawda in central Damascus. Amid a fog of shisha smoke, he told me about life under Assad. ‘I had a friend who owned a barber shop,’ he said. 

Buildings are all destroyed, a reminder of Assad’s autocratic regime 

‘One day, one of his customers made a joke about Bashar. A few hours later, the police came and arrested him. ‘But I didn’t tell the joke,’ he said. ‘No, but you didn’t confront the customer about it,’ was their reply.’

This was life under Assad, vertiginous autocracy and relentless idiocy. Mohamad takes a sip of his tea. ‘We used to say there is one place you can open your mouth in Syria. The dentist.’

The challenges facing Syria’s new government are not limited to devastated infrastructure and mass trauma, however.

In almost every high street in Damascus you see water cooler bottles filled with petrol. If a single image sums up the dysfunction and incompetence of Assad’s regime, it’s these bottles, which are testament to oil-rich Syria’s failure to provide its own citizens with fuel. 

They are the container of choice for the smugglers who bring in petrol from Lebanon and sell it on the black market. The petrol stations stand empty for two reasons. First, Assad shipped out much of the country’s oil to Moscow in return for its support.

Second, Syria’s most oil-rich region is in the country’s north-east, which is run by the country’s Kurdish minority.

This latter factor is not lost on the country’s Sunni Muslim majority. As a businessman said to me one morning: ‘We need to deal with the Kurds. We hope for a political solution, but if not we will give them a military one. We respect minorities, but we Sunnis make 85 to 90 per cent of Syria.’ 

In fact, according to the last census taken – before the war in 2011 – Sunnis made up 74 per cent of the population, with Alawites (the Assad family’s sect) at 13 per cent and Christians 10 per cent.

In the last decade or so, millions have fled the country – many of whom were Sunni. One expert estimated to me that Sunnis probably make up around 65 per cent of the population today.

The disconnect does not bode well for future stability.

With al-Sharaa now running the show, the Sunnis are back in charge. He repeatedly vowed to respect Syria’s minorities, and his early behaviour and that of his forces appeared to indicate he is keeping his promise.

And yet if al-Sharaa is a reformed jihadist, there are those around him who aren’t. At my hotel, I drank coffee with Samir Dahi, a researcher specialising in political and social structures and local governance. Given the violence that lay ahead, it was a meeting that would prove portentous.

‘In Damascus, things are good,’ he tells me. ‘But when you visit some areas outside it, things can be scary. A lot of the soldiers at the checkpoints don’t fly the new Syrian flag; they don’t even fly HTS flags, they fly Nusra flags. 

A few days ago, I saw some HTS soldiers carrying heavy machine guns as they patrolled. I asked the leader why he used weapons like this. He replied that he knew we were Alawites and therefore bad people. I said we’re just Syrian civilians. ‘You are not civilians,’ he replied, ‘You are pigs.’

Meanwhile, the Kurds in the north-east are worried. They know Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan despises them. And they haven’t forgotten about HTS’s history of brutality (it wasn’t all that long ago that the group was selling unfortunates to ISIS to torture and kill).

Last week a Kurdish friend sent me a video of men being made to lie down in the street while armed government forces bound, beat and cursed at them. ‘Welcome to the new Syria,’ he wrote. The Kurds also control the Al-Hawl refugee camp in northern Syria, which is home to around 50,000 prisoners, including British ISIS bride Shamima Begum.

The exact number of jihadists within the camp is unclear, but if the Kurds are no longer able to run it we can be sure that thousands of jihadis will start exporting terror once again.

So what is happening in government? A day later, I went to the Control and Inspection Authority, which evaluates the performance of government ministries and their employees.

In a large office I met its chairman, Dr Issam Khalid al Khalif.Behind his desk was a large rectangular picture frame, illuminated with a strip light. Not long ago it contained an image of Bashar al-Assad, but it has been torn out. So far, he tells me, they haven’t had to fire too many officials from the old regime.

‘The big challenges are digitising our records, but right now everything is on paper,’ he tells me. ‘The other reason is to raise government salaries. A big cause of corruption was because salaries were so low. The finance ministry is hoping to raise government wages by 400 per cent. But even this is not enough. We want to get to $300 per month. That should be possible in a few months.’

He fixes me with a stare. ‘What we really need is a lifting of the sanctions,’ he says.

He’s not wrong. Syria has been under US, UN and EU sanctions regimes since 1979. If Syria is to succeed it needs economic relief, and fast. To this, the government must now add the task of uniting a country in danger of descending to civil war. Its leader al-Sharaa must act or Syria will implode, and its people will once more face a life of the most grievous violence and murder.

*Hassan is a pseudonym