Eighteen Months, Two Death Sentences: Syria's First Verdict on the Alawite Massacres Measures Nothing

An Aleppo military court has finally handed down its first sentences over the March 2025 massacres of Alawites on Syria's coast — one death sentence by hanging, one life sentence, one 20-year term for a Ministry of Defence soldier, one acquittal. Four verdicts, out of fourteen defendants, eighteen months after the killing. Further rulings are expected on 24 September. This is being reported as accountability. It is closer to triage.

The scale it is meant to answer for: a Reuters investigation traced the chain of command for roughly 1,500 Alawite deaths back to security officials in Damascus. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights counted well over a thousand dead across dozens of separate massacre sites in Latakia, Tartus, Hama and Homs. Videos verified by monitors showed men kneeling, being sorted by sect, and shot. None of that scale is reflected in a trial of fourteen people — seven of them, notably, counted as "Assad loyalists" rather than the government forces and allied factions that Reuters's own reporting says received orders from the top of the Ministry of Defence.

That's the split worth sitting with. Judge Zakaria Bakkar's court convicted one government soldier of "intentional murder" and gave him 20 years — the softest sentence handed down today. The death sentence went to a man from Latakia charged with "aggression aimed at inciting civil war," a framing that folds a sectarian pogrom into the language of insurgency and treats a comparatively low-level actor as the exemplary villain. Meanwhile the state's own investigative committee, whose July report identified the "vital centres" narrative and never assigned responsibility to transitional government forces, remains the operative account. A tribunal that punishes the resistance harder than the security apparatus that did the killing is not building a record — it's laundering one.

This is the standard playbook for post-transition states trying to keep a Western audience on side while a new sectarian order consolidates. Ahmed al-Sharaa's government needs the story that Syria is moving past Assad-era impunity, especially while it lobbies capitals for sanctions relief and normalisation. A handful of convictions, timed and framed to distinguish "rogue" loyalists from the chain of command, produces exactly that story without touching the officers or factions — the Sultan Suleiman Shah Brigade, the Hamza Division — that Reuters and Amnesty International separately named as central to the killing. Meanwhile Amnesty has documented dozens of kidnappings of Alawite women since December 2024; the interior ministry told the New York Times that of 42 reported cases it examined, only one was "real." That is not an investigation, it's a denial with a fig leaf of process.

None of this is an argument for Assadist restoration, and nobody serious is making one — the regime that built the sectarian security state Alawites are now being scapegoated for is the same one that gassed and starved its own population for a decade. But solidarity with a persecuted minority doesn't require pretending the successor government is different in kind rather than personnel. A state that convicts a soldier of murder and sentences an insurgent to death in the same afternoon, while its own fact-finding process exonerates its command structure, is not delivering justice. It is managing a body count into a press release.

Sources

Middle East Eye: Syria's court issues first sentences over 2025 Alawite massacres
Reuters investigation: Syrian forces massacred 1,500 Alawites, chain of command led to Damascus
EUAA Country of Origin Information: Syria 2025 — Alawites
Wikipedia: 2025 massacres of Syrian Alawites