Nine killed in Syria within 24 hours amid rampant sectarian violence

As many as nine people, including a Shia Muslim man and four Alawites, have been killed across Syria as violence keeps plaguing the country in the aftermath of its Israeli-backed takeover by former Takfiri commander Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.

The fatalities were caused on Sunday, the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitor, reported.

According to the report, unidentified attackers gunned down a young Shia man in the city of Homs in western Syria.

Unknown assailants also “directly shot and killed” four people from the country’s Alawite community as the victims were returning from work in the Jadrin Village in the suburbs of the city of Hama, likewise located in the Arab country’s west.

It cited “reliable sources” as saying that the victims used to work in construction.

The report suggested that the deadly violence had taken place after the Jolani-led regime’s “general security forces” removed security checkpoints from the village.

Elsewhere in the country, the body of a young man from the al-Maliha al-Gharbiya town in the eastern countryside of the southern city of Dara’a, who used to live in the capital Damascus, was found on the highway between the city and the capital near a private university.

Three more deaths occurred in the northwestern provinces of Aleppo and Idlib.

Sectarian violence has been running rampant across Syria since late last year, when Jolani, a former Daesh (ISIS) and al-Qaeda commander, and his Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group overthrew the nation’s former government of President Bashar al-Assad.

The takeover was marked by significantly enhanced violence at the hands of the HTS, which had been cornered, mostly in Idlib province, by Assad’s security and military forces in retaliation for the group’s years of deadly Takfiri violence throughout the Arab country.

Simultaneously with the takeover, the Israeli regime unprecedentedly scaled up its attacks on Syria, targeting the country’s military and civilian infrastructure.

The sectarian violence has taken its biggest toll on the Alawite community, from which Assad has hailed, with credible investigations documenting mass killings, abductions, and displacement.

A Syrian government fact-finding committee confirmed that over 1,400 mostly Alawite civilians, including women and children, were killed in the coastal region in March alone, amid reports of homes burned, looting, and sectarian insults.

Reports also note attacks on Shia Muslims, with armed groups explicitly claiming responsibility for assaults on Shia and Alawite civilians.

Jolani has, meanwhile, been receiving increasing political recognition by the Israeli regime and its biggest ally, the United States, with President Donald Trump having met him at least twice and calling him a “fighter” and a person with a “very strong past.”

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