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The fascist threat is by no means over in Syria, and neither is the revolution.

The showdown between irreconcilable Assadists and the country’s new rulers which didn’t erupt on December 8 last year is happening now. Worse, the attendant sectarian breakdown which Syrians feared may well be underway.

On March 6, Assadists in the coastal areas launched coordinated attacks on Syrian security forces, killing well over 100. Snipers also attacked and killed civilians, killing dozens. Hospitals and ambulances were targeted, and highways were closed by gunfire.

The violence was met with a massive popular response. In cities across Syria demonstrations came out in support of the government and to demand the rapid suppression of the Assadists. People rejected absolutely the idea of returning to the terrible past of torture chambers and barrel bombs. They also expressed fury at the Assad regime’s “remnants”, as they are known, for refusing the reconciliation offered.

Despite their extremist background, the new authorities had surprised many Syrians with their pragmatic approach to the old regime, offering an amnesty to all fighters except the top-level war criminals, and assuring people of all sects and ethnicities that their rights would be assured. Syrians hoped that Assadists, and the Alawite community from which many emerged, would, in turn, accept the wrong they had done the country, and seek to make amends. Instead they were attacking hospitals.

Tens of thousands of angry men rushed to the coast to support the government. As well as convoys of pro-government militia, armed civilians joined the flood, despite an interior ministry statement asking citizens not to engage.

Though fighting still continues, government forces have regained control over urban centres. But abuses against Alawite civilians risk turning this immediate victory into a longer-term defeat.

There were numerous field executions of Assadist fighters. Far worse, the reliable Syrian Network for Human Rights says at least 642 civilians were summarily executed in various locations. This – the first massacre perpetrated by men associated with the new authorities – is a disaster.

Syria must move on from the massacres

The culprits were probably members of the only partially integrated Syrian National Army rather than HTS fighters, but the effect will be the same. It plays into the hands of Assadists, potentially charging an insurgency manned by Alawites who have lost their positions in the army or their fake jobs in the bloated Assadist bureaucracy, and who now fear sectarian annihilation.

The killing plays into the hands too of the insurgency’s foreign backers – Iran chief amongst them. The researcher Gregory Waters that young men in Alawite villages hurried to receive weapons delivered by unknown actors in trucks. Other reliable sources point to coordination between the Assadists and Lebanon’s Hezbullah, as well as the PKK-led SDF.

Russia may have helped to direct the assault from an operations room at the Hmeimim air base. And the violence coincided with a new Israeli incursion in Quneitra province, alongside an assassination attempt against Suleiman Abdul Baqi, a Druze leader close to the government, probably sponsored by Israel. Israel as much as Iran is desperately seeking to foment chaos so that Syria cannot stabilise, rebuild, and then potentially defend itself against land grabs.

The killing of civilians plays too to the prejudices of Europe and the US, who are already reluctant to lift sanctions, and whose politicians and media tend to understand the region through the lens of “oppressed minorities”. When the French foreign minister recently visited Damascus, he insisted on meeting representatives of the churches, as if the year were 1860.

Though it is indeed important to ensure the protection of all Syrian communities, western preconceptions fail to recognise that it is the Sunni majority that has suffered genocide at the hands of Assadists over the last 14 years. The overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, of those driven from their homes, of those tortured to death in prisons, were Sunnis.

The communities subjected to starvation siege were Sunni. The urban neighbourhoods reduced to rubble once housed Sunnis. And the people still living in appalling tent cities on the country’s borders are all Sunnis. The killing and expulsion of these Sunnis was committed by local Assadists – commanded by Alawi officers – and backed by militias organised by Iran and manned by Shia Lebanese, Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghans.

During the war, dozens of massacres of Sunni women and children were perpetrated by irregular Alawite militias and organised by the regime precisely in order to create a Sunni backlash which would then terrify minority communities into loyalty. In this and other ways, the Alawite community has been manipulated, terrified, and made complicit by the regime. This is the sectarian dynamic which Syria urgently needs to break.

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The enemy is Assadism and the divide-and-rule social hatreds it generates, not the Alawi community as a whole. When Assadists besieged neighbourhoods in coastal cities in recent days, revolutionaries were sheltered in Alawite homes, and in many cases Alawites protected and gave medical care to wounded Syrian soldiers.

It was too much to expect that Syria was going to move directly from six decades of fascism and fourteen years of war to peace, stability and prosperity, especially given its encirclement by hostile powers. But peace, stability and prosperity are what the vast majority of Syrians of all backgrounds want to achieve.

It’s not necessary to be starry-eyed about the new authorities to believe that they too aspire to these aims. They wish to rule over a functioning polity. The alternative is bloody chaos which serves nobody but the country’s many enemies.

“What distinguishes us from our enemies is our commitment to principles,” said President Ahmad al-Sharaa in a hasty address to the nation. “Our people on the coast are our responsibility,” he continued. “The remnants of the overthrown regime are seeking to provoke you into committing abuses they can use to claim victimhood and seek outside intervention.”

This implicit recognition of crimes committed must be followed by exemplary punishment of the guilty. Ismailis, Christians, Shia and most Druze are already integrating well into the new system. Anti-Assad Alawites now need to be appointed to high-level administrative positions, especially on the coast. All Syrians need to work towards a society based on shared citizenship and to overcome the social splintering inherited from the old regime. The task is urgent, and the stakes enormous.

Robin Yassin-Kassab is co-author ofĚý, and chief English editor of theĚý

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