Sectarian Killings Along Syria’s Coast Spiral Into Crisis for New Government

 Reports of a wave of killings in Syria’s coastal region sparked an international outcry, including a rebuke from the U.S., and further inflamed sectarian tensions in what has become the most serious crisis yet for the war-torn country’s new government.

The violence began ahead of the weekend with a series of deadly ambushes of state security forces by what the government said were insurgents who supported the deposed Assad regime. Reports soon emerged of reprisal killings that residents said were carried out by fighters affiliated with the government.

The region is home to Syria’s Alawites, a minority group that included the Assads and which has been associated with the regime—though many Alawites were among its victims.

A number of residents in the area reached by The Wall Street Journal said convoys of armed men arrived over the weekend and began threatening residents, shooting people and looting and burning homes.

“Near our house, there are 15 bodies, and nobody has the courage to remove them since yesterday,” said a resident of Al-Qabu, near Homs. Several others spoke of bodies lying in the streets, and one shared photographs of corpses.

The claims and the affiliations of the attackers couldn’t be confirmed, though residents blamed the government and foreign fighters who have bolstered its ranks.

The United States condemns the radical Islamist terrorists, including foreign jihadis, that murdered people in western Syria in recent days,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday.

“The United States stands with Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities, including its Christian, Druze, Alawite, and Kurdish communities,” he said. “Syria’s interim authorities must hold the perpetrators of these massacres against Syria’s minority communities accountable.”

The U.K. and France expressed strong concerns about the violence.

Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, said he was setting up an independent committee to investigate the attacks on civilians as well as those against security forces. Schools in the coastal regions were suspended Sunday and Monday because of the fragile atmosphere.

“The remnants of the former regime, along with external forces backing them, are attempting to create new strife and drag our country into a civil war with the aim of dividing it and destroying its unity and stability,” Sharaa said, according to state news agency SANA, as he pledged to hold the perpetrators accountable.

Government security forces launched what they called an extensive combing operation Friday along Syria’s Mediterranean coast, the heartland of the Assads’ Alawite religious minority, after gunmen loyal to the old regime launched deadly ambushes on security forces in the town of Jableh.

The battles were among the fiercest since the new government’s forces overthrew Bashar al-Assad in December, ending more than a decade of civil war in which the former president used torture, executions and chemical attacks to try to suppress an uprising by his own people.

The clashes reignited tensions across Syria, with throngs of supporters of the government taking to the streets in cities such as Hama and Homs in support of the security operation. Reinforcements poured in ahead of the weekend, with convoys of armed men riding in pickup trucks.

A 35-year-old Alawite from the Jableh countryside said large convoys arrived over the weekend and killed many people, as he and other men fled into the mountains.

A university student from Homs in western Syria said there hadn’t been widespread killing in her area, but said residents had been threatened and insulted by large numbers of armed men.

“They came to intimidate us,” the student said. “They pass by every day to scare us. At night, they were using loudspeakers, calling us traitors and backstabbers.”

The incidents highlighted the still-simmering sectarian tensions in a country that has been taken over by Sunni Islamist rebels with previous ties to al-Qaeda and Islamic State. The new government has pledged to respect Syria’s diversity, but is largely untested. Its forces—just 25,000 at the time of the lightning campaign that toppled the Assads last year—are stretched tight trying to secure a country of 24 million.

Syria’s defense ministry told state media that security forces were continuing to pursue what it called remnants of the old regime.

Many people have expressed concerns about foreign fighters in the new government’s ranks, battle-hardened and often more ideologically intense than their Syrian counterparts.