ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A military court in Syria on Thursday sentenced a supporter of ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad to death and another to life in prison over their role in the March 2025 massacres of the country's Alawite community, state media reported, in the first verdicts handed down in connection with the killings.
“The military criminal court on Thursday held a sentencing session for four defendants accused of committing violations on the coast, at the Palace of Justice in Aleppo,” the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) said, adding that “the court sentenced one of them to death, the second to life imprisonment and the third to 20 years in prison, and acquitted the fourth.”
Syria's judiciary began the first public trials in the northern city of Aleppo last November for those accused of committing violations during the coastal violence, with victims' families in attendance.
The court has since “held several public sessions devoted to reviewing the evidence and examining the defenses submitted by the defendants, in the presence of the competent judicial authorities,” SANA said.
The verdicts come about a year and a half after more than 1,700 Alawites were killed in violence that placed Syria's new authorities, who came to power after Assad's ouster in December 2024, under intense international scrutiny over reports that government forces and affiliated armed groups took part in the killings.
Largely concentrated in Syria's western coastal regions, the Alawite community has long been stereotyped as loyal to Assad, who is himself an Alawite.
In the aftermath of the violence, Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa in March 2025 ordered the formation of an "independent national committee" to "investigate" and "identify the causes, circumstances, and details that led to the occurrence" of the killings, which was required to submit "its report to the presidency."
In July 2025, committee spokesperson Yasser al-Farhan said it had identified nearly 300 suspects linked to "serious violations against civilians," including "murder, premeditated murder, looting, destruction and burning of homes, torture, and sectarian insults."
Despite the accountability efforts, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) in mid-August said it had documented the deaths of at least 100 Alawites since the start of 2026, including 86 men, nine women and five children, in attacks that "varied between direct gunfire, throwing grenades, and kidnapping."
The monitor described the killings as "crimes bearing a sectarian nature," saying that “despite repeated calls for serious and transparent investigations and accountability … the relevant authorities [in Damascus] have not announced the arrest of any perpetrators of these crimes or their presentation to justice."
