Syrian court sentences two men to death over 2025 coastal violence
Court rulings concern violence and killings during the March 2025 uprising by forces loyal to Assad and retaliatory attacks.
A court in Syria sentenced two supporters of the ousted Bashar al-Assad regime to death for inciting last year's uprising and handed down heavy sentences to members of the current government's security forces for killing hundreds of civilians from the Alawite religious minority.
According to the state media, the military criminal court in the Palace of Justice in the northern city of Aleppo sentenced Eloude Ismail and Maher Ali to death.
Ambassador Arjan of Syria (SANA) reported that these two people were convicted for inciting civil war and sectarian conflicts and leading armed gangs with the intention of attacking public forces.
The third defendant, Maher Osman, was sentenced to 12 years in prison, the court announced on Thursday without mentioning the defendant's charges.
In separate rulings, the court sentenced Mohammad Bakour, a member of the 82nd Department of the Ministry of Defense in the new government, to 20 years in prison after convicting him of intentional murder.
SANA said it sentenced Ammar Abdul Aal to three years on torture charges and acquitted Abdul Raouf Bakrjan and Mohammad Zarzouri.
The verdicts are related to the investigation conducted by a government committee into the attacks of March last year. At least 1,426 people, mostly civilians, were killed in days of sectarian violence in mainly Alawite areas of Syria's coastal regions.
The defendants included loyalists to the former Assad regime and members of the new government's security forces.
The government committee announced that it had identified 298 suspects involved in serious violations during the violence in the Alevi heartland.
The committee's investigation "documented serious violations against civilians on March 7, 8, and 9 [2025], including murder, manslaughter, looting, destruction and burning of houses, torture, and sectarian insults."
The committee said 238 army and security forces were killed by pro-Assad fighters in attacks in Tartus, Latakia and Hama provinces.
About 200,000 pro-government military auxiliaries then converged on the area and carried out revenge killings.
Al Jazeera's Heidi Pett, reporting from the Syrian capital Damascus, said the uprising was started by people loyal to the Assad regime, who are themselves from the Alawite religious minority.
"After the fall of the Assad regime and its leadership fled the country at the end of 2024, its supporters, including loyal soldiers of the ousted regime as well as members of the militia, fled to the mountains and from there launched an uprising against the new government in March 2025," Pat said.
He added that forces loyal to the new government are accused of killing civilians from the Alevi minority group in revenge attacks.
The trials are for seven men who participated in the initial pro-Assad uprising, as well as seven members of the new government's security forces who were subsequently deployed in the region and are accused of carrying out revenge attacks.
On September 17, the court handed down verdicts against four other defendants accused of violations during the incidents in the coastal region last March, SANA reported. One was sentenced to death, one to life imprisonment and one to 20 years in prison. The fourth was acquitted