1. Home
2. Arab World
3. Syrians Protest After Violence Against Alawite Minority

Several hundred people protested on Tuesday in Syria's coastal city of Latakia in the country's Alawite heartland against recent attacks targeting the minority community, AFP correspondents said.

Protesters in Latakia shouted slogans including "The Syrian people are one" and "To the whole world, listen to us, the Alawites will not bend."

Security forces were deployed in the city but did not intervene.

Since longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad -- himself an Alawite -- was toppled by an Islamist alliance last December, the community has been the target of attacks.

"We are one united people. We want armed factions in the region to leave, justice for our martyrs on the coast, and the release of our prisoners... We don't know what they are accused of," said Joumana, 58, a lawyer, who declined to provide her family name.

People also gathered in other areas.

The protests, the biggest in the Alawite regions since Assad's fall, took place after a call on social media by the Supreme Islamic Alawite Council in Syria and Abroad. That appeal followed a wave of violence against the community in the central city of Homs after a Sunni Muslim Bedouin couple was killed on Sunday, with sectarian graffiti found at the site.

After accusations emerged that Alawites were behind the killings, shops and homes were vandalized in districts home to the community before authorities imposed a curfew and later said the killings were "a criminal act and not sectarian in nature."

Protester Mona, 25, said that "what happened in Homs is unacceptable."

"We demand freedom and security, an end to the killings and to kidnappings," she said, also declining to provide her surname.

"We want federalism for the Syrian coast," she added.

In March, sectarian violence tore through Syria's Alawite heartland, killing at least 1,426 members of the minority community, according to authorities, who said the violence began with attacks on government forces by Assad supporters.

A war monitor said more than 1,700 people were killed.

AFP