Hunt for Syrian regime remnants expands to new areas outside Al Assad strongholds

Hayat Tahrir Al Sham troops swept through several mountain cities west of Damascus on Wednesday, residents said, expanding a campaign to capture loyalists of the former regime that has raised concerns about the replication of the Assad era's arbitrary rule.

Arrests in the Sunni cities of Madaya, Zabandani and Bloudan in the foothills of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains separating Lebanon from Syria follow a three-week campaign into the Alawite coastal heartland. The minority community had provided core support for the rule of former president Bashar Al Assad, who comes from the same sect and was deposed last month by HTS, which traces its origin to Al Qaeda.

A former local police officer, who has been co-operating with HTS, told The National that 20 members of former auxiliary forces set up by the regime and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah have been arrested. Several warehouses left by Hezbollah, containing M-16 rifles, hand grenades and ammunition, were seized, he said.

“It is a targeted sweep,” he said.

Activists in the area aligned with HTS published a statement on social media saying that “there will be no arbitrary actions or retribution”.

Earlier this month, Murhaf Abu Qasra, an HTS commander who became interim defence minister, met former rebels from Zabadani who had returned from exile in north Syria to their hometown, to discuss bringing them into a new Syrian army. On Wednesday, he said the army would be returned to its original purpose of serving the Syrian people, one month after the group deposed Mr Al Assad.

“The defunct regime used the army and armed forces to serve its personal interests and ambitions, to protect itself and to kill the Syrian people, thus earning this army a bad reputation and its name became a cause for fear and dread among the Syrian people,” he said in a statement released by the Syrian news agency Sana.

“We promise that we will work to return the army to its primary goal of protecting the homeland and defending the people, a source of pride, and we affirm that we are striving with all our efforts to repair the gap between the armed forces and the Syrian people.”

Even since Syria and Lebanon were carved out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920, the rugged area has been a main corridor of smuggling between the two countries, in addition to being famous for apple production.

But Zabadani, and the nearby cities of Madaya and Bloudan, joined the 2011 revolt, mounting armed resistance before surrendering to regime and Hezbollah forces after siege warfare in 2014-2016.

The fall of Mr Al Assad on December 8 has marked Sunni ascendancy in Syria for the first time since the 1963 coup that ushered Alawite domination of the majority Sunni country.

Syria had a population of 22 million before the 2011 revolt against Mr Al Assad, who ruled the country with an iron fist. His forces killed thousands of mainly Sunni civilians in a crackdown on the peaceful protest movement that demanded his removal in March 2011. By the end of that year, Syria was in civil war, setting the scene for the rise of HTS and other religious armed groups.

Although HTS has its roots firmly in militant ideology, it has sought to project an image of moderation since taking charge in Damascus. The group was based in the northern Idlib governorate near Turkey, but now it controls almost all of Syria, a country of sizeable Kurdish and Alawite minorities, as well as established Druze, Christian, and Ismaili communities.

A Syrian delegation has been touring the region in recent days, seeking support from America's allies in a quest to lift fully US sanctions on the Syrian government to aid in state building. The sanctions were first imposed first in the 1970s for Damascus's support if militant groups, and stiffened in the following decade.

But the sweep into the coast has drawn outcry among the minority Alawite community. Its members said that HTS-led forces killed 120 Alawites since last month in coastal provinces and the central area of Homs, under the guise of looking for regime remnants. There was no independent confirmation of the killings.