As armed men gather outside the gate, their mother and her daughter bounce off by the attic window. They try not to make sounds. However, in a video where they vigorously documented this difficult moment, it is clear that they can barely control their panicked breath.
That day, on March 7th, the head of the Halil family had assuranced them that they were not in danger. He was alongside the new Islamic government in Syria that had descended into the village of Arsanobar.
“We’ve done nothing wrong,” his relative recalled what he said as they saw the fighter through the window raiding the neighbor’s house. Hours later she said the Patriarch had died and his invigorating body spread across the patio next to his son’s body.
A masked fighter sang “Ethnic Cleansing, Ethnic Cleansing” and posted a video on his Facebook page for his 28,000 followers, parading around the looted house. A family hiding on the upper floors told CNN they had heard that the attack, including executions, had been unfolded.
The murder at Halils’ home, spoken through video and survivor’s testimony, was one of many similar incidents that took place throughout the Alawian community in Syria’s coastal areas earlier this month.
CNN surveys will be zero for events in Sanovaru or the English “Pine Village.” This is a town of thousands of members of the Syrian minority Alawian community of Governor Latakia. The attack on villages, where farmland herds of farmland surround small clusters of buildings, reveals new details about the intensity of the sectarian violence that swept Syrian coast.
Based on interviews with seven survivors, satellite images and validated footage from the ground, CNN was able to shed light on the scale of the town’s massacre. There, villagers, largely unarmed by government-aligned troops, were plundered, discovered, sectarian, and corpses were wrapped around two Musgraves.
CNN tallied at least 84 bodies in a video geolocated in Pine Village, which has a population of thousands. Locals said they counted more than 200 deaths – most of them were men. The witness spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation.
The attack on the Alawians raises questions about whether interim president Ahmad Alshara can fulfill his promise to comprehensively control Syria, ensure protection for minorities, and ensure that the rebel factions do not pose a serious threat to the outlook for peace.
The latest cycle of violence began when Assad’s loyalists worked with Syria’s new Sunni Islamic government on March 6 to stage a bloody ambush on what became apparently a coordinated attack. Assad collapsed in December last year, prompting fatal retaliation in the provinces of Latakia and Tartus, which he described as an effort by the new government as an effort to contain the remains of the old dictatorship.
The state condemned the mass murder of unfair elements. Alshara vowed to establish a fact-finding committee to investigate the murder and explain the cause.
The attack targeted the Alawites, a derivative of Shia Islam, whose members were Assad families and who ruled the regime for more than half a century before they were expelled. The video reviewed by CNN was posted by Sunni Muslim extremists loyal to the Shara government.
CNN contacted the government to comment on the bloodshed in Pine Village.
“They called us Alawian dogs.”
Human Rights Watchdog, Syrian Human Rights Network (SNHR), said more than 800 people were killed in the attack following the ambush. Other rights groups say the number is even higher.
Authorities say that since then, Assad’s loyalists have staged several small attacks on government forces.
Survivors said the attack in Pine Village began early on Friday, March 7, the day after the first ambush by the Assadist Loyalist was reported.
CNN has identified an armed man who filmed himself at the Halil family’s home, combining his face details, clothing and builds along with other photos and videos on his Facebook profile. The cached version of his account indicates that the video was later removed. Two survivors who saw his footage shared on social media said he was the same man who was destroying their town.
CNN contacted the man on Facebook but did not receive a reply.
Over the next few days, another video showed him singing on social media, with his body littered behind him. “We’ve come to you. We’ve come to you with the taste of death.”
CNN was able to check the location of the video as the village entrance using pine trees, utility poles and curved road lines corresponding to images of the pine forest. Residents also identified the body of the man depicted in the video.
“The sword of the people of Idlib wants you alone,” he sang, referring to the territory of northern Syria, ruled by Alshara’s now disbanded Heyat Taril al-Sham (HTS), and the army took control from the old regime and became the Dektor government. The HTS fighter jets now make up most of the country’s general security forces.
In his Facebook profile picture, the fighter is seen in fatigue embroidered on what appears to be an insignia of the HTS. Three military experts said the patch on his shoulder was consistent with some HTS units, but the photos were too blurry and blurry to determine a particular brigade.
Another fighter can be identified in two videos that CNN geolocated in Pine Village and are believed to have been filmed during the course of the attack. The red-haired bearded man can be seen in footage taken at the entrance to Halil’s house and Pine Village.
Another clip, validated by CNN, shows that a middle-aged man identified as villager Yazan Mostafa by local sources drags him to his execution, causing extremists carried by other unidentified fighters.
An eyewitness who spoke to CNN detailed the time it took to get into execution. “They came (in our home) and said they were looking for the remains of (Assad) regime, or armed people,” one woman told CNN three days after she said her father and two brothers had been executed on Tuesday. Images she shared the aftermath at home helped CNN support her account.
“Initially, they went to the house and confiscated the phones they could find…and they left the village. Then they went back and looted our house. Then they left,” she added between tears. “And the third time they entered the house and demanded that all the men go outside.”
“My father and my two brothers. My father was a 75-year-old retired teacher… They shot my father in the head… They shot my brother in the heart.”
She said another brother, who was injured by a bullet on the right side of his body, pretended to be dead while he was bleeding. When the night fell, he tried to escape. According to the woman, the fighter fired him six times as he limped through the field.
Her mother was sitting in shock and sadness among the relatives of the dead man, she said.
Another local woman also told CNN that she had entered her house several times before the fighter dragged her husband outside and shot him and several other men into the ditch.
Locals said only a handful of men survived. One man told CNN that he ultimately saved his life but couldn’t stop them from killing the brothers whom they said were executed.
“I didn’t run away. I stood up wisely against them and they shot the ground below us to threaten me and my family,” he told CNN. “I opened my house to every faction I asked, and they pointed guns at my chest many times.”
“The will of God saved me,” he added. “I asked them to let my brother go, but no one listened.”
One woman told CNN that she was rescued by a fighter plane. “The man who killed my family was from Idlib. The man who saved my life was from Idlib,” she said.
Gather your body
According to three local people CNN spoke, the bodies were scattered across the streets of Pine Village after villagers said the fighters had banned their deaths. On March 10, the armed man oversaw a search for the remains that took place over two days, according to residents.
Locals said the bodies were loaded into large tombs near the village’s Alawite Shrine. Some of this was captured with videos and images that CNN geolocated in the area, matching the satellite image to check the date.
The photographs CNN, which he deemed to have taken at the village shrine cemetery, captured at least 10 bodies wrapped in shrouds placed in two narrow graves.
In one video, CNN counted at least 42 covering bodies abandoned along the roadside, three more in shallow graves. Nearby Earth Mounds proposed additional burials.
Another verified video showed at least 29 bodies in two shallow graves. There, excavators appeared to be replenishing the soil.
CNN could not confirm whether the bodies in the two videos and photographs portray different individuals or the same thing.
The body and grave can also be seen in satellite images reviewed and verified by CNN.
Aerial images provided by Airbus from March 11 show ground obstacles near the shrine where CNN identified the grave. The image appears to capture a body covered in shrouds and an excavator seen in one of the videos geolocated to the same site.
Maxar images from March 14 also show evidence of soil migration. Maxar told CNN that the roughly dimensions of the excavated, smooth cemetery are 26 meters x 16 meters (approximately 85 feet x 52 feet).
Villagers said they were still trying to give their loved ones burial according to Islamic rituals.
“We will definitely give the dead a proper religious burial,” said the survivor whose father and brother were killed. “But for that we need to return to the village and we are afraid to come back.”