A series of horrific massacres committed by the forces of the Assad regime and sectarian militias supporting it in the village of Al-Bayda and the Ras Al-Nabaa neighborhood in the Syrian coastal city of Baniyas on May 2 and 3, 2013, in which hundreds of children, women and men were killed, and entire families were exterminated. The Syrian Network for Human Rights documented the killing of 459 civilians in it, describing it as “sectarian cleansing,” while survivors confirmed that the actual number was more than that.
The primary responsibility for these massacres is attributed to the commander of what is known as the National Defense Forces supporting Assad, Maraj Oral (Ali Kayali), from whom he gained his most famous nickname, “The Butcher of Baniyas,” for his role in inciting them and participating in them, according to what recordings of his conversations among his supporters revealed.
The village of Al-Bayda is administratively affiliated with the city of Baniyas, north of Tartous Governorate, and overlooks the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It was one of the uprising areas at the beginning of the Syrian revolution from its first day, as was the Ras Al-Nabaa neighborhood located at the international highway in the city of Baniyas, and they are inhabited by the Sunni majority.
Motives of perpetrators
There are many stories regarding the motives that led the perpetrators of the Baniyas massacres. One of them states that a security patrol clashed with one of the rebel groups in the city, resulting in deaths on both sides, which prompted the regime’s supporters to go towards civilians and take revenge on them. While another story states that an ambush by a group of revolutionaries targeted a security patrol, and the regime took revenge on the people of the city.
However, recordings broadcast after the massacre showed Maraj Oral – a commander in the so-called National Defense Forces supporting Assad – speaking about the necessity of “encircling and beginning to cleanse” Baniyas, to prevent the rebel factions from having access to the sea, which reinforced the opinion that the massacres were part of a pre-planned campaign to prevent any movement from the city against the Assad regime.
Al-Bayda massacre
in May 2, 2013The Assad regime forces began their operation by bombing the village of Al-Bayda in the Baniyas countryside. The bombing continued for hours, and then at about one o’clock in the afternoon, the village opened to a large storming in which the National Defense Forces and the “Popular Front for the Liberation of Iskenderun” militia, led by Meraj Oral, participated, along with militants from neighboring Alawite villages and members of Hezbollah, so that the narrow alleys in the village turned into closed paths from which there was no escape.
According to the testimonies of survivors of the massacre, the storming was not a passing moment, but rather a siege that tightened its grip on the place, followed by a sweep that started from the southern neighborhood and extended slowly until it reached the town square.
Inside the village, the houses were emptied of their residents, and men, women, and children, including infants, were gathered in separate groups. Then episodes of killing began to occur through various means: field executions, slaughter with knives and machetes, dismemberment and mutilation of bodies, and beatings with stones to death, before the bodies were piled up and burned in various locations, and stories were told about burning alive as well.
Entire families, with their men, women and children, were wiped out in their place. In some homes, men were separated from women and taken to temporary detention places where they were tortured before being executed.
At more than one point, gatherings of bodies appeared that were burned or collected and then destroyed by fire. In one of the incidents documented by Human Rights Watch based on testimonies and video clips, at least 25 bodies were piled up inside a phone store in the town square, before it was set on fire.
And the next day, May 3, 2013The artillery and missile shelling returned to hit the village around ten in the morning, and dozens of residents rushed towards the orchards in an attempt to survive, amid roads that were no longer safe even for escape. Then the village was stormed again from multiple axes, including Jabal Al-Ajama and the axis of Al-Marah village, so that the killing operations continued until the afternoon hours, between field executions and slaughter with knives, in a direct continuation of what began the previous day.
The sectarian dimension was present in the massacre. Narrations reported that field instructions were clear to target members of the Sunni sect. Residents of neighboring Alawite villages also participated with regime forces in it. Some families of the village of Al-Bayda were taken to neighboring villages where they were killed, or beaten and humiliated, before being released.
Testimonies of survivors indicate that some residents were not killed in Al-Bayda, but rather were arrested and transferred to the village of Al-Zouba, with reports of burning incidents there. Also, some families were taken to the village of Kawkab, where they were beaten and insulted, before only the women and children were released, and they returned on foot to their areas.
A siege was imposed on neighboring villages, including Al-Marqab and Al-Basateen, which included arrest campaigns that targeted dozens of people.
The operations extended outside the village of Al-Bayda, where regime forces and the militias supporting it pursued the residents who fled towards agricultural areas and neighboring towns. These movements included the areas of Watta Al-Bayda and Sahm Al-Bahr, with reports of executions in those locations, without the availability of direct testimonies confirming their field details.
The massacres were accompanied by looting and arrests over two days, as trucks transported furniture and electrical equipment from village homes towards neighboring towns.
After the operations ended, the village remained in a state of heavy silence: bodies in the streets and inside homes, and burned or destroyed homes and vehicles, as if the place itself had emerged from the event and was no longer as it was.
In total, the Syrian Network for Human Rights documented the killing of 264 townspeople, all of them civilians documented by name and photo, including 36 children and 28 women, in addition to dozens of missing persons and detainees, in light of the difficulty of reaching an accurate final toll.
Ras Al Nabaa massacre
It came in the context of the Al-Bayda village massacre itself, influenced by the same motives, and as an extension of what happened there.
When the people of Ras Al-Nabaa neighborhood – as well as the city of Baniyas in general – reached the news of what happened in Al-Bayda, and that it was driven by a desire for revenge on the part of the Assad regime and the sectarian militia supporting it, aiming to annihilate its opponents in the city, a large number of residents rushed to flee their homes and try to leave the area as soon as possible. When they tried to cross the bridge that connects their neighborhood to the rest of the city of Baniyas, they were stopped by forces stationed at a checkpoint above it, separated the women, children, and the elderly from the men, and ordered them to return to the neighborhood, while they arrested and tortured the men before returning them to the neighborhood. However, a number of residents were able to leave the neighborhood at dawn via the international highway.
And in a day May 3, 2013What had happened and is still continuing in the village of Al-Bayda was repeated in the Ras Al-Nabaa neighborhood in the city of Baniyas, and the same patterns of killing were repeated by shooting, slaughtering with knives, and burning.
At approximately 2:30 p.m., regime forces and the sectarian militias accompanying it surrounded the Ras Al-Nabaa neighborhood in Baniyas, and tanks were deployed, before it witnessed intense artillery shelling using heavy artillery installed in its surroundings, under the Ras Al-Nabaa Bridge and at the Al-Quz neighborhood bridge. The bombing continued for about an hour, directly targeting civilian homes inside the neighborhood.
With the cessation of the bombing, forces began storming the neighborhood with forces estimated at about a thousand soldiers. They combed it house by house, killing the entire population of some houses, burning their homes on them, and expelling their people from some houses. They gathered the men and young men in a square in the neighborhood before killing them there, with bullets or slaughter with knives, until entire families were exterminated, or only those who were outside the neighborhood remained.
The killings also included the wounded, and the bodies were left in the square, the roads, and inside the burned houses, as well as being mutilated. Medical teams and paramedics were prevented from entering the neighborhood, while snipers were deployed in its surroundings to prevent any rescue attempt. The massacres were accompanied by looting of homes and theft of their property and furniture, before several homes in the area were burned.
A state of chaos from the disaster spread throughout the neighborhood, as those left behind by the criminals fled from the butchers, and took refuge randomly in neighboring areas, until families were separated and were unable to reunite those who remained until weeks after the massacre.
It is estimated that at least 195 people from the Ras al-Nabaa neighborhood in Baniyas were killed, including 56 children and 43 women, while residents confirm that the numbers are higher.
After the operations ended, the residents who arrived in the neighborhood began collecting the bodies of their relatives and neighbors and burying them in mass graves.
A state of fear prevailed in the Sunni neighborhoods and villages of Baniyas, and this was accompanied by the arrest of 65 people from the village of Basateen, who were taken to an unknown destination, without information being available about their fate yet. andThe region witnessed a large wave of displacement towards neighboring areas, including: Jableh city And Tartous Governorate, in addition to other villages and rural areas. A new arrest campaign was later recorded, targeting families who returned to the village or to the Ras Al-Nabaa neighborhood in Baniyas.
On May 5, the bombing was renewed on a limited basis on the outskirts of the Ras Al-Nabaa neighborhood, and then government teams began removing traces of destruction and trying to obliterate them.
Source: The island + Syrian press + Amnesty International
