Syrian Court issues first sentences over 2025 massacres of Alawites

Syria's judiciary issued its first verdicts on Thursday in the trial over massacres of Alawites on the Syrian coast last year, sentencing a member of government forces to 20 years in prison, while two supporters of the deposed government received a death sentence and a life sentence, respectively.

Fourteen people - seven members of government forces and seven supporters of former president Bashar al-Assad - were accused of involvement in the killings, in a trial that opened in Aleppo in November 2025. According to an AFP journalist present at the scene, the court delivered verdicts Thursday concerning four of the defendants, with further rulings expected on September 24.

The government forces member sentenced to 20 years, who belonged to the Ministry of Defense's forces, was found guilty of "the crime of premeditated murder," said the presiding judge of the military criminal court, Zakaria Bakkar.

Several of the defendants considered supporters of Assad had pleaded not guilty at the opening of the trial, with one claiming he was in Lebanon at the time of the violence. 

Among them, a defendant from the coastal region was sentenced to death by hanging, notably for "aggression aimed at provoking civil war and sectarian clashes," while a second was sentenced to life imprisonment and a third was acquitted.

The violence, which erupted between March 7 and 9, 2025, in the coastal cities of Tartus, Latakia and Hama - a region with a large Alawite population, the minority from which the Assad clan hails - followed attacks by former officers loyal to the fallen regime against security forces of the interim government. 

A national commission of inquiry found that at least 1,426 people were killed, most of them civilians, in what the UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria concluded amounted to war crimes.