Outside the deserted Homs political security directorate building, a group of freshly recruited armed guards were engaged in a heated debate about justice. Sado Junaid, whose sister and brother-in-law were detained and tortured in the squat facility’s underground prison, sided with Mahmoud al-Bashar, who as they spoke sometimes held the black coil of wire and a black-and-white rod once used to beat him and other detainees.
They clashed with another young recruit about whether they should be allowed to torture officers from the deposed regime of Bashar al-Assad before any accused of crimes face trial, or whether suspects should be immediately delivered to Syria’s nascent justice system.
“I just want to meet one of them and torture them as they did to me,” said Bashar.
“If you saw someone who tortured your father, your brother, your loved one, can you really say you would deal with them peacefully?” said Junaid. He only wanted to hurt those who had harmed his family, he said, although he conceded he would not recognise their names or faces if he passed them on the street.
Homs was known as the cradle of the uprising against Assad, where Syria’s Alawite and Sunni communities have long lived in close quarters.
The diverse city has grown tense since Assad’s fall, as security forces loyal to the new caretaker government conduct sweeping raids targeting groups loyal to the deposed dictatorship. Homs’ Alawites, including many who once filled the ranks of Assad’s army and security forces, say they are terrified of reprisal attacks, and whisper about kidnappings and violence targeting members of their sect.
Junaid was quick to say he had no issue with the Alawite people, but he hoped to see justice served “for those who committed crimes”, even as the identities of those he wanted to stand trial remained opaque.
“The good Alawites who committed no crimes can live peacefully, as long as they don’t establish sleeper cells,” he said, in a nod to the frequent spasms of violence that continue to plague Homs. From the perspective of Homs’ Sunnis, the source of the problem was remnants of the former regime. For Alawites, it is armed extremists they say are targeting civilians, accusing the new government of turning a blind eye.
“We live in constant fear and instability now,” said Abu Mohammed, an Alawite former three-star captain in Assad’s army. He had barely left his house since the Assad regime fell, he said, instead spending his days frantically scrolling social media where descriptions of attacks on Alawite villages outside Homs were rampant, although often difficult to verify.
Mohammed and his former army colleague Mahmud Ibrahim said they felt abandoned by the upper echelons of the military who had either fled or were in hiding, leaving them facing an uncertain future.
Mohammed had been to one of the settlement centres set up by the new authority, where security and military personnel turn in their weapons in exchange for papers saying they have surrendered and regularised their status. He described witnessing Sunni militants assault an Alawite student who they had pulled from a nearby bus as he waited in a queue outside the settlement centre. He had since avoided the checkpoints staffed by fighters that ring the city, fearing the piece of paper he obtained from the settlement centre would do little to protect him.
“Both of us want to return to the army – but also to get a salary,” said Ibrahim, frustrated at being out of work despite his former status as a military recruiter. Mohammed scoffed at the idea they could volunteer for the new local security forces like Junaid and the others, who earn the equivalent of £80 a month in foreign currency. Guarding buildings, he said, was beneath their former military status.
For the people of Homs, the violence of the Assad regime was intimate. Security services largely made up of Alawites raided the homes of their neighbours in majority-Sunni neighbourhoods, often a short drive from the imposing detention centres ringed with barbed wire, where the officers surveilled their neighbours. Officials worked house by house to crack down on anyone accused of joining protests against Assad’s rule that began in 2011, with Homs witnessing the largest demonstrations in Syria, as well as mass arrests in response.
Swaths of the city bear the scars of the civil war that followed, when the Assad regime attacked its own citizens with airstrikes and shelling. Neighbourhoods whose names became synonymous with destruction by Assad’s forces, such as Baba Amr, where Bashar said he once fought, contain whole blocks ground into little more than pockmarked foundations and dust.
Some residents such as Bashar say they know the identities of those who abused or surveilled them, raising the spectre that victims of the Assad regime’s violence against its own people could one day encounter those responsible on the streets of Homs. While many of the notorious names such as the former head of the political security directorate Husam Louka fled with Assad to Moscow, many of the lower-ranking officers and security personnel who could not afford to leave the country are now in hiding, either in Homs or the nearby Alawite heartland of Latakia.
“All those remnants of the former regime are hiding in their homes, down to the former traffic police,” said Salman Shbeeb, an Alawite former politician who said he had encouraged changes from the Assad regime and had been detained and questioned under Assad and his father, Hafez, who was president until his death in 2000.
“They’ve even got new, Sunni recruits directing the traffic now,” he added.
At busy intersections across city, these tensions were laid bare as fighters from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group that toppled Assad, stood guard. At the entrance to one majority-Alawite neighbourhood, militants loitered next to an anti-aircraft missile mounted on a flatbed truck. Elsewhere in the city, fighters ringed a roundabout near a Sunni neighbourhood, saying they were there to keep the Alawite and Sunni communities apart after an Alawite protest got out of hand when a militia joined in.
“Our goal is to stop the fighting,” said Abu Salem Hawash, a HTS fighter standing guard. Their presence was intended “to push the Sunnis away and protect the Alawites”, he said.
Another fighter, Abu Mossah Kermaz, said he was among the forces raiding Alawite homes, and was adamant that suggestions of reprisal attacks were lies. The militants had been careful to treat people with respect when they went inside looking for people, he said, adding that they had directed all the women in the house to one room and asked homeowners to keep hold of their valuable items and electronics.
“The new government will solve all these problems soon, god willing,” he added. What the new authority in Damascus may do other than target remnants of the former regime remained unclear.
Ibrahim and Mohammed said they had attempted to establish a kind of neighbourhood watch group, but said local Sunni forces had prevented this. Confined to their homes and fearful, they were desperate to find something to do.
“Maybe they will allow us to protect our neighbourhoods, without guns, but we’re not even allowed to gather in big numbers,” said Mohammed.
Ibrahim was bolder with his frustrations. “If the Sunnis continue like this for another few months, maybe the Alawites will call for the return of a president like Assad. Maybe they’ll even call for his return,” he said.
