It’s been just over a month since Hamza al-Amareen went missing. The 33-year-old Syrian, head of an emergency response center for the country’s civil defense organization, the White Helmets, was abducted from his vehicle on July 16. He had just returned from fighting fires elsewhere and was assisting a United Nations team with evacuations after recent violence in the Sweida area, which is home to Syria’s Druze minority.
After his family had some brief contact with his kidnappers by phone, relatives say they have not heard from or about the father of three again.
“Why would he be kidnapped in this way?” al-Amareen’s family told DW in an emailed interview “Because humanitarian workers are usually not targeted; they have nothing to do with any conflict. We were shocked because [Hamza] has no connection to any side: His mission was purely humanitarian.”
Al-Amareen’s kidnapping is part of intercommunal violence in Syria that most recently saw members of the Druze minority clash with other Syrians, including Bedouin Sunnis and members of the new national military. His family believes that al-Amareen is likely being held captive by a Druze militia in Sweida and it’s quite possible he was taken simply because he is Sunni.
The violence in Sweida that started in mid-July resulted in the deaths of almost 1,700 people. And it is not the only such incident of intercommunal violence. Human rights monitors reported that around 1,000 people died due to fighting in coastal areas, mostly home to the country’s Alawite minority, in March.
This month, observers say what appears to be an insurgency against Syria’s interim government flared up again. There are also ongoing incidents of targeted killing, kidnapping and sectarian abuse.
But at the same time, there is also a huge amount of dis- and misinformation and prejudice as well as conspiracy theories about who is responsible for the worst of the violence.
“No one knows the facts,” a Syrian who has lived in Germany since well before the country’s civil war started in 2011 told the website Syria in Transition. “People’s interpretation of who’s responsible depends entirely on their political perspective.”
Investigating the violence
After violence in Alawite-majority areas in March, Syria’s interim government, headed by former rebel militia leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, promised to investigate who was responsible for the killings.
The results of this inquiry were released in July. It identified 298 alleged perpetrators associated with military factions (that is, the interim government) and 265 alleged perpetrators linked to armed groups associated with Syria’s former dictatorship, the so-called “remnants” of the ousted Assad regime.
Last week, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, which is tasked with monitoring human rights violations in the country, also published a 66-page report that goes into even greater detail about the violence in early March.
The commission concluded that violence in the coastal areas “followed a systematic pattern across multiple, widespread locations.” That might indicate “an organizational policy within certain factions or groups or among private individuals operating in the area.” But, investigators concluded, there was “no evidence of a governmental policy or plan to carry out such attacks.”
Documenting 42 incidents and interviewing more than 200 witnesses, the report indicates just how chaotic the situation was. For example, in some towns fighters associated with the government protected civilians while at the same time, in the same town, other fighters associated with the government were involved in war crimes and looting.
There was violence, extrajudicial killing, sectarian abuse and wrongdoing on all sides, the report found — even by some civilians who used the fighting as a cover to engage in violence themselves.
That makes sense, Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, said. The earlier Syrian government investigation estimated that 200,000 people were involved in the coastal violence in one way or another, he noted. There were only ever between 30,000 and 60,000 fighters in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel militia that now heads the interim government and is the foundation of the new army.
Decades of distrust
“The war in Syria didn’t magically end with Assad’s ouster,” said Lars Hauch, a researcher at the UK consultancy Conflict Mediation Solutions and the managing editor of Syria in Transition. “It’s still ongoing, and the foreign meddling and regional rivalries are still there,” Hauch said. “Syria has been shaped by trauma that goes back generations, by sectarian divisions, by misinformation that spreads online and by a lack of governance capacity.”
Researchers say the Assad regime used brutal force against Syrians and encouraged divisions. Decades-old, pent-up antipathies are emerging now that the dictatorship is gone. Some Syrian civilians are also taking advantage of a comparative security vacuum to, for example, take revenge on people whom they believe harmed them during the dictatorship. The result is chaos and insecurity that, combined with the circulation of deliberate misinformation, makes it even harder to know who has done what to whom.
“As a consequence of the war, the country is awash with weapons,” Zelin added. “A lot of different people are responsible for the violence, it’s a multi-dimensional issue. The state doesn’t have a monopoly on violence so it’s most likley to continue until that dynamic changes,” he told DW.
‘Impunity and fear’
Although the various investigations indicate that there has been wrongdoing all around, observers and civil society activists believe that the responsibility to act, to prevent violence and division from growing, now lies with the interim government.
“The norms established by the Assad regime must be broken, and this requires the interim government to urgently act to protect civilians and hold its forces to account,” Razan Rashidi, executive director of the UK-based human rights group the Syria Campaign told DW. “The apparent targeting of humanitarian workers, the use of siege, intimidation of journalists and civil society will all add to the culture of impunity and fear that is solidifying across the country.”
Meanwhile, the family of missing aid worker Hamza al-Amareen can only wait. They say they want Syria’s interim government to put pressure on the militia holding him and would like international organizations such as the United Nations to do the same.
And just this week more civilians and aid workers were abducted near Sweida.
Al-Amareen’s family wants it all to stop. “We are against the division happening in Syria under any circumstances,” they said. “We have friends from all sects in Syria. And we still have hope that the situation will improve because we believe in a better, safer future for our country.”
Edited by: M Gagnon
