9 April 2025

Massaoudiye, Lebanon – Samir Ismail sat on his knees, his forehead on the ground and hands clasped behind his back. His young nieces and nephews watched — their eyes wide in horror — as he demonstrated how militants lined the nine men up, then shot and killed them. 

Samir, 53, drew his hand up, shaking his index finger and thumb in a shooting motion. His relatives were sitting around him in a small cinder block room, part of an old school in the northern Lebanese village of Massaoudiye, where they had called home since fleeing Syria in early March. Mattresses, winter jackets, and suitcases took up most of the space, squishing them into a tightly packed circle, as Samir continued his story. 

On the evening of Jan. 31, he said, armed men drove into the Alawite village of Arza, in Syria’s Hama province. They entered three homes on the outskirts of the village, locked the women inside and took away their phones, and dragged the men outside. 

The Alawites are a religious minority in Syria, to which the ousted Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, belongs. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni Islamist group, led the coterie of rebels that overthrew Assad in December.