14 March 2025

Al-Massaoudiye, Lebanon – Sara (a pseudonym) wore a fuzzy rainbow jacket, her blue rubber sandals caked in thick mud as she trudged up the road from the river marking Lebanon’s northern border with Syria on Wednesday, two plastic bags of children’s clothes in her hands. 

The 24-year-old had just come from her home in the Syrian coastal city of Baniyas, roughly 60 kilometers to the north. After fleeing to Lebanon over the weekend, she returned this week to bring clothes to her five young daughters, who had been residing in a makeshift shelter in the northern Lebanese border village of al-Massaoudiye for several days. 

“I [travelled] under the attacks and the killing to bring clothes for our kids,” Sara told Syria Direct, asking to remain anonymous.

Violence erupted in Baniyas on March 7, the day after Assad loyalists ambushed a local patrol of security forces in a village outside Jableh, a city in Latakia, killing at least 13. Armed confrontations quickly spread throughout Syria’s coastal provinces, with pro-Assad fighters briefly taking control of some city centers. 

As the Syrian government called in reinforcements—a mixture of official security forces, factions recently integrated into the state and unaffiliated armed groups—sectarian killings took place in multiple villages and cities. Many of those killed were Alawites, members of the minority Shiite Muslim sect to which the family of deposed president Bashar al-Assad belongs.

On March 8, Sara and her husband, who are Alawite, quickly gathered what they could carry and fled with their daughters to neighboring Lebanon. 

Roughly 8,898 people are estimated to have fled Syria for Lebanon since March 6, United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) Lebanon spokesperson Lisa Abou Khaled told Syria Direct on March 13. 

Most have arrived in 17 villages across Lebanon’s northern Akkar governorate, Abou Khaled added, with the small Alawite border villages of al-Massaoudiye and Tal al-Bireh hosting the highest number of arrivals, with 2,331 and 1,557 people, respectively. 

“Families, including female-headed households, are arriving traumatized from armed conflict and flight, with most arriving on foot across the border, through rivers and having travelled at night through insecure areas,” Abou Khaled said. 

The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), an independent human rights monitor, has documented the extrajudicial killing of at least 961 people across Latakia, Tartous, Hama and Homs since March 6. Forces affiliated with Damascus killed at least 529 civilians and “disarmed members of the remnants of the Assad regime,” it said, while pro-Assad fighters killed 207 members of government forces and 225 civilians.