AL-SANOBAR, Syria — Mayada pointed to a divot picked out of the pavement in front of her parents' house — the hole left by the bullet when gunmen threw her 85-year-old father on the ground and shot him execution-style in the head.

"His skull was completely split … all in pieces," she said, her face impassive. Inside the house she found her mother and sister, also shot dead from a hail of bullets fired through the windows.

"There was blood everywhere."

Weeks later, the blood has been washed away, but the aftereffects of the bloodletting linger here in the coastal village of Al-Sanobar and throughout northwestern Syria.

The early March massacres that killed members of Mayada's family (she gave only her first name to avoid reprisals) left hundreds — maybe thousands — of civilians dead. It was the worst outbreak of violence since an Islamist rebel coalition ousted former President Bashar Assad in December and seized control of the country.

The killings, which began with clashes between Assad loyalists and pro-government forces, turned into an all-out sectarian pogrom targeting Alawites, members of an Islamic sect who dominate Syria's coastal regions and are viewed by some Muslims as apostates. Assad is an Alawite.

Al-Sanobar, a well-appointed village named after its plentiful pine trees, is a ghost town, with many house fronts blackened with scorch marks.

Only the occasional woman or old man appears on the streets, making furtive bread runs before quickly heading home; young men are nowhere to be found. Inside Mayada's home, the living room has a frieze of shrapnel spatter covering a wall.

"After they killed everyone they killed, the government told us we should come back home. But most of the men are still in hiding," Mayada said, her eyes flitting between a visiting journalist and the direction of a security checkpoint manned by government soldiers a few dozen yards from her house.

Mayada began to count off the dead she and surviving villagers had found in the houses nearby before stopping at the thought of one her neighbors, a 15-year-old boy.

"His mother begged them to leave him alone, saying he was a child, and that she would give them money or gold she had to spare his life," she said. They took the money and killed him anyway, she said.

For the new Syrian government, the violence fractured the honeymoon period that followed the departure of a long-reviled dictator, and cast serious doubts as to whether the government can corral armed factions it says will form the backbone of a new national army.

Abroad, the killings have tanked the new authorities' hopes of legitimizing their rule before the international community and of ending sanctions on a country ravaged by nearly 14 years of civil war.

The United States, United Kingdom and Europe have demanded accountability for the violence. On March 31, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said any adjustment to U.S. policy on Syria would be contingent on the government's actions, including guaranteeing the rights of minorities.

To allay those fears, Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa formed a seven-person investigative committee, which last month began interviewing victims' families and witnesses while analyzing dozens of videos of the massacres, many of them taken and uploaded to social media by the perpetrators themselves.

So far, said committee spokesman Yasser Farhan, the panel has investigated only the province of Latakia but will soon move to neighboring provinces. The committee will also interview pro-government gunmen and Assad loyalists in the authorities' custody. The results of the investigation are expected to be released in about two months.

"Peace remains fragile if justice isn't achieved," Farhan said, adding that he understood Syrians' skepticism of investigative committees. During the Assad regime, such panels were used to hide crimes committed by the security forces.

"We have to move forward with rapid and just measures for accountability if we want to stop the culture of taking your rights by your own hand," he said.

But even with all that, assigning blame will be no easy task. To subdue what al-Sharaa says was an attempted coup by Assad loyalists, he rallied not only his fighters in the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham but dozens of other factions, including hard-line militant groups with variable loyalty to the country's new leaders.

Also joining them were thousands eager to wreak vengeance on the Alawites, a minority they blame for empowering Assad's brutal rule, even though most did not benefit from the former regime. Alawites follow a synchretic religion that is an offshoot of Shia Islam. Iran joined the Syrian civil war on the side of Assad's government, supercharging sectarian tensions with Syria's Sunni-majority population.

A full accounting of the casualties has yet to be completed, but monitoring groups say more than 1,300 people were killed, including 211 members of the Syrian security forces and 228 civilians killed by Assad loyalists.

Analysts say that punishing anyone from factions fighting alongside the government could trigger a wide-scale insurrection — a potentially deadly blow to a fledgling government relying on those groups to secure its grip of the country. Others point out that the queue for justice in Syria is long: Though former regime enforcers have been caught, most remain free and have been allowed to live openly among the communities they victimized.

Among Alawites, few believe anyone will be held to account — especially with sectarian violence still ongoing. On March 31, the first day of the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of Ramadan, two masked gunmen from military factions affiliated with the Syrian army executed six Alawites in the village of Haref Benemra, including the mayor and a child, authorities said.

Meanwhile, social media is awash with reports of factions entering villages for bouts of looting, or kidnapping and killing local notables, including in Al-Sanobar.

"One faction kills and another steals … they all cover for each other," Mayada said.

A drive through Syria's coast and the nearby mountains reveals a string of shell-shocked communities, with the electric tension of potential violence felt at every checkpoint.

In the Alawite-dominated neighborhoods in the cities of Jableh and Banias, where some of the worst massacres took place, residents hid indoors and refused to speak to a visiting journalist. Storefronts were either shuttered, defaced, or both, with the husks of burnt cars lining the side of the road. Other vehicles lay abandoned, their windshields adorned with the telltale spider webs of bullet holes.

It was much the same along the highway leading away from the coast, where village after village showed signs of violence.

"I was hiding all this time. It's the only reason I survived. I only came back a few days ago," said Yasser, a 35-year-old automotive supplies merchant surveying the damage to his store in the village of Barmaya. On the walls, someone had spray painted graffiti calling Alawites dogs and apostates. Others vowed, "By Allah we will fight you."

"There's a martyr in every place you pass on the road here," Yasser said, shaking his head.

During the killings in early March, about 8,000 people — most of them Alawite families — sought shelter in Russia's Khmeimim Airbase, 6 miles south of Al-Sanobar, according to Russian authorities.

Many remain there, living in a tented encampment but with little in way of supplies. The Russians, meanwhile, have made it clear that residents must leave. But many have refused to do so without security guarantees, or authorization for locals to take up arms and defend their communities.

"How can this government protect us? They can't even protect abandoned villages from looting," said Nawras, a 38-year-old commercial ship captain who had taken his mother, sister and brother's family to the air base while staying with his own wife at the base's periphery. He gave his first name to avoid reprisals against his family.

"You can't impose control, nor are you allowing me to defend myself," he said. "So you're telling me to come be slaughtered. It's like you're executing me."

Though Mayada remains home, the feeling of safety is gone. She and her family were alert to every sound, worried that any moment could bring pro-government gunmen to the house. She spoke in a weary tone of how no one in the village was allowed to bury their dead.

"They just took all the corpses and put them in a pit near the village shrine," she said.

"There isn't even a sign."

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.