Batisa

After midnight, when the village of Batisa in the western Homs countryside was asleep, gangs operating under the "General Security" apparatus of the Jolani regime came for the Al-Marai family. Not because of anything the family had done. Not because of any crime or any threat they posed. Because of what they were. Three brothers, from the same mother, raised in the same house, were taken and executed in a single sectarian act of murder. The three martyrs were: – Marhaf Mana' Al-Marai – Munhal Mana' Al-Marai – Habib Mana' Al-Marai The Al-Marai family lost three sons in a single night. The choice to come after midnight is itself telling: it is the hour of maximum vulnerability, when resistance is least possible and fear is most acute, when the darkness provides cover for what the perpetrators understood could not bear the light. Batisa is in the Homs countryside — far from the coastal massacres that dominated early reporting on March 2025. But the logic was the same. The Al-Marai brothers were Alawite. That was enough.