Al-Mukhtariya

On March 7, 2025, extremist factions operating under the new military leadership descended on Al-Mukhtariya and killed over 128 Alawite civilians — among them elderly men and women who could not flee, children, and young people cut down mid-life. The attack was not a skirmish. It was an extermination. Field reports and human rights committees documented how residents were identified by name, face, or identity document before being executed on the spot. No distinction was made between those who could fight and those who could not. The village, part of the Lattakia countryside for centuries, was treated as a target to neutralise rather than a community to spare. When the killing stopped, the destruction continued. Most homes were set ablaze in a methodical sweep — not out of military necessity, but as a deliberate act of erasure. Agricultural land, orchards tended by families for generations, and personal belongings accumulated over lifetimes were burned or looted. The surviving inhabitants, traumatised and dispossessed, were driven into the mountains and into refugee camps, leaving behind a village that had been home.