What began as an argument about allegations of harassment on the streets of Al-Suqaylabiyah, a Christian-majority town in Syria’s northwest Hama province, soon turned to violence.
On Saturday, hundreds of men from the neighbouring Sunni village of Qalaat Mudiq entered the town to commit a spate of destruction targeting Christian homes , shops, and property.
A local network of civil peace activists, tipped off about the approaching mob by the Syrian security services, had warned residents to clear the streets, with no immediate reports of casualties.
With the town's local security forces failing to rein in the crowd, the looting lasted hours before security forces, sent from the nearby city of Hama, managed to expel the mob from the town.
Protestors from the Christian community took to the streets on Sunday, calling for the state to deal with the issue of unregulated weapons and to protect its minority Christian community .
A number of Syrian Churches have announced that they are scaling back Palm Sunday celebrations to only hold prayers inside their churches due to what they described as “the current discouraging circumstances.”
The violence is a grim reminder that Syria’s latent sectarian grievances, deepened over more than a decade of war, are far from healed, more than 15 months since the fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime. The frontline town Disputes between residents of Al-Suqaylabiyah and local Sunni villages are not new, but the town's position on the frontline of the war has given personal conflicts the propensity to take on a darker character.
Even before the war, “it was frequent for there to have been small fights as these towns are local rivals,” Felix Legrand, an independent researcher and consultant working on Syria, tells The New Arab .
Despite this history, both communities have also had long-standing economic and social ties. The war, however, disrupted these to some extent as sectarian cleavages were opened across the country.
During the conflict, Al-Suqaylabiyah became a “frontline town that saw a local mobilisation [as part of the pro-regime National Defence Forces],” explains Legrand, sandwiched between opposition-held Sunni towns and regime-controlled Christian and Alawite communities.
The town's local militia was implicated in the destruction and looting of neighbouring Sunni villages. However, according to Legrand, “the idea that the local community was supportive of the regime is not the political reality; in general, there was a lot of dislike for the local warlord”.
Since the fall of the regime, tensions have intensified as Sunni communities associated with the opposition feel empowered and angry towards those they perceive as having aligned with the former regime.
“You have displaced people and individuals associated with the revolution who are returning to find their homes destroyed and looted; their lands cultivated by others,” explains Legrand.
“Whilst Al-Suqaylabiyah and the Alawite villages are completely untouched.” Syria's sectarian grievances Since the fall of Assad’s regime, Syria has witnessed a pattern of long-standing sectarian grievances rooted in war-era crimes erupting into communal violence amid a weak security environment and a lack of meaningful transitional justice mechanisms .
It is a pattern that has repeated numerous times, the highest profile of which were a series of massacres targeting Alawites on the coast in March and Druze in Suweida in July.
The country continues to be plagued by simmering vigilantism, retaliatory killings, and kidnappings, occasionally marked by incidents of mob violence. In November, the murder of a Sunni couple in rural Homs triggered a tribal mobilisation that led to riots targeting the city’s Alawite community, whom they blamed for the murder.
This is also not the first high-profile incident in Al-Suqaylabiyah. In December 2024, during the initial weeks of the new government’s rule, a Christmas tree in the town’s main square was set alight by foreign fighters, triggering a number of protests in Christian neighbourhoods across the country denouncing the infringement of their religious rites.
These mutual grudges have not been properly addressed. “There is no formal channel through which grievances, from any side, are heard, investigated, or resolved,” explains Nanar Hawach, a senior researcher for Syria with the International Crisis Group (ICG), to TNA .
“That vacuum does not justify violence, but it adds to the conditions under which violence becomes more likely.”
However, Gregory Waters, an independent researcher and Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, warns against viewing these incidents solely at a macro level and instead stresses that each incident is highly context-specific and driven by local particularities.
“If there is a pattern [fuelling these outbreaks of violence across the country] it is a pattern of unresolved local frictions,” he adds. “Calls for ‘national dialogue’ won't actually address what's happening on the ground. [Syria] needs local dialogue between communities aimed at reducing the willingness of residents to escalate issues.” Security service architecture These spates of violence are also being exacerbated by shortcomings in Syria’s security situation. “These towns have had social frictions for decades without producing any comparable [violent incidents],” explains Hawach. “What has changed is the security architecture around it.”
In Syria’s mixed areas, local security forces are often drawn from one side of the communal divide and deployed to police the other. “In areas where civil war grievances remain high, [this system] often shapes whose safety is prioritised and reduces the likelihood of early intervention [in instances of violence.”
He says the “behavioural gap” between local forces and reinforcements brought from Hama demonstrates this fact. “The former appear to largely have stood by, while the latter moved to stop the violence.”
However, for Waters, the shortcomings stem largely from the lack of manpower. “The checkpoints between these communities are normally staffed by two people. There is no reasonable expectation for two men to stop hundreds of guys from entering the town,” he explains.
Equally, the local police force, consisting of 20 officers, was unable to control the mob. “The Ministry of Interior just doesn’t currently have the resources to stop access when signs of escalation appear.”
With Hama a forty-five-minute drive from Al-Suqaylabiyah, Waters argues, the hour it took for reinforcements to be deployed from Hama is actually “quite good.”
Ultimately, whilst addressing the security shortcomings might lessen the impact of such violence, it doesn’t resolve the root cause of the tensions.
Many communities still feel that they have not received adequate justice and compensation for the crimes committed against them during the war.
Lacking any real pathway to transitional justice, many, empowered by the perception that Syria’s new government is on their side, are seeking to exact that justice themselves.
Until that sense of injustice is resolved, communities like Al-Suqaylabiyah may always feel in danger. Cian Ward is a journalist based in Damascus, covering conflict, migration, and humanitarian issues Follow him on X: @CP__Ward Edited by Charlie Hoyle