At least 62 prisoners, mostly Alawites from Homs, have died in Syrian prisons this year under Ahmad al-Sharaa’s rule.

Homs Governorate in central Syria is witnessing a wave of sectarian violence, both from attacks by unknown gunmen targeting members of the Alawite religious minority and from the torture and killing of Alawites in Syrian government prisons.

At least eight have been killed in the governorate over the past three days, including seven on sectarian grounds, and two women, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported on 20 October.

Some 359 people have been killed in Homs since the beginning of the year as a result of the chaos that has plagued the city since former ISIS commander Ahmad al-Sharaa took power in Damascus.

“These developments, coupled with continued official silence, raise growing fears of a widening sectarian rift and a threat to what remains of the city’s social cohesion,” SOHR wrote.

On 16 October, two masked gunmen attacked a barbershop in the village of Mukhtabiyeh in the Talkalakh area of the Homs countryside, killing two people, one Sunni and the other Alawite.

Local sources told SOHR the attackers threw a hand grenade inside the barbershop before fleeing on a motorcycle toward the Burj area.

The attack also injured the barbershop’s owner, the father of Mira Thabet, a young Alawite girl who earlier this year gained widespread attention on social media. She briefly disappeared following a school exam, only to appear in a video on social media saying she had run away with a Sunni man and married him.

Amid a broader wave of kidnappings of Alawite women and girls taking place at the time, Mira’s father said she had been kidnapped and forced to marry the Sunni man.

SOHR reports that on 16 October, a man and his wife were shot and killed by gunmen on a motorcycle while inside a shop in the Karm al-Zeitoun neighborhood of Homs.

Local sources said the area where the attack occurred is surrounded by several checkpoints manned by Syria’s internal security forces, the General Security.

However, when the attackers fled, they were able to pass through the General Security checkpoints towards the Al-Aseel roundabout without being stopped.

On 18 October, a 50-year-old Alawite man and his son were shot by unknown gunmen while working at a stall near the Wadi al-Dhahab exchange in Homs.

Both were injured and taken to the hospital where father later died from the gunshot wounds and the son is still being treated.

The Syrian Justice Archive (SJA) reported on 19 October that three people, including a man and his wife from the Alawite minority, were killed in a shooting by unknown gunmen riding a motorcycle. Ibrahim Saleh al-Ali, his wife Suad Wannous, and another man, Rajeh Aqoul, were killed in their shop on the Bab al-Dreib Road in Homs.

The day before, an Alawite man went missing in western rural Homs amid fears he has been abducted, SJA reported further. Contact was lost with Hajmat Taysir Idris on the morning of Saturday. His white truck was later found empty with its doors open on the Al-Hawz–Al-Qurniyah road.

Amid the killings in Homs, SOHR warned of an “escalation in sectarian revenge attacks as perpetrators continue to enjoy impunity.”

SOHR also reported that 62 detainees had been tortured to death in Syrian government prisons since the fall of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Most of these detainees were from Homs Governorate and killed for sectarian reasons, the rights group added.

One of the men recently tortured to death was Tariq Habib Ismandar, a former officer in the Syrian Army, SJT reported.

Arrested in May, Ismandar died in prison on Saturday without receiving a trial or any form of judicial process since his detention.

His death certificate said he died of a heart attack.

SJT noted that all deaths and killings that occur inside Syrian prisons are officially recorded as heart attacks, regardless of the victim’s age.

According to STJ, several residents from Syria’s coastal region have reported that the Syrian authorities refuse to issue death certificates for detainees who died after arrest, or for those killed in the horrific massacres of Alawites on the coast in March, unless the cause of death is listed as a heart attack in official medical reports.

Regarding the killings of Alawites in prisons, SOHR noted that with the exception of a few cases, the perpetrators have gone unpunished.

SOHR warned authorities in Damascus “against continuing to follow the approach of the former regime, calling for all perpetrators of these crimes to be held accountable, without discrimination based on sect or affiliation.”

The Cradle Media report