Inside a City Swept by Roving Gunmen, Deadly Grudges and Fear

The Syrian city was nearly empty in early March, its streets littered with burned cars. Shops were plundered, their windows shattered and locks shot off. Some buildings were little more than blackened walls and ash.

Emergency workers had turned a looted furniture store into a makeshift morgue. A white pickup truck pulled up, a pair of feet dangling over the back in pink socks with white polka dots. Minutes later, an ambulance arrived with two other bodies, then a blue pickup appeared carrying more.

Nearby, men pleaded with emergency workers to help collect the remains of their killed loved ones.

“There’s seven bodies in that building.”

“There’s another body on the square.”

“There are at least 40 bodies on one road.”

The city, Baniyas, was the site of some of the worst violence in Syria last month, when thousands of armed men stormed the country’s Mediterranean coast and killed more than 1,600 civilians, mostly from the Alawite religious minority.

Over three days, gunmen went house to house, summarily executing civilians and opening fire in the streets, according to dozens of residents who spoke to The New York Times.

My colleagues and I managed to report from the city for nearly a day as the killings unfolded. What we found was evidence of a massacre — and a broad failure by the new, rebel-led government to protect Alawites, the group that dominated Syria’s elite circles during the Assad family’s decades-long dictatorship.