Interim leader Sharaa calls for peace as Syria hit by deadliest violence in years
World
Interim leader Sharaa calls for peace as Syria hit by deadliest violence in years
DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Syrian leader Ahmed Sharaa called for peace on Sunday after hundreds were killed in some of the deadliest violence in 13 years of civil war, pitting loyalists of deposed President Bashar al-Assad against the country's new Islamist rulers.
The clashes, which a war monitoring group said had already killed 1,000 people, mostly civilians, continued for a fourth day in Assad's coastal heartland.
A Syrian security source said the pace of fighting had slowed around the cities of Latakia, Jabla and Baniyas, while forces searched surrounding mountainous areas where an estimated 5,000 pro-Assad insurgents were hiding.
Interim president Sharaa urged Syrians not to let sectarian tensions further destabilise the country.
"We have to preserve national unity and domestic peace, we can live together," Sharaa said in a circulated video, speaking at a mosque in his childhood neighbourhood of Mazzah, in Damascus.
"Rest assured about Syria, this country has the characteristics for survival ... What is currently happening in Syria is within the expected challenges."
Rebels led by Sharaa's Sunni Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group toppled Assad's government in December. Assad fled to Russia, leaving behind some of his closest advisers and supporters, while Sharaa's group led the appointment of an interim government and took over Syria's armed forces.
Assad's overthrow ended decades of dynastic rule by his family marked by severe repression and a devastating civil war that began as a peaceful uprising in 2011.
The war - in which Western countries, Arab states and Turkey backed the rebels while Russia, Iran and militias loyal to Tehran backed Assad - became a theatre for proxy conflicts among a kaleidoscope of armed factions with different loyalties and agendas. It has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions of Syrians.
GROWING INSURGENCY
After months of relative calm following the ouster of Assad, violence spiralled this week as forces linked to the new Islamist rulers began a crackdown on a growing insurgency from Assad's Alawite sect in the Mediterranean provinces of Latakia and Tartous.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor, said on Saturday more than 1,000 people had been killed in the two days of fighting. It said 745 were civilians, 125 members of the Syrian security forces and 148 fighters loyal to Assad.
Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the observatory, said the civilians included Alawite women and children.
Abdulrahman told Reuters on Sunday that the death toll was one of the highest since a chemical weapons attack by Assad's forces in 2013 which killed some 1,400 people in a Damascus suburb.
