Syria's new authorities said 14 Interior Ministry personnel were killed and 10 others wounded in an ambush near the western coastal city of Tartous, an area long associated with ousted president Bashar al-Assad's support base. Officials blamed Assad loyalists for the attack, one of the first direct armed challenges to the administration that emerged after his fall.
The fighting took place on Tuesday, a little more than two weeks after a rapid rebel offensive ended more than five decades of rule by the Assad family. The offensive was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, whose leader Ahmad al-Sharaa became Syria's de facto national leader. Assad and his family fled to Russia as the former government collapsed.
Reports said the security personnel were ambushed while trying to arrest a former officer over his alleged role at Saydnaya prison near Damascus. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, said three armed men were also killed, but did not identify them. It later reported that the former officer, Mohammed Kanjo Hassan, had been detained with 20 other people; that claim was not independently verified in the supplied reporting.
State news agency Sana said security forces subsequently began an operation in Tartous province intended to restore order and pursue remnants of the former government's forces. Reinforcements were sent to the area after the ambush.
The violence exposed the new authorities' difficult balance between accountability and stability. Many Syrians want officials linked to torture, disappearances and deaths in Assad-era prisons brought to justice. At the same time, members of the Alawite community, from which much of the former political and military elite was drawn, fear collective retaliation. Tartous, Latakia and Assad's hometown of Qardaha are all in the coastal region where Alawite communities are concentrated.
Separate unrest underscored those tensions. Authorities imposed an overnight curfew in Homs following demonstrations connected to a video said to show an attack on an Alawite shrine. The Interior Ministry said the footage was old and dated to fighting in Aleppo in late November. The monitoring group reported one demonstrator killed and five wounded in Homs.
HTS has promised to protect Syria's religious and ethnic minorities, even as it confronts armed former officers who have refused to surrender weapons. The group remains designated as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, United States, European Union and United Kingdom. How the new leadership handles arrests and security operations in former regime strongholds will be a central test of its promises of civil peace and equal protection.
The administration was also under pressure after protests over the burning of a Christmas tree. Those demonstrations reinforced demands that security policies protect communities without punishing people on the basis of religious identity.
