Syria’s new administration has stepped up its campaign to track down and arrest members of the ousted regime of Bashar al-Assad, signaling that it would act with a heavy hand against people suspected of atrocities against Syrians.
Sana, the state-run Syrian news agency, reported on Saturday that “a number of remnants of the Assad militias” were arrested in the coastal Latakia region in western Syria. It said that weapons and ammunitions were confiscated.
The new administration, which has tried to assert its authority over Syria since an alliance of rebels toppled Mr. al-Assad three weeks ago, has signaled that pursuing loyalists of the Assad dictatorship is a top priority. But the leader of a prominent human rights organization has raised alarm about the way in which the transitional government was going after Assad loyalists, saying it was carrying out arbitrary arrests of supporters of the old regime.
Over the past few days, Sana has also reported that government security forces were pursuing members of the Assad regime in the regions of Tartus, Homs and Hama.
On Wednesday, an attempt to arrest Mohammed Kanjou al-Hassan, the former director of military justice under Mr. al-Assad, set off deadly clashes in the Tartus area — part of the heartland of Mr. al-Assad’s Alawite minority. Security forces were ambushed by loyalists of the former government in the area, according to the Britain-based war monitoring group, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Fourteen members of the government forces were killed, according to Mohammed Abdel Rahman, Syria’s interim interior minister.
While some reports have said Mr. al-Hassan was later arrested, media officials in Syria’s transitional government still haven’t confirmed that and his whereabouts remain unclear.
Rami Abdulrahman, the director of the Syrian Observatory, said that he was receiving reports from his group’s activists in Syria that the government security forces were carrying out random arrests of supporters of Mr. al-Assad, while largely failing to take action against people who were top military leaders.
“We need transitional justice, not revenge justice,” he said in a phone interview on Saturday. “The new Syria should be a state of justice, democracy, equality, and law.”
A spokesman for Syria’s interim government didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The new authorities, Mr. Abdulrahman said, should publish a list of all the people suspected of perpetrating war crimes against Syrians and work with families in towns and villages to arrest them. He said they should then be given a fair trial.
The new government is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist group that ruled over parts of northwestern Syria before al-Assad’s fall.
Ahmed al-Shara, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has sought to reassure Syria’s minorities including Alawites, Christians and Druse. But some members of those communities have expressed fears that they could be persecuted.
Syria’s new leaders, Mr. Abdulrahman said, were holding a unique opportunity to build a state that serves Syrians.
“We want the people of Syria to have a new image of Syria,” he said. “We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the criminal Bashar al-Assad’s regime.”
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