"Referencing them as loyalists is inaccurate and contributes to a sectarian narrative that pits different religious communities in Syria against each other without evidence of such being the case."
March 10, 2025
To:
Global News BC1 – Global National
Dear Global National Newsroom,
I am writing on behalf of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) to express my concern regarding Global News BC1’s broadcast on escalating violence in Syria that aired today March 10, 2025 at 3:45 am.
Global’s coverage is shockingly poor and failed to provide any critical context on the war crimes committed in Syria’s coast against the Alawite community. To exclude such details, is a disservice not only to your viewers but also dehumanizes the Syrian community at large.
Let’s break down how your newsroom misrepresented the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Syria’s coastal region.
To begin, the report vaguely references “alarming violence” and “hundreds of people” without specifying the scale of atrocities committed.
Indeed, it seems that the recent violence in Syria's coastal regions began on March 6, 2025, when pro-Assad gunmen ambushed a Syrian security patrol near Latakia. However what is of concern is that your newsroom decided to exclude the fact that this violence has resulted in over 1,000 deaths in the last four days.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a widely cited monitoring group used by The Guardian, Reuters, BBC, and AP, at least 973 civilians have been executed in Latakia, Tartus, Hama, and Homs in what amounts to war crimes. While SOHR’s methodology has faced scrutiny due to its reliance on local networks, its data is frequently corroborated by organizations like Amnesty International, which has independently documented systematic killings of civilians by both regime and opposition forces.
Yet your report entirely ignored these numbers, reducing the conflict to a battle between two factions rather than a massacre of civilians.
This angle perpetuates needless sectarianism among the Syrian community. The wave of revenge killings targeted Alawites as the Syrian coast is heavily populated by the sect. Although the deposed Syrian president originates from this community, most Alawites are not associated with the Assad regime.
Additionally, the depiction of Syria as a place of primordial, sectarian strife reduces the country’s complex social, economic, and political realities to a simplistic Sunni vs. Alawite dichotomy. This narrative overlooks factors like political grievances, economic disparities, and foreign interventions.
As Syrian scholar Yassin al-Haj Saleh argues, the conflict’s roots lie in decades of authoritarian governance, economic inequality, and state violence, not innate sectarian hatreds (The Impossible Revolution, 2017). For example, many working-class Alawites initially joined anti-Assad protests in 2011, only to retreat due to regime coercion and opposition factions’ sectarian rhetoric.
The assumption that Alawites are inherently loyal to Assad ignores the diversity of political views within the community. Many Alawites oppose the regime, just as many Sunnis support it.
By labeling entire communities as "loyalists" or "rebels," this framing ignores individual and collective agency, reinforcing a static and reductionist understanding of Middle Eastern societies.
Thus, referencing them as loyalists is inaccurate and contributes to a sectarian narrative that pits different religious communities in Syria against each other without evidence of such being the case.
The executions of Alawite civilians is clearly a form of collective punishment by armed groups affiliated with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—which is itself an offshoot of ISIS and Al-Qaeda and now leading the transitional government.
However, you don’t present this context. Instead, the segment generalized the conflict as the HTS clashing with Assad loyalists which obscures the identity of perpetrators and victims.
SOHR over the recent days has also documented the following:
- Reports indicate that security forces affiliated with Syria’s new leadership have continued operations against Alawite communities in the country’s western regions, including Latakia, Tartus, Hama, and Homs.
- The operations ended with about 40 massacres documented by the Syrian Observatory
- The burning of civilian homes, forcible displacements, and large-scale retaliatory killings against minority populations.
- Thousands of citizens fled their homes to seek refuge at the Russian Hmeimim base near the coast.
- Civilians chanted against ethnic cleansing, and wrote banners demanding international protection from the liquidation operations that affected hundreds.
- Total fatalities reached 1,454, including 231 members of the security services and 250 pro-Assad Alawite fighters.
Yet, your report did not mention a single civilian death, which is both irresponsible and a failure of journalistic ethics.
Moreover, SOHR just put out a statement in Arabic claiming that the civilian death toll could be well over one thousand.
According to their director, they have verified video footage showing field executions carried out by fighters. The SOHR director states that the Damascus government bears responsibility for these crimes. He also claims there’s video indication that Syrian security forces are now removing evidence of their crimes by washing streets and buildings and transporting bodies in an attempt to cover up the truth. Allegedly the investigation committee deployed by the transitional government has also been passing unnoticed in some areas on the coast.
Given your misleading, incomplete, and decontextualized report, I urge your newsroom to issue a follow-up segment or at the very least an on air correction that accurately represents the scale of civilian casualties and sectarian violence.
Global News must correct and acknowledge the mass killings of civilians and the role of the HTS in these atrocities. Journalistic integrity demands that coverage of Syria not be selectively sanitized to omit key atrocities and human rights abuses.
Given the harm caused by this broadcast, I will be filing a formal complaint to the CBSC as this level of sloppy, misleading reporting must not go unchallenged.
Anthony Issa
Media Analyst
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East