The Stories and Names of Over 60 Children Executed in the Syrian Coast Massacres

Hadeel Arja

The Tiny Hand team, in collaboration with Daraj, collected over 50 testimonies documenting the killing of 60 children during the massacres in the Syrian coastal region. To this day, the perpetrators have not been held accountable. These were “unidentified” killers — witnesses interviewed could not determine their factional affiliations, alongside others from armed civilian groups who arrived in the coastal area. Amnesty International has called for their prosecution, considering the events of March 6, 7, 8, and 9, 2025, to be war crimes.

Thaer (a pseudonym) was in his home in the Al-Qusour neighborhood of Baniyas when he awoke on the morning of Saturday, March 8, to the sound of gunfire. He called his brother, but a stranger answered the phone. Thaer said, “I want to speak with my brother,” to which the stranger replied, “By God, they sent him to hell—him and his children.”

Thaer was not able to reach his brother’s home until two days later. There, he found the bodies of his brother and his two children (aged 10 and 6), while his brother’s wife had been taken to the hospital. She survived, despite being shot in the head. When he visited her, he discovered that she was unaware of what had happened—she did not know her husband and children had been killed. When she regained consciousness, she began asking about them. It seemed she had been the first person shot.

Other chilling phrases were heard by the “Tinyhand” team—investigators working in collaboration with Daraj—while collecting more than 50 testimonies documenting the killing of 60 children. Phrases like:

“My son’s brain stayed tangled in my hair for three days. I told the doctors: don’t remove it, leave it, let it remain a memory of his scent.”

“Please stop, guys, I swear I didn’t do anything.”

“By the heater—I found all six there: my wife, my daughter, her three children, and my nephew.”

“I didn’t want to move their bodies so the media could come and film—but no one came.”

More than 60 children were killed without a single perpetrator held accountable to this day. The killers remain “unknown”; the witnesses we spoke to could not determine their factional affiliations. Others appeared to be from armed civilian groups that had entered the Syrian coast. Amnesty International has called for their accountability, stating that the events of March 6, 7, 8, and 9, 2025, constitute war crimes.

The Syrian presidency formed a committee “to uncover the causes and circumstances that led to these events, to investigate the violations against civilians, and to determine who was responsible.” The committee later requested an extension of its work by three additional months. We reached out to the committee’s spokesperson, Yasser Farhan, who explained that “the committee has temporarily suspended media statements,” adding, “We are currently spending time with the families, listening to witnesses, investigating the facts, and examining the locations. For this reason, the committee decided not to give statements at this time, but we will resume doing so later.”

The massacres and mass killings began in Alawite-majority villages along the Syrian coast, following an attack by remnants of the regime against General Security Forces in the new administration. While there are no official figures on the number of General Security members killed by the remnants during the clashes, there are also no official figures on the number of Alawite civilian casualties. However, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated more than 1,600 civilians were killed.

March 7 & 8 – Al-Qusour Neighborhood in Baniyas: The Youngest Victim was a One-Year-and-Seven-Month-Old Girl

Lying face down on the ground between her parents, little Minisa (3 years old) was killed by a bullet to her forehead. Just a few steps from her body lay her grandmother, also lifeless—a scene family friend Iyad (a pseudonym) could not have imagined.

On March 7, Iyad had climbed to the second floor of a building in the Al-Qusour neighborhood of Baniyas, the coastal city in Tartous governorate, where the home of his friend, mathematics teacher Muhannad Hassan, was located. He found the door broken, seemingly forced open. Iyad had been trying to contact the family, but with no success. When he arrived, he discovered that all the phones had been stolen.

In the living room, according to photos Iyad shared with us, the grandmother (Muhannad’s mother) was lying lifeless on the ground with a visible gunshot wound to her neck. Muhannad himself had been shot in the chest and killed. His wife had been shot in the head. Their small daughter Minisa had fallen between them after a bullet pierced her forehead.

“This was our first real shock… the idea of mass killing,” says Iyad, who later discovered that his daughter’s friend, Farah Asaad (10 years old), and her brother, Khodr Asaad (15 years old), had also been killed and buried in a mass grave—dug as a long trench in the Sheikh Hilal area of Baniyas—referenced in an investigation by Misbar.

There, most of the victims were buried. Each body was placed in a separate bag, with a stone divider between each corpse. Every body was assigned a unique number. For those who couldn’t be identified, photos were taken and tagged with the corresponding numbers, in hopes they might be identified later.

Through dozens of interviews we conducted in Baniyas, we were unable to determine a single, unified identity for the perpetrators of the massacres. Testimonies varied regarding their ages, accents, and clothing. This was also confirmed by Umm Hassan (a pseudonym), who told us that she shared her testimony with the “Fact-Finding Committee” investigating the coastal events, despite her hesitation, as she feared for the safety of her remaining family. She added, “What we witnessed on March 8 is impossible to forget.”

It began with screams followed by gunfire, then a heavy silence fell. At that moment, Umm Hassan was trying to ask her Christian neighbor what had happened at the home of their neighbor, the young man Yazan Khalil (31 years old), in the Qusour neighborhood of Baniyas that morning. The phones rang with no answers, some lines were cut off, and the ringing of landlines echoed unanswered.

Movement was nearly impossible due to the gunfire and the constant reports of massacres. Umm Hassan had no choice but to reach out to a Sunni family friend, Omar, to take her to Yazan’s house. And that’s what happened. She managed to reach the house and was met with a horrifying scene: the toddler Qamar Khalil, aged one year and seven months, was lying on the ground in yellow pajamas, soaked in blood, next to the body of her mother, Alin Shahla.

Qamar and Alin were not alone. Also killed were the child Ali Salman (7 years old) and his mother, who were guests visiting the family.

Kumit Salman, the father of Ali, had also been visiting Yazan Khalil’s home, according to Umm Hassan’s account. Mila Salman, the little girl who had not yet turned five, was the only survivor of the massacre. She was struck on the head and collapsed beside the bodies of her brother Ali and her mother.

Neighbors searched for the missing until they found Kumit lifeless on the rooftop of the building. Yazan was found drenched in blood, wounded by a bullet to the head and another to the pelvis. Despite his pain, he kept repeating that his wife Alin had been killed, not knowing that his young daughter Qamar had already preceded him in death. After hours of agony, Yazan passed away.

In the same building and on the same floor lived the Khazameh family: the father, Amjad Ahmad Khazameh; his wife, the teacher Abeer Houriyeh; and their six children — the twins Adam and Akram (7 years old), Baneh (11), Mahmoud (13), and Nour, a university student. They were all shot and killed.

Also in that building, along with Mila, the child Yousef Bilal (9 years old) survived. He had witnessed the murder of his brother, father, and mother. He was found in the lower floors of the building, where Jamal (a pseudonym) managed to get him out. Jamal told us: “My phone rang, and it was little Yousef saying, ‘They killed my brother Ali, and Mama and Baba.’”

At that moment, Jamal, whose house was only a few meters away, told Yousef to hide in the bathroom and stay quiet. After more than an hour, Jamal was able to reach the house. That’s when he understood how Yousef had survived: he had laid down over his brother Ali’s body (12 years old), who had been shot in the head. Yousef passed out from the shock, and they left him, thinking he was dead.

Jamal says: “We weren’t afraid of being killed, because we hadn’t done anything wrong. But later, the killings started happening after they asked: ‘Are you Alawite or Sunni?’”

This false sense of security was repeated in the testimonies of many we interviewed — among them, Khaled, a relative of the Majd Nseiri family. Khaled had called to check on Majd, his wife, and their two children. A stranger answered the phone and told him that everyone in the house had been killed. Then the call ended.

Khaled (a pseudonym) wasn’t able to reach the house until a day after that phone call. There, he found the two children, Kumeit (6 years old) and Hamza (10 years old), killed beside their father, while their mother, Nagham Al-Atiq, had been taken to receive medical care. In the same neighborhood, around 9 a.m. on March 8, Ahmad Nizar Issa (18 years old), along with his father, brother, and several neighbors, were taken to the building’s garage, where they were all executed.

Mona, a neighbor who witnessed what happened, told us: “We had just woken up when they started knocking on our doors. They told the women and girls to go into the bedrooms, while the young men and adult males were taken to the garage. One of them asked about the women, and the response was, ‘That’s enough,’ meaning they only wanted the men and boys.” She added, “If we had known that would be their fate, we would’ve run, or refused to open the doors. We would’ve hidden our children.”

A similar scene occurred near the National Hospital in Baniyas, where children, youths, and men were rounded up and executed — among them Haidar Al-Qaddar (16 years old), who despite pleas to spare him because of his age, was shot alongside his father, brother, neighbors, and their relative, Yusha Al-Qaddar (17 years old).

March 7–8 – Villages in the Syrian Coast and Hama Countryside: The Youngest Victim was a One-Year-Old Girl

In the village of Hammam Wasel, one of the western Masyaf countryside villages administratively part of Hama governorate, we spoke with Moayyad (a pseudonym), who participated in the burial of one-year-old Jouelle Ali Zaher. Jouelle was laid to rest beside her three-year-old brother, Mirza Ali Zaher. Both were killed on March 7, along with their father Ali, mother Zeina Abboud, grandfather Mirza Zaher, and grandmother Afaf Zaher. In this case, too, armed men stormed the house, opened fire on everyone inside, and left.

In Sanawbar Jableh, we spoke with Rima (a pseudonym), who stopped sending her children to school after the attacks on her village, following the killing of her husband and several of the village’s children: Ayman Dioub (16), Mostafa Dioub (17), Zain Basel Dioub (15), Mohsen Dioub (18), and Youssef Assef Mostafa (15).

Rima said: “On March 7, when heavy gunfire broke out in the village, many of the men and young people tried to flee and take shelter in the nearby farmlands.” She and her children hid in the bathroom of their home, fearing for their lives. She survived, but her husband did not. When the shooting stopped, she searched for him and found him lying lifeless outside his uncle’s house.

Four-year-old Leya Salman was another child who did not survive. Around 4:00 p.m., gunfire erupted in Harf Radwa, one of the villages in the Qardaha area. Leya’s family tried to protect her from the bullets that were piercing the walls of their home, but the gunfire was so intense and forceful that it killed Leya and her mother as they hid in the living room.

A relative shared a photo of Leya after her death and told us: “We couldn’t bury her and her mother until late that day. We had to wait until the gunfire stopped, then buried them quickly.”

A few kilometers from Harf Radwa is the village of Ain al-Arous, where 13-year-old Moein Deeb was killed along with his father and mother. His siblings survived, despite being shot and injured, as they had hidden in the bathroom. Moein, however, ran toward the kitchen, where he was found shot dead by Basel, a friend of the family.

Basel told us: “Their bodies remained there for four days before we could bury them.”

Hassan Al-Zouda (5) and his sister Leya Al-Zouda (6) were killed in their home in the village of Qabu in Qardaha. Their mother was holding Hassan in her arms when a bullet struck his head, killing him instantly. At the same moment, another bullet hit Leya in the chest, killing her as well.

The massacre in that house occurred at 7:00 a.m. on March 8. Later, neighbors discovered the horrific scene: everyone had been killed—children Leya and Hassan, their grandmother, and a neighbor, Sara Al-Khalaf, originally from Idlib, who had lived in the village for many years. She was found dead alongside her four children: Ahmad, Ibrahim, Hussein, and Sawsan Al-Hussein. The mother of Leya and Hassan survived, despite being shot in the arm and stomach.

March 7 – Al-Tuwim Village, Western Hama Countryside: Ten Children Killed

In the village of Al-Tuwim, west of Hama, all residents heard the approaching gunfire, except for Farah Muhammad Issa (14 years old), who suffers from hearing and speech impairments. Perhaps she could read the lips of the assailants or saw the terror on the faces around her.

Around 8:00 PM, heavy gunfire erupted, as described by Yamen (a pseudonym), a resident of Al-Tuwim: “The men and young people of the village hid among the trees, believing that the attackers would not harm women and children and would only conduct searches. After more than an hour, silence fell, and it seemed they had left.”

Yamen and others returned to their homes to a horrifying scene. From the Issa family alone, 25 people were killed, including ten children: Taj Imad Issa (3 years old), Jana Imad Issa (3 years old), Aseel Imad Issa (4 years old), Munir Muhammad Issa (5 years old), Mahmoud Muhammad Issa (7 years old), Musa Mohsen Issa (7 years old), Mahmoud Mohsen Issa (12 years old), Khidr Muhammad Mahmoud (13 years old), Abdullah Mahmoud Issa (14 years old), and Farah Muhammad Issa (14 years old), who had hearing and speech disabilities.

Yamen shared photos of the mass grave where they were buried, along with images of the children who were shot alongside their mothers.

Those were not the only images we received during the course of this investigation. We also obtained a set of photos shared by a resident of the village of Al-Rusafa in Masyaf, showing children who were shot and killed. They were siblings: Yahya Alaa Ali (9 years old), Jawad Alaa Ali (5 years old), Zain Alaa Ali (3 years old), and their visiting cousin Bashar Amouri (7 years old).

March 7 – Al-Rasafa Village, Western Hama Countryside: Four Children Killed, Youngest Aged 3

At 5:00 PM, armed men stormed a family’s home in Al-Rasafa village. Inside were the grandfather Abu Ali, his wife, their daughter, grandchildren, and a visiting child named Bashar, who often played with the family’s children.

One of the assailants, described by witnesses as a man in his twenties with a thick beard and long black hair, ordered the grandfather to stand facing the wall at the entrance. The other attackers entered the house, and gunfire ensued. They left immediately afterward, while the grandfather remained in shock.

Abu Ali recounted: “Initially, I thought the gunfire was meant to scare us, especially after hearing screams inside the house.” As night fell and with no electricity, he heard a voice in the darkness calling out: “My daughter Milana… my wife Umm Ali (Maryam Ibrahim)… where are you?” He searched the kitchen but found no one.

He remembered hearing one of the attackers say: “Herd them into the corner.” Upon entering the living room, he found the bodies of the grandmother, mother, three children, and their cousin Bashar lying side by side near the fireplace, all fatally shot.

March 9 – Al-Shir Village: The Tragedy of Child Karam Mansour

After spending two days hiding under lemon trees, most residents of Al-Shir village decided to return to their homes on the morning of March 9, following reports of a “sweeping operation targeting the village and its agricultural lands.” Karam Mansour (14 years old) was among those who had sought refuge in the countryside.

Karam returned home with his family, but within hours, armed men re-entered the village and began shooting. Fearing for his life, Karam fled the house. Two eyewitnesses from the village, including Firas (a pseudonym), recounted: “One of the gunmen shouted, ‘That boy, bring him here,’ and then shot him in the head.” Although Karam’s heart continued to beat, he succumbed to his injuries despite attempts to save him.