13 years later, Syria arrests suspect in Baniyas massacre

DAMASCUS : Syrian authorities said on Thursday they had arrested a paramilitary leader who supported ousted ruler Bashar al-Assad during the country’s civil war and was the main suspect in a massacre of nearly 250 civilians.

“The intelligence services have arrested Ali Kayali, who also went by the name Mihrac Ural, the main suspect in the Baniyas massacre of 2013, while he was attempting to flee across the border,” state news agency SANA reported.

It did not specify which country he was attempting to flee to.

In May 2013, government forces and their allies killed at least 248 people in mass executions in the predominantly Sunni Muslim towns of Bayda and Baniyas, in the coastal province of Tartus, according to Human Rights Watch.

The rights monitor described the killings at the time as “one of the deadliest instances of mass executions in Syria’s increasingly bloody conflict”.

The arrest “sends a clear message: there is no room in Syria for impunity for criminals; the rights of victims will not be lost, no matter how much time passes”, Syrian Justice Minister Mazhar Alwais wrote on X.

Syria’s war began with pro-democracy protests in 2011 that were violently suppressed by the government. It quickly escalated into a complex armed conflict involving paramilitary forces, jihadists and foreign powers.

In the religiously diverse country, the war took on a sectarian dimension, with the killings in Baniyas and Bayda often seen as marking the beginning of that shift.

The conflict ended with Assad’s ousting in 2024 following a lightning offensive led by an Islamist rebel group that subsequently took power.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the death toll in Baniyas and Bayda was around 400.

Kayali escaped from prison in his native Turkey in 1982 before moving to Syria, where he later founded a paramilitary force allied with Assad’s government.

Syria’s new authorities have arrested dozens of former security officials, with their trials beginning in April.

President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s media adviser, Ahmed Zeydan, welcomed Kayali’s arrest, describing him as “a criminal… who committed massacres during the Syrian war, including those in Bayda and Baniyas. Every murderous criminal will be hunted down”.