Syria announces the end of a military operation against Assad-linked gunmen in a coastal region

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) - Syria’s interim government on Monday announced the end of a days-long military operation against insurgents loyal to ousted president Bashar Assad and his family in the worst fighting since the end of the 13-year civil war in December.

The Defense Ministry’s announcement comes after a surprise attack by gunmen from the Alawite community on a police patrol near the port city of Lattakia Thursday spiraled into widespread clashes across Syria’s coastal region, during which monitoring groups said hundreds of civilians were killed.

Syria’s new interim Islamist rulers are struggling to exert their authority across the country and reach political settlements with other minority communities, notably the Kurds of the northeast and the Druze in southern Syria.

"To the remaining remnants of the defeated regime and its fleeing officers, our message is clear and explicit," said Defense Ministry spokesperson Col. Hassan Abdel-Ghani. "If you return, we will also return, and you will find before you men who do not know how to retreat and who will not have mercy on those whose hands are stained with the blood of the innocent."

Abdel-Ghani said that security forces will continue searching for sleeper cells and remnants of the insurgency of former government loyalists.

Though the government’s counter-offensive was able to largely contain the insurgency, footage surfaced of what appeared to be retaliatory attacks targeting the broader minority Alawite community, an offshoot of Shia Islam whose adherents live mainly in Syria’s western coastal region.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said 1,130 people were killed in the clashes, including 830 civilians. The Associated Press could not independently verify these numbers.

The interim government is made up of members of Sunni Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which led a lightning insurgency in December that overthrew Bashar Assad, ending over half a century of his family’s dictatorial rule. The Assad family are Alawites.

Interim President Ahmad Al-Sharaa said the retaliatory attacks against Alawite civilians and mistreatment of prisoners were isolated incidents, and vowed to crack down on the perpetrators as he formed a committee to investigate the incident.

Abdel-Ghani says the security forces will allow the committee "the full opportunity to uncover the circumstances of the events, verify the facts, and rectify wrongdoings."

Still, the footage of houses in several neighborhoods set on fire and bloodied bodies laid on the streets alarmed Western governments, who have been urged by Al-Sharaa to lift economic sanctions on Syria.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a statement issued Sunday urged Syrian authorities to "hold the perpetrators of these massacres" accountable. Rubio said the U.S. "stands with Syria's religious and ethnic minorities, including its Christian, Druze, Alawite, and Kurdish communities."

Thousands of Syrians from the coastal area fled to neighboring Lebanon, mostly through unofficial crossings. The UN refugee agency said in a statement that according to local authorities, 6,078 people have arrived in about a dozen villages in northern Lebanon’s Akkar province fleeing the fighting, while arrivals in other parts of the country were still being verified.

Lebanon is hosting more than 755,000 registered Syrian refugees, with hundreds of thousands more believed to be unregistered. Since the fall of Assad, the flow had begun to reverse, with the UN reporting that nearly 260,000 Syrian refugees have returned home since November, about half of them coming from Lebanon.