Grenade attack kills Alawite schoolteacher in Homs as sectarian violence escalates
The central Syrian city of Homs has become the epicenter of attacks on Alawites by extremists affiliated with Syria's new government
Sectarian killings and abductions targeting Syria’s Alawite religious minority continued this week, as the country continues to cope with the aftermath of the rise of former Al-Qaeda commander Ahmad al-Sharaa to power in Damascus.
On the evening of 24 October, unknown militants killed Raham Nizar Hamouda, a 32-year-old Alawite woman living in the Al-Waleed neighborhood of Homs City.
Hamouda, a teacher at the Sabea Rajoub School, was killed when the militants threw two grenades into her home. Her friend and colleague, Sara Muhammad Hamidoosh, was seriously injured by the shrapnel.
Hamouda’s husband, a former officer and engineer in the Syrian army, is currently detained in Hama Central Prison.
Earlier this month, on 7 October, another female teacher in Homs was killed when militants shot and killed her in front of her school in the Zahra neighborhood.
On 21 October, an young Alawite girl was killed and her sister injured by gunfire from members of Syria’s internal security forces, the General Security Services, Syria Justice Archive reported.
The two sisters, Hanin Raslan, 13 years old, and Ghazal Raslan, 14 years old, were attacked in the Masaken al-Omran neighborhood of Homs.
On the same day, the body of a young Alawite man, Alaa Mohammad Ibrahim, was identified at the Al-Waer Hospital in Homs. He was killed the day before, and his body was reportedly dumped in the Al-Qarabis neighborhood before being transferred to the hospital.
On 20 October, Hatem Abboud, a security guard working with the UN mission at the Safir Hotel in Homs, was shot and killed by militants on Al-Habbal Street in the Al-Wuroud neighborhood.
Local sources reported that he bled to death on the ground without receiving medical aid, Syria Justice Archive reported.
In a video posted to social media on 23 October, a man in Homs expressed his anger that militants had thrown a bomb in front of his house.
When he asked one of the militants why they had done it, the militant replied, “Because this is an Alawite street.”
The young man replied that the neighborhood is not Alawite or Christian. "I am a Sunni living in this neighborhood. So why did you throw the bomb?!”
Bomb attacks, shootings, and kidnappings of Alawites in the religiously mixed city of Homs have been common since the fall of former president Bashar al-Assad and his government in December 2024.
The city saw heavy fighting, sectarian kidnappings, and widespread destruction during the 14-year war that began in 2011.
In that year, the US, Israel, and allied countries began covertly providing weapons and funding to extremist Sunni militant groups to topple the government of Assad, who is Alawite.
These groups, including the formerly Al-Qaeda affiliated Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), embrace an ideology advocated by the medieval religious scholar Ibn Taymiyyah that labels Alawites as apostates and calls for their killing.
HTS took power in Damascus on 8 December, with the group’s leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, naming himself president.
The ongoing violence in Homs comes in the wake of the events of 7 March, when the HTS-led Syrian security forces and affiliated armed factions perpetrated the massacre of more than 1,500 Alawite civilians, including many elderly, as well as women and children, in 58 separate locations on the Syrian coast.