Aleppo military court issues first verdicts over Syria’s March 2025 coastal killings

The Military Criminal Court sitting at the Aleppo Justice Palace ruled on Thursday against four defendants in the case arising from the March 2025 killings along Syria’s coast. Enab Baladi’s correspondent, present in the room, reported the session was chaired by Judge Zakaria Bakkar and covered four of seven defendants, with three held over. AFP-derived copy and Al Jazeera, citing SANA, report a death sentence and life imprisonment for two supporters of the deposed government, twenty years for a former member of government forces convicted of murder, and one acquittal with release. The National’s version differs — it records a twenty-five-year term where the others record life, a divergence that has not been reconciled against the Arabic original. The death sentence was handed down for “assault aimed at provoking civil war and sectarian clashes.” Fourteen people were charged when the trial opened on 18 November 2025: seven members of government forces and seven Assad supporters.

Kamel Atli, head of the Aleppo branch of the Syrian Bar Association, told SANA the proceedings were held publicly, that volunteer lawyers represented several defendants, and that hearings for five other defendants were postponed to Thursday 24 September. The defendant arithmetic does not close: four of seven per Enab Baladi, five postponed per Atli, fourteen accused per AFP — most plausibly separate case files, though no English-language source establishes that. The scale against which these four rulings sit is an official one. Syria’s National Commission for Investigation and Fact-Finding, reporting in July 2025, recorded 238 security personnel killed in the 6 March attacks that triggered the violence and documented violations against civilians in the days that followed; the figure of 1,426 dead circulating in wire copy is the commission’s, not an independent count. The UN Syria Commission found in August 2025 that the coastal violence was “widespread and systematic.”

Assessment: Read the asymmetry, not the arithmetic. The heavy sentences went to supporters of the old government; the one ruling against a member of the security apparatus went to a *former* member, and drew the shortest term. That is a fact about Thursday’s verdicts, not yet proof of intent — but it is the test to apply on 24 September. If the remaining defendants are all ex-personnel, the process has a ceiling built into it, and the July 2025 investigative committee’s decision to attribute no responsibility to transitional-government forces becomes the frame rather than a footnote. Also unresolved: whether “life” or twenty-five years was actually imposed, and what appellate route exists from a military criminal court under an interim legal order. Damascus wants this counted as accountability delivered. Four rulings is a beginning, and should be reported as one.