Aleppo closes the coastal massacre trials with thirteen verdicts and no commander in the dock

Justice Info, reporting from Aleppo and Paris on 20 October by Bushra Alzoubi and Karam Amer, records that the trials over the March 2025 violence against the Alawite population of the Syrian coast have concluded at the Military Criminal Court in Aleppo, ten months after the first hearing on 18 November 2025. Thirteen verdicts were delivered in all: four on 17 September and nine on 15 October. The National, citing SANA, reported that the October batch sentenced two men, Al Waddah Ismail and Maher Ali, to death for seeking to incite civil war and sectarian fighting and for leading armed groups; three other defendants received prison terms and two were acquitted. Fourteen defendants were accused when the trial opened, according to The New Arab. Accounts of the September batch still differ: an AFP-derived file in the Malay Mail described one death sentence, one life term and a 20-year sentence for murder against a former member of government forces.

The scale against which those thirteen verdicts sit comes from Syria’s own national commission of inquiry, which put the coastal death toll at at least 1,426, as cited by The New Arab on 17 September. That is the government’s count, not an independent one. The unanswered question was posed on 20 October by Ultra Syria, carried in the Syrian Observer’s index, under the headline: “Syria’s Coastal Massacres: Justice Reaches the Killers, but Will It Reach Their Commanders?” No command-level defendant has appeared in the Aleppo proceedings. The same test is running in parallel in the south, where a Druze legal body has rejected the Syria–Jordan–US roadmap for Suwayda as inconsistent, called for international accountability and reasserted what it called the community’s right to self-determination, according to Rudaw.

Assessment: A court that convicts gunmen and never reaches the men who deployed them is not necessarily a sham, but it is a choice, and the choice is legible: prosecuting Assad-aligned individuals costs the new authorities nothing, while an indictment naming a commander of pro-government forces would cost them a constituency. Watch for an attorney-general statement or a second indictment list — their absence settles the question as surely as their content would. The figures on the coast and in Suwayda should also be handled with care; the toll ranges in circulation for Suwayda, from a monitor’s 940 to Rudaw’s 2,000-plus, cover different windows and definitions and cannot be averaged into one number.