Hello and welcome to NewsAar from the BBC World Service. We're coming to you live from London. I'm James Menendez.

It has been the worst outbreak of violence and bloodletting in Syria since the fall of the Assad regime at the end of last year.

The British-based monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,

says more than a thousand people have been killed in the space of just a few days. Many, perhaps

most of them, civilians living in areas traditionally loyal to the ousted president. That's along

Syria's Mediterranean coast. The fighting began when the country's new Islamist-led security forces were ambushed by fighters

loyal to Bashar al-Assad.

Further clashes ensued together with revenge killings against the Al-Alawite community,

the minority sect to which the Assad family belonged.

While Syria's new interim leader, Ahmad al-Shara, has called for an end to the violence

and called for national unity.

What's currently happening in the country comes within the expected challenges.

We have to preserve national unity and domestic peace, and God willing,

we can live together in this country. Well, a short time ago, I spoke to Hiba. She is

Alawhite and spoke to me from Banias, one of the towns worst affected by the violence. I asked her

what she'd seen. They came and attacked our neighbourhood.

Our neighbours were killed, including children. They came and they took everything, gold, everything.

And for the last three days, we've had no water, no power. We had to use batteries, whatever we could, to stay connected.

They came and they smashed up our car and then they stole it. They stole all of the cars in the

neighbourhood. They even went to the supermarket and they took everything from the shelves. They

robbed the supermarket. And who is they? Who were they the fighters that came to your town?

It was Chechens.

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