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🗓️ 13 October 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | This is The Guardian. |
| 0:08.6 | Before we begin, this article contains descriptions of violent scenes. |
| 0:14.3 | Welcome to The Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking. |
| 0:21.0 | For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to the Guardian.com forward slash long read. |
| 0:29.9 | What reconciliation, what forgiveness, Syria's deadly reckoning by Gheath Abdul-Ahead, read by Mouayyub. |
| 0:38.8 | Munir and Anas are pseudonyms. |
| 0:45.6 | On the night of March the 6th, Monir, his wife and their two sons, both in their 20s, got no sleep. |
| 0:56.9 | They huddled together in a small bedroom in their apartment as government troops and militiamen entered their neighbourhood of Korsur in the coastal |
| 1:02.3 | city of Benayas and went from house to house. The fighters seemed to be moving through the streets |
| 1:08.8 | with little coordination. |
| 1:16.2 | One house might get raided by five separate groups, while others were left untouched. |
| 1:21.9 | There was no plan, Munir said, just violence and looting. |
| 1:31.7 | The first question the fighters were asking when they stormed into an apartment was, |
| 1:39.3 | Are you Sunni or an Alawait? The answer decided the fate of the residents. Sunnis were spared, |
| 1:48.6 | although in some cases their apartments were looted. When the Raiders found an Alawhite home, some stole what they could carry and left. |
| 1:53.7 | Others had come for revenge and would steal first and then shoot. |
| 1:58.4 | If one didn't kill you, the next one might, Munir said. |
| 2:18.3 | Munir, a committed Marxist, had spent more than a decade as a prisoner in Bashar al-Assad's brutal prison system. When the regime ended in December last year, he was jubilant. But Munir is from an Al-Oyte family, the sect that had been associated with the Assad regime since the 1970s. |
| 2:20.3 | Members of the community had been involved in some of the worst atrocities of the civil war |
| 2:25.3 | that broke out in 2011, including disappearances, imprisonment and torture. |
| 2:32.3 | Munir knew that this could not be brushed the side. |
| 2:37.1 | After Essed's fall, a climate of fear and uncertainty descended over the countryside |
... |
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