Haider* hid in the attic as gunmen rifled through his cousins’ belongings. “Is anyone upstairs? Don’t come down or I will kill you!” yelled a masked man wearing military fatigues. Haider waited in silence for an hour before fleeing his cousins’ house in the village of al-Sanobar on Syria’s coast.
He emerged to find his home ablaze and 11 members of his family shot dead, including his 22-year-old brother and 16-year-old cousin. His family were some of the more than 200 al-Sanobar residents killed in sectarian massacres in north-west Syria on 7 March which mostly targeted members of the minority Alawite religion, a sect of Islam.
