DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Many of Syria's Alawite religious minority are leaving a Damascus suburb where thousands of their members live in ramshackle houses, days after it was raided by a Syrian pro-government armed faction who beat and arrested many and ordered them to evacuate their homes.
The Muslim minority group was seen as privileged under the rule of the Alawite Assad family, but since Bashar Assad's government fell late last year, members have feared revenge from the country’s Sunni majority.
Though government officials later said there was no such eviction order, many residents of Sumariya packed their belongings into trucks and left their homes, fearing further attacks.
The incident illustrated how delicate the situation in Syria is nearly nine months after Assad was ousted in a rebel offensive, ending 50 years of his family's rule.
United Nations spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric on Friday said U.N. officials were “following with concern the developments ... including reports of threats of evictions and the reports of abuses against innocent civilians, including women and children.”
Assad was a member of the Alawite minority, and during his time, Alawites were disproportionately represented in the security and intelligence forces. The Sumariya area, northwest of Damascus, once contained military housing, including for members of the 4th Armored Division, which Syrian opposition activists accused of carrying out extrajudicial killings, torture, extortion and drug trafficking.
Most of the 4th division members fled the area when Assad fell. But civilian families also lived there, many in small, shoddily constructed single-story houses.
Mohammad Ibrahim, a retired government worker, told The Associated Press on Saturday he had bought his small house in 2010, and later got a court decision making the ownership official.
“The walls, if you hit them, they will break, and the doors are the same. It’s housing for the most basic level of living,” he said.
The Syria Report, a publication tracking the country’s economy, said Sumariya emerged in the 1980s on land expropriated from the town of Moadamiyat al-Sham. It noted that “many current occupants lack official documents proving their ownership or rental agreements, making them vulnerable to sudden eviction.”
But even those with documentation said they were threatened and ordered to evacuate.
Ragda Jerawa, a mother of two and government employee living in one of the small houses in Sumariya, said that residents had been told that an inspection committee would come Thursday to check ownership papers.
“We had our papers ready, so we thought that’s it, no one would bother us,” she said. “The next day I went to work, and my husband called me saying they came in, beat him up and beat up my son, and they didn’t even ask for papers.”
Jerawa said the armed men told residents that they must leave within 48 hours, “otherwise we’ll demolish the houses over your heads.” Some men were rounded up, detained, beaten and coerced into signing documents giving up their houses, she said.
Karam Khuzam, head of the neighborhood committee, said it had been notified by security officials that inspectors would come to issue eviction orders for some illegally constructed homes whose residents did not have ownership papers for them.
There had been a court order issued in 2004 legalizing the ownership of land in Sumariya, he said, but after Assad’s fall, some of the original land owners in Moadamiyat al-Sham said the people who had bought houses in Sumariya no longer had legal standing. However, instead of a legal process to determine ownership, armed men descended on the neighborhood and ordered residents to get out immediately.
“There were some violations — beating and insulting people, random arrests… some of the guys hit women,” Khuzam said.
He said members of the neighborhood committee later spoke with government officials and were told to stay in their houses unless they received an official eviction order from the governor.
Even after being told that there was no official eviction order, residents said members of a local armed faction, led by a man known as Abu Huzaifa, continued to threaten them. Numerous families were too frightened to stay and take their chances.
Many remembered the violence that erupted on Syria’s coast months before, when clashes between security forces and pro-Assad armed groups spiraled into sectarian revenge attacks in which hundreds of Alawite civilians were killed.
Jerawa’s family was packing its modest belongings into a truck on Saturday, preparing to take them to the coastal area of Latakia, although Jerawa feared leaving Damascus would mean losing her job.
“To whom do we complain? Where is the state? We got rid of the old regime, and now what?” she said. “It doesn’t matter anymore ... Let them kill us, we’ll be relieved.”
Sewell reported from Beirut. Associated Press journalist Omar Sanadiki in Damascus contributed to this report.
Alawite man sits on his ramshackle house in Sumariya, a suburb northwest of Damascus, Syria, Saturday, Aug. 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Sanadiki)
A house door is seen marked with "XO", indicating an order for the family living there to leave, in Sumariya, a suburb northwest of Damascus, Syria, Saturday, Aug. 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Sanadiki)
Alawite Syrian men load their belongings onto a truck as they leave their home in Sumariya, a suburb northwest of Damascus, Syria, Saturday, Aug. 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Sanadiki)
Federal immigration agents deployed to Minneapolis have used aggressive crowd-control tactics that have become a dominant concern in the aftermath of the deadly shooting of a woman in her car last week.
They have pointed rifles at demonstrators and deployed chemical irritants early in confrontations. They have broken vehicle windows and pulled occupants from cars. They have scuffled with protesters and shoved them to the ground.
The government says the actions are necessary to protect officers from violent attacks. The encounters in turn have riled up protesters even more, especially as videos of the incidents are shared widely on social media.
What is unfolding in Minneapolis reflects a broader shift in how the federal government is asserting its authority during protests, relying on immigration agents and investigators to perform crowd-management roles traditionally handled by local police who often have more training in public order tactics and de-escalating large crowds.
Experts warn the approach runs counter to de-escalation standards and risks turning volatile demonstrations into deadly encounters.
The confrontations come amid a major immigration enforcement surge ordered by the Trump administration in early December, which sent more than 2,000 officers from across the Department of Homeland Security into the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Many of the officers involved are typically tasked with arrests, deportations and criminal investigations, not managing volatile public demonstrations.
Tensions escalated after the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a 37-year-old woman killed by an immigration agent last week, an incident federal officials have defended as self-defense after they say Good weaponized her vehicle.
The killing has intensified protests and scrutiny of the federal response.
On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota asked a federal judge to intervene, filing a lawsuit on behalf of six residents seeking an emergency injunction to limit how federal agents operate during protests, including restrictions on the use of chemical agents, the pointing of firearms at non-threatening individuals and interference with lawful video recording.
“There’s so much about what’s happening now that is not a traditional approach to immigration apprehensions,” said former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Sarah Saldaña.
Saldaña, who left the post at the beginning of 2017 as President Donald Trump's first term began, said she can't speak to how the agency currently trains its officers. When she was director, she said officers received training on how to interact with people who might be observing an apprehension or filming officers, but agents rarely had to deal with crowds or protests.
“This is different. You would hope that the agency would be responsive given the evolution of what’s happening — brought on, mind you, by the aggressive approach that has been taken coming from the top,” she said.
Ian Adams, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, said the majority of crowd-management or protest training in policing happens at the local level — usually at larger police departments that have public order units.
“It’s highly unlikely that your typical ICE agent has a great deal of experience with public order tactics or control,” Adams said.
DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a written statement that ICE officer candidates receive extensive training over eight weeks in courses that include conflict management and de-escalation. She said many of the candidates are military veterans and about 85% have previous law enforcement experience.
“All ICE candidates are subject to months of rigorous training and selection at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, where they are trained in everything from de-escalation tactics to firearms to driving training. Homeland Security Investigations candidates receive more than 100 days of specialized training," she said.
Ed Maguire, a criminology professor at Arizona State University, has written extensively about crowd-management and protest- related law enforcement training. He said while he hasn't seen the current training curriculum for ICE officers, he has reviewed recent training materials for federal officers and called it “horrifying.”
Maguire said what he's seeing in Minneapolis feels like a perfect storm for bad consequences.
“You can't even say this doesn't meet best practices. That's too high a bar. These don't seem to meet generally accepted practices,” he said.
“We’re seeing routinely substandard law enforcement practices that would just never be accepted at the local level,” he added. “Then there seems to be just an absence of standard accountability practices.”
Adams noted that police department practices have "evolved to understand that the sort of 1950s and 1960s instinct to meet every protest with force, has blowback effects that actually make the disorder worse.”
He said police departments now try to open communication with organizers, set boundaries and sometimes even show deference within reason. There's an understanding that inside of a crowd, using unnecessary force can have a domino effect that might cause escalation from protesters and from officers.
Despite training for officers responding to civil unrest dramatically shifting over the last four decades, there is no nationwide standard of best practices. For example, some departments bar officers from spraying pepper spray directly into the face of people exercising Constitutional speech. Others bar the use of tear gas or other chemical agents in residential neighborhoods.
Regardless of the specifics, experts recommend that departments have written policies they review regularly.
“Organizations and agencies aren’t always familiar with what their own policies are,” said Humberto Cardounel, senior director of training and technical assistance at the National Policing Institute.
“They go through it once in basic training then expect (officers) to know how to comport themselves two years later, five years later," he said. "We encourage them to understand and know their training, but also to simulate their training.”
Adams said part of the reason local officers are the best option for performing public order tasks is they have a compact with the community.
“I think at the heart of this is the challenge of calling what ICE is doing even policing,” he said.
"Police agencies have a relationship with their community that extends before and after any incidents. Officers know we will be here no matter what happens, and the community knows regardless of what happens today, these officers will be here tomorrow.”
Saldaña noted that both sides have increased their aggression.
“You cannot put yourself in front of an armed officer, you cannot put your hands on them certainly. That is impeding law enforcement actions,” she said.
“At this point, I’m getting concerned on both sides — the aggression from law enforcement and the increasingly aggressive behavior from protesters.”
Law enforcement officers at the scene of a reported shooting Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Adam Gray)
Federal immigration officers confront protesters outside Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Adam Gray)
People cover tear gas deployed by federal immigration officers outside Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Adam Gray)
A man is pushed to the ground as federal immigration officers confront protesters outside Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/John Locher)
A woman covers her face from tear gas as federal immigration officers confront protesters outside Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Adam Gray)
