Finding the remnants of the old dictatorship and bringing them to justice has emerged as a top priority for the new administration in Syria.
Syria’s new administration has stepped up its campaign to track down and arrest members of the ousted Assad dictatorship, signaling that it would act with a heavy hand against people it claims are challenging its ability to impose law and order.
Sana, the state-run Syrian news agency, reported on Saturday that “a number of remnants of the Assad militias” had been arrested in the coastal Latakia region in western Syria. Weapons and ammunitions were confiscated, the report added.
The new administration, which has tried to assert authority over Syria since an alliance of rebels toppled President Bashar al-Assad three weeks ago, has indicated that pursuing loyalists of the Assad dictatorship who are undermining its authority is a top priority.
But a human rights organization has raised alarms about the way the transitional government was going after Assad loyalists, saying it was carrying out arbitrary arrests of supporters of the old regime.
Over the past few days, Sana also has reported that government security forces were pursuing members of the Assad regime in the regions of Tartus, Homs and Hama.
On Wednesday, an attempt to arrest Mohammed Kanjou al-Hassan, the former director of military justice under Mr. al-Assad, set off deadly clashes in the Tartus area — part of the heartland of Mr. al-Assad’s Alawite minority. Security forces were ambushed by loyalists of the former government in the area, according to the Britain-based war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
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