Syria announces arrest of Assad-era paramilitary leader

Syrian authorities on Thursday announced the arrest of a paramilitary leader whose forces backed ousted leader Bashar al-Assad during the country's war, and who is accused of being the main culprit in a massacre of nearly 250 civilians.

"The intelligence services have arrested Ali Kayali, who also went by the name Mihrac Ural, the main suspect in the Banias massacre of 2013, while he was attempting to flee across the border," state news agency SANA said.

It did not specify which country he was trying to flee to.

In May 2013, government and pro-government forces killed at least 248 people in mass executions in the predominantly Sunni Muslim towns of Bayda and Banias, located in the coastal province of Tartus, according to Human Rights Watch.

The monitor had at the time described the killings as "one of the deadliest instances of mass executions in Syria's increasingly bloody conflict."

Syria's war began with pro-democracy protests in 2011, and quickly morphed into a complex armed conflict that drew in paramilitary forces, jihadists and foreign powers.

In a multiconfessional country, the war took on a sectarian nature, with the killings in Banias and Bayda often seen as a starting point of that shift.

It ended with the ousting of Assad in 2024 by an Islamist rebel group that took power in a lightning offensive.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor, the death tolls in Banias and Bayda came to around 400.

Kayali fled from jail in 1982 in his home country, Turkey, before moving to Syria, where he would end up founding a paramilitary force allied to Assad's government.

The new authorities in Syria have arrested dozens of former security officials.

Their trials began in April.

President Ahmed al-Sharaa's media adviser Ahmed Zeydan welcomed Kayali's arrest, describing him as "a criminal... who committed massacres during the Syrian war, including those in Bayda and Banias. Every murderous criminal will be hunted down."