Syria's new authorities under interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa have sought to disband armed groups
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor has reported that 745 Alawite civilians were killed in Latakia and Tartus provinces.
Syrian authorities said the violence began when remnants loyal to Assad launched a deadly and well-planned attack on their forces on Thursday.
There were no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.
Sharaa was appointed Wednesday to lead Syria for an unspecified transitional period
No group has claimed the four activists' abduction and they have not been heard from since.
Ankara-backed rebels played a key role in supporting Sharaa's Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which headed a rebel alliance that seized Damascus on December 8, toppling longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad.
The seismic change in Syria is expected to yield deeper Turkish sway just as a change of US administration is raising questions over how long Washington will keep backing the country's Kurdish-led forces.
Assad fled Syria following a lightning offensive spearheaded by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), more than 13 years after his crackdown on democracy protests precipitated one of the deadliest wars of the century.
Russia's military says rebels in Syria's eastern Ghouta start new offensives after midday, during a five-hour ceasefire, Interfax news agency reports citing a Russian general.
Turkish allegations of Saudi, Emirati and Egyptian support for the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) threaten to turn Turkey's military offensive against Syrian Kurds aligned with the PKK into a regional imbroglio.
Suspected Russian jets kill at least 20 civilians and wounds dozens when they dropped bombs on two residential buildings in a besieged rebel enclave east of the Syrian capital, residents and a war monitor says.
The son of Syrian President Bashar Assad said people who call his father a dictator don’t understand the reality of his country and that the population is united with him in fighting “invaders,” Brazil’s O Globo newspaper reported.
Rock star Sting headlined a concert in Paris' Bataclan music hall on Saturday to mark the venue's reopening a year after three Islamist militants gunned down 90 revellers in France's bloodiest terror attack.
A boom of interest in cricket in Germany, fuelled by the influx of asylum seekers from Pakistan and Afghanistan, is a tale poised to hit the silver screen.
Around 120 asylum seekers and refugees in Switzerland will next week compete in a football tournament organised with the backing of UEFA.
As the world is now well aware, Syria has been consumed by violence for years now. What people are less aware of, however, is why it has been raging for so long.
According to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria…. intelligence documents, published by WikiLeaks, show that by 2012”, some US allies “were arming, training and funding radical Jihadist Sunni fighters from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to overthrow the Assad's Shia allied regime.
The human consequences of the education crisis among Syrian refugees are impossible to miss. They are apparent in the growing army of child labourers picking vegetables in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley or working at garment factories in Turkey, where a half-million refugees are out of school.
