Lebanon: arrest of the main suspect in one of the worst massacres of the Syrian civil war

Syrian authorities announced Thursday that they had arrested the main person responsible for a massacre of nearly 250 civilians, who was apprehended in Lebanon, according to a Syrian security source.

“The general intelligence services arrested Ali Kayali, known as Mihrac Ural, who is the main suspect in the Banias massacre in 2013, while he was trying to flee across the border,” announced the official Sana agency, without specifying which border it was. Ali Kayali was a member of a paramilitary group that fought alongside President Bashar al-Assad's troops during the civil war.

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A Lebanese-Syrian rapprochement

A Syrian security source indicated that he was “apprehended in Lebanon during a security operation coordinated with the Lebanese side.” Syria and Lebanon are trying to write a new page in their bilateral relations since the fall of Bashar al-Assad at the end of 2024, overthrown by an Islamist coalition, and the weakening of Hezbollah, its ally in Lebanon. On May 2 and 3, 2013, at least 248 people were summarily executed by government and pro-government forces in the predominantly Sunni towns of Bayda and Banias, in the coastal province of Tartous, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

HRW called these massacres “one of the deadliest episodes of mass executions” of the Syrian civil war. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH), the death toll from the Banias and Bayda massacres is around 400 dead. This arrest “sends a clear message: there is no place in Syria for impunity of criminals (...) regardless of the time that has passed,” reacted the Syrian Minister of Justice, Mazhar Alwais, on X.

According to the official Turkish agency Anadolu, Mihrac Ural, born in Antakya (formerly Antioch) in 1956, was imprisoned in Turkey before fleeing in 1982 to settle in Syria. Married to a relative of the Assad family, he established close ties with Jamil Assad, brother of former president Hafez al-Assad (1930-2000) and made his fortune.

Arrest of dozens of people close to Assad

During the civil war, he led a paramilitary group allied to the Syrian regime, which controlled areas of Latakia province, north of Tartous, and was involved in the Banias and Bayda massacres, according to the Turkish agency. He is also suspected of having planned, with the help of Assad's intelligence services, the double car bomb attack which left 53 dead on May 11, 2013 in Reyhanli, in the south-east of Turkey, according to documents from the prosecution in charge of the investigation cited by Anadolu. Turkish services recently arrested a key suspect in this double attack which was the deadliest attack in Turkey linked to the repercussions of the civil war in Syria, which broke out in 2011 and caused a large number of Syrians to flee to neighboring Turkey.

Syria's new Islamist authorities have arrested dozens of former Assad security officials, and trials began in April. On “Every murderous criminal will be hunted down,” he warned. The Lebanese authorities, for their part, arrested in September a second cousin of Bashar al-Assad, and earlier a former officer of the Syrian intelligence services, as well as several accomplices who allegedly planned attacks against the forces of the new Syrian government. In August, Beirut extradited a former Assad-era general to Damascus, accused of crimes including murder and torture.