MASAOUDIYEH, Lebanon, March 22, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - When he arrived in the town of Masaoudiyeh in northern Lebanon earlier this month, fleeing massacres on Syria's Mediterranean coast, Dhulfiqar Ali had escaped death not once but twice.

He is among thousands of Syrians who have fled across the border after armed groups descended on the Syrian coastal heartland of ousted president Bashar al-Assad's Alawite minority and killed hundreds of civilians, mostly Alawites.

"They didn't even speak Arabic... they knew only: 'Alawites, pigs, kill them'," Ali said of the gunmen.

A mobile phone shop owner who lived in an Alawite neighbourhood of Homs, Ali had already been attacked before, soon after Assad was toppled in a lightning offensive by Islamist-led rebels in December.

"They shot and killed my two brothers in front of me and they shot me and thought I was dead," said the 47-year-old father of two, who now lives with his family at a school in Masaoudiyeh.

He escaped to the mountains near Latakia in January to receive treatment, only to be forced to flee again, this time across the border.

Lebanon says nearly 16,000 Syrians have arrived since early March -- adding to the already substantial population of 1.5 million Syrians who sought refuge in the country during the nearly 14-year civil war.

Most are now in predominantly Alawite villages and towns in Lebanon's northern region of Akkar, including nearly 2,500 in Masaoudiyeh.

Masaoudiyeh Mayor Ali Ahmed al-Ali said the town was "above capacity".

- 'Extermination' -

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor, security forces and allied groups in Syria killed at least 1,614 civilians, the vast majority of them Alawites, during the violence that erupted on March 6.

Still using a crutch to walk because of his gunshot injury, Ali said those who had descended on the coastal areas were "not Syrians".

The group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham that spearheaded the offensive that toppled Assad is an offshoot of the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, and is still proscribed as a terrorist organisation by countries including the United States.

After the massacres in Syria, a fact-finding committee was formed to investigate.

But Ali and many others told AFP the violence began well before March.

Samir Hussein Ismail, a 53-year-old farmer from Hama province, said his small village of Arzeh was attacked in late January, and nine people were killed.

He fled alone first, and only after the coastal killings did his family follow.

The armed groups "came to my village again on Friday morning, on March 7", Ismail told AFP.

"They exterminated everything," he said, adding that more than 30 men from Arzeh were killed.

Among them were six of his cousins, he said in the modest schoolroom with a tall pile of mattresses in a corner.

Like most now living in the school, he was among 10 people, or two families, sharing the space.

"We have to distinguish between massacres -- the massacres are still ongoing in Syria -- but everything that happened after March 7 is extermination, and not a massacre," Ismail said.

- 'No one dared leave' -

Many people AFP spoke to described men being lined up and shot dead.

Almost unanimously, they called for "international protection" so they could return home.

Among those was Ammar Saqqouf, who said his cousin was taken by Syria's new security forces and found dead days later.

He said security forces began a sweep of his town. "Five or six days later, we found his body, decapitated."

One woman, who gave her name only as Mariam, arrived in Lebanon last week with her son after her husband, a conscripted soldier, was killed.

She fled her home town of Al-Qabu in Homs on foot, crossing the border by wading through the Al-Kabir River that divides it, like many others.

"They attacked us in Al-Qabu," she said from where she now lives alongside scores of others at a mosque in Masaoudiyeh.

"People began fleeing and my husband told me and my son, 'I will flee like those people.'"

He fled, she said, "so they killed him".

Mariam described living in fear before they finally left.

"No one dared leave to get a piece of bread. They surrounded the whole town.

"We don't even dare say we're Alawites any more."

Ismail, the farmer from Arzeh, said he felt "deprived of his humanity".

"What future do we have ahead of us?" he asked.

"We fled from hell."