On 14 December 2025, the family of the young man Mahmoud Mohammad Suleiman identified his body at Al-Walid Hospital in the city of Homs, after it was found that he had been killed.
The victim is the young man Mahmoud Mohammad Suleiman, who belongs to the Alawite sect, and was a resident of the village of Beit Qrein in the countryside of
The young man Mahmoud Suleiman had been subjected to abduction on 24 August 2025 by unidentified armed men, near the Zara Bridge in the Talkalakh area in the western countryside of Homs. The kidnappers demanded that the victim’s family pay a financial ransom of 5,000 US dollars in exchange for his release. After the family paid the requested amount, contact with the kidnappers was completely cut off, without providing any additional information about the fate of the abducted person.
Later, the young man was found killed, with no information available about the party responsible for the killing or its detailed circumstances.
This incident comes within a broader context of escalating incidents of killing, abduction, and arbitrary detention in various regions of Syria during the recent period, as many families have reported the continued disappearance of their children without obtaining official information about their places of detention or the legal bases for their arrest.
The incident also falls within a general climate characterized by an increase in incidents of targeting and violence against members of religious, sectarian, and ethnic minorities, in parallel with the growth of hate speech against multiple components of Syrian society, which raises increasing human rights concerns regarding the safety of civilians and the guarantee of their protection, especially in light of the escalation of killings, sectarian violence, and kidnappings targeting minorities after Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham assumed power.
