Shock and outrage are appropriate, but no one really has an excuse for being surprised at the dreadful scenes that have emerged from Syria’s western coastal region in recent days. The civilian death toll is now thought to be somewhere above 750, with over 1,000 people killed in total (Alawi sources place the number much higher). Around 125 members of the Damascus regime’s security forces have also died. Video clips, many of them filmed by the perpetrators, show people in civilian clothes being summarily executed by Islamist gunmen; the humiliation of Syrian Alawi men and women; and the inevitable Sunni jihadi battle cries of ‘Allahu Akbar.’

The specifics of the situation are important (more on that in a moment), but the non-specifics are no less crucial. What has just happened in western Syria is what happens when Sunni jihadi fighters encounter a non-Muslim civilian population which they have defined as an enemy. It is what Islamic State did to the Yazidi people of the Nineveh plains in the summer of 2014. It is what happened to Israeli Jews near Gaza in October 2023.

The fact that western governments have chosen to believe in recent months that the current Islamist rulers in Damascus exist somehow outside of the known patterns and practices of Sunni jihadi organisations should not obscure the simple, and terrible, truth: the massacre of civilians is an inherent element of the Sunni Islamist way of war.