AL-HAKEEM, Syria — The woman was clutching her infant, still in the dressing gown and pajamas she had been wearing a day earlier when fighters overran this village in Syria’s Latakia province, the heartland of Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority sect.
Her scorched home still radiated heat from the fires they had set. She hadn’t seen her husband since he fled into the citrus groves.
“We are dying from fear,” she said, standing outside the house, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. “It’s as though our hearts are in our hands.”
