Bashar Abdo had just returned home last month after four years in the Syrian military when a mob of neighbors and others armed with guns and knives swarmed his family’s front door and accused him of being a thug for the ousted regime.
His sisters and sister-in-law tried to block the crowd as he hid. But people stormed in and found Mr. Abdo, 22, in the kitchen. They stabbed him before dragging him outside, even as his sister, Marwa, clung to him. There, he was shot.
The account, shared by Mr. Abdo’s family, was confirmed by local police in the northwestern city of Idlib. Video footage widely shared on Syrian social media and verified by The New York Times captured the gruesome scene that followed: As Ms. Abdo gripped his lifeless body, neighbors continued to kick him. She begged them to stop, saying he was already dead.
“This is your fate,” one man yelled. Other verified video footage shows a crowd shouting expletives after Mr. Abdo’s body was tied by the neck to a car and dragged through the streets. It is not clear who filmed the video.
Ms. Abdo recalled those moments in an interview with The Times four days later. She vowed revenge, a sign of the growing threat of a cycle of violent retribution in a new Syria.
The country is emerging suddenly and unexpectedly from 13 years of civil war and more than five decades under the Assad dynasty, which maintained its grip on power with fear, torture and mass killings.
The killing of Mr. Abdo underscores the complicated reckoning ahead in Syria, where the wounds remain fresh and anger is close to the surface. Many Syrians want accountability for crimes conducted during the civil war. Others are seeking vengeance.
At least half a million Syrians were killed during the war, most of them in airstrikes carried out by Syrian warplanes and helicopters or in prison under torture or in mass executions, according to Syrian human rights groups. Many people remain unaccounted for.
Officials with the new interim Syrian government, headed by the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, are racing to set up courts and police forces to address decades of grievances. They are urging citizens to forgive and not take matters into their own hands.
Ahmed al-Shara, the head of the rebel alliance that overthrew the Assad government, has said that it will hunt down and prosecute senior figures for crimes that include murdering, wrongly imprisoning, torturing and gassing their own people, but that rank-and-file conscripted soldiers would receive amnesty.
In a recent interview, Mr. al-Shara said that “justice must be sought through the judiciary and the law. Not through individuals.”
“If matters are left that everyone takes revenge, we will have transformed into the law of the jungle,” he said.
Some Syrians have said that while Mr. al-Shara may choose to forgive, they will not. Last week, the mayor of Dumar, a suburb of Damascus, was killed by residents who accused him of informing on people and getting them arrested under the former government, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Mr. Abdo was a soldier — a conscript — in the Syrian military for four years. But his family said he tried to defect twice by failing to return after he was given a few days’ leave. In the end, he spent a month in a military prison for his attempts to desert and was released when the rebels who overthrew the Assad government captured the prison as part of their lightning-fast sweep through the country, several family members said.
At first he was afraid to come home, but when he heard that Mr. al-Shara had said that soldiers like himself would be given amnesty, he felt safe enough, his family said. Not long after he got back, the mob was at the front door.
They accused him of informing on his neighbors, resulting in their being killed or imprisoned. The family said they see many of the killers every day, but they have not confronted them and are seeking to move to another neighborhood.
In response to questions about the killing, the police in Idlib, who are affiliated with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which has ruled the province for years, said in a statement that they were investigating the killing but that the Abdo family was “notorious for working with the regime.”
But the police said that “no one has the right to assault anyone.” No one has been arrested so far.
The family members denied that they had any connections to the regime. They also said that if their brother had worked as an enforcer, he would not have returned home. He was only a foot soldier, they said.
“We vowed that if the government doesn’t get justice, we will get our own justice,” Ms. Abdo, 32, shrieked, tears streaking her face. She slammed her fist into the carpet that she and her sisters had spent days washing to remove her brother’s blood. There was still blood in the kitchen and on some of the walls.
“We won’t let his blood be spilled with no response,” she said.
Others are using whatever means they can to try to avoid a cycle of retribution.
Muhammad al-Asmar, a media official with the new government, said he sent out a Google document to residents of his native village, Qabhani, in Hama province, to submit any grievances against fellow villagers. Mr. al-Asmar said he took the initiative after hearing that several people whom the government had relied on to abuse and intimidate Syrians had returned home after Mr. al-Assad’s fall.
“There wasn’t any response,” he said, because “people are saying, ‘I’m going to take justice into my own hands.’”
Still, he hopes that such an approach could be adopted on a national level to stem vigilante justice.
Officials with the new justice ministry admit that they were not prepared to take over governance for much of the country when they launched their offensive on Nov. 27. Efforts to maintain calm appear for now to be coming in the form of public statements or suggested sermons for imams appealing to peoples’ restraint.
“Honestly, we are under a great weight and there will be transgressions,” said Ahmad Hilal, the new head judge at the Aleppo courthouse. People who are angry over crimes during the Assad era “don’t want to wait for the courts to act — they want to take law and justice into their own hands.”
The struggle against mob justice is daunting because in every city and town, Syrians who may be accused of such crimes are returning home.
When Assad’s government fell last month, Alaa Khateeb went back to his village, Taftanaz, in the countryside of Idlib province. His family quickly started telling people that he had dodged the military for years and then deserted twice to signal that he was not a willing participant in Mr. al-Assad’s army.
“I know I haven’t done anything,” Mr. Khateeb, 25, a married father of three, said on a recent day on the outskirts of the village, working to renovate a relative’s home that Syrian soldiers had taken over and stripped.
Despite Mr. Khateeb’s protestations, he faces a cloud of suspicion. Even lowly conscripts are being blamed for enabling crimes — whether or not that is true.
One of Mr. Khateeb’s relatives, Salah Khateeb, 67, who has a produce market in the village, wasn’t sure he would even say “hi” once he heard that his second cousin had returned to Taftanaz.
“He is my relative and I was questioning if I should accept him or not,” he said. “Others might even consider taking retaliation.”
Muhammad Haj Kadour, Jacob Roubai and Nader Ibrahim contributed reporting.
