DAMASCUS (Dispatches) -- Gunmen opened fire on a family in the Syrian city of Homs just after midnight on Monday, killing the mother and injuring her son, in the latest sectarian killing targeting Alawites in the country’s third-largest city.
Armed men riding a motorcycle opened fire with silenced pistols on a mother, her son, and her husband on Tawil Street in the Alawite-majority neighborhood of Wadi al-Dahab, the Syrian Justice Archive (SJA) reported.
The mother, 41-year-old Yumna al-Halaq, was killed in the attack. Her 13-year-old son, Zein Ibrahim, was seriously injured and taken to the nearby Al-Zaim Hospital. Her husband was unharmed.
Residents believe the gunmen who carried out the sectarian killing are Salafist extremists affiliated with the Syrian takfir regime’s internal security forces, known as General Security.
The attack on Halaq and her family comes a week after unknown gunmen targeted another Alawite family in Homs, the SJA reported.
On July 18, armed men in the Alawite-majority Sabil neighborhood opened fire, killing 39-year-old Amina Qaeer, her 9-year-old son Issa Khansa, and her 14-year-old daughter Lujain Khansa.
Meanwhile, on Monday, an Alawite man, Emad Rifat Asad, was killed after being shot by armed men while herding sheep near his village, Hawrat Amourin, in the Masyaf countryside in Hama Governorate.
Alawite civilians have been regularly murdered and kidnapped by unknown gunmen in Homs since former terrorist Abu Muhammad al-Jolani’s Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) took power in Syria in December 2024. 
According to locals, many of the gunmen carrying out killings in Homs belong to Bedouin tribes that the Jolani regime allows to remain armed, while the Alawite community has been disarmed.
HTS was led by former Al-Qaeda leader Jolani, who appointed himself president of Syria and changed his name to Ahmad al-Sharaa after ousting president Bashar al-Assad.
The ideology of HTS is based on the teachings of the medieval religious scholar, Ibn Taymiyyah, and the 20th-century Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb.
Ibn Taymiyyah taught that heterodox Muslim groups, including Alawites, Druze, and Shia, should be killed and their property taken.
Syria’s new security forces, comprised of Salafist extremists from HTS and other armed factions, have carried out horrific massacres of Syria’s Druze and Alawite religious minorities since Jolani came to power.
Two young women have gone missing in recent days, SJA confirmed, raising fears of their abduction and enslavement by the extremists.
Etedal Fouad Dargham, a 23-year-old Alawite woman, went missing on July 25 after leaving the Abbasiyah neighborhood heading toward the Muhajireen neighborhood in Homs.
No information has been available about her whereabouts or fate since then.
Samia Munzir al-Nasser, a 24-year-old Christian woman, went missing in the Kashkoul area in the Damascus suburbs on the evening of July 19.
Nasser is married and has a child. She is from the village of Basir in Deraa and lives in Rabla in the western Homs countryside. She had traveled to Damascus to visit her family before contact with her was lost.
Extremists linked to the Syrian takfiri regime have carried out a wave of kidnappings of Alawite women since HTS came to power.
Rather than investigate the cases of abducted Alawite women, including many documented by western press and rights groups, Syrian officials have tried to cover up the kidnappings, at times forcing the abducted women to make videos claiming they have run away from their families to marry a Sunni Muslim man or to convert to Islam.
At the same time, thousands of mostly Alawite former military personnel remain detained after nearly 20 months without any legal charges being filed against them, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said in a statement on July 26.