A man identifying himself as a member of Katibat il Muhajiroon, or the Battalion of Emigrants, speaks in a video clip posted on YouTube on Aug. 12 in front of women and children he says his group is holding captive. Talal, an Alawite man whose family was captured, says he spotted his three youngest children in the video. Al Jazeera

Talal had set his cellular phone to silent, so he didn't hear the 18 attempts to rouse him in the early hours of Aug. 4. The 43-year-old Syrian father of four woke at a quarter to 6, just as his brother's wife was calling.

"She told me that the armed men had entered my village and killed my wife and children and everyone in it," he said. "That was how the information first reached me."

Talal is an Alawite, a member of the same minority sect as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Most Syrians, about 70 percent, are Sunni Muslims. Some two and a half years ago, before the Syrian uprising kicked off in March 2011, it was generally considered rude to ask a Syrian his or her sect. But the once peaceful protest movement that morphed into a civil war and has claimed at least 100,000 lives has taken an increasingly sectarian tone. Now sectarian affiliation carries a presumed political position, although in reality it's not that simple. There are Alawites and members of other minority groups, including Christians, who are opposed to Assad; and there are Sunnis who support the regime even though most rebels are Sunni.

Talal still lives in the working-class Alawite neighborhood of Mazze 86 in Damascus, but after several car bombs in the area, he sent his family away from the capital. They took refuge in his sleepy village of Blouta, in the northwestern countryside of the province of Latakia, the Alawite heartland. Being the family's breadwinner, he stayed behind to work in his cosmetics and perfume store, believing his family would be safer in the village even though it was near the rebel-controlled Sunni villages of Salma and Doreen.

But on Aug. 4, Sunni rebels positioned in Salma and Doreen captured Blouta and 10 other Alawite villages before dawn. Some 105 Alawite women and children were taken hostage in the raids. Although regime forces won back the villages 15 days later, the captives remain in the custody of Katibat il Muhajiroon, or the Battalion of Emigrants, a hard-line group of foreign fighters led by a Libyan, Abu Jaafar il Libi.

"At first I thought it couldn't be true," said Talal, speaking from the Lebanese capital, Beirut. He called his wife's cellular phone. Somebody picked up but didn't speak.

"I could hear screams and cries and shouts of 'Allahu akbar' (God is great)," and then the line went dead, said Talal. He called and sent text messages requesting information about his family. All went unanswered.

He headed toward his village, arriving around 1 p.m., although he could get no closer than 2 miles away. The Syrian army was shelling his hometown, backed by air support from MiG fighter jets and helicopter gunships.

"I saw a lot of smoke, so much smoke I couldn't see the houses in the villages," Talal said. He remembered something his wife had told him: if there was trouble -- and she had time -- she had said she would hide their children in an attic-like storage space above the kitchen.

"I told the officer, 'Please, sir, don't let the planes hit my house, there's a 99.99 percent chance my children are still in it,'” Talal said. “I don't know if he listened."