For months, Sweida in southern Syria has been a tinderbox waiting for a match. Now, the mountain of the Druze is burning.
Since the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in December, the region has essentially been mired in a low-level conflict. Trenches have cleaved the landscape in two. Armed checkpoints have separated Druze villages from their Bedouin neighbors. Criminality has been rampant. Armed robberies and kidnappings, assisted by ample disinformation, have fueled mutual distrust. Minor insults have been met by retribution and petty vengeances with sporadic communal rage, lighting up the night with the glare of tracer rounds and falling rockets.
Then things would calm down, and figures like Omar al-Sabra, a Bedouin who describes himself as a “social peacemaker,” would use his good standing in both communities to act as the go-between to “connect the different perspectives of the two sides,” as he explained. “I connect civilians, soldiers and politicians to build understanding and work toward peace.”
An arrangement between Damascus and local Druze notables that had prohibited the government security services from entering the region in any meaningful sense, alongside the security services’ inability to adequately control the roads into the region, left large swaths of Sweida’s borderlands a quasi-lawless zone.
Over the last six days, the region has been engulfed in an escalating series of clashes. What began as communal violence between the province’s Druze and Bedouin communities mutated into something far more severe, as Damascus launched a violent security operation in the region, and Israel’s ongoing intervention in Syria culminated in a series of airstrikes on the capital itself on Wednesday.
The pot had been simmering with each cycle of escalation and de-escalation. It felt inevitable that it would boil over eventually.
It finally happened last Friday, after a Druze vegetable merchant was stopped at an improvised checkpoint on the Sweida-Damascus road, robbed, assaulted and kidnapped. Druze militias kidnapped a number of Bedouin in response, sparking a cycle of escalatory retaliations. This time was different; no one was able to bring the factions back from the brink.
With killings breaking out across the province, the government announced on Monday that its security services were intervening, ostensibly to end the clashes. But they were quickly drawn into the communal conflict after government forces were ambushed making their way into Sweida. The Druze militias had elected to offer stiff resistance, following calls from spiritual leader Sheikh Hikmat al-Hajari to “confront this barbaric campaign.”
For many in the region, the horrors of the coastal massacres are still a source of fear. In March, 1,662 people, largely Alawites, were killed by forces associated with the government, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. During my last trip to Sweida, several fighters from the Druze militias made reference to these massacres to justify why they felt so ardently that they needed to defend their homes.
Rawad, whose name has been changed, was at home with his brother when he heard the screaming. Across the road, his extended family had been gathering at their home in the heart of Sweida’s old city on Tuesday. Many had fled the fighting on the edges of the city, fearing a repeat of the coastal massacres, Rawad said.
“We hid the women and children in a room in the basement,” he recounted over the phone, the heavy thud of artillery strikes occasionally cutting him off. “I had just returned to my home, when a car came full of gunmen wearing military uniforms.”
Rawad heard people screaming, and someone shouting “you are pigs” before a sustained sound of gunfire.
Eighteen members of his family were killed, their bodies splayed out across the living room where they sat, their blood pooling on the concrete floor among smashed pictures of venerable sheikhs. A video Rawad took capturing the scene quickly spread online.
To verify this video, I have spoken to multiple members of the family and have obtained a list from them of their relatives who were killed. The accents in the video have been verified as distinctly from Sweida, as are the furnishings of the room, which display the Druze flag and photographs of prominent Druze sheikhs. Reverse searches found no prior instances of this video on the internet before yesterday.
“They killed them all, they just killed them all,” he muttered, still in shock. “There is a horrible irony because many of the men in that room were activists who were opposed to the Assad regime and had gone to Karama Square to call for this revolution.”
For over a year before the fall of the regime, people from both Bedouin and Druze communities gathered daily in Sweida city’s central square. What began as a protest over fuel prices morphed into calls for the overthrow of the regime — as if some small ember of the Arab Spring had been relit in southern Syria.
Omar was there often, standing arm-in-arm with his Druze compatriots. “It was a good time, we were unified,” he told me when I first met him in June. On Tuesday, though, amid the sound of gunfire over a crackling phone line, he described the unfolding events in Sweida as a “catastrophe.” I haven’t been able to get through to him since. At least 300 have been killed in Sweida over the last few days, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, although the death toll is likely to climb far higher.
I haven’t been able to reach many of the people I spoke with in June for my report for New Lines, which focused on the villages in the west of the province, close to the border of Daraa. This was where the main thrust of the government advance came from, home to some of the first Druze villages to be captured by the security services.
Government forces took control of al-Thaala on Monday. I visited the village last month, speaking to several members of the community — both civilians and fighters. I have not been able to contact anyone I met but was able to discover the fate of one individual I spoke to: 80-year-old village elder Sheikh Marhej Shaheen.
When I met Shaheen, he welcomed me into his home, greeting me with an iron-grip handshake. Between several cups of strong, bitter coffee, he recounted the history of the Druze people in Sweida and their centrality in continuously campaigning for Syria’s sovereignty.
“We are part of, and believe, in this Syrian Arab Republic,” he explained. “We don’t want to separate from Syria, as we are Syrians, and we will defend its land because it’s our land.”
He rejected any notion of secession and affirmed the sole demand of the Druze: to live with dignity. However, when fighters came to his home on Monday, they took him outside and filmed as they shaved off his mustache — a symbol of manhood for the Druze — in an act of public humiliation. Not long after, he was reported killed, though his granddaughter later stated he was still alive.
There is simply no possibility he could have been mistaken for a fighter. He was hard of hearing — I had to repeat my questions a few times before he could hear — and visibly frail.
Only a 10-minute drive from al-Thaala sits the mixed village of al-Mazraa. This is the site of a famous victory during the 1925 Great Syrian Revolt, in which an alliance of Druze and Bedouin defeated the French, whom they considered a foreign occupier. On the site of the battlefield, at the edge of the village, sits a great stone monument to the victory, a potent symbol of Syria’s continued quest for independence from foreign interference. A century later, on Tuesday, Israel struck that same village in an intensive series of airstrikes, after security forces expelled Druze fighters from their positions in the region.
Israeli intervention has hung like a Damoclean sword over the region since the fall of the Assad regime in December. Just a month ago, the notion was overwhelmingly rejected by both Druze and Bedouin. Yet opinion seems to have shifted.
In London on Wednesday, a group of around 30 Syrian expats gathered outside Downing Street, the home of the British prime minister, calling for the British government to reverse its decision to recognize the new Syrian state and intervene to stop the violence. Curiously, another protest was taking place at the same time. A group was there calling on the British government to help Israel “bring the hostages home” from Gaza.
The groups mingled somewhat, and many calling for the return of the hostages expressed their solidarity with the plight of the Druze. Daher, whose name has been changed, said the Druze had always rejected foreign interference, including from Israel, but after the killings, they “of course” wanted Israel to “save” them.
However, some attendees were more reluctant. Alaa Abu Hassan said that Israel is “not the solution” and that, once again, the Syrian people will find themselves being “a pawn in a game” between stronger powers. “This is not what the Druze wanted — we wanted a free Syria, a democratic civil Syria, and I think this could be very risky for us.”
It remains unclear what Israel’s ultimate intention is in Sweida, but the possibility that it could carve out a protectorate in the south is faintly reminiscent of its attempts to build a Lebanese buffer state in southern Lebanon beginning in 1977. That project ultimately failed in 2000, after the collapse of the Christian-dominated South Lebanon Army and the flight of thousands of its members, when the Israeli military withdrew in the face of a grueling Hezbollah-led guerrilla campaign.
On Wednesday, Israel ratcheted up the pressure on the Syrian government by directly striking the Ministry of Defense in the heart of Damascus, killing three and injuring 34. The U.S. mediated a ceasefire between the Syrian government, Druze militias and Israel, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio posting on X that they had agreed on steps that would end the “troubling and horrifying” situation.
Syria’s president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, addressing the nation on Thursday morning from the presidential palace, announced that he “decided to assign some local factions and Druze religious leaders the responsibility for maintaining security in Sweida.”
It seems like this may just be a return to the status quo ante. Given the grave transgressions that have been committed in Sweida and the abject failure of the previous security settlement, however, this may only be a freezing of the battle lines. Calls are already going out from Daraa on social media to boycott the region, which they accuse of betraying Syria for a foreign power.
Where will the next flash point be?
Tensions are simmering across the country. Negotiations between Damascus and the Kurdish-majority Syrian Democratic Forces have stalled. Syria’s minorities have largely been excluded from the new government, particularly its security services. Meanwhile, certain communities, most acutely the Alawites, still regularly face violations at the hands of armed groups.
Syria’s new leaders have repeatedly stressed the centrality of unity in their new vision of Syria, but absent any meaningful integration of these minorities into the governance of the state, it seems hard to imagine an outcome in which violence like that we have witnessed over the last week won’t recur.
“Spotlight” is a newsletter about underreported cultural trends and news from around the world, emailed to subscribers twice a week. Sign up here.