Before dawn on Dec. 7, 2024, dozens of local gunmen stormed the feared Military Intelligence Branch prison in Syria’s southern Sweida province, as well as the Sweida Central Prison a bit further afield, freeing the prisoners from dark basement cells. Left behind in the mayhem was evidence of recent horrors: names and dates desperately scrawled in Arabic in the prison cells, reams of paper documenting alleged political “crimes.” In one room, children’s clothing lay on the floor. The gunmen then set fire to buildings once so feared that one former detainee, Emad al-Ashous, told me, “we couldn’t even look at it” until a couple of weeks ago. He walked me through the cold underground maze of “interrogation” rooms and solitary confinement cells, which he said once reverberated with the sounds of torture.
But that night in early December, the guards fled and so did the men in regime uniforms at the concrete checkpoint barriers around town, as well as at a military airport and police headquarters.
Sweida was, at long last, free.
And the next day, so was the rest of Syria. Last month, Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebel forces under the command of Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani) launched a lightning offensive from their home base in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province. Within days, the HTS fighters seized Aleppo, Homs and Hama, forcing regime forces to stand down from battle-weary towns and cities once revered as bastions of the 2011 Syrian revolution. By Dec. 8, the rebels had seized all of Damascus, the capital, after former President Bashar al-Assad fled the country.
More than 50 years of brutal rule by the Assad family were suddenly, shockingly, over. Now, HTS is in charge. Within days, a delegation from Sweida was in Damascus meeting with Sharaa. By New Year’s Eve, the transitional government had appointed Muhsina al-Mahithawi, a Druze woman from Sweida, as governor of the province.
When I got to Sweida on Dec. 18, past an expanse of empty flatland about an hour and a half from Damascus, there were still celebrations underway in the city’s main Karameh Square. The square has been the heart of simmering protests for the past two years — some of the few public displays of dissent in Assad-held Syria at the time. Women and men alike waved the green-and-black Free Syria flag, as well as the five-color Druze flag. “FREEDOM 2024,” one gigantic banner read, atop a makeshift outdoor stage.
Unlike in Damascus, where the victors from Idlib now patrol the city streets, there were no HTS fighters in sight.
Cold, steppe-like Sweida — the “Druze Mountain” — in the southernmost reaches of Syria along the border with Jordan, is the only part of the country with a Druze majority. Numbering several hundred thousand, Syria’s Druze follow an offshoot of Islam that emerged in medieval Egypt and the Levant. They believe in, among other things, the reincarnation of souls and the “oneness” of God.
They also have a long history of taking up arms against outside oppressors. Statues and photos of the grandly mustachioed Sultan al-Atrash, a son of Sweida who led the countrywide Great Syrian Revolt against French mandatory rule in 1925, still dot public squares, private living rooms and even gas stations across the province.
“Historically, the relationship with Sweida and the central state is very rocky,” says Tobias Lang, a political scientist who has published research on the Druze of the Levant. “The Druze always claim some autonomy.”
Even after Syria gained independence from France in 1946, Sweida remained somewhat a solitary thorn in the side of the state, isolated down its long road from Damascus. That is why, says Lang, “it was with huge brutality that the Druze were integrated into the modern state.” Adib al-Shishakli, who served briefly as Syrian president in the 1950s, bombed parts of Sweida in 1954 to quash Druze dissent.
He only stoked more.
Atrash himself, aged 63 at the time, then took part in a nationwide uprising in the same year that led to the ouster of Shishakli, who fled to Brazil. There, a decade later and more than 6,500 miles from the “Druze Mountain,” a man named Nawwaf Ghazaleh from Sweida shot and killed Shishakli out on a bridge — revenge for the 1954 bombing campaign that killed much of his family.
Ghazaleh “became a very important symbol for the Druze,” even outside Syria, Lang explains. In 2006, just five years before the spark of Syria’s 2011 revolution, the Lebanese Druze leader Walid Joumblatt spoke to a group of mourners at the funeral of one of his guards. Joumblatt’s father, Kamal, had himself been assassinated decades earlier, allegedly by Syrian killers associated with the ruling Baath Party, while 2005 and 2006 had seen a spate of political assassinations in Lebanon blamed on Syria and its allies.
Joumblatt appeared to aim his 2006 speech directly at the Assads: “Another Nawwaf will doubtless emerge.”
Outside Sweida city, past a smattering of roads littered with former Assad regime checkpoints, is the tiny village of Mazraa. There’s a large stone house in the village with a tomb out front, bearing the five-color Druze star and the name of one Wahid Balaous.
That is the man who, in 2014, founded the Men of Dignity movement, which would emerge as Sweida’s main group taking up arms against the regime. He was among the first to do so after 2011, when the Druze of Sweida had remained largely hesitant to join an all-out rebellion. In return, the regime had been careful not to stoke too much anger among Syria’s Druze.
But it came anyway. Previously, as a police officer for the Assad regime in the 1990s, Wahid “saw the injustice that Assad’s prisons did to people,” his son Laith told me last week at the Balaous family compound in Mazraa. A 28-year-old religious sheikh dressed in a red tarboosh cap wrapped in white, Laith sat beneath walls adorned with pictures proclaiming Wahid a “martyr,” beside portraits of Atrash and generations of Druze religious sheikhs past.
“He saw how the people suffered, how some people stayed for 40 years in prison.” Wahid left the police force, soon afterward exchanging his civilian clothing for the traditional black and white garments of Druze men of the cloth.
By 2014, when the Men of Dignity emerged, Balaous was filling a “power vacuum made over decades by the Syrian regime,” says Lang. “They have no Joumblatt or [Lebanese Druze politician] Talal Arslan there. … Since Atrash died in the 1980s, there was no Druze leader in Sweida.”
Balaous wouldn’t last long at the helm of the growing Men of Dignity movement. A car bomb attack in 2015, later blamed on the Assad regime, killed him and dozens of others just outside Sweida city. His son Laith was only 19 at the time.
Now Laith and his brother Fahed lead a splinter group of their father’s original movement, dubbed Sheikhs of Dignity, while another local leader, Yahya al-Hijjar, heads the original Men of Dignity.
It was fighters from both of those groups who freed the Sweida prisons that pre-dawn morning on Dec. 7.
Now that the dust is settling, it’s not yet completely clear what the two groups’ roles will be. I asked Laith about this in between villagers coming into the reception room asking for his help navigating family disputes.
Will they be a police force? Do they still need to stick around, to protect Sweida from outsiders? After all, Sweida sits at the knife-edge of the empty Badiya desert, where some Islamic State group fighters are believed to still roam out in the distance. An Islamic State attack on the city back in 2018 killed more than 250 people; the jihadist fighters also captured nearly two dozen women and children, disappearing with them into the desert.
I thought back nervously to the 2018 attacks when, the night before my meeting with Laith, I heard explosions, RPGs and the pops of automatic gunfire somewhere in the distance. There’s also been a spate of kidnappings and murders this past year by armed criminal gangs. Multiple people warned me not to go out at night.
That is despite the Men of Dignity successfully ousting a regime-linked criminal faction two years ago that had been involved in the cross-border trade of the Captagon drug. Though the trade continued, the ouster helped propel the Dignity movement into wielding greater authority — and a comparatively clean rap sheet — on the ground in Sweida.
Still, Laith himself survived an assassination attempt only last year, when unknown gunmen fired on his car.
And there are still a lot of weapons sitting around, in a lot of hands. I later learned, through a group of local activists, that I had simply been hearing the sounds of villagers just outside Sweida city pursuing an alleged thief, shooting RPGs and bullets in the air to intimidate him.
“All that noise just for a thief?” one of the activists joked in their group chat. Somehow, I wasn’t reassured.
Past row after row of crowded vegetable stalls, a couple of dozen people are gathered, singing and celebrating in Sweida’s Karameh Square. It’s still been less than two weeks since the fall of Assad. In this same square, they had been protesting together a year and a half ago for exactly that. Now the provincial headquarters and the police station across from them sit empty.
Already, HTS has sent a delegation of its men down to Sweida to meet with local notables, after a delegation including the son of Syria’s Druze spiritual leader, Sheikh Hikmet al-Hajiri, visited Sharaa in Damascus.
“I want to at least give them a chance,” Hanoud Azzam, a 50-year-old agricultural engineer in Karameh Square, told me when I asked if she’s worried about what Syria under HTS might look like. She’s been coming to the protests here in downtown Sweida for two years.
Others said they felt the same way. “I’m against extremist Islam,” Rabah Ghaneim, a construction worker from a village just outside the city, told me.
Twenty-one-year-old Alissar al-Chaar, a university student, said she’s worried HTS “could affect the role of women.”
There are still no HTS fighters in sight here in Sweida — neither at the entrance of the city nor guarding any of the abandoned police stations and prisons, as they do in Damascus, where young men in camouflage stand watch.
Sharaa has explicitly stated in recent days that no harm will come to Syria’s minorities. But the group has a troubled history.
HTS’s predecessor, the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, reportedly shot and killed two dozen Druze in a smattering of tiny Druze villages in Idlib province in 2014, in what came to be known as a massacre. Others in the area reportedly converted to Islam to avoid potential harm. HTS later confiscated the homes of Druze villagers who had fled Idlib, handing them over to house fighters and internally displaced people.
But that was Idlib, HTS’s home base, which has an overwhelming Sunni Muslim majority and tiny minorities of Christians and Druze.
“In Sweida, there’s an overwhelming Druze majority,” says Lang. “I think for other areas like close to the Golan Heights, which are mixed areas, the Idlib story is important, because HTS’s record isn’t that great.”
“Extremist Islam is rejected!” a Men of Dignity leader told a group of supporters last week, echoing some fears of what might come under broader HTS rule. “Syria is a united, secular country!”
His comments came after Sharaa told a Druze delegation in Damascus that all rebel factions “must be disbanded.” He didn’t appear to specify whether the Dignity movement factions in Sweida were included in that order. “Syria must remain united,” Sharaa said. “There must be a social contract between the state and all religions to guarantee social justice.”
For now, Laith Balaous told me at his family compound, the Dignity fighters are staying put, to “protect” Sweida — though they aren’t a police force, he added. That’ll come “soon,” in the form of a traffic police force under the banner of HTS’s transitional government, an HTS spokesperson told me by phone this week — though it’s not yet clear exactly when this force will be deployed. People from Sweida will be able to sign up to join, he added.
Also for now, the celebration continues in Karameh Square. One young woman, 20-year-old student Hamsa Abu Hassoun, told me on Thursday it was her very first time going to a protest, ever. “I’m really so happy to be here,” she smiled.
Thirty years her senior, Hannoud Azzam simply hopes young people like Hamsa can now have a future in Sweida, with Assad — and the constant threat to life under dictatorship — gone, for now.
“I have one son who was forced to leave the country,” she told me. “I want to protect the others from that same fate.”
With contribution from Samer Salloum.
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