Syria's Druze count the toll of another deadly episode in long struggle for survival

The National

a day ago

The once invincible Sweida in southern Syria, the epicentre of a revolt against French colonial rule, was counting its dead on Monday after a week of fighting that left its mostly Druze inhabitants bowed, but not defeated.
A ceasefire appeared to hold as Monday was the first day without clashes in a week. Authorities were moving Bedouin civilians out, but aid convoys were still to enter.
Local branches of the Health Ministry sent teams to count the dead and take bodies to hospitals, where mortuaries were full after three waves of incursions by government forces and auxiliaries in the past week. Last year, Sweida was a centre of a non-violent uprising against the Assad regime when peaceful protest in Syria had long been crushed.
The Druze are an offshoot of Islam, whose history is defined by struggles for survival.
US diplomatic pressure on Syrian authorities, and Israeli raids, halted the offensive on Sunday. However the area, comprising the heartland of the ancient sect, remains under siege by the central authorities.
Damascus said Druze militias killed hundreds of Sunnis in Sweida during the clashes in the provincial capital, which were sparked by sectarian abductions.
Khaldoun, a Druze surgeon at the main Sweida National Hospital, told The National Syrian military and Interior Ministry forces who arrived in the city last week 'supposedly to stop clashes and spread security, turned out to be monsters.'
Women were among dead, felled by snipers and other government triggermen. Dr Khaldoun said 'medical teams were shot dead while trying to save people.' He said at least the bodies of 500 people have been brought to the hospital or died while receiving treatment there since government attacks on Sweida began.
Jiryes al Ishaq, a Christian who lived on a farmland on the western outskirts of Sweida, said he fled the government advance to the Greek Orthodox parish in the centre of the city. 'Pillage has been widespread but I don't know what happened to my land,' he said.
'We are provided for at the parish, because the authorities have vowed not to harm [the compound], but the rest of the city is devastated,' he said, pointing out unconfirmed reports that government militants had killed a Christian family of a dozen members in Sweida. The government had said during the offensive that killings would result in prosecutions.
Fighting in Sweida - in pictures
Sweida, with its basalt rock landscape, is home to 270,000 Druze who comprise most members of the sect left in Syria after waves of migration, particularly during the 2011 to 2024 civil war.
There are an estimated one million Druze worldwide, mainly in Syria, Lebanon, Israel and a diaspora in Latin America. From 1925 to 1927, the Druze, led by Sultan Basha Al Atrash, mounted a revolt against French rule. The revolt failed but it was instrumental in projecting the image of the Druze as being Syrians first in a predominantly Sunni country.
Sultan Al Atrash became a figure in the narrative of Arab nationalists across the Middle East. Bedouin tribes, some of whom have been attacking Sweida, had joined him in the revolt. Sunni merchants in Damascus, who later supported former leader Bashar Al Assad and the post Assad order, financed the Druze armed struggle against the French as thousands of Druze fighters were killed with superior French firepower.
Sultan Al Atrash died in 1982. However, one of his daughters, Muntaha, led peaceful resistance in Sweida when the March 2011 protest movement broke out.
In the last 15 months of Mr Al Assad's rule, Sweida renewed the civil disobedience movement demanding the removal of the regime. Among its leaders was Sheikh Hikmat Al Hijri, the most senior of a triumvirate comprising the Druze spiritual leadership.
Suhail Tebian, a prominent Druze civil figure who had opposed an increased arming of the Druze under Mr Al Hijri since the regime fell, said the community has had no choice but to resist government forces comprising religious extremists, although the cost has been high.
'Sweida has become a disaster zone,' Mr Thebian said. There is nothing more I can tell you. I have survived, for now'.
Mr Al Hijri resisted attempts by the new authorities – formerly Hayat Tahrir Al Sham – to control Sweida, saying that new security forces should be drawn from residents of the province. He labelled the government as extremists and undemocratic, pointing out the lack of any independent branches in the new political system.
So, when clashes began in Sweida last week between Druze and Sunni residents of Bedouin origins, Mr Al Hijri refused government security forces in the city. This set the scene for a week of incursions in which the government recruited rural Sunnis on its side, from Sweida and nearby Deraa. The authorities also taken by bus in more Sunnis, this time Bedouin, from the province of Deir Ezzor, in the eastern fringes of Syria, and from the governorate of Aleppo.
But even Druze who have been critical of Mr Al Hijri's handling of the crisis said the blood shed by the government forces and its auxiliaries have robbed it of credibility.
'They have cut the internet to make it difficult to know and document the size of the atrocities they committed,' said Nawaf, another Druze doctor.
An engineer in Sweida said the city and nearby villages 'have been devastated'.
'We can't even reach them,' he said. 'Bodies are still lying in open fields. There is no [transport] vehicles. No gasoline. I went to see the [main] hospital, it can't receive anyone. It is out of service.'