From New Lines Magazine
What began as intercommunal clashes in Sweida has mutated into a major security operation and Israeli intervention
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.
Cian Ward is a freelance journalist based in Beirut who covers conflict and political and humanitarian issues.
More content from this blog
- We Need to Articulate Our Struggles. Interview with Catarina Martins – 29 January 2025
- Syria’s Unions: Yesterday and Today, by Sulaiman Abdullah – 9 September 2024
- Rojava Between the Hammer and the Anvil, by Daniel Adediran & Blade Runner – 19 February 2025
- Settler colonialism, by Lachlan McNamee – 5 October 2023
- Putin’s Russia and Peripheral Imperialism, by Anatoly Kropivnitskyi – 20 December 2023