A surge of violence in southern Syria has exacerbated fears among minority communities and exposed what analysts say is the Damascus authorities’ intent to rein in the Druze population.
More than 1,200 people were killed in a week-long outbreak of intercommunal clashes in Sweida province, a Druze-majority region, further casting doubt on the new Islamist government’s capacity to manage sectarian tensions.
The week-long clashes in the Druze-majority Sweida province further raised doubts about the new government’s ability to handle intercommunal issues in the diverse and war-scarred nation.
Damascus has ‘opened the Pandora’s box of intercommunal violence’, Syria expert Fabrice Balanche said.
The clashes initially involved Druze fighters and Sunni Bedouin tribes, but government forces intervened on the side of the latter, according to witnesses, experts and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor.
Jamal Mansur, a comparative politics researcher specialising in Syrian and Israeli studies at the University of Toronto, said he believed interim leader Ahmed al-Sharaa made ‘a huge mistake’ by ‘trying to subdue the Druze’ and in using the tribes, who are part of his popular base, to do so.
Balanche, a lecturer at the University of Lyon 2, said it was ‘easy to mobilise tribes against the Druze, but then how do you get them to fall in line?’
Israel, which says it wants to protect the Druze and has demanded a demilitarised southern Syria, struck the presidential palace and the Syrian army headquarters in Damascus to force government troops to withdraw from Sweida.
The United States then announced a ceasefire between Syria and Israel, which allowed government forces to deploy to Sweida province but not the city, which remained under the control of various Druze groups.
Those groups are now surrounded by areas controlled by government forces and their tribal allies across the province, where sporadic clashes are still taking place.
Damascus was previously negotiating the integration of Druze fighters into its ranks, but the clashes, during which large-scale abuses were committed, could prompt the Druze to refuse to hand over their weapons.
Sharaa ‘has two options either he obstinately continues trying to subdue the Druze’ or he backtracks, said Mansur.
The bloodshed in the south followed sectarian massacres in March in coastal Syria, in which 1,700 people, mostly Alawite civilians, were killed according to the Observatory.
Overthrown Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is an Alawite and the sect was long associated with the brutal rule of Assad and his father.
Security forces, allied armed groups, and foreign jihadists were implicated in March’s killings.
A national commission of inquiry formed by the authorities on Tuesday said it had verified serious violations leading to the deaths of 1,426 people, mostly civilians, and identified 298 suspects.
Sweida was ‘a repeat of the same scenario: the desire to subjugate minorities, but unlike on the coast, the Druze are well armed and protected by Israel,’ said Balanche.
Christians, Syria’s other significant minority group, also live in fear following several threats and the bombing of a Damascus church in June which killed 25 people.
Syrian authorities blamed the Islamic State group, but a shadowy jihadist organisation claimed responsibility.
The greatest challenge facing Damascus in its attempt to assert its authority across all of Syrian territory remains the Kurds, who control swathes of the northeast.
Kurdish officials have been negotiating with Syrian leaders to have their civil and military institutions, including the powerful US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, integrated into the Syrian state.
Following the Sweida violence, senior Kurdish official Bedran Ciya Kurd called on Syria’s authorities to review their approach to the country’s minorities as a whole.
The deadly clashes had ‘already impacted (Sharaa’s) negotiating situation with the Kurds’, said Mansur of the University of Toronto.
Washington, the SDF’s main backer, had previously pushed the Kurds to make concessions to the Syrian government.
Now, the US ‘need to listen to the Kurds’, said Mansur.
