'The future is still uncertain': Syria's Druze figureheads on why Suweida is waking from slumber

A pile of stones is all that distinguishes one man’s land from another in Suweida — black igneous rock worn smooth over the centuries by wind and sun, before being gathered by a solitary farmer to mark the grounds of a budding olive grove.

The borders of Suweida are harder to define. The brittle Syrian Desert seeps deep into the country's southernmost province before hitting a volcanic mountain range that provided thousands of families with a refuge after their vanquish in an intra-Druze civil war in Lebanon centuries ago.

Outside Suweida City, a Druze man wearing baggy shirwal trousers and an elegant moustache strolls past monuments to Suweida’s war dead, where tombs in the shape of fighter jets or artillery pieces provide a post-mortem footnote to the deceased’s military division.

At one point, these men picked up rifles to fight off the Syrian war’s main actors — from the Islamic State group to the Assad regime — yet the schisms that emerged in this conflict still run deep within Druze society.

Militarisation

Whilst an array of Druze militias that emerged over the past 14 years ensured Suweida enjoyed a modicum of stability compared to other parts of Syria, it also engendered a highly militarised society where criminality, weapons, and rival armed factions are still rife today.

Despite the divisions, a thread that binds most in the region together is the Druze faith — an offshoot of Ismaili Islam that departed as a separate religion during the rule of Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah in 11th century Cairo, but still gives Suweida its distinct identity a millennium after his disappearance.

The inner teachings of the religion remain closed to most Druze; six scholars of the faith, known as the Sheikh Al-Aql, remain highly influential figures among a politically stratified community with adherents in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine.

In the centre of Suweida’s sprawling provincial capital is the Maqam Ain al-Zaman — a fortress-like headquarters of Syria’s Druze community, which serves as a centre of learning for religious students and a place of pilgrimage for the lay community.

Inside the shrine, a sleepy courtyard centred around a now dry fountain is silent, but the chirping of caged doves sounds a song supposed to resemble the words: Ya Karim (Oh noble one).

In a majlis, a group of moustached Druze scholars sit pensively next to the names of Syria’s three Sheikh al-Aql, inscribed on one-metre-high plaques bolted to the wall.

Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, Sheikh Hammoud al-Hinnawi, and Sheikh Youssef Al-Jarbou are Druze figureheads who have achieved the highest rank of enlightenment in this monotheistic religion and their words, even among their lapsed cohorts, remain hugely significant in Suweida. 

Sheikh Jabrou’s assistant guides us into an office, where we meet the Sheikh, his ancient philosopher’s beard, the unending aesthetics of the Sheikh Al-Aql.

Almost immediately, he voices concerns about the Salafi origins of interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa, a strand of Islamic revivalism that rejects any perceived deviations from orthodox Islam as a heresy, including the Druze.

“Frankly, the future is still uncertain," Sheikh Youssef Al-Jarbou tells The New Arab.

"What we currently see on the ground — some sectarian behaviour — raises doubts and concerns among all Syrians about how far we can truly progress toward a civil state. If the state’s religion is Islam and the president’s religion is Islam, we have no objection, but if the source of legislation is fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), then that is a vast domain,” he explains. 

“We could end up with the interpretations of Ibn Taymiyyah or Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, both of whom considered anyone outside their school of thought, even Sunnis who didn’t fully align with them, to be unbelievers. So, how would this affect the governance of a diverse society like Syria, with all its different groups? Governing people by fiqh has alarmed many communities, including the Druze,” the Sheikh adds. 

Divisions

Suweida has a complicated relationship with the former regime. Although many welcomed the fall of Bashar al-Assad following an ouroboros of self-destruction in the five decades of Baath Party rule, the collapse of the regime has, like the coastal region, resulted in many losers in Suweida, particularly former military and state employees.

On a road south in Suweida, the name of Bassel al-Assad, who was supposed to inherit the presidency from his father Hafez until his premature death in 1994, has been removed from a university hospital, while all references to the Assad family appear vanquished at Suweida City’s Ankoud Roundabout.

Yet the pervasiveness of the former regime can be seen in the abandoned pillboxes that still line the highway and faded red-white-black flags adorning the portraits of Suweida’s military dead, omnipresent in nearly every public square.

The Druze banner still greatly outnumbers the new Syrian national flag, long associated with the opposition, perhaps showing some ambivalence toward the new regime, but a monument to the revolution stands proudly in Suweida city centre — the message ‘Peace to all Syrians’ above portraits of the martyrs to the rebel cause — highlighting the complexity of the province.

What many in Suweida now fear is that Sharaa’s interim government will gradually shapeshift into an octopoid theocracy, wrestling the degree of autonomy the Druze-majority province still enjoys away from it.

In the mountains, close to the Jordanian border, another of Syria’s Sheikh Al-Aql, Hammoud al-Hinnawi, greets The New Arab at his majlis, which, like every reception room in Suweida, contains a table decked with baklawa and fruits for his guests.

Late at night in December, the Sheikh began to receive calls from military commanders in the area, informing him that the regime was about to fall, and they were placing themselves under his protection.

With no income, some of the former brigadiers and colonels of the Assad regime have been reduced to selling produce on the streets, he says, a situation not dissimilar to that on the coast, where a major anti-government insurgency swept through Tartous and Latakia in March, fuelled by widespread anger at the Alawites’ perceived disenfranchisement under the new government.

Many in Suweida believe that the only way to prevent frustrations from spilling out into insurrection is for a pluralistic and democratic government to emerge in Damascus that allows the Druze to practice their beliefs in peace and offers hope for a better future.

"We expected [the fall of the regime], but we hadn't anticipated it would happen so quickly," Sheikh Hammoud al-Hinnawi tells The New Arab.

"My feeling was, 'nothing lasts forever'… At the same time, there was an immense joy following the suffering that few people in history have endured. [Now] we want a comprehensive and inclusive constitution that prevents injustice," the Sheikh adds.

"The current one is temporary, we hope the government will listen to all its citizens and adopt constructive ideas to form a proper national charter."

Scepticism and separatism

Despite Sharaa’s public overtures to Syria's minorities of representation and dialogue, many in Suweida are sceptical that he will fulfil his obligations, particularly due to an absence of outreach by Damascus toward the Druze religious and political leadership.

The Suweida Military Council, an armed group loyal to Hikmat Al-Hijri — one of the most critical figures in Syria's Sheikh Al-Aql toward the new government — appeared on guard and suspicious about Ahmed Al-Sharaa when we visited.

The armed group was formed by Tareq Al-Shoufi, a former officer who defected from the regime in 2015, shortly after the capture of Damascus by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, perhaps anticipating a new challenge to the province’s freewheeling status from Sharaa and his men.

"After reaching Damascus, [Sharaa] seized power through a military coup, gathered loyalist factions from one direction, and installed himself as the ruler and formed a coalition of loyalist factions," Al-Shoufi told The New Arab.

"They created this problem: from the beginning, they did not extend their hand to the defected officers or the Free Officers working on the ground. Instead, they only tried to rely on their base of loyalist factions and built their authority through them."

Given the suspicions and antipathy in Suweida toward the new regime, Israel has attempted to use its self-declared status as another of the region's 'embattled minorities' to proclaim itself the ‘guardians' of Syria’s Druze.

It is a weak pitch given the harrowing war on Gaza, but one backed by the Palestinian Sheikh Al-Aql, Muwaffaq Tarif, who leads a community broadly supportive of the Israeli government, but most in Syria see Israel's actions as an attempt to smother a nascent revolutionary government.

Following a series of Israeli airstrikes on Syrian government positions in late April, far-right Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich perhaps revealed the true intention of Israel’s ‘support’ for the Druze: "We will end this campaign when Syria is dismantled."

It came amid rumours that some Druze militias were provided arms and medical support by Israel during the recent clashes with government-linked entities, leading many to believe that Suweida is not fully onboard with the new Syrian project, and even willing to receive help from Syria's enemies to fulfil its separatist ambitions.

Al-Shoufi, like all we spoke to in Suweida three weeks before the clashes, denied any outside support for his militia and said he is committed to a united and democratic Syria, but given the uncertain future, is not yet willing to give up the weapons held by his group.

"If Israel claims to protect the Druze, I cannot stop it, I did not ask it to protect the Druze, and I cannot refuse if it claims to offer protection," he told The New Arab.

"This is a position that concerns the government; you should ask the government about it, it is the authority responsible, and it is responsible for the security of all of Syria."

On the wall of his majlis is an image of former Lebanese Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt, whose son Walid inherited the leadership of his Progressive Socialist Party and had attempted to build bridges between the Syrian Druze and Sunnis during the war.

Walid Jumblatt was recently in Syria for a rare post-retirement appearance in a bid to cool tensions after clashes between the two sides in Jaramana and Ashrafieh Sahnaya.

War footing

There are still tacit signs of Israeli influence in Suweida. The New Arab saw at least one Star of David sprayed on the side of a wall during our tour of the province, while in March, an Israeli flag was hoisted at the northern entrance to Suweida City, although this was swiftly removed and burned by locals.

During a brief stop at the home of Sheikh Hikmat Al-Hijri, a procession marched down the road toward his compound carrying the distinctive kaleidoscopic banner of the Druze and singing a homily to the religious leader.

In the courtyard, the chanting crowd arranged itself into a circle, as a man in military fatigues strode to the centre of the crowd breaking into a truculent dance known as the 'jowfiyya', performed by Druze during times of war, but in this case a display of fealty to Hijri amid difficult times for the sheikh.

After greeting his supporters, Sheikh Hijiri held a brief audience with The New Arab at a reception room perched high in Jabal Al-Arab, speaking gingerly, but off record, about the new government.

It was a prescient scene given the sectarian violence that was to unfold in southern Syria between Druze and Sunni armed groups a few weeks later, which involved, it is said, some of the sheikh's partisans.

A group that has been more open to the new government is Rijal Al-Karama (‘Men of Dignity’), a highly disciplined militia formed by the charismatic leader Wahid Al-Balous until his assassination in 2015, a murder almost certainly ordered by Bashar Al-Assad due to his open defiance of the Baathist regime.

In an oasis village deep in southern Syria is the home of Sheikh Yahya Abu Hasan, a leading figure in Rijal Al-Karama, a movement widely respected in Suweida for striking a balance between resistance to the Assad regime and autonomy from the rebel camp.

The Sheikh occupies the sole armchair in a stone majlis, its bare walls adorned with the images of Rijal Al-Karama’s many martyrs, the kaleidoscopic hues that adorn the portraits representing the five holy dignitaries of the Druze faith.

Although Rijal Al-Karama was always the Druze faction most sympathetic to the rebel cause, Sheikh Abu Hassan said his men would also not disarm, given the insecurity and bloodshed still gripping Syria after Assad’s fall.

"[Our] weapons are for our self-defence… we are prepared to surrender the heavy weapons we captured from the regime, but we will not surrender the weapons we brought ourselves," he told The New Arab.

"The coastal massacres undid all the government’s previous efforts (at outreach). They were unable to control one single incident, this has eroded all trust."

He was also mindful that if any conflict between regional powers and Israel were to break out on Syrian soil, Suweida could be the first casualty of the war.

"We do not wish for a war to break out between Israel and Turkey, or between Israel and Iran, because any new war would be fought in Suweida, and it seems that Israel is benefiting from this state of chaos and wants this to continue," he said.

Waking up

Despite its key strategic role, Suweida has fared better than other parts of Syria during the war, thanks in part to the role Druze militias played in staving off hostile, outside parties. The apartment blocks currently under construction are a sign that many of Syria's Druze living overseas believe the future of the province is worth investing in.

Beyond the militia fighters and Druze sheikhs, there is a highly-educated middle class, some working overseas and others remaining at home resisting Assad’s henchmen and other reactionary forces in a bid to make Suweida a place with some freedoms.

It is perhaps this group that is most eager for a peaceful outcome in the recent sectarian conflict and for Suweida to play its part in a new democratic future for Syria, the province becoming a microcosm of the deep divisions within the country but also offering hope that tensions can be soothed by peaceful activism and dialogue.

At an arts and crafts exhibition held at an engineers’ union, Hesham Abo Assy returned to Suweida for the first time since finding refuge in Germany over a decade ago, following repeated and increasingly dangerous harassment by regime security forces due to his political views.

"Going back to Suweida after all these years has allowed me to rediscover myself not as a refugee but as a free person, someone who can live life like anyone else, who can visit his home, his parents, his country," he told The New Arab.

"It is impossible to put into words what it means for my mother to finally hug her son after so many years, or for a father to meet his son again, now eleven years older. These are the moments beyond language, filled with emotion and healing, something that I can only describe as reclaiming a part of myself that I thought I had lost."

Paul McLoughlin is a senior news editor at The New Arab and author of Syria Insight. He spent two weeks in Syria post-Assad to compile stories for the Syria in Focus special series

Follow him on X: @PaullMcLoughlin