The July 2025 violence in southern Syria’s al-Suwayda region that killed 600 people and displaced thousands more traces its origins back to April 2025, when Sunni and Druze Syrians clashed in the suburbs of Damascus after fake videos circulated falsely depicting a Druze personality attacking the Prophet Mohammad. Setting off the July clashes was the Syrian Bedouins in al-Suwayda’s kidnapping of a Druze businessman. After Druze retaliation, interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa sent troops to calm the situation. As government and Bedouin fighters attacked Druze, Israel bombed targets in Damascus—ostensibly to protect the Druze, but mainly to warn neophyte leader al-Sharaa to keep his troops away from Syria’s borders with Israel. Mediation finally stopped the fighting, but only after 5,600 mostly Bedouin families had fled al-Suwayda for neighboring Daraa.
The Druze-Bedouin clashes are not the first episode of inter-communal violence in post-Assad Syria. In March 2025, pro-Assad Alawis clashed with Sunnis and government troops on the northwestern coast. Weeks of vicious attacks left some 1,700 people dead, mostly Alawis, and shattered trust between the Alawi community and al-Sharaa’s government.
Inter-communal clashes such as those in al-Suwayda and the coast can often be sparked by seemingly mundane local factors, such as disputes over land or water, business or family arguments, kidnappings motivated by politics or financial gain, sentiments of offended honor, or exclusion from local decision-making mechanisms. Hostile acts quickly generate aggressive countermoves: shots are fired, houses and shops firebombed, roads closed, checkpoints erected, militias mobilized, and individuals detained or killed.
Such recurring local troubles inevitably reflect bigger fears about the equitable sharing of land, resources, and national wealth, and the protection of minorities by the central government. When the government is a party to clashes with its own citizens, as has happened recently in Syria, reviving trust becomes even more difficult.
Beyond these immediate factors, clashes like those in al-Suwayda highlight the common national challenges that plague many Arab countries, even after a century of statehood. Such challenges include systemic violations of citizens’ rights, a lack of human security, an overconcentration of power in the central government, socio-economic inequity, and a lack of peaceful coexistence in societies with ethnic and sectarian pluralism. In Syria, as elsewhere in the region, such challenges can only be overcome through a genuinely inclusive and democratic process by which the citizenry defines how power and governance are exercised in a way that satisfies all.
Al-Sharaa has said that he seeks an inclusive national government that is representative of Syria’s diversity. Yet progress towards this goal has been agonizingly slow. In northeastern Syria, for example, the new government signed an agreement with the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which are comprised mainly of local Kurds, to integrate their units into the Syrian national armed forces. But Damascus and the SDF continue to disagree on the degree of centralization or decentralization. Resolving these differences has acquired renewed urgency in the aftermath of the al-Suwayda clashes, as SDF leader Mazloum Abdi recently observed. More clashes involving minorities will only further deepen the distrust between the state and its citizens.
The Syrian government’s inability to foster public trust leads to two further sources of instability. The first is that some minority groups are turning to each other for assistance in resisting Damascus’s control of political and military power. For example, the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration in North-East Syria recently responded to calls for humanitarian aid from Druze leader Hikmat al-Hijri, who seeks to maintain Druze autonomy, by exploring the seemingly impractical idea of opening a humanitarian corridor from the northeast to al-Suwayda in the far south of the country.
A second consequence of pervasive distrust in the central government is that minority groups start to look outside the country for leverage. Some Syrian Druze want closer links with Israel. This is highly controversial, because Israeli intervention in Arab countries helps Israel achieve its aim of breaking up larger Arab states into smaller ethnic-based units that it can more easily dominate. Yet the recent Druze calls for Israeli intervention echo other fearful Arabs’ past quests for external protection. During Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war, for instance, some Lebanese Christians and Shia Muslims sought the aid of Israel and Iran, respectively. In Syria and in Iraq, groups such as the Druze, Kurds, Assyrians, and Arab Christians have also variously looked to Israel, Turkey, and the United States for support in times of perceived need. From the 1860s to today, attempts to establish viable systems of national governance in the Middle East have been repeatedly hampered by European colonial powers, by Israeli military intervention, or by self-interested homegrown autocrats.
Whether Syria can emerge from this delicate moment of nationwide discord will be clarified in the coming months. The national parliamentary elections scheduled for September 2025 will test views on the extent to which Syrians believe that the new leadership in Damascus can deliver real power sharing and generate trust. As Syrians urgently adjust to the new balance of power since the Assad regime’s collapse, the clashes in al-Suwayda serve to remind them of both new possibilities and stubborn old dangers.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Shutterstock/Fahed Saad Kiwan
