BEIRUT (BN24) — Fierce fighting between local armed groups and tribal factions in Syria’s southern city of Sweida has left at least 30 people dead and around 100 wounded, the country’s interior ministry said Monday, marking a dangerous escalation of sectarian violence in the region.
The clashes erupted in Sweida, the provincial capital of Syria’s mainly Druze province, after a wave of kidnappings, including the abduction of a Druze merchant Friday along the main highway connecting Damascus to the south.
Officials said the violence pitted Druze gunmen against Bedouin Sunni tribes, fueling fears that the power vacuum left after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad last December is deepening the country’s sectarian divides. Assad’s overthrow by Islamist-led rebel forces and the installation of a new government have upended the balance among Syria’s religious minorities.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that battles centered in the Maqwas neighborhood on the eastern edge of Sweida and spread to villages on the western and northern outskirts. The Defense Ministry has deployed military convoys in an effort to stabilize the area, the Observatory said.
This is the first major outbreak of fighting reported inside Sweida itself, although tensions have simmered for months. Last April, clashes erupted between Sunni militias and armed Druze residents in Jaramana, southeast of Damascus, before spreading to nearby districts.
The interior ministry said security forces would intervene directly to end the confrontations, but did not provide a timeframe.
The violence comes as Western governments, including the United States and Britain, have signaled readiness to gradually normalize relations with Syria after more than a decade of civil war. But minority communities remain on edge after repeated revenge killings. In March, hundreds of Alawites were killed in what appeared to be retaliation for an earlier attack by Assad loyalists, the deadliest sectarian flare-up Syria had seen in years.
Sweida lies about 24 miles (38 kilometers) north of the Jordanian border, in a region that has largely escaped the worst of the conflict but is now seeing renewed instability.
news.sky.com
