According to state-run Ekhbariya TV, Druze armed groups have attacked members of Syria’s internal security forces in the rebellious Suwayda region, killing at least one government official and injuring others, and shelling several villages in the southern province.
A security source, who was quoted in Ekhbariya’s report on Sunday, claimed that the armed groups had violated the ceasefire that had been reached in the region’s overwhelmingly Druze region, where sectarian bloodshed claimed hundreds of lives last month.
The Syrian government stated in a statement that “the media and sectarian mobilization campaigns led by the rebel gangs in the city have not ceased over the past period.”
The Syrian state’s efforts and its obligations to our people in Suwayda were thwarted by these gangs, who resorted to violating the ceasefire by staging vicious attacks against internal security forces on numerous fronts and shelling some villages, causing the death and injuries of a number of security personnel.
Four people were killed in the most recent clashes in Suwayda, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, three of whom were local fighters and three of whom were government soldiers.
On July 13, Bedouin tribal fighters and Druze factions tussled in Suwayda.
Israel launched strikes on Syrian troops and bombed the city’s heartland Damascus under the pretext of protecting the Druze, but the bloodshed continued.
The region’s minority population has followers in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. The communities have long had conflicts over land and other resources, and Suwayda province is primarily a region of Druze descent but also has Bedouin tribes.
Following previous unsuccessful attempts, Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa announced a ceasefire in Suwayda in tandem with the United States’ brokering of a truce. For almost a week, fighting had been raging in Suwayda City and the surrounding towns. Syria established a committee to investigate the clashes, as it had promised to do.
Following a flurry of sectarian violence in the coastal region in March that claimed hundreds of Alawite lives, the Suwayda bloodshed was yet another blow to al-Sharaa’s fledgling government.
In Suwayda, hundreds of Bedouin families were forced to relocate to nearby Deraa after the fighting broke out.
Syria is under new Israeli attack.
Separately, the Israeli military announced on Sunday that it had saturday a raid on targets in southern Syria.
The army said it seized weapons and interrogated a number of people it claimed were involved in local weapons trafficking.
Meanwhile, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced on Sunday that five of its members had been killed in an ISIL (ISIS) attack on a checkpoint in Deir Az Zor in eastern Syria on July 31.
The SDF and the US collaborated extensively in Syria during the conflict that ended ISIL in 2019 after the group imposed a caliphate on all of Syria and Iraq.
Middle Eastern, West, and Asia have all been staging attempts by ISIL to resurrect. ISIL seized Deir Az Zor city in 2014, but the Syrian army reclaimed it in 2017.
Four army personnel and three civilians were hurt in an attack by the SDF in the countryside of Manbij on Saturday, according to Syria’s Defense Ministry.
