DAMASCUS/BEIRUT: At least 101 people were killed in two days of sectarian clashes near Damascus, most of them Druze fighters, a monitor said in an updated toll on Thursday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said clashes in the capital’s southern suburbs on Tuesday and Wednesday killed 10 civilians as well as 30 loyalists of the Islamist-led government and 21 Druze gunmen.

In the Druze heartland in Sweida province, it said 40 Druze fighters were killed, 35 of them in an “ambush” on Wednesday. Druze spiritual leader Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri on Thursday condemned what he called a “genocidal campaign” against his community after two days of sectarian clashes left 101 people dead.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz warned his country would respond “with significant force” if Syria’s new authorities fail to protect the Druze minority.

The violence poses a serious challenge to the Islamist authorities who ousted longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad in December. It comes after a wave of massacres in March in Syria’s Alawite heartland on the Mediterranean coast in which security forces and allied groups killed more than 1,700 civilians, mostly Alawites, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

It was the worst bloodshed since the ouster of Assad, who is from the minority community.

Hijri in a statement denounced the latest violence in Jaramana and Sahnaya near Damascus as an “unjustifiable genocidal campaign” against the Druze. He called for immediate intervention by “international forces to maintain peace and prevent the continuation of these crimes”.

Israel has ramped up its support for Syria’s Druze, with Foreign Minister Gideon Saar on Thursday urging the international community to “fulfil its role in protecting the minorities in Syria — especially the Druze — from the regime and its gangs of terror”.

In a later statement, Katz said: “Should the attacks on the Druze resume and the Syrian regime fail to prevent them, Israel will respond with significant force.”

The violence was sparked by the circulation of an audio recording attributed to a Druze citizen and deemed blasphemous.

Truces was reached in Jaramana on Tuesday and in Sahnaya on Wednesday. The government announced it was deploying forces in Sahnaya to ensure security, and accused “outlaw groups” of instigating the clashes.

However, Hijri said he no longer trusts “an entity pretending to be a government... because the government does not kill its people through its extremist militias... and then claim they were unruly elements after the massacres”. “The government (should) protect its people,” he said.

Published in Dawn, May 2nd, 2025