The Druze massacre in Syria and the true face of the new regime

The rise to power of a new regime in Syria last December marked the end of a brutal 14-year-long civil war. In the past months since the fall of the autocratic Assad regime, which had ruled Syria for more than half a century, new hope had awoken.

The newly appointed president, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, has received wide international recognition – so far meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron, UN chief Antonio Guterres, and US president Donald Trump. Those meetings reflected a swift transformation of a man that only, a short time earlier, was known under his nom de guerre of Muhammad Al-Jolani, a wanted Al-Qaeda commander with a $10 million USD bounty on his head, due to his role in terror attacks against American forces in Iraq.

Nevertheless, recent violent events against minority communities in Syria raise the suspicion that this international rapid rehabilitation is misguided, and that the new leader of Syria has not abandoned his radical Jihadist past.

It just might be the case that he engulfs two identities simultaneously: President Al-Sharaa and Jihadist Al-Jolani. In the past week alone, more than 1,000 people from the Druze minority, a religious group claimed to be infidels by radical Jihadists, were massacred – many of whom were unarmed civilians.

The trigger for the murder spree was a local incident between the Druze inhabitants of southern Syria, where most of the country’s 700,000 Druze minority resides, and local Sunni tribes known for their Islamist zeal.

The events escalated into widespread attacks on Druze villages in the area, with scenes of Jihadist fighters looting villages, committing public executions and forcing by gun point Druze men to jump off buildings to their death, quickly circulating on social media.