‘Kill them all’: Sectarian violence turns Syrian city into a slaughterhouse
Sweida, Syria – The last thing Hatem Radhwan heard that the fighters say were, “Kill them all. We don’t want them to identify us. “
It was at this moment that the five armed men, dressed in desert camouflage uniforms and who said they were with the Defense Ministry in Syria, armed their AK-47 rifles, shouted: “You pig!” and sprayed the piece of bullets.
Radhwan, a 70 -year -old blacksmith, felt a bullet or a piece of debris – he couldn’t say – grazing his upper lip. He fell on the ground while the armed men continued to shoot.
Rashad Abu Saadeh, a neighbor who hid in his apartment on the other side of the street, heard the gunshots. “For more than half a minute, they continued to shoot,” he said. “It was like a very long time.”
The killings of the Radhwan family show were part of a paroxysm of sectarian violence that swallowed up the city of Druze-Majority last week. The fights, which involved bombing of reservoir and mortar, summary executions and Israeli air strikes, left some 1,380 dead, moved more than 120,000 others – and transformed which was formerly a well named city, largely spared the ravages of the 14 -year civil war of Syria, in a slaughterhouse.
“There is not a single house in the whole province that does not cry someone,” said Randa Mihrez, one of the coroners of Sweida National Hospital.
A truce interrupted the clashes – which began this month between the Bedouin clans and the Druze religious minority – but the losses are counted.
The colleague of Mihrez, Akram Naim, traveled images of the 509 corpses brought to the courtyard of the hospital during the fighting. They were transferred to a mass tomb on Wednesday after days of decomposition in summer heat.
“The youngest victim was 3 months old, killed by bursts of shells that hit him,” he said.
He clicked on another photo – a young girl, his head turned to the side, with a gloomy expression on his face. A scarlet line crossed his throat.
“He was 14 years old. She was massacred,” said Naim, her voice has mastered.
“It is only the people we know and who could reach us,” said Mihrez, adding that many victims have been buried in makeshift tombs near people’s houses because the hospital had been surrounded for a large part of the battles.
“The final count will be much worse,” he said.
A Druze soldier stops for a photo in the corridor of the National Hospital of Sweden Thursday after being treated for injuries suffered during the clashes between the Bedouin tribes and the Druze factions.
(Hasan Belal / For Times)
At Maison Radhwan, the blacksmith finally dared to open his eyes five minutes after the departure of the armed men, only to find 17 of his bloody members bloody around him. Thirteen were killed squarely; Four others survived but remain in critical condition, while a fifth parent died later. Radhwan was the only one for the most part.
“They shouted and I tried to move them, to help them in one way or another. But I continued to slide on the blood,” said Radhwan, his look according to the brown red spot that slipped from the sofa to the floor.
“A parent was bleeding and barely alive. He begged: “shoot me”. But I had no weapons on myself.
The Sweida crisis, which arises from similar episodes of semi-seizure of sectarian blood against minorities by groups aligned by the state, highlights the challenges that the acting president Ahmad al-Sharaa, which seized the power in December after having directed a coalition of rebel groups, to overthrow the longtime dictator Bashar Assad.
Although he received the support of President Trump – who accelerated the lifting of the sanctions, reopened the United States Embassy in Damascus and sent an envoy who defended the new government – Al -Sharaa has so far failed to convince the rival factions to centralize under his authority, and his government forces have mainly aligned with the Bedouins.
Instead, the euphoria on Assad’s eviction has been replaced by a feeling of concern among many Syrians, in particular the minorities, who are wary of the Islamist past of Al-Sharaa. Harden members of his faction, the Hayat Tahrir of Hayat Tahrir Al-Time, consider the Druze as heretics who should be killed.
One of the injured in the city of Sweida receiving treatment at the national hospital following the battles that took place between the Bedouins and the Druze factions in Sweida, Syria on Thursday.
(Hasan Belal / For Times)
This was particularly true for the Druze, the members of a syncretic sect which is an emanation of Shiite Islam which constitute some 3% of the Syrian population. There are about 1 million druze in the world, them in Syria and the rest in Lebanon, Israel and elsewhere. Many Syrians’ Druze speak proudly – and often – about the role of their sect in the construction of the nationalist conscience of the country, with families praising their filial link with the Sultan al -Attrash, a revolutionary who rose up an uprising against French domination in Syria in the 1920s. Sweida, the city and the province named eponymous, are the only areas of the country with a majority of the Druze.
During the civil war, Sweida kept a suspicious distance from Assad and the opposition, and the government allowed him a certain autonomy. Since the release of Assad, important figures from the Druze community have sought to have good relations with Damascus, but the militias have rejected integration under the armed services of Al-Sharaa, which, according to them, are made up of unruly factions which are not completely under the control of the actual chief.
When the kidnappings and theft of tit-for-tat between Bedouins and Druze have turned into open war this month, the government mobilized its forces to restore order. But the residents of Druze accused them of engaging in a sectarian murder and of retaliation.
Israel, which since the release of Assad has occupied large expanses of the border areas of its neighbor in the North and demanded that southern Syria be a demilitarized area, responded to requests from its own Druze to protect their co -religionists and launched air strikes targeting the Damascus headquarters of the Syrian army and the presidential palace. He also struck Sweida’s forces, forcing them to withdraw.
In the aftermath of these strikes, Al-Sharaa accused Israel of having interfered in Syrian affairs and trying to keep the country weak. But Thursday, Syria’s special American envoy Tom Barrack said he had met Syrian and Israeli officials from Paris to make “dialogue and de -escalation” – the first high -level talks between the two countries since 2000.
“And we have done precisely that. All the parties reiterated their commitment to continue these efforts,” wrote Barrack on X Thursday.
About 1,500 people of Bedouin tribal families who had been detained in the governorate of Sweida were evacuated earlier this week by virtue of a ceasefire agreement, following fiercely between tribal forces and armed men of Druze faithful to the religious leader Hikmat al-Hijri. Sweida’s confrontations have resulted in dozens of deaths.
(Rami Alsayed / Nurphoto via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, the atmosphere in the city of Sweida remains tense. Standing near the frantic ball of an Israeli fire, Yamen Zughayer, a Druze faction commander, dropped a road leading from Sweida.
“There are still bodies of our people that we cannot recover. An elite shooter awaits us there,” he said. He walked in a side street, highlighting the sung remains of houses which, according to him, were burned down by Bedouins and combatants linked to the government.
“For 14 years of war, nothing happened to Sweida. [For] Three hours, the government has entered and looks at what happened, “he said.
Zughayer, a 35-year-old who usually worked as a car merchant, said the tragedies inflicted on Sweida are Druze suspect in Al-Sharaa.
“In your opinion, what would have happened if we did not have our weapons? We are sitting here to speak to you because of them,” said Zughayer, adding that he would not accept any solution that did not imply the militiamen who hold back their arms.
Hashem Thabet, another nearby fighter, said that he did not want Israel to control the territory, the actions of the Syrian government led Druze like him.
“I don’t care who comes to protect me as long as they do. If it is Israel, then welcomes Israel,” he said. The government, he added, “pushes us into its arms”.
A powerful explosion struck an ammunition deposit in the city of Maarat Melin, north of Idlib City in Syria on Thursday. The explosion caused at least 10 deaths and injured more than 100 people. The civil defense teams, known as white helmets, continue rescue operations in the midst of a general devastation.
(Omar Albaw / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images)
A few kilometers from the place where he stood in vigilance, on a bare mountain outside the outskirts of Sweida, Basel Abu Saab looked with a dark satisfaction at the trench he had dug with his bulldozer – a serious mass for 149 people from the hospital who were not identified or whose families could not bury them.
“At the start, we wanted to bury them in the hospital courtyard, but the administrators feared that we will contaminate the water tank,” said Abu Saab.
“The bodies broke down too much in the sun, they became unrecognizable. We couldn’t wait.”
Yes, the location chosen for the mass tomb was far from the city, he added, but it was also far from the fights.
Abu Saab returned to the neighboring road, walking in a pit where he had buried the tight body bags, his nose folded with the smell. From the edge of the pit, the edge of a hospital garment was taking a look, floating in an erratic way in the breeze of twilight.
