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Small Druze minority in northern Syria idlib The province was rocked this week by an apparently targeted shooting that left three members of their community dead.
The attack came in the wake of clashes months earlier in another region of Syria that targeted Druze communities, and amid heightened sectarian tensions and calls for secession by some Druze groups.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack in Idlib on Tuesday evening, in which unidentified gunmen on motorcycles opened fire on a van near the Druze village of Kafr Maris, killing two women and a man.
Idlib is a Sunni-majority province that was the birthplace of islamic former rebel group Hayat Tahrir Al-Shamwho led last year’s offensive and ousted Syria’s former autocratic leader, Pres. bashar asadFormer HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa is now the country’s interim president.
At the funeral of the victims on Wednesday, his uncle Rafik Ahmed said Druze in Idlib had faced false accusations in recent months of Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, a Druze spiritual and political leader in the southern Sweda province, of associating with allied militias that have clashed with pro-government forces.
Ahmed said his nephew and niece had taken a van to a dentist in a neighboring town on Tuesday and were returning when the gunmen opened fire on them.
“If they wanted to rob the van they would have set up a checkpoint and stopped it to rob, but their intention was to kill and intimidate the people here and perhaps force them to leave this country,” he said.
Ahmed said there have also been incidents of robbery and intimidation recently and olive farmers in the area are afraid to go to their orchards. He called on the state to arrest the killers and set up checkpoints around Druze villages to protect them.
Local government official Abdelrahman Ghazal said authorities were “taking the necessary procedures” to identify and prosecute the perpetrators of the deadly shootings, and were setting up more checkpoints and security cameras in the area.
“As we all know, this evil criminal act is aimed at undermining civil peace in the region,” he said.
There have been previous attacks on Druze communities in Idlib during the civil war, including a 2015 attack in which militants from the al-Nusra Front – the predecessor to HTS – killed at least 20 Druze villagers. Islamic terrorists have forced hundreds of members of the sect, whom they consider heretics, to secretly convert to Sunni Islam.
While tensions had calmed down in recent years, they have risen again since the fall of Assad.
In July, armed groups affiliated with al-Hijri clashed with local Bedouin tribes in Sweida, prompting the intervention of government forces, who effectively sided with the Bedouin. Hundreds of civilians, mostly Druze, were killed, many of them by government fighters.
Israel intervened in the conflict on behalf of the Druze – who are also a significant minority in Israel – by launching airstrikes on Syrian government forces. The intervention further heightened sectarian tensions, with many Sunnis accusing the Druze of being traitors.
The Druze, a branch of Shia Islam, formed about 5 percent of Syria’s pre-war population of 23 million people in the 10th century. Before the 2011 uprising plunged the country into civil war, Idlib province had a population of about 30,000 Druze spread across several villages. It is believed that now this number has reduced by two-thirds.
During the civil war, when Syrian and Russian military aircraft attacked neighboring Sunni villages linked to Assad’s opposition, “we would open our homes and welcome them and their wives and children,” Ahmed said.
“We hope that the state will control these matters so that we can all live as families and brothers and no one says, ‘This is Muslim, this is Druze, this is Shia, this is Armenian,'” Ahmed said. “Our ancestors have been living here for a long time.”