Midstream in the Middle East's Rubicon
Whatever you've heard about the massacres in Suwayda, it's probably wrong.
I’ve spent the weekend on inquiries picking up from The Smog of War, here. Ground-level visibility in Syria is often near zero at the best of times, but the media landscape has been exceedingly dark with disinformation and propaganda over the past few days.
Cutting through all the Syrian smog is an effort I’ve been making over the past 15 years for the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, and Macleans, and from reporting directly from Northern Syria, from Turkey, Jordan, Iraqi Kurdistan and Israel. I’ve been giving it my best shot these past few days, but it’s a hard slog to confirm and verify the main elements of the disturbing picture that’s emerging.
I’d intended a full Sunday Real Story newsletter yesterday but there were some important angles I needed to hammer down, and then there were some dizzying developments over the weekend. By Saturday night it looked like a cessation in the bloodletting in and around Syria’s Druze-majority southern governorate of Suwayda might hold. By Sunday morning that wasn’t so clear. Who knows what fresh hell might be upon us by the time you read this.
Why it matters
It should matter that more than 1,000 people have been killed and 128,000 people have been displaced, and that the conflict in Suwayda threatens to up-end the Syrian revolution and plunge the country back into the mayhem of the Assad years. It matters because we’re at a junction in history that’s more bewildering than anything since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s, and everything either awful or favorable to the cause of democracy and stability in the Greater Middle East now radiates outward from Damascus.
To begin with stuff almost everybody gets wrong: For starters, Ahmed Al-Sharaa’s government in Damascus has not been engaged in a slaughter of the Druze of Suwayda. The Syrian Druze have not been imploring the Israelis to rescue them by bombing Syria’s transitional government.
The atrocities in Suwayda have been committed by “all sides.” Israel, too, has killed civilians. It’s all perfectly honorable for the Israelis to pledge protection to Syria’s Druze, and Israel’s Druze have been beside themselves with worry lately. But it’s necessary to question what Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy is here. There are also quite a few troubling questions about the bona fides of the Israelis’ primary interlocutor in Suwayda, Hikmat al-Hijri.
Hijri can be described as the hereditary spiritual leader of Syria’s Druze. He is also not unreasonably understood as an opportunistic warlord who has tanked at least three U.S.-backed ceasefire agreements over the past ten days.
Those are just some of the incumbrances littering the foreground. . .