For Sheikh Mowafaq Tarif, the spiritual leader of Israel’s 150,000-strong Druze population, only one man can ensure the safety and dignity of minorities in Syria: US President Donald Trump. Aware that Trump reads The Jerusalem Post, Sheikh Tarif issued a message:
“Today, the US is the leader of the whole world. America must protect all minorities, as it is doing today, working to preserve them and striving for peace so that it exists throughout the whole world,” he said.
“And in Syria, we wish for all the Syrian people, after suffering for tens of years, which they endured under the former regime, and its repression, terror, and persecution of its people: We hoped for good from the new regime, that it would be a regime that embraces all its people.
But unfortunately, this did not happen,” Tarif lamented.
“There is still another opportunity for the regime to embrace its people, but we need America, and the American president, Trump, to be the one involved in this – to provide guarantees, meaning to guarantee the rights of all minorities in Syria, from our Christian brothers and the Kurds, and the Alawites, the Yazidis, and the Druze: all the minorities in Syria,” the sheikh said.
“There must be guarantees that protect them, and if there is any breach of these guarantees, all the sanctions that were on Syria should be reinstated. This is what we hope for from President Trump in Syria.”
Travelling three hours north of Tel Aviv last Monday, with heavy camera equipment and laptops in tow, the Post arrived in the northern Druze village of Julius, at Tarif’s home.
Trust in Syrian authorities remains low, the sheikh and members of the Israeli Druze community told us, despite the regime carrying out a wave of arrests against officials known to have been involved in the genocide.
Syrian Judge Hatem Naasa, who is leading the investigation into the massacres in southern Syria, told reporters in Damascus on the same day as the Post’s visit that several security and military officials had been detained for participating in the brutality.
However, Naasa declined to provide an official death toll or confirm how many officials had been arrested for their alleged involvement in the atrocities.
Sadistic attackers and assaults
The shadowy promise of accountability comes after months-long attempts by Syrian authorities to paint the conflict as an eruption between Bedouin and Druze militias in Syria’s south – despite years of general calm under Assad, and the Druze’s own account of the violence.
In the Druze command and control center, where a team of former IDF soldiers from the community scour for information to coordinate potential relief efforts, a large screen displayed what they described as significant evidence against the regime.
Alongside graphic footage of torture and killings in the villages, the Post was shown clips of individuals driving government trucks with their identifying features crudely painted over, who were participating in the violence, including attackers wearing official security force uniforms.
We were also shown footage of prisoners captured during the attacks and the confessions they gave while in captivity.
The adult men, who appeared to have travelled from across the Middle East and parts of Asia to participate in the assaults, claimed they had been instructed by authorities in Syria to rape, pillage, and kill as they pleased. The Post is unable to verify whether the confessions were made under duress.
The men, some said to have been from the Taliban and others from ISIS, “came to Syria and they joined under the name of the regime, to be one of the fighters, so-called soldiers, and to do whatever they do,” one of the center’s experts told us. “They saw the opportunity [for] doing what they really like to do, which is killing.”
The footage shown to the Post appeared sadistic in nature. We reviewed clips of men forced to jump off tall buildings at gunpoint, people being dragged away and driven from their villages, and the bodies of women and children left to decompose in the streets. Bodies were burned, the videos revealed, and people were beheaded.
In one video, a man was repeatedly interrogated on whether he was Druze, and each time he responded that he was Syrian and only wanted bread. When he eventually admitted to being part of the minority community, he was shot and seen collapsing to the ground.
Another senior official commented, “In the past 14 years, Syria was a magnet for radicals from all around the world… all the crazy people came now to this playground that’s called Syria. And now they have a regime, they have a country. They got their uniform, and now they’re official… now they have [the official right to] delegitimize me.”
The abuse of Druze women and civilians
Despite having captured some of their attackers, many women, men, and children from the community were abducted during the mass intrusions. While the exact number of hostages taken by surrounding Bedouin tribes, ISIS, and government forces is unknown, a volunteer told the Post that the number exceeded 500, including at least 17 women.
With many families entirely wiped out, reporting missing loved ones has been a significant hurdle for those trying to understand the scale of the destruction. UN experts in August confirmed the abduction of at least 105 Druze women and girls by armed groups affiliated with the Syrian interim authorities, though some have since been returned in prisoner-for-hostage deals.
Many of the attacks were said to be centred on humiliation and religious persecution. Religious men were held down and had their facial hair cut from them – a humiliation ritual described by posters put up around the command-and-control center as “Holocaust-esque.”
The motion of applying scissors to the upper lip and beard area has since become part of an Islamist dog whistle used globally to signal support for extremist groups.
Less visible than the public shavings, many Druze women were sexually assaulted during the attacks.
In the conservative community, these violations carry a lifetime of shame and trauma, delicately explained to the Post by a female volunteer from the organization Bonot Alternativa Druze, the Druze chapter of the national women’s organization in Israel, building an alternative future for gender equality.
Volunteers attempted to arrange for the morning-after pill to be smuggled to the women, hoping that preventing pregnancies would allow them to grieve with some degree of privacy, but the smugglers were killed before they could deliver the medication, she said.
While the testimonies of survivors may prompt the United Nations or other international bodies to take a more active role in Syria, the volunteer explained that they could not ask any woman to place herself in such a difficult public spotlight without some assurance that it would help their community.
Needing the world to know the truth but unwilling to sacrifice the comfort and dignity of Syrian Druze women, Sheikh Tarif has repeatedly acknowledged and condemned the sexual violence publicly. In July, he told Israeli media about a five-year-old girl being raped, and how the militias entered “a holy place where women were hiding to avoid being harmed, and burned them alive.”
“They entered the hospital, raped nurses, and killed them along with the injured. It’s all documented in videos,” he told Walla. The sheikh has also spoken at length about the issue with both US and UN officials, refusing to allow the situation to be swept under the rug.
Fix it - tomorrow
Despite the immense pain experienced by the community, officials expressed hope that the Sharaa regime would moderate and create a prosperous future for all Syrians.
“It’s in the hands of the regime. It’s in the hands of the government. They have the access and the power if they want to show the people good intentions and good faith, to process a good thing – it’s in their hands,” Tarif said, according to a volunteer translator.
“They can show it tomorrow; they could decide to show good intentions tomorrow – they can release all the hostages,” he explained.
“It’s not late yet. We can still do it tomorrow,” he continued, citing diminishing hope that the situation could improve without more violence. “Tomorrow, bring back the villages. Tomorrow, bring back the kidnapped. Tomorrow, let us provide them with the medical support that we want to give them. It’s a good intention.”
When asked why the campaign for the return of the Syrian Druze hostages has been much quieter than Israel’s – and whether this was to allow the new regime to change its current course – it was quickly explained that the world is eager to ignore the realities on the ground.
No ears to hear our screaming
Retired Lt.-Col. Akram Mansour, one of many Druze who volunteer at the center after a long military career in the IDF, explained to the Post that the Syrian Druze are surrounded by larger geopolitical issues that are stifling hopes for international support.
Only 3% of Syria’s population is inconsequential to the global powers when compared to the economic and social benefits that come with recognizing Ahmed al-Sharaa’s regime.
The brutality perpetrated in Bashar Assad’s Syria has forced millions to flee to Europe and the United States, creating new security concerns for the West and adding strain to already overburdened welfare systems.
By recognizing Sharaa as having legitimate leadership, lifting sanctions, and overlooking his past connections to Al Qaeda groups in Iraq, the West has been able to return asylum seekers it was previously obligated to house.
“We screamed from day one; the sheikh told us to tell everybody about the kidnapping,” Mansour said, commenting on the absence of Israeli media at the control center.
“It’s not about us [deciding to use a quieter strategy or not], moving our information to the world – no, we do it. It’s the world that doesn’t want to hear about it. And I can’t blame the world when inside the house, inside my country, the issue is not that important,” the retired volunteering IDF officer said.
“If it were actually important, it would be on all the news channels every night: two, three, four minutes about what is actually happening in Sweida – what the Druze of Israel are asking for,” he said. “None of that is happening. So, we screamed about it, but there are no ears to hear our screaming.”
A terrorist in a suit
Adding insult to injury, Mansour expressed his community’s shock at Trump’s warm embrace of Sharaa during his visit to the United States in November.
“He’s staying in the US. He’s visiting the United Nations. He’s speaking day and night, while his people, his regime, are continuing to kill the Druze and other minorities. So how can we explain such a thing?” he asked.
“He’s showing the world one picture, and the world is buying it. I call it the ‘suit picture’ – and they are buying it. Maybe because they want to buy it. They want to believe that there’s going to be a change.
As Trump “jokes with him, makes fun with him, [as] they sit together for dinners, and whatever – the question is, would Trump have sat with Osama bin Laden, with Hitler, with Mussolini?
They’re all terrorists,” Mansour said. “So, the image is that Trump supports him, and he shows everyone that it is okay, and he is a normative person. That gives him the legitimacy to do whatever they are doing.”
While Sharaa has changed his military garb for a suit, Mansour was skeptical that the new leader of Syria would have dropped his Islamist extremist leanings. He was designated as a terrorist by the US in 2013, the same year he told Al Jazeera that Syria should be run by Sharia Law.
Mansour and the wider Druze community were not the first to raise concern that Sharaa’s reformed image was smoke and mirrors to gain international recognition.
Sara Kayyali, a former senior Syria and Jordan researcher in the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch, confirmed the organization had testimonies that people living in a province under his control were repeatedly subjected to torture during a PBS Frontline interview – the same 2021 program that saw Sharaa claim every person in the Islamic world was happy at the September 11 attacks on the US.
Trump could have leveraged Sharaa’s desire for legitimacy as a way to protect the rights and dignity of minorities in Syria, Mansour pointed out.
Minorities in Syria under attack
Sheikh Tarif spoke at length in support of the Alawites, who have also been victims of recent waves of sectarian violence. Followers of a branch of Shi’ite Islam who make up 10% of Syria’s population, they have been frequently attacked by the same largely Sunni networks attacking the Druze.
Alawite communities in Homs were burned and pillaged over the past week by Bedouin militias after the killing of a Bedouin couple sparked new unrest. Connected to former president Assad only by shared ancestry and the perception of favourable treatment under his regime, the Alawites have repeatedly been targeted by pro-Sharaa militias.
In March alone, more than a thousand Alawites were killed in response to deadly attacks on security forces by former officers loyal to Assad.
Responding to the violence, the Alawite community has begun demonstrating against Sharaa. Sheikh Ghazal Ghazal, an influential Syrian Alawite leader, has started pushing for self-determination as a means to end what he described as attempts at “ethnic cleansing.”
While the Alawites may lean toward self-determination, it was repeatedly made clear that the Druze were not interested in their own nation and were not focused on living in a democracy, only wanting to continue living on the land in peace.
“We don’t have a problem with any regime, country, or religion that keeps us alive, that accepts us as a Druze without being forced to do anything,” another of the center’s experts explained.
“We have no problem with that, and we have no problem with the Muslim governments in Jordan and in Saudi Arabia; there are Sunnis in Dubai. They’re Sunnis. We have no problem with anyone, because they respect the citizens.”
While the Druze said they had very different aspirations than their Alawite counterparts, officials at the command center said they shared a common path, which has informed their decisions.
Seeing how the Alawites were brutalized when they laid down their weapons, the officials explained that the Syrian Druze have refused to sacrifice their ability to defend themselves by disarming, an act they believe saved countless lives.
Ethnic tensions spread from the South
While the violence has seen temporary pauses, the cultural impact has been deeply felt across Syria. Over 180,000 people remain displaced, the UN confirmed earlier this week, leading many to attempt to find employment in Syria’s major cities, but where they instead have found that ethnic tensions have spread.
The Druze volunteers explained that in the wake of the attacks, Syria has become an apartheid state where their people cannot receive medical treatment, cannot find employment, and are left with the decision to suppress their identities or risk being killed.
A volunteer explained how he had been speaking to a Syrian Druze man who was looking for work. While many shops are looking for employees, they ushered him away when they learned of his ethnic identity and told him he was lucky they didn’t kill him.
As the economic opportunities are stripped from the Druze of Syria, their ability to receive aid from their Israeli brethren has become an essential tool for survival. With the Trump administration pushing for Jerusalem to thaw relations with Damascus, and Sharaa demanding an Israeli withdrawal, hopes for survival pin on Israel not buckling to the pressure.
A Syrian Druze previously spoke to the Post about his anxieties that Israel would lose its momentum on the issue, noting that the incoming winter, the slaughter of livestock during the attack, and the authority’s attempts to block aid meant that the already difficult situation is only expected to worsen.
In a world that continues to ignore them and allows their hosts to terrorize and abuse them, Syria’s Druze community is pinning its last hopes on neighbouring Israel. Their cousins in the Jewish state pray that Trump and the US will guarantee their long-desired peace after decades marred by conflict and religious persecution.