Druze community in Syria’s Idlib province on edge after targeted shooting kills 3

KAFR MARIS, Syria (AP) — The small Druze minority in Syria’s northern Idlib province was shaken by an apparently targeted shooting that killed three members of their community this week.

The attack came in the wake of clashes in another area of Syria months earlier in which Druze communities were targeted, and amid heightened sectarian tensions and calls by some Druze groups for secession.

No group claimed responsibility for the attack in Idlib 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 the Islamist former insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which led last year’s offensive that unseated Syria’s former autocratic leader, President Bashar Assad. Former HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa is now the country’s interim president.

At the funeral Wednesday for the victims, one of their uncles, Rafiq Ahmad, said the Druze in Idlib had in recent months faced false accusations of being affiliated with Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, a Druze spiritual and political leader in the southern Sweida province with affiliated militias that have clashed with pro-government forces.

Ahmad said his nephew and nieces had taken the van to a dentist appointment in a neighboring town Tuesday and were returning when the gunmen opened fire on them.

“If they had wanted to rob the van they would have made a checkpoint and stopped it to rob it, but they intended to kill and to intimidate and scare the people here and maybe to make them leave this country,” he said.

Ahmad said there had also been recent incidents of robbery and intimidation and that olive farmers in the area were afraid to go to their orchards. He called on the state to arrest the killers and to put checkpoints around the Druze villages for their protection.

Abdelrahman Ghazal, a local government official, said authorities are “taking the necessary procedures” to identify and prosecute the perpetrators of the deadly shooting, and are installing more checkpoints and security cameras in the area.

“As we all know, the purpose of this wicked criminal act is to undermine civil peace in the region,” he said.

There had been previous attacks on Druze communities in Idlib during the civil war, including one in 2015 in which militants with al-Nusra Front – the predecessor of HTS – killed at least 20 Druze villagers. Islamist militants also forced hundreds of members of the sect, whom they consider to be heretics, to covert to Sunni Islam.

While tensions had calmed in recent years, they have risen again since Assad’s fall.

In July, armed groups affiliated with al-Hijri clashed with local Bedouin clans in Sweida, spurring intervention by government forces who effectively sided with the Bedouins. Hundreds of civilians, mostly Druze, were killed, many by government fighters.

Israel intervened in the clashes on behalf of the Druze – who are also a significant minority in Israel – launching airstrikes on Syrian government forces. The intervention further stoked sectarian tensions, with many Sunnis accusing the Druze of being traitors.

A 10th century offshoot of Shiite Islam, the Druze made up about 5 percent of Syria’s prewar population of 23 million people. Idlib province had a population of about 30,000 Druze spread over a number of villages before the country’s 2011 uprising-turned-civil war. The number is now believed to have decreased by as much as two thirds.

During the civil war, Ahmad said, when Syrian and Russian military planes would strike neighboring Sunni villages affiliated with the opposition to Assad, “we used to open up our houses and welcome them and their wives and children,” he said.

“We hope that the state will control these matters so we can all live as family and brothers with no one saying, ‘This one is a Muslim, this one is Druze, this one is Shiite, this one is Armenian,’” Ahmad said. “Our ancestors have lived here for a long time.”