How sectarian violence has engulfed the rebirth of Syria

Optimism after the fall of Bashar al-Assad has faded as Israel lays waste to a fragile peace in the name of protecting the nation's Druze ethnic-religious minority, reports Bel Trew

- 

Just a few months into the tentative rebirth of a new Syria, a bloody sectarian conflict is once again raging in the volatile southern borderlands. War now threatens to tip the country over the edge and spill into an already unstable region.

Fighting has engulfed Suweida, a southern city with a majority Druze population - an ethnic-religious minority with roots in Shia Islam, whose adherents live in Syria, Lebanon and Israel. Videos shared from the ground claim to show horrific summary executions and violence.

Neighbouring Israel, facing pressure from its own Druze population, has taken a violent stand. Missiles have rained down on government forces in Suweida and in central Damascus, pounding the country's defence ministry and presidential palace.

In this whirl of shrapnel and shellfire, hopes for a new era of peace in a nation long torn apart by dictatorship and an almost 14-year civil war are quickly fading. Instead, Syria appears on the brink of being dragged into yet another civil and international conflict.

"A lot of the dead have been shot in the head. Eighty per cent of the population are now refugees in the surrounding villages. It's a disaster," says Samer (not his real name), a Druze journalist who spent years clandestinely reporting from Suweida during Syria's bloody civil war.

Samer talks to The Independent from a partially functioning hospital in Suweida, where he says hundreds of the injured and dead were taken. He asks to remain anonymous for fear of his life.

“We are trying to bury the bodies around the hospitals because of the smell and because we are afraid of infection. Some of them were shot in the head, some killed by bombing,” Samer says.