For a moment – perhaps only that – the guns have fallen silent in Sweida, the mountain enclave of Syria’s Druze minority. Reports trickled in that the Bedouin fighters, who had surged through the city’s outskirts, had begun to withdraw. A US envoy, speaking in that well-worn idiom of diplomacy that always manages to say nothing with poise, suggested that a deal was taking hold.
It is hard enough to get a clear picture of the facts in Syria, and harder still to make sense of them. Sense presumes order. But what has unraveled in Syria over decades is something more than disorder. It is the collapse of the very categories that once allowed observers to discern who was who, what was what, and why any of it mattered. The reign of Baathist tyranny may have ended with the fall of Bashar al-Assad. The factions may have mutated, some claiming “moderation.” But the killing continues.
I cannot pretend to offer you a comprehensive analysis of the shifting alliances and factions or the centuries-old enmities now rewritten by blood and satellite maps. There are experts who will try. And there are diplomats who will lie. I will do neither. I offer you instead the story of a single family. That is all I can give you: not a theory of Syria nor a prediction of what is to come, but the voice of one of its daughters.
The voice of a Syrian Druze woman in exile
Her name is Yousra. She is a soft-spoken Druze woman now living in exile in Norway. I sat with her – not as a reporter compiling statistics nor as a scholar mapping revolutions but as a listener. Her brother had been slaughtered by militants. Her relatives have vanished. Her community stood encircled. She spoke with the halting dignity of someone who has outlived the myth of progress.
Her recounting of events is not the sort one finds in the polite pages of newspapers published in Western capitals, where euphemisms are traded like currency and where “stability” is always the word of the day. No, Yousra speaks in a register untouched by the abstractions of foreign correspondents and press attachés. She does not speak of a government “working to restore calm” as the communiqués would have it. She speaks of a government orchestrating terror.
“The Bedouin and ISIS fighters,” she told me, without embellishment or hesitation, “are part of the regime. It’s no secret anymore who they are acting on behalf of. There is no point in pretending anymore.”
“This started long before last week,” Yousra said, as if wearied by the need to correct the world’s forgetfulness. “Ever since the Assad regime ‘fell,’ they’ve tried to enter Sweida again and again. At the checkpoints between Damascus and Sweida, they shoot at us. At the checkpoints, they force Druze women entering Damascus to wear a hijab, even though it’s not part of our religion.”
According to Yousra, this campaign of violence began, as these things often do, with a warning. A Druze man returning from Damascus was intercepted. “They took everything,” Yousra said. “His car, his phone, his money. They tortured him and sent him back to Sweida on foot.” They made him a courier – not of goods but of terror. “They told him to tell the community: ‘We are coming for you. We’ll slaughter your children. We’ll rape your women. We’ll torture you pigs.’”
Soon after, a bus was ambushed. “They opened fire... my uncle was there,” Yousra said. “He dove under the seats and survived. Others weren’t so lucky.” Then her voice faltered, not from uncertainty but from the weight of what was pressing forward. “Soldiers stormed medical centers in Sweida.” Patients were executed in their beds. Doctors and nurses were gunned down where they stood. Elsewhere, women were raped and murdered – children and elders alike. Young men were thrown or forced to jump from balconies. Entire families were lined up and shot in order.
“I have the videos,” Yousra whispered. Her voice, for a moment, barely crossed the distance between us. “They shot a man in a wheelchair. He couldn’t move his hands or legs. And they say we are terrorists. How can a paralyzed man be a threat, a terrorist?”
When I finally sat down to watch the videos Yousra had sent, I found myself in a confrontation not merely with violence but with something deeper, darker, and more elemental. What appeared on the screen was not acts of war but humiliation. The victims were not merely denied life. They were denied dignity, denied even the final shelter of anonymity.
The forced veiling of women was there too, which is not an act of religious modesty. It is a form of conquest inscribed on the body. It is a declaration: “You will become what we demand you to be, or you will disappear.” Similar acts, brutal in their intimacy, were visited upon Druze men, forced at gunpoint to shave off their mustaches. For the jihadist, the mustache is haram, forbidden by divine law. But for the Druze, it is a mark of pride, a quiet symbol of continuity, of masculine dignity passed down through generations. To shave it is to efface not just hair but heritage. It is to say: “Your customs are void, your ancestors misled, your identity – over.”
In one video, soldiers laugh as they drive a car over a dead man’s body. “We’re crushing you. This is your fate.... Do you see the Prophet Muhammad now?” Another shows a soldier looting a shop in Sweida: “God is the greatest.... We’re right in the middle of the Druze pigs’ market. We’ve taken everything now, and in a few hours, God willing, everyone who follows [Druze leader Hikmat] al-Hajari will also be pigs.”
Another captures an ISIS terrorist, filmed before enacting slaughter, announcing his act as a holy obligation. And then, as if to complete the nightmarish theater, the final video shows none other than soldiers of the Syrian army doing the same – looting, killing, laughing, repeating slogans. This violence reveals the paradox – no, the blasphemy – at the heart of the jihadist violence: that in his act, he does not fear God, as Islam requires him to. He believes, utterly and fanatically, that God has made him the judge. That his hands, blood-soaked and trembling with adrenaline, are the very agents of redemption. Not submission to God but impersonation of God.
On the call with Yousra, she recalled her brother. “He was very handsome,” she smiled. He was in his early thirties – a businessman, a soccer fan, soon to be engaged. They spoke three hours before he was murdered. He had told her not to worry. “We are strong... no one will touch the Druze.” And then, hours of silence went by. She called him many times. Finally, someone answered. “It wasn’t him. It was one of them. The man said, ‘We slaughtered him. But don’t worry – we tortured him first.’ And then he laughed.” Later, Yousra found her brother’s photo in a Telegram group where fighters post their crimes like trophies. “They had stepped on him. Only half his face was still there.” She found videos too – of corpses burned, shot again and again. “To leave no hope.”
Yousra’s story is not an exception. It is a page from a larger, blood-stained script in the Middle East: the slow extermination of pluralism in the Arab world, the methodical replacement of communities with cults, of nations with dogmas. I ended by asking Yousra a simple question: What is it that you wish for? “Let us live like the Druze in Israel,” she said. “That’s all we want. Peace.” We have heard these cries before. From Yazidis on Mount Sinjar. From Christians in Mosul. From Copts in Minya. From women, always from women.
If you were to work up a color-coded map of the Middle East – ethnicities here, religions there, languages bleeding into dialects – you would behold a vision so intricate, so kaleidoscopically fractured, it would seem to belong not to geography but to modernist art. The Western press, however, in its unfortunate habit of reducing the Middle East to slogans, rarely sees it this way. Algeria is listed as an Arab country, yet the Kabyles, who do not consider themselves Arab and never have, may very well be a majority, depending on which census you trust and which mythology you reject. Iran is a Persian Shi’a state, until you realize that Bahá’ís, Kurds, Azeris, Arabs, and Baluchis complicate that narrative beyond repair – and that Persian Shi’a orthodoxy, at least in its theocratic form, may represent not a consensus but a coercive imposition. And then there are the Kurds – abandoned, betrayed, stateless. Forever stateless? It seems obscene even to phrase the question.
Yousra’s voice, steady even as it cracked, should ring out beyond the borders of Norway, across the chancelleries of Europe. Because in those capitals, there is too much silence from the lecture halls. The same voices that once hailed the Arab Spring now seem struck dumb. Perhaps because the ideological compass that guided commentary in 2011 has long since spun out of control. Or perhaps it is simply that the victims this time are Druze – an inconvenient minority, neither Muslim enough for Leftist solidarity nor Western enough for sympathy.
So let us entertain a revolutionary idea: that we treat our friends as friends, even if our friends are inconvenient. Even if our friends have enemies. The Druze of Israel, the Druze of Syria – these are not merely strategic allies or minority footnotes in a broader Arab tableau. These are people who have bled for ideas that ought to be familiar to us: loyalty, dignity, and memory. They are our allies not only on the battlefield but in the history of the human conscience. Shouldn’t that count for something?
In the end, Yousra spoke five words that should echo louder than any speech, louder than any official condemnation: “Let us live in peace.”■