US envoy Tom Barrack’s claims that the area between Sweida and Daraa was “the captagon manufacturing operation of the world” and that a Druze sheikh was using perceived American and Israeli backing to “persecute other Druze” have sparked outrage in the Druze community, with some Israeli experts telling The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that the remarks had led them to question his suitability for the role.
Speaking in an interview with Lebanese-Australian podcaster Mario Nawfal on Friday, Barrack alleged that Druze in the area were living off the manufacture and sale of illicit drugs.
“It's not Israel that worries me. It's a particular Druze sheikh who utilizes the perception of Israeli backing of some alignment with America to persecute other Druze,” Barrack said.
Although Barrack did not name the sheikh, his comments have been widely interpreted in Arab media as referring to Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, a spiritual leader of the Druze community who has called for Israeli support and independence from Syria.
Growing calls for Syrian Druze independence
Calls for independence and Israeli support among Syria’s Druze community have grown more frequent since Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa came to power in late 2024. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the formerly designated terrorist organization led by Sharaa, has a documented history of persecuting Druze, while the sectarian massacres in July 2025 and sporadic violence since have further fueled fears of Damascus’s Islamist government.
Against this backdrop, Israeli Druze diplomat and historian Dr. Reda Mansour criticized Barrack’s remarks in a post on X, describing his attribution of the global Captagon trade to the Druze region and his criticism of its local leadership as “highly irresponsible” and untruthful.
“By baselessly criminalizing an entire ethnic minority, these statements put the vulnerable Druze community in southern Syria at direct risk of sectarian violence and targeted jihadi attacks. Painting a minority enclave as an illicit hub paints a dangerous target on their back for extremist networks,” Mansour wrote. “Diplomacy demands accuracy, not reckless generalizations that compromise human lives. We stand in solidarity with the Druze community in Syria.”
Mansour’s concerns come amid continued violence against the community. More than 1,300 Druze were killed in the July 2025 massacres in Sweida and surrounding villages, according to UN figures, while subsequent outbreaks of sectarian violence have continued to see civilians abducted and killed.
Civilians have also been killed in Jordanian military strikes on facilities Amman alleges are used for weapons storage and drug manufacturing. In a strike on January 18, 2024, for example, Jordan killed sisters Farah and Dima, aged three and five, along with their parents and other members of their extended family.
Dr Mordechai Kedar, a research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, told The Post that Barrack’s comments, and “lack of understanding” on the region have “brought a lot of damage to the whole Middle East.”
Doubting Barrack’s knowledge of the issue of Sweida or the sectarian violence, Kedar said that he thought Barrack was relying on information provided to him and not the information on the ground or from the people affected by the violence.
Jonathan Hessen, a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, added that Barrack's remarks were not just “dismaying” because they showed a disregard for the safety and security of a community that has already been subjected to multiple massacres but because his statements were factually unfounded.
“Even when the Jordanians launched airstrikes in southern Syria, the majority of the targeted warehouses were actually in Daraa, the province south of Sweida, where the Bedouins reside,” he explained. “One warehouse was also targeted in Sweida, although I am not aware of its contents. However, those targets were provided to the Jordanians by Damascus, so there are certain aspects that need to be taken into account.”
He noted that Barrack has a pattern of minimizing the suffering of those across the Middle East where the impact would disrupt his broader plans, referencing both Barrack’s comments last week, where he insisted that the Islamic regime was “not evil,” and past commentary on Syrian violence.