Recently, we saw large-scale violence targeting the Syrian Druze community in Sweida province in southern Syria. Druze are a small religious minority group in Syria and are around 3.20 per cent of the total Syrian population. As per the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s forces and allied militias have carried out massacres in Sweida, and approximately 600 members of the Druze community have been killed, including 140 women and children. This eruption of violence was an eerie reminder of a series of violent attacks that have been launched against the Syrian religious and ethnic minorities since the current regime came to power. The Syrian National Army (SNA), which is also part of a coalition led by President Ahmad Al-Shaara’s group Hayat Taheer Al-Sham (HTS), attacked Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in North-East Syria in December 2024. In particular, fierce fighting along the Tishreen Dam became the focal point. In March, indiscriminate killings of Alawites were carried out in the Syrian coastal areas, especially in the city of Banias. While exact figures remain difficult to verify, more than 1,300 individuals, most of them Alawites, lost their lives.
In some cases, entire families were summarily executed. These atrocities were solely directed against the Alawite minority and instigated by militias affiliated with the new regime, ostensibly as part of a response to attacks in Latakia and Tartous from armed groups affiliated with the deposed Assad regime. In the name of fighting former President Bashar Al-Assad’s loyalists, collective punishment was given to the Alawite community.
In June this year, the church in the Syrian capital of Damascus was rocked by a suicide explosion; in this deadly attack, 25 people were killed. The Syrian authorities blamed the attack on the Islamic State (IS) group. However, a lesser-known Sunni extremist group, Saraya Ansar al-Sunnah, claimed responsibility for this attack. Many analysts believe this little-known group has deep links with HTS, as their relations with HTS stretch back to before the Bashar Al-Assad regime’s fall. Then, it was allegedly part of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s broader coalition and helped HTS recruit cells to operate inside Assad-held territory. If we look at the pattern of all these past attacks, it indicates that they were carried out on the instructions or at least with tacit approval of the current Syrian regime. The objective of these attacks was to subdue the minorities through terror, so they wouldn’t demand their political rights. The current Syrian regime got emboldened by the recent lifting of western sanctions and informal recognition it got from Arab states and the United States. In May 2025 the US president met Ahmad Al-Shaara in the Saudi capital Riyadh and expressed admiration for him. He went further and mentioned Al-Shaara as a strongman, the brute, the resilient survivor and declared him a “Tough guy with a very strong past.” The US president should have done research and dug more into the past of Al-Shaara, as his past is one marked by links to al-Qaeda, nothing else.
HTS subscribes to the Salafist school of thought, which is the same as Al-Qaeda’s. The group imposed strict Islamic rule in areas it controlled in the past, and civilians in those areas say the group’s practices are like those of the Islamic State. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham used to host a significant number of foreign fighters, including Arabs, Turks, Chechens, Uzbeks, and Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province. The group’s attitude toward heterodox minorities like the Druze and Alawites never changed. There is, for example, a small community of Druze in northern Idlib whose inhabitants were forced to convert to Islam by HTS’ predecessor, Al-Nusra Front, in 2015. We should always be mindful of the fact that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is no different to Al-Qaeda; it’s just the old wine in a new bottle. In January 2017, HTS was born out of the merger of Salafi jihadists from mainly Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zinki, Liwa al-Haq, Jaysh al-Sunna and Jabhat Ansar al-Din with Al-Nusra Front. HTS tried to showcase through various mergers with other groups that it has ended its affiliation with Al-Qaeda. Still, these mergers did not indicate an ideological split with Al-Qaeda, but were part of a strategy to increase the group’s appeal within Syria.
Ahmad Al-Shaara should come to his senses and understand the fact that just by taking off his military attire and wearing a business suit, he can’t fool the world. Syria is a multiethnic society consisting of Sunni Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, Turkomans, Alawites, Druze and Yazidis. To keep the country united and stable, the future Syrian state should be a nation that accommodates and grants rights to all the ethnic and religious groups, so that everyone feels their participation in running the state. Unless the current regime follows this approach honestly, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) must be isolated and marginalised by the international community. As with the current jihadist ideology and criminal actions, the current regime of Al-Shaara remains a ticking time bomb that arguably poses a greater long-term threat to the region and Syria’s stability.
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