Druze clashes in Syria were not a sectarian conflict Opinions

The period of violence in the southern Syrian province of Sweyoda in July once again raised fears that the country may return to the conflict. The headlines of the media were quick to draw this as another link in the “sectarian conflict” in the region between the Druze societies and the Sunni societies. But this frame is hidden more than it reveals.

Reality is more complicated. While sectarian identities were invoked during periods of tension, the root causes of this conflict lies elsewhere: in historical disputes over lands and pastures, in competition for the methods of smuggling and the state’s attempt, and in economic collapse exacerbated due to long drought and climate change. To reduce this glow to the issue of religious hatred is to erase the deeper political environment, social history of the region and excessive ways to solve tensions.

Druze migration

In the eighteenth century, the Druze began to migrate to Jabal Al -Orab, a mountainous area in what was then Horan Sanjak of the Ottoman Empire, as a result of the competition between the various tribes in Mount Lebanon. They established villages, landed lands, and ultimately affirmed political and military domination in the region.

The Druze saw that the settlement of the region was the restoration of arid terrain – a land it described in their oral traditions as “empty”. But this novel was deeply competed by the Bedouin grazing societies, which had a presence in the region centuries ago.

The Bedouins were a mobile society and did not create permanent settlements; They used the land season to graze their herds, move the old migration methods and rely on water sources that could not be separately owned. For them, these were not vacant spaces but rather landscapes of the ancestors, and the Druze tribes were the new expatriates.

This inevitably led to the conflict. The skirmishes on pasture rights, access to wells, and border control have been a frequent advantage of social fabric in the region. Historical accounts refer to these confrontations in the name of gases – tribal raids and fear that were related to the competition of resources as much as they were about honor and survival. Druze oral history tends to depict the Bedouins as terrible, subject to betrayal. Bedouin novels were filmed Druze as a form of regional transgression.

However, the relationship was not exclusively hostile. There were periods of coexistence and cooperation: Druze farmers rented Badwin, and the Bedouins relied on the Druze markets and grain supply. But this fragile balance often collapsed during times of tension, especially during drought, state collapse, or political intervention.

History of political manipulation

Over the past two centuries, the successive regimes – from the Ottomans to the French mandate, then took the rule of the Assad family – firm local tensions to serve wider strategies to control.

To reaffirm its authority over the increasingly independent meat of Gabal Al -Arabi, the Ottoman Empire turned into the Bedouin tribes and encouraged its raids on the rebel Druze villages. The goal was not only to punish the opposition between the Druze, but also to balance its increasing impact without committing large empire forces. The result was deliberately deepening the hostile works between the continuous and the Bedouins at the beginning of the twentieth century.

France, which took control of Syria after the First World War, also sought to control the region by exploiting the current rift lines. It has given special privileges to the Druze by establishing the Gabal Druze state, but this did not calm down.

In 1925, a revolution broke out in Gabal Al -Arabi, led by Druze Commander Sultan Awrash. Bedouin groups joined Druze, fighting together in major connections such as Al-Kafr and Al-Mazraa battles. The moment of cooperation between the Druze and Bedouins Communities was born from common grievances and the collective opposition of colonial rule. The possibility of a multiple unit in the resistance showed.

After independence in 1946, this fragile relationship deteriorated again when President Adib Shishakli launched a violent campaign against Druze, and imagined it as a threat to national unity. Its forces occupied a mountain and encouraged Badwin tribes on the raid of the villages of Druze, reviving fears of complicity and consolidating a narration of betrayal.

During the same era of early independence, the Syrian constitution began to settle all Bedouin societies and remove many of the privileges granted during the French mandate. In 1958, during the Syria Union with Egypt, the tribal law was canceled, and the Bedouins were stopped possessing any separate legal identity. They also considered a threat to national unity alongside the Druze.

In contracts that followed, especially under the rule of the Assad family, the state maintained stability by suppressing the open conflict without treating basic grievances. In the eighties and nineties of the last century, the Druze and Bedouins societies coexisted uncomfortable, as they had the minimum interaction and disputes at times or grazing conflicts.

This turbulent calm collapsed in 2000, when a local quarrel escalated into fatal clashes in Suwaida. Violence raised historical tensions, hardening collective borders, and revealing the limits of authoritarian stability.

The outbreak of the civil war in 2011 increases the destabilization of relations between the Druze, as well as Islamic factions, especially ISIS (ISIS) and the victory front, and the exploitation of Badwin to recruit fighters and create trousers in the Syrian desert. Although all the Bedouin communities compatible with these groups, the relationship between some Bedouin tribes and Islamic armed groups deepened circular doubts and intensified the Bedouin’s perception as a security threat.

The massacre in Soyoa in 2018, which ISIS carried out and facilitated “sleeper cells” in nearby BDPs, strengthened this narration of betrayal. Thus, the Islamic manipulation of the Bedouin discontent worked to break relations related to fragile communication, which led to the retreat of years of fragile coexistence between two historical groups.

Economic collapse and climate stress

While historical grievances and state manipulation at this stage, it is the current economic collapse and environmental pressure that exacerbated tensions in Sweden in Sweden. The Civil War brought the Syrian economy to the brink of the abyss, which badly affected the south, which the central government has long neglected. For both societies, staying on formal employment or agriculture was not dependent alone, but on the informal economies that intersect and compete in dangerous ways.

In the absence of state services, many parts of southern Syria have become dependent on smuggling methods, especially across the porous Jordanian border. Fuel, drugs, and basic commodities all move through these corridors.

It can mean controlling a checkpoint or a path of smuggling today the difference between contour and destitution. For the Druze factions in the Swituda and Bedouin groups on the sidelines of the desert, this has been translated into a land struggle, disguising as enforcing security or tribal honor.

These are strategic competitions for movement and access. Badwin, accused of cooperation with the travelers, may collide with the Druze militia seeking the region’s police, or vice versa. Accusations of betrayal, revenge killing, and the closure of roads follow. What may appear externally because group violence is, in practice, a struggle for the spoils of the informal economy in an illegal area.

This increases this is the increasing weakness in the region for climate change. Repeated drought has destroyed traditional forms of livelihood. Druze farmers saw the collapse of crops. The pastoral Bedouins can no longer preserve herbal herbal flocks. It was not once a seasonal rhythm of participating-grassy accreditation on open lands in winter, agriculture and harvest in summer-day. Both meetings are now competing for rare and increasingly decomposed lands.

In this context, the framing of violence is purely as a sectarian thunderbolt not only inaccurate; It is dangerous political. Such a novel serves those who benefit from fragmentation. The depiction of local conflicts as ancient hatred justifies repression and delay any serious efforts to implement decentralization or follow -up reconciliation. It erases the long history of cooperation, trade, and even the common struggle between tribal societies and alternatives. The real and material demands grow at stake: safe land rights, sustainable economic opportunities, and ending the imposed political margin.

Understanding this conflict as economic, political, not religious or tribal, is the first step towards ending it.

The opinions expressed in this article are the authors ’king and do not necessarily reflect the position of the editorial island.