Almost eight months since Bashar Al-Assad’s fall, deadly sectarian clashes in southwestern Syria have exposed one of the biggest challenges to the country’s postwar recovery — the new leader’s failure to forge national unity.
After fighting broke out earlier this month in the province of Suwayda between the Druze religious minority and Bedouin tribes, President Ahmed Al-Sharaa deployed forces seeking to quell the violence. But reports by independent monitors said government forces — most of whom, like Sharaa, belong to the country’s Sunni Muslim majority — instead sided with their co-religionists, the Bedouin and allied militias, to target the Druze.