Druze Families Grieve the Massacre in Sweida From London

As massacres unfold in southern Syria, Druze families in Britain share their grief and beg for the world to pay attention.

It was around 7am in mid-July when Omar was jolted awake by the sound of his wife screaming. She was crying and beating her chest—her 21-year-old brother had just been kidnapped. For chaos was raging nearly 3,000 miles away in Sweida, a region in southern Syria where Druze families like theirs were being targeted in a brutal wave of violence.

Omar still can’t comprehend why his in-laws were among the targets. “They work in agriculture. They’re peaceful people.”

Later that morning, safe in his London home, he turned to Facebook for answers. What he found broke him. A video showed militants laughing as they executed his mother’s 87-year-old uncle and his cousin, who was in his 40s.

In total, 14 of Omar’s maternal relatives were killed. Six of his friends died, too. His wife lost multiple family members.

“There’s one video I can’t forget. A father whose only son was shot in front of him. They drove over his body with a car.” Though Omar speaks quietly and remains composed, I can hear the anguish in his voice.

As for his brother-in-law, he narrowly escaped death. A machine gun was held to his head, but he was spared only after a Bedouin man who knew his family intervened.

He was lucky. But luck hasn’t spared most in Sweida.

Omar and I meet in a lively north London café. The 43-year-old recounts the horrors unfolding in his place of birth. He is one of several members of the Druze diaspora in the UK who are now speaking out, desperate for the world to hear what their community is enduring.

The summer’s violence began with a local dispute but quickly exploded into full-blown clashes between Bedouin tribes and Druze fighters. On July 14, Syria’s interim government forces tried to enter the province. When the Druze resisted, there was bloodshed.

Social media was flooded with disturbing footage, with even children and the elderly among the dead. In one video, a man in military uniform forcibly shaves the trademark white moustache of a Druze elder—a grave insult in their culture.

Within a week, more than 33 villages were burned. UN experts reported looting, killings, and livestock theft, calling it a “targeted campaign against the Druze minority”. Government soldiers filmed themselves mocking and desecrating Druze homes. In one recording, a fighter holds a machete to the camera, saying, “We’re on our way to distribute aid,” then tears down a photo of a Druze leader and tramples it underfoot. “On behalf of the tribes, oh Druze and Alawites, we are coming for you with sectarianism,” he continues.

Another fighter gloats as he drives past bodies in a street in Sahwet Blata. “These are your dogs, al-Hijri,” he says, referring to one of the community’s spiritual figures, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, around 1,500 Druze have been killed, though precise figures remain contested.

And the horror didn’t end with death. Women and children have been kidnapped. I have heard reports of underage girls being raped. “The terrorists told one woman, who had been raped, ‘we’ll come back in 9 months to collect the children’,” says Etab Albeetar, a mother-of-two originally from Shahba city. On her in-laws’ side, 15 members of one family were killed.

Dr. Basheer al-Aware, a Syrian doctor living in Winchester, lost three cousins and several friends from medical school. “I have seen videos of people beheaded with knives, and people were celebrating it,” he tells me.

Basheer has taken leave from work to process the trauma. “It’s not a conflict, it’s a war against the community. I never imagined this would happen in Syria. I thought it was a moderate society.”

As thousands had to flee their homes, bodies were left to decompose on the streets in the summer heat. Relatives who returned later struggled to identify them.

Omar remembers a time when Sweida was a hub during Syria’s long civil war, leaving more than 13 million people forcibly displaced. “We didn’t call them refugees. They were our guests,” he says.

Now, many of those same communities are silent—or worse.

“I saw some Syrians online saying this is a form of jihad,” says Etab. “We feel unsafe knowing that they don’t view us as we viewed them… as partners.”

She watched the atrocities unfold online. “They were shouting things like, ‘We’ll teach you how to listen.’”

Etab raised the issue with her MP. The response? A short note of sympathy, and then silence.

Though her city, Shahba, escaped the worst of the violence, it’s now overwhelmed with displaced families. Nearly 200,000 people have been displaced, according to the UN, although this figure may be an underestimate.

Pregnant women are giving birth in abandoned schools. “That means the children aren’t getting an education,” says Etab. “The last thing we need is a generation that grows up uneducated.”

At least 105 Druze women and girls have been abducted. To help rape survivors, the Israeli Druze tried to send morning-after pills into Syria—alongside a fatwa from their spiritual leader, Sheikh Muwaffaq Tarif, permitting their use.

The community has also called for a humanitarian corridor, as aid is barely getting in. Even when it does, they say much of it is looted. The banking system has collapsed. Cancer patients are going without treatment. A young diabetic woman died due to a lack of insulin.

At the main hospital in Sweida, doctors are reportedly performing surgery without sterile conditions.

Omar fidgets with a sugar packet absentmindedly as he recalls how great interfaith relations used to be. “We never had problems with anyone before. Suddenly, this ideology came to Syria and ruined everything.”

I ask what happened. “Who is the president?” he replies with a wry grin. “A former al-Qaeda fighter. You can’t get worse than that.”

The Syrian interim president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, has been welcomed on the international stage. Last week, he addressed the UN General Assembly—the first Syrian head of state to do so in 60 years. Domestically, however, the situation remains dire.

Following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024, Sharaa’s group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, dissolved and appointed him president. His initial moves, such as announcing a general amnesty and convening a national dialogue conference, generated cautious optimism. But violence and impunity have since undermined faith in the new administration.

In March, after Assad loyalists attacked government forces in Jableh—part of the coastal area which forms the heartland of the Alawite minority sect to which the al-Assad family belongs—reprisals led to the massacre of 1,500 mostly Alawite civilians.

Four months later, Sweida suffered a similar fate.

While Western governments have been quick to re-establish diplomatic and economic ties, some Syrians remain unconvinced.

“[Al-Sharaa] wears a suit and smiles for the cameras,” Etab says. “But we know he’s a terrorist. There is zero trust.”

Amnesty International has confirmed that government and affiliated forces were responsible for extrajudicial executions in Sweida, with victims killed in homes, schools, hospitals, and public squares.

Diana Semaan, Amnesty’s Syria researcher, said these killings were “yet another grim reminder of the deadly consequences of impunity for sectarian-based killings in Syria, which has emboldened government and affiliated forces to kill without fear of accountability.”

The human rights group is also investigating alleged crimes committed by the Druze,

There is now a growing sentiment that it might be time for a completely separate state for the Druze, something they have never seriously considered in the past.

Just recently, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri reiterated demands for a separate Druze region, though his opponents accuse him of siding with Israel.

When Israeli warplanes struck Syrian army tanks advancing toward Sweida on July 15, the government in Jerusalem framed it as a humanitarian intervention. Israel’s growing engagement in Druze matters and the delicate situation in southern Syria have broader geopolitical consequences that extend beyond the current conflict.

And while the Druze have a reputation for being loyal to the state where they reside, recent events in Sweida have been a turning point. “There’s no way back from this,” says Omar. “How can you ever talk to the people who killed your family?”

For Basheer, even the civil war under the Assad regime didn’t diminish the Druze sense of national pride. “Ten years ago, people in Sweida were unhappy but still united. There was a stronger national identity. Now they’ve lost it,” he says. “If people lose their national identity and don’t feel a sense of belonging to a certain place, then it’s difficult to build the country again.”

Even Washington seems to be reassessing its position. US Syria envoy Thomas Barrack acknowledged the need to consider “not a federation but something short of that, in which you allow everybody to keep their own integrity, their own culture, their own language, and no threat of Islamism.”

In the meantime, violence continues to plague Sweida. Just a few days ago, there were clashes between Syrian government forces and the Druze. Kidnapped women and children have still not been returned. The community in Britain watches on hopelessly, desperate for more aid to get in before the onset of winter. If not, the humanitarian situation will only worsen.

“I cry every night, after my wife and son are asleep,” says Omar. “It’s the children in Sweida I am concerned about. They will pay the price for all this.”

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