It was a scene that has become all too familiar in today’s war-torn Middle East: civilians murdered in cold blood. Just over a week ago, long-running tensions between Bedouin and Druze in Suwayda province in southern Syria erupted. Amid the turmoil, Syrian government forces sent to restore order ended up contributing to the violence, further stoking the flames of civil conflict and provoking a fresh round of Israeli airstrikes on Syrian government troops and the Ministry of Defence in Damascus.

Militants on all sides committed atrocities against non-combatants, although the death toll is highest on the Druze side. Chilling reports of the ritual humiliation of Druze sheikhs, wanton brutality enacted on women and children hiding in their homes, and the summary execution of innocent bystanders, all being carried out by men under the banner of the Syrian government, bring to mind the previous killings of ‘Alawites in Latakia province earlier in the year. Together, such events have shattered the country’s fragile civil peace, and punctured the heady optimism that followed the fall of the Assad regime; the post-Assad vision of a Syria for all Syrians threatens to unravel.

For now, a ceasefire brokered by the United States has brought a temporary pause to the fighting, but it hangs by a thread. The mutual enmities and animosities unleashed by the killing of civilians by all sides will live long in the memory. Worse still, they will undermine efforts made by Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, to unify his country’s administration and armed forces. The overtly sectarian nature of the violence in Suwayda will only poison the possibility of co-existence between Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority and its many ethnic and religious minorities. Not only Syria’s Druze, but also its Kurds, ‘Alawite and Isma’ili Shia, and Christians will have watched events unfolding in Suwayda with horror and concern.

The Druze are no strangers to persecution and upheaval. From their origins, they have striven to maintain their distinct minority culture and protect their interests under the political domination of others. The Druze are Arabs who adhere to a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion that emerged in 11th-century Cairo under the Shia Fatimid Caliphate. It was a time of heightened apocalyptic expectations – fertile ground for the emergence of innovative and eclectic religious ideas. They call themselves al-Muwahiddūn (‘the monotheists’) or Ahl at-Tawhīd (‘the people of unity’), invoking the Islamic concept of the unity of God.

Yet while the Druze emerged from a Shia Islamic milieu, they are emphatically not Muslims. Instead, their faith, which to outsiders often appears mysterious and eccentric, is a fascinating blend of theological traditions. Like Pythagoras and Plato, they believe in reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. They venerate the prophets of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and worship the same, singular God. At the same time, they also revere the Fatimid Caliph Abu ‘Ali al-Mansūr (r. 996-1021) as a reincarnation of Allah, and believe that he will return in a grand apocalypse to inaugurate a new golden age of justice. They hold the Qur’an to be a sacred text, but they also have their own Epistles of Wisdom. They repeat the Islamic Shahada but reject the Islamic Shariah. In their rebellion against the strict legalism of Sunni Islam, and their embrace of an alternative relationship with the divine, the early Druze resemble both the radical Protestant reformers of 16th-century Europe and the Sufi mystics of the Islamic World.

There are no longer Druze communities in Egypt, but since the 11th century they have spread across the Levant. Today, there are just over a million Druze living across Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. The region’s largest Druze community is in Syria, where they account for about three per cent of the population. The majority of the Syrian Druze live in Suwayda province, in the Hawran Plateau, an area which borders on Jordan to the south.

Even in the aftermath of the horror and tragedy of recent events in Suwayda, it would be wrong to present the Druze as the perpetual victims of sectarianism. Like the wider Middle East, their history is also characterised by long periods of inter-religious cooperation, punctuated by episodes of great heroism. Indeed, in the recent past, the fate of Syria’s Druze has been bound up with the triumphs and tragedies of the country as a whole.

A century ago, in the summer and autumn of 1925, the Druze led a vast, country-wide uprising against French colonial rule. Like its close cousin, the Iraqi Revolt of 1920, the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925 threw down a challenge to the British and French Mandates, the quasi-imperial system that was imposed on the Middle East after the First World War. The Druze had rebelled against the Ottomans in 1896 and 1908, but these had been highly localised affairs; they were the revolts of a small imperial periphery against the administrative centralisation and tax burdens imposed by a far-away capital, in Ottoman Constantinople. What made the Syrian Revolt of 1925 significant was that, while it erupted among the Druze of the Hawran Plateau, it quickly spread like wildfire across Syria, and mobilised Syrians of all stripes – Sunni, Shia, Christian, Kurdish and Druze – behind the call for national liberation from French rule.

There was a great irony in all this. On assuming their mandate in 1920, the French had sought to divide Syria into a series of statelets and justify their colonial presence by posing as the protectors of religious minorities. Accordingly, a Maronite Christian-dominated state centred on Mount Lebanon was separated off from the rest of the country; the ‘Alawites were provided with their own enclave around Latakia. The French also set up a Kurdish tribal zone in the northeast and demarcated a Druze statelet in Hawran.

The 1925 Revolt represented an emphatic rejection of such divide-and-rule policies: its leaders fought explicitly for a unified Syria, not for a Druze mini-state. The immediate trigger for the uprising came in July of that year, when Druze leaders were invited to Damascus by the French authorities to discuss their grievances, only to be thrown in prison and held hostage. The following week, the Druze of the Hawran, under the leadership of the charismatic Sultan al-Atrash – a veteran of the British-sponsored Arab Revolt against the Ottomans – rose in revolt, driving French forces out of the plateau, capturing French artillery, and rallying Muslims and Christians to his cause.

Al-Atrash quickly forged connections with the Sunni Arab nationalists of Syria’s urban centres. In the process, the instinctive, rural nationalism of the Syrian countryside was brought into cooperation with the liberal nationalist ideology of Damascus. A flurry of leaflets announcing the aims of the revolt combined Arabist rhetoric with the language of the French Revolution, denouncing imperialism and calling for ‘the complete independence of Arab Syria’ under ‘a Popular Government’ in accordance with ‘the principles of the French Revolution and the Rights of Man’. Throughout its course, the revolt’s leaders went out of their way to reassure and protect Syrian Christians and Jews. Yet they were less successful in controlling rogue insurgent bands, who often engaged in extortion, pillaged villages that refused to join the revolt, and carried out atrocities against Armenian refugees.

The Great Syrian Revolt was no trivial affair. In October 1925, the Syrian revolutionaries almost captured Damascus. In the end, they were defeated by a brutal French counterinsurgency campaign, which made full use of the mandate authorities’ superior artillery and, crucially, air power. In a strategy reminiscent of Bashar al-Assad’s regime during the Syrian Civil War, they steadily bombarded rebel-held areas, reducing whole urban areas to rubble before recapturing them. Their final assault on the Damascene neighbourhood of Maydan in May 1926 spelled the end of the Great Syrian Revolt; its leaders were rounded up and sent into exile.

The cross-sectarian coalition that led the revolt would resurface again, in 1944-46, to finally win Syria’s national independence, and in 1954, to topple the dictatorship of Adib al-Shishakli. But it became harder to sustain thereafter. The decline of the great Arab nationalist Sunni notables, and the rise to power of the Ba’ath Party in the 1960s, both contributed to its demise. The regime that emerged under Hafez al-Assad and continued under his son Bashar tended to use the spectre of Sunni Islamist power as a tool to keep the Druze in line. An ‘Alawi-dominated regime, it pursued a cynical alliance of minorities that mirrored colonial-era divide-and-rule strategies.

When the Arab Spring came to Syria in 2011, the Syrian government spared the Druze in Suwayda the repressive treatment that was meted out by the army to their Sunni neighbours in nearby Dara’a. In return for their compliance, Druze militias – like their Kurdish counterparts in the northeast – were given a greater degree of autonomy to run their own community’s affairs, while the regime focused on defeating an increasingly Sunni Arab-dominated insurgency. On the other hand, large-scale protests continued to break out in Suwayda, calling for the fall of the Assad regime, most notably over a period of 12 months in 2023-24.

The story of the Syrian Druze is no morality play. They are not immune to the sectarian interests or impulses that drive other ethno-religious groups during times of conflict. Certainly, they have had their fair share of triumphs, where they have made great sacrifices and displayed true courage for the cause of a Syria for all Syrians. And throughout Syria’s recent history, they have shown a willingness to build a genuinely national community that transcends ethnicity and religion. Nonetheless, they are also wary of the potential for the Sunni majority to dominate that community and impose national unity on its own terms.

Nor do the Syrian Druze speak with a single voice. Since the fall of the Assad regime, some Druze leaders have called for a strong measure of local autonomy from Damascus in the Druze-dominated Suwayda province. Others fear that this will open the Druze up to accusations that they are separatists, traitors to the nation seeking to undermine Syria’s post-revolutionary transition. The whole situation is complicated by the existence of a Druze minority in Israel and the occupied Golan Heights, many of whom have close family ties to the Syrian community. Watching the recent violence unfolding in Suwayda, many Israeli Druze staged protests demanding that Israel act to protect their Syrian cousins. Meanwhile, those in Suwayda may just be frightened enough by the recent violence to accept the protection of anyone who can safeguard them from future bloodshed.

Ultimately, if they continue to feel threatened by the spectre of a Damascus dominated by Sunni Islamists, Syria’s Druze may rescind their commitment to the national ideal altogether and adopt a self-interested pragmatism reminiscent of the region’s Kurdish minorities. They, like the Kurds, may come to believe that they have no friends but the mountains.