S uwayda is well-equipped for protests. The area is overwhelmingly filled with members of the Druze sect, who follow an esoteric form of Islam whose adherents span a swath of Lebanon and Syria, including the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Even before Assad fled last month as an insurgency reached Damascus, residents of Suwayda had been demanding a secular state that enshrined minority rights, and are now emphatically insisting their voices be heard in the new Syria. Protests in Suwayda began in August for increased public services and quickly spilled into demands for Assad to go, in a place that his regime had long ignored. The southern province was a rare pocket of resistance for well over a year before his rule collapsed amid a wider insurgency at the end of Protesters said their demands for improved public services and a secular state remained unchanged despite the new leadership in Damascus, putting the caretaker authority under pressure.
Adding to this friction is an expanding Israeli presence around the Golan Heights, a mountainous region with a large Druze population that has been part-occupied by Israel for decades. We want to know: who is our enemy in Syria? Loyalty, Balous said, would come when the Druze saw how a new government performed.
But the view from Suwayda was that the transitional leadership was not there to talk about its concerns. They had recently welcomed a visiting delegation from Damascus, Fakher said, but those ministers had come to check on their respective departments such as health and policing, not to discuss the formation of a civil state or how minority groups such as the Druze could be represented in future.
This caretaker government cannot make decisions about the strategic direction of Syria. Standing outside the central mosque after the weekly protest, Kuntar said demonstrators were, however, impatient to see change. Komai Obeid, 24, a medical student, said he had joined some of the first anti-government protests in Suwayda but had been too frightened of arrest to continue. Now, he said, he was finally free of the fear protesting could see him arrested and was embracing protests as a form of political engagement with Damascus that was impossible under the Assad regime.
