Though the Arab world has increasingly worked toward normalizing ties with Assad’s Syria, the reality on the ground demonstrates that the country is still in decline and deeply unstable.

Since late August, large anti-government demonstrations have taken place across Syria’s Suwayda governorate as the country’s economic situation continues to fall apart.

Protests in the majority-Druze region have been relatively common since 2014, when a prominent Druze sheikh called on the community to resist conscription into the Syrian army. However, these most recent protests have been unprecedented in both scale and intensity.

Sparked by sudden hikes in the price of gasoline, protesters in Suwayda city, as well as in surrounding towns and villages in the countryside, have cut off roads, burned tires, and destroyed government buildings, chanting slogans calling for the downfall of the regime under Bashar al-Assad and his cronies. 

The current calls for radical change in Syria echo the demands for freedom and dignity that sparked the 2011 revolution. As Suhail al-Ghazi, a Syrian researcher and analyst, told Tamooda, “what the people started chanting in 2011 is still now being repeated [almost] 13 years later.”

Throughout Syria’s modern history, Suwayda has been a restive, unstable region, rife with protest. From revolts against the Ottomans and the French to uprisings against the authorities in Damascus after independence, the people of Suwayda have historically punched above their weight in Syrian politics. After all, the Druze community only makes up a small percentage of the country’s population.

In the 1920s, the Great Syrian Revolt against the French saw Sultan al-Atrash, a prominent Druze sheikh in Suwayda at the time, lead an uprising that swept across the entire country. The revolt was only ended by harsh French reprisals against Syria’s rebellious communities, which were a cross-sectarian mix of different groups agitating for an independent Arab state free of outside interference.

After the French withdrew following the Second World War, Syria was wracked with political instability, with constant coups and counter-coups up until the 1960s. One post-independence leader, Adib Shishekli, who came to power in 1950, tried to put Suwayda’s Druze community under the authority of his administration in Damascus via a full-scale military assault on Jebel al-Druze (Suwayda), with the military bombarding the region in 1953. Not long after, Druze officers helped a multi-group coalition to overthrow Shishekli. 

When the Assad family took power in Syria in 1970, following another coup by Hafez al-Assad, the father of Syria’s current ruler Bashar, the country became increasingly authoritarian, as Hafez brutally cracked down on political opposition and dissent. Suwayda and Syria’s Druze community would again find themselves stuck in between a deeply autocratic state and interfering foreign powers. 

The so-called neutral community

Assad’s Syria, which is majority Sunni Arab, is sometimes described as a “dictatorship of minorities.” The Assad regime has historically favored the country’s Alawite community for positions within the military and security apparatus, which forms the backbone of the regime’s power.

The regime also draws on the support of elements of the country’s other minority communities, such as Christians, Shiites, and, of course, Druze, as well as segments of the Sunni urban elite. However, like many authoritarian powers in the Middle East, the regime ultimately uses patronage systems of all varieties to maintain its rule, stoking sectarian tensions when it feels threatened.

Throughout the civil war, the Druze community has often been described as “neutral,” though this is quite reductive. The official Druze leaders, or perhaps more fittingly the community’s interlocutors with the regime, have refrained from taking a position that could be interpreted as fully anti-government.

These leaders, currently Youssef al-Jarbou, Hammoud Hinnawi, and Hikmat al-Hijri, though perhaps not representative of the Druze community or Suwayda at large, have shown varying degrees of support for the current protests in Suwayda.

Suhail al-Ghazi told Tamooda that al-Jarbou, who manages a center in Suwayda that dispenses social services, has attempted to push the community away from protesting. “In the past couple of years, there have been lots of discussions of corruption among the people, among the locals, that this money [from the center] is going into the hands of Jarbou and his sons and that was unacceptable,” he said. 

Al-Ghazi indicated however that Hikmat al-Hijri has given cover to the protesters. “And now he is the one who is helping them be there, despite Jarbua’s attempts to dismantle those protests…” he told Tamooda. “He gave them the cover, and on the other side he is now gaining a lot of support within the province, within the sect, because he is giving them cover but he is stopping at a limit that people don’t want to take the Druze completely against the regime.”

As al-Ghazi points out, al-Hijri has not called for the downfall of the regime, as this would compromise his position as one of the community’s interlocutors. Perhaps this is part of the reason why the regime’s response has been notably light-handed regarding the protests. Since 2011, the regime has shown that it is not shy of using extreme brutality to crush protests.

Protests have also been going on in the Suwayda’s neighbor, Daraa governorate, in towns and villages that were once under rebel control but are now “reconciled.” This means that the regime’s security apparatus is not as present in these areas as it is in the rest of the country.

Though the restive nature of Suwayda’s modern history is certainly an important factor in the regime’s calculus regarding dissent, al-Ghazi said that one of the most important factors is that the regime can no longer play the “ISIS/Jihadi card,” meaning the government cannot use the threat of the Islamic State (or what was once Jabhat al-Nusra) to scare the public into submission. On top of that, Suwayda’s Druze community is very well-connected and “difficult to infiltrate,” al-Ghazi said. 

There are a variety of reasons why Syrians have risked their lives since 2011 to call for a new beginning. The recent protests come at a time when, though the government has avoided collapse and re-asserted its control over much of the country, Syria continues to decline.

The country has become a warlord state, not far from Lebanon in the 1980s, with the country being divided into small fiefdoms controlled by local tyrants alongside foreign powers, namely Russia, Iran, the US, and Turkey, which have all carved out their own spheres of influence throughout the country. And although the rest of the Arab world, which once shunned Assad and his regime, has now decided that normalizing ties with Syria is in the region’s geopolitical interests, this does not change the facts on the ground.

The vast majority of the Syrian population lives in poverty, with most of the country’s infrastructure still in ruins, and almost half of the country’s pre-war population remaining displaced.

Iran has turned large chunks of Syria into a staging ground for its regional geopolitical ambitions, while regions like Suwayda have seen an explosion of drug production and smuggling, which in most cases can be tied back to the Syrian government, Iran, or one of its proxies, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Suwayda is one of many regions in Syria experiencing unending instability, with a so-called “tribal” uprising also occurring in the country’s Deir ez-Zor governorate in recent weeks, leading to fighting between US-backed forces and local factions. Though not directly connected to the protests in Suwayda, this uprising is just another indication that the current status quo in Syria is untenable. These calls for freedom and dignity cross ideological, religious, economic, and generational lines.

Suhail al-Ghazi told Tamooda that, unlike other protests in recent years, these demonstrations have mobilized larger segments of society, as opposed to a small “liberal leftist elite.” “The revolution, with what’s happened in Suwayda, it got a push,” he said. “A civil revolution with liberal views, with the involvement of all segments of society: women, men, and different sects. That is something that is continuing now in the Suwayda protests…It’s not dying, it is something that is continuing, despite everything that has happened.” It seems Syrians will continue their calls for a new future, regardless of the dictates of the region’s power brokers.