Syria, as it is sprouting up before our eyes is perhaps the clearest symbol of a double failure, the failure of pan-Arab nationalism and the failure of what might be called Arab nation-statism.

Salman Masalha

The Slaughter in Syria Was Known in Advance

The acts of slaughter in Syria and all the ensuing horrors instigated by the jihadi militias and the tribal rabble from among the supporters of the new Syrian ruler were engraved in the 14th century in religious rulings by Ibn Taymiyya, the spiritual teacher of al-Joulani and his motley crew of jihadist disciples. 

What has been happening in the Arab world for generation after generation is closely connected to the lack of a national identity that transcends sectarian and tribal borders. It is possible to declaim endless high-flown slogans about “one Arab nation,” but over and over again the reality comes along and smacks the sloganeers in the face.

The Nationalism is a Colonial Invention

On August 30, 1915, Vincent Arthur Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in the Sultanate of Egypt sent a missive to the head of the Hashemite dynasty and the Emir of Mecca, Sharif Hussein. In flowery Arabic, he assured in his letter that His Majesty’s Government is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs. He assured in his letter that His Majesty “would welcome the resumption of the caliphate by an Arab of true race”. McMahon  reconfirmed His majesty’s desire for the “independence of Arabia and its inhabitants, together with our approval of the Arab Khalifate when it should be proclaimed.”  He praised the Arab people, as opposed to the Turks, in an attempt to obtain Arab aid in defeating “the German and the Turk… the new despoiler and the old oppressor”, in what has become known as World War I.

In other words, it appears that the pan-Arab awakening in this region was fundamentally an invention by His Majesty’s Government. No Arab caliphate arose in the wake of the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Britain and France divided up the region among themselves in the Sykes-Picot Agreement that was signed in 1916, arbitrarily delineating the borders.  Additionally, the publication of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 prepared the ground for a Jewish national home. 

Among the states that sprang up in the region after the withdrawal of the colonial powers, Syria is a test case for these “national” entities. In this context, in 1925 the Druze in the Sweida Province, led by Sultan Basha al-Atrash, were the spearhead in the war against the French Mandate and in support for a united Syria that ultimately received its independence from France in 1946. However, it was not long before a series of coups began, culminating in the wresting of control by Hafez al-Assad, a member of the Alawite sect who for three decades led a cruel and oppressive regime.  As he approached his death, he took care to bequeath his rule to his young son Bashar al-Assad. 

The Arab Spring

At the end of 2010, the protests known as “the Arab Spring” flared up in Tunisia and sparks began to burn in demonstrations in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world that was under oppressive regimes.  In an interview to The Wall Street Journal, Bashar al-Assad hastened to say that Syria was an exceptional case. “We are not Tunisians and we are not Egyptians,” he declared. He justified his remarks by saying that what was happening in those countries stemmed from the public’s anger at the regimes and from what the West was perpetuating in Palestine, Iraq and other Muslim countries. He repeatedly claimed that Syria was immune to upsets like those because of its steadfast stance vis-à-vis Israel and the United States. 

Clearly Syria is not Egypt, but not for the reasons Assad gave. Egypt is different from Syria and different from the other Arab states. This is because in Egypt there does exist a kind of Egyptian national identity. None of the the Egyptian presidents – neither Nasser and Mubarak nor Sisi – based themselves on any particular tribe or sect. The regime in Egypt is based on national institutions, especially the institution of the  military, which is not sectarian at all. That is not the case in the other Arab states, which have been ruled by bloodthirsty dictators, the sole prop for whose regimes has been tribal and sectarian, and who have been fawned upon by sycophants from other interest groups. 

It is worth mentioning another facet of what is called “the Arab spring.” It is not by chance that this “spring” was not experienced in countries that are kingdoms, like Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the other emirates. The Arab kingdoms survived the tribulations of the Arab spring because royal regimes have been deeply embedded in Arab societies for centuries. All the regimes that are called republics have flown the banner of nationalism in vain.  In none of those states has a nation been created nor has a nationalism sprung up that blends citizens from different sects, ethnic groups and religions into a single, inclusive civic identity.  Neither in Iraq nor in Syria has a nation arisen and begun to walk. In none of those countries has a ruler succeeded in establishing, or has even intended to establish, a nation state for its citizenry worthy of the name. There is no light at the end of the sewer of the Arab tribal-sectarian world. 

Thus, for example, there is the hostility between the two tyrannical regimes in Syria and Iraq under the rule of the Ba’ath Party, with its motto of pan-Arab nationalism, which was equal to or greater than their hostility towards Israel. In this context, Hafez al-Assad did not hesitate to support the United States in its war against Saddam Hussein, thereby revealing the hollowness of the Ba’ath slogan “One Arab nation.” 

Nor did the elder Assad, as he was dying, hesitate to change the rules and lower the age of eligibility for the presidency as stipulated in the Syrian constitution, in order to pave the way for his son, young Bashar, to inherit his rule. The amendment of the constitutional provision for the sake of Bashar al-Assad was approved in a national referendum by a majority of 97%, as befits regimes of that sort.

At the start of his regime in 2000, many pinned hopes on Assad Junior, an ophthalmologist educated in the West. At the outset, he released political prisoners and to some extent permitted freedom of speech. However, that spring in Damascus did not last long. It quickly became clear that Bashar al-Assad had not fallen far from his father’s sectarian-tribal tree, and he began to oppress political opponents. Further along, he sent buses to park in front of the American embassy in Damascus and filled them with Islamist volunteers to fight against the United States in Iraq. These Islamists and others who fought the Americans in Iraq ultimately formed the “spiritual” basis of ISIS. Among those who flocked to Syria in the early 2000s was none other than Abu Muhammad al-Joulani. There he met Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a senior jihadist in al-Qaida. Al-Joulani was captured and spent several years in an American prison. After he somehow managed to slip out of there, he met Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of al-Qaida, and he returned to Syria with al-Baghdadi’s blessing to fight Assad’s regime. He gathered around himself jihadists from all over: Chechens, Uyghurs, and Arabs from many different places, for a war against the Assad regime and to conquer extensive areas of Syria.  

In 2013, al-Joulani sent a letter to al-Baghdadi, in which he set out his plan to expel the minorities from all of Syria and establish a purely Sunni Islamic state there. Al-Joulani, as he told American journalist Martin Smith who met him in Syria, did not admire al-Baghdadi, neither as leader nor from an intellectual perspective. In this context, in addition to the struggle for control in the entity straddling the border between Iraq and Syria, al-Baghdadi decided to move into Syria with his people, adopt a new name and declare the establishment of the Islamic State. 

In an interview to Al-Jazeera in 2015, al-Joulani noted that the disagreements between al-Qaeda and his faction, Jabhat al-Nusra, stemmed, inter alia, from the breaking of the oath ISIS has sworn to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Additionally, he said, most of the ISIS leaders were Iraqis who focused on action inside Iraq, who did not devote attention to the war on Assad’s regime in Syria and who had no qualms about killing people from Jabhat al-Nusra. As proof of his statements, he told the interviewer that ISIS people were killing Shi’ites in Iraq but refraining from killing Alawites in Syria, the bedrock of Assad’s regime. The Alawites, too, according to Ibn Taymiyya’s doctrine, are heretics like the Druze.

The First Massacre of  the Druze

For hundreds of years, a Druze minority of about 20,000 souls lived scattered in a number of villages in the Idlib Governorate of Syria, which borders on Turkey. Al-Joulani’s plan regarding the future of the minorities in Syria began to be implemented in the Druze villages there, in a way involving crimes like those ISIS committed against the Yazidi minority in Iraq. Al-Joulani’s jihadists began the campaign of oppressing the Druze minority in northern Syria by destroying their prayer halls, blowing up sites holy to them and forcibly compelling Druze to convert. In June of 2015 they carried out the first massacre of Druze. This happened in the village of Qalb-Loze. There, the Jabhat al-Nusra people murdered tens of Druze elders and children in cold blood. 

It must be noted here that, ever since the days of Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria on a tribal-sectarian basis, the Islamists have borne in their hearts burning hatred for the Ba’ath regime.  They have not forgotten for a moment that the elder Assad slaughtered members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama in 1982. The younger Assad inherited his father’s rule and perpetuated his sectarian-tribal legacy. When the sparks of the “Arab Spring” reached Syria, he began slaughtering members of the “Arab Nation” and even surpassed his father’s murderousness. When he saw that the uprising against him was gaining strength and undermining his rule, Bashar al-Assad asked Russia, Iran and its affiliate Hezbollah for help. For another decade he continued to bomb and destroy indiscriminately the cities of Syria, killing their inhabitants until the moment the regime collapsed at the end of 2024, when he fled to Moscow. 

Slaughter Follows Slaughter

As al-Joulani’s militias moved from the Idlib area in the direction of Damascus, Assad’s army rapidly disintegrated. Within a short time, al-Joulani entered the presidential palace in Damascus as a victor. However, before doing so he went, surrounded by his people, to the Umayyad Great Mosque in Damascus, on the ruins of a Byzantine church that had been built on the ruins of a Roman temple that had been built on the ruins of an Aramean temple.  It was not by chance that he first entered the grand mosque that is a symbol of the Islamic caliphate of the Umayyad dynasty. After entering the presidential palace, he stripped off his uniform and donned a suit and tie. He also discarded his nom de guerre and returned to his original name, Ahmed Al-Sharaa.  

However, Al-Shaara’s caliphate in a suit did not change the essence of the new regime. His entry into the Great Mosque surrounded by his supporters was a symbolic move that signaled what was to come. Al-Joulani was borne aloft into the presidential palace on by jihadist militias from all kinds of tribal and ethnic groups, some of which are not Syrian and some of them not Arab. All these groups are imbued with an ISIS-Islamist ideology, like the new leader himself. 

The Druze Position in the Civil War

When the Civil War in Syria began in 2011, and the magnitude of the killing Assad was carrying out among people of “his nation” became clear, the Druze leadership in Jabal al-Druze came to the decision prohibiting young Druze men from joining Assad’s army that relied on the Alawite sect, because it realized that the war was becoming a sectarian war in which they did not want to take part. Initially, the leadership adopted a neutral position and demanded that the Druze soldiers remain in the Sweida Governorate on order to defend themselves in their own areas in the midst of the general chaos, and also to resist the jihadists if they approached their areas. 

The ISIS Slaughter of the Druze

This position was inimical to Assad, who depicted himself as the guardian of the minorities in Syria vis-à-vis ISIS. And in July of 2018, ISIS militias invaded Druze villages in the governorate, killed and abducted children and women and in a series of suicide attacks in the city of al-Sweida killed and wounded hundreds of Druze. Ultimately the Druze militias in the Jabal Druze succeeded in defeating the ISIS jihadist militias. The Druze accused the Assad regime of collaborating with the ISIS fighters who brought people in buses from the Yarmuk Refugee Camp near Damascus into the desert area east of Jabal al-Druze. That was in the framework of an agreement between the Syrian regime and ISIS people who controlled the refugee camp. Druze inhabitants related that the day before the massacre all the means of communication in the area were cut off and there was total silence. 

As noted, the Druze had tried to maintain a low profile and distance themselves from all the bloodshed that was inundating Syria. They gave refuge in the Sweida Governorate to tens of thousands of Muslims who fled from the Assad regime’s army that was slaughtering them. In recent years the Druze also held mass demonstrations every Friday in the city of al-Sweida and demanded the toppling of the Assad regime. 

Two years later, on December 8, 2024, the blood regime came to its end, Assad was boarded onto a plan and smuggled by the Russians to Moscow. The Assad army fell apart and al-Joulani’s militias entered the presidential palace in Damascus.

Will the Leopard Change Its Spots?

As noted, al-Joulani was borne aloft into the presidential palace by many jihadist militias.  Despite his initial moderate declarations, it was the Alawites’ turn to suffer under the blows of the jihadist ideology. In March of 2025, al-Joulani’s people and other militias attacked Alawite communities in the Syrian coastal hills and slaughtered thousands of civilians, claiming that this was in a clash with soldiers from the remnants of the previous regime’s army, and out of a desire to disarm the remnants of the previous regime. From the perspective of the other minority sects, this was a flashing blood-red warning light. 

The Druze in the Sweida Governorate refused to hand over their weapons as the new regime in Damascus demanded before receiving assurances as to the nature of the regime that would arise in Syria. They demanded that before disarmament they had to come to agreements as to a number of principles having to do with the character of the new regime. Among other things, they insisted on the principle of participation all the sectarian and ethnic elements in in the governing, as well as separation of religion and the state. The response by al-Joulani’s army in cooperation with the jihadist militias was the perpetration of a massacre in Sahnaya and Ashrafiyya, Druze areas in the suburbs of Damascus. This took place at the end of April 2025, in the wake of the distribution of faked recording in which a Druze sheikh is supposedly heard speaking in condemnation of the Prophet Muhammad. This slaughter aroused great anger both in the Sweida Governorate and among the Druze in Israel, who demonstrated and demanded intervention by Israel. In the wake of that, Israel warned the al-Shaara regime against attacks on the Druze and made it clear that it would not hesitate to intervene if the attacks on the Druze did not cease.

Agreements were reached between the Druze leadership in Sweida and people from al-Joulani’s government to the effect that the local Druze inhabitants would run matters in the governorate in cooperation with a governor appointment by the authorities in Damascus. Thus, a head of the governorate on behalf of Damascus was appointed, he entered into talks with the Druze leadership and it appeared that the situation had calmed. Additionally, an officer from al-Joulani’s army was appointed to serve as the governor in the Quneitra Governorate and was subsequently put in charge of internal security in the Sweida Governorate. This officer, Ahmad al-Dalati by name, had served in the past as a liaison officer with Israel and it has been reported that he has met several times with the Israeli side in the Golan Heights with the aim of reducing the tension between Israel and al-Shaara’s regime.

On Saturday, July 12, Israeli and Syrian representatives met in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, to discuss the situation between the two countries in southern Syria, the Golan and especially Jabal al-Druze. Details of the agreements between the two side at this meeting have not leaked. However, Ahmad al-Dalati, who is in charge of security in Sweida, sent a kind of summary of the talks in Baku to a person who is living in London. Al-Dalati wrote: “The Israelis told us that they no longer consider the al-Sweida Governorate to be a red line for them, and that we can continue to implement the necessary security measures as they have been implemented in the other Syrian governorates.”

The very ext day al-Joulani’s forces headed towards Jabal al-Druze on their killing spree. They bombarded the Druze villages, beheaded people, looted, abducted women and children and shaved the mustaches of Druze sheikhs as a symbol of religious humiliation. In short, nothing was missing from the crimes of the jihad against “the heretics,” as enumerated in the chronicles of tribal and Islamic history.

The outcry among the Druze in Sweida and their pleas for help from the Druze in Israel, who demonstrated against the slaughter in Sweida and burst across the border into Syria. This impelled Israel to bomb the Syrian military command headquarters and the grounds of the presidential palace in Damascus. 

Al-Shaara’s regime went on to take revenge on the Druze in another way. Claiming that the Druze had attacked Bedouin in the area of Sweida, Sunni tribal militias, were recruited and sent to slaughter Druze. Government forces also participated in the spree of killing and destruction in the Druze villages in the Sweida Governorate. 

Just as in the massacre by Hamas on October 7 in the Gaza border communities, here too in Jabal al-Druze the murderers recorded themselves carrying out the crimes as they shouted “Allahu akbar.” A BBC correspondent reported from the region that the commander of one of the jihadist militias, Abu Hudhayfa by name, gave orders to his people and explained that “the aim is to kill the Druze heretics.” He added: “We don’t want to take prisoners. Kill everyone you find, whether a child or an old person.” Christians, who are also “heretics” in the eyes of the jihadists and who live in peace with the Druze in Sweida, were also a target for the murderous raids. In one locality, they massacred an entire Christian family of about 20 people. The father of the family was originally a Druze, who converted to Christianity and became a priest and the head of the local church, living in peace for years with the Druze and the Christians there. 

In a leaked recording attributed to al-Dalati, the man in charge of security in Sweida, he asks his security people and the other militias not to upload the videos they film to the internet. In the meantime, he is heard saying, it is necessary to let the security forces and the tribal people crush the sons of bitches. After they take over the place, you can upload as much as you want. 

Even if the recording is not of al-Dalati but rather of the commander of some other jihadist militia, the remarks speak for themselves.  In videos posted by Al-Joulani’s people and jihadist militias, they filmed themselves raiding Druze communities and they are heard reciting quotations from 14th century religious rulings about how to treat the Druze. 

What Do Those Religious Rulings Say?

The reference is to a ruling by Ibn Taymiyya, who is known as Sheikh al-Islam and is considered the guiding light by disciples of the jihadist movement such as al-Qaeda, ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and the like. This is the “spiritual”  breeding ground of al-Joulani and others among the Islamist fanatics. With regard to the Druze, Ibn Tamiyya wrote in his ruling that “there is no one among the Muslims who disagrees that the Druze are heretics. And anyone who doubts this is himself a heretic like them.” He added that they are even worse than the Jews and the Christians and other idolators: “They do not have the status of People of the Book or the polytheists who also  have other gods beside Allah.” And about how treat them he added: “It is prohibited to eat of their food, their women will be taken captive, and their property will be confiscated ... They must be killed everywhere they are to be found, and their repentance must not be accepted.” 

This is the “cultural baggage” on which the jihadists have been educated. Thus, there is no cause for astonishment at the horrific acts of slaughter in the Jabal Druze that were carried out by al-Joulani’s messengers, the jihadist agents and the tribesmen assembled from all kinds of places in Syria with the aim of murdering, slaughtering, abducting and carrying out whatever they are ordered to do by their incurable teachers of the above-mentioned murderous ideology. 

It is hard to know what will happen in Syria in the foreseeable future. However, looking at the jihadist tradition and the  modern history of Syria with its decades of oppressive and murderous rule by Assad the father, Assad the son who inherited the rule and oppression from his father and even surpassed him in murderousness, and now the holy spirit of the new murderous regime from the school of Ibn Tamiyya and his disciples, there is apparently no light at the end of this sewer. Syria, as it is sprouting up before our eyes is perhaps the clearest symbol of a double failure, the failure of pan-Arab nationalism and the failure of what might be called Arab nation-statism. 

As long as those who dwell in this part of the world do not understand the source of this failure, it does not look as though the future is offering them any change for the better.  

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Published in MEMRI

 

For Hebrew press here

 

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