CAIRO, July 18. /TASS/. Thousands of Bedouins have fled Syria’s Sweida governorate for neighboring Daraa amid renewed fighting in the area, the Syria TV channel reported.
According to the television channel, more than 1,000 Arab families have crossed into the Daraa governorate. The local authorities have set up a special committee to address the situation and provide the refugees with temporary housing and daily essentials.
The SANA news agency reported on July 17 that illegal armed groups killed numerous Bedouin militia members in the city of Sweida after government troops withdrew from there. According to the Al Watan newspaper, the upheavals in Sweida were triggered by supporters of the radical Druze cleric, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, who calls for closer relations with Israel and defiance of the Damascus authorities.
The situation in Syria aggravated on July 13 when clashes between Arab tribal militias and Druze self-defense groups broke out in the heavily Druze-populated Sweida governorate. On July 15, the Syrian army entered the governorate’s administrative center, the city of Sweida, and launched a mop-up operation to restore order. Shortly after, Israel began delivering airstrikes on Syrian army convoys, claiming that the operation was geared to protect the Druze population. On July 16, Israel hit a number of strategic targets in Damascus.
Late on July 16, the Syrian defense ministry announced the withdrawal of government forces from the city of Sweida under a ceasefire agreement. Unlike Hikmat al-Hijri, Druze spiritual leader Sheikh Yousef Jarboe hailed the agreement on the cessation of hostilities.
The Druze are a tight-knit ethnoreligious Arabic-speaking group living mainly in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan who adhere to a specific faith that split from Shiite Islam in the Middle Ages. Israeli Druzes live in Galilee in the north of the country and serve in the Israeli army and police along with Jews. However, after Israel gained control over the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War in 1967, most of the Druzes living there have preserved their Syrian citizenship. Syria’s Druze population numbers around 700,000, being the third biggest ethnoreligious minority after the Kurds and Alawites.