Syrian Minorities Abandoned to Islamist Power Brokers
Kanako Mita, Sawako Utsumi, and Lee Jay Walker
Modern Tokyo Times
President Donald Trump of the United States—alongside key Gulf states and Turkey—continues to extend diplomatic and political backing to Sunni Islamist power brokers in Damascus, even as mounting evidence exposes atrocities against Syria’s minorities. The result is a volatile and deeply fractured landscape where ancient communities face a renewed campaign of terror and intimidation.
In Sweida (Suweida), tensions between the Druze population and local Sunni Bedouin groups remain dangerously high. The situation worsened after Sunni Islamist militants advancing from Damascus carried out brutal massacres against Druze civilians earlier this year. Eyewitnesses described scenes of slaughter that left entire families wiped out, with the killers invoking sectarian justifications for their crimes.
Reliable reports indicate that Druze civilians were executed by forces loyal to Islamist factions backed by Damascus-based power brokers. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), Druze civilians were shot, beheaded, or abducted in coordinated attacks. The death toll being extremely high, a chilling reminder of how minority lives have become bargaining chips in Syria’s shifting alliances.
The same networks are implicated in the earlier massacre of approximately 1,700 Alawites, targeted by Sunni Islamist groups aligned with Islamist circles in Damascus. Combined with other documented assaults on Christian and Druze communities, these events underscore the growing vulnerability of non-Sunni populations in areas nominally under regime control. The specter of ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and affiliated jihadist movements looms once again, exploiting the chaos and the cynicism of regional powers.
Israel’s Foreign Minister, Gideon Saar, issued a blunt warning: “It is very dangerous to belong to a religious minority in Syria. This has been proven time and again over the past six months.”
He added, “The international community must ensure the security and rights of the minorities in Syria before these communities disappear altogether.”
Despite these warnings, Washington, Brussels, and London—along with Gulf capitals and Ankara—appear willing to tolerate the resurgence of Sunni Islamist influence in exchange for temporary political leverage. Religious minorities and secular Syrians, once the backbone of the country’s plural identity, are being systematically sidelined and exposed to violence.
Meanwhile, the Kurdish leadership in the north watches with growing unease. After years of being used as a proxy force against ISIS, Kurdish officials now fear they too will be left to face the same ruthless actors, abandoned by the very powers that once relied on their sacrifice.
Trump and other world leaders have applied mounting pressure on Israel to quietly accept the new realities unfolding in Syria. Yet the Druze community in Israel is unlikely to remain silent. Deeply bound by history and faith to their brethren in Sweida, the Druze are expected to intensify calls for the Israeli government to hold the Sunni Islamist power brokers in Damascus militarily accountable for the bloodshed and persecution of their people.
The United States, the European Union, Gulf states, Turkey, and the United Kingdom should hang their heads in shame. Their calculated overtures to Sunni Islamist elements in Damascus—forces that govern through fear, coercion, and sectarian manipulation—represent a moral collapse of the very principles they claim to defend. In exchange for short-term influence and political expediency, they have turned their backs on the very minorities who once defined Syria’s plural and tolerant heritage.
Religious minorities, secularists, Kurds, and other vulnerable communities now face an existential threat under the tightening grip of Sunni Islamist domination in Damascus. Churches, Druze shrines, Alawite neighborhoods, and secular enclaves that survived a decade of war may not withstand what is coming next.
So the question stands—cold, unavoidable, and damning: why is the international community abandoning Syria’s religious mosaic to those who would destroy it?
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