Syrias new authoritiesset up committee to probe assaults on civilians in latest sectarian violence

Syria’s new authorities have arrange a committee tasked with investigating assaults on civilians throughout latest sectarian violence within the nation’s south, officers stated Thursday (July 30, 2025).

The combating in Sweida province earlier in July killed lots of of individuals, displaced tens of hundreds, and threatened to unravel Syria’s fragile postwar transition.

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It was sparked by tit-for-tat kidnappings between armed Bedouin clans, principally Sunni, and fighters with the Druze spiritual minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. Syrian authorities forces intervened to finish the combating, however successfully sided with the clans.

Disturbing movies and reviews quickly surfaced of Druze civilians being humiliated and killed in public, typically accompanied by sectarian slurs. Druze teams later launched revenge assaults on Bedouin communities.

Syria’s Justice Ministry stated the committee would work to uncover the “circumstances that led to the occasions in Sweida”, examine assaults and refer these implicated in them to the judiciary, state-run information company SANA reported. The committee is to submit a remaining report inside three months.

An identical committee was shaped in March, when sectarian violence on Syria’s coast killed lots of of civilians from the Alawite spiritual minority, additionally a Shiite offshoot.

Attacks by armed teams affiliated with former President Bashar Assad, a member of the Alawite minority, prompted Damascus to ship safety forces, which descended on the coast from different areas of the nation, joined by hundreds of armed civilians.

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That committee discovered there had been “widespread, critical violations in opposition to civilians,” together with by members of Syria’s new safety forces and that greater than 1,400 individuals, most of them civilians, had been killed.

Its four-month investigation recognized 300 individuals suspected of crimes, together with homicide, theft, torture and looting and burning of properties and companies. The suspects had been referred for prosecution, the committee stated however didn’t disclose what number of had been members of the safety forces.

The outbreaks of violence have left Syria’s spiritual and ethnic minorities more and more suspicious of the nation’s new authorities, led by interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa, who beforehand led the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.