‘Kill them all’: Sectarian violence turns Syrian city into a slaughterhouse

SWEIDA, Syria — The last thing Hatem Radhwan heard the fighters say was, “Kill them all. We don’t want them identifying us.”

That’s when the five gunmen, clad in desert camouflage uniforms and who claimed they were with Syria’s Ministry of Defense, cocked their AK-47 rifles, shouted, “You pigs!” and sprayed the room with bullets.

Radhwan, a 70-year-old blacksmith, felt a bullet or a piece of debris — he couldn’t tell — graze his upper lip. He fell to the ground as the gunmen continued to fire.

Rashad Abu Saadeh, a neighbor who hid in his apartment across the street, heard the gunfire. “For more than half a minute they kept shooting,” he said. “It felt like a long, long time.”

The killings at the Radhwan family salon were part of a paroxysm of sectarian violence that engulfed the Druze-majority city of Sweida last week. The fighting, which involved tank and mortar bombardment, summary executions and Israeli airstrikes, left some 1,380 dead, displaced more than 120,000 others — and turned what once was a well-appointed city, largely spared the ravages of Syria’s 14-year civil war, into a slaughterhouse.

“There isn’t a single home in the whole province that isn’t grieving someone,” said Randa Mihrez, one of the coroners at Sweida National Hospital.

A truce halted the clashes — which began this month between Bedouin clans and the Druze religious minority — but the tallying of the losses continues.

Mihrez’s colleague Akram Naim scrolled through images of the 509 corpses brought to the hospital’s courtyard during the fighting. They were transferred to a mass grave on Wednesday after days of decomposing in the summer heat.

“The youngest victim was 3 months old, killed by shrapnel that hit her stomach,” he said.

He clicked on another photo — a young girl, her head turned to the side, with a morose expression on her face. A scarlet line ran across her throat.

“This one was 14. She was slaughtered,” Naim said, his voice subdued.

“These are only the people we know about and who could reach us,” Mihrez said, adding that many victims were buried in makeshift graves near people’s homes because the hospital had been surrounded during much of the battles.

“The final tally will be much worse,” he said.

At the Radhwan house, the blacksmith finally dared to open his eyes five minutes after the gunmen left, only to find 17 of his family members bloodied around him. Thirteen were killed outright; four others survived but remain in critical condition, while a fifth relative died later. Radhwan was the only one mostly unharmed.

“They were screaming, and I tried to move them, to help them somehow. But I kept slipping on the blood,” Radhwan said, his gaze following the brown-red stain that crept from the couch down to the salon floor.

“One relative was bleeding out and barely alive. He was begging, ‘Shoot me.’ But I had no weapons on me. I would have done it otherwise,” he said.

The crisis in Sweida, which comes at the heels of similar bouts of sectarian bloodshed against minorities by state-aligned groups, highlights the challenges facing interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa, who seized power in December after leading a coalition of rebel groups to topple longtime dictator Bashar Assad.

Though he received support from President Trump — who fast-tracked the lifting of sanctions, reopened the U.S. Embassy in Damascus and dispatched an envoy who has championed the new government — Al-Sharaa has so far failed to convince rival factions to centralize under his authority, and his government forces have essentially aligned themselves with the Bedouins.

Instead, the euphoria over Assad’s ouster has been replaced by a sense of foreboding among many Syrians, especially minorities, who distrust Al-Sharaa’s Islamist past. More hard-line members of his faction, the onetime Al Qaeda-affiliated Hayat Tahrir al Sham, view Druze as heretics who should be killed.

One of the injured from the city of Sweida receiving treatment at the National Hospital following the battles that took place between the Bedouins and the Druze factions in Sweida, Syria on Thursday.

(Hasan Belal/For The Times)

That has been especially true for the Druze, adherents of a syncretic sect that is an offshoot of Shiite Islam who constitute some 3% of Syria’s population. There are an estimated 1 million Druze worldwide, half of them in Syria and the rest in Lebanon, Israel and elsewhere. Many Syrian Druze speak proudly — and often — of their sect’s role in building the country’s nationalist consciousness, with families touting their filial link to Sultan Al-Atrash, a revolutionary who mounted an uprising against French rule in Syria in the 1920s. Sweida, both the city and the eponymously named province, are the only areas of the country with a Druze majority.

During the civil war, Sweida kept a wary distance from both Assad and the opposition, and government allowed it some measure of autonomy. Since Assad’s exit, prominent figures in the Druze community have sought to have a good relationship with Damascus, but the militias have rejected integration under Al-Sharaa’s armed services, which they say are composed of unruly factions not totally under the interim leader’s control.

When tit-for-tat kidnappings and robberies between Bedouins and Druze escalated into open warfare this month, the government mobilized its forces to restore order. But Druze residents accused them of engaging in a sectarian killing rampage, and fought back.

Israel, which since Assad’s exit occupies wide swaths of its northern neighbor’s border areas and has demanded south Syria be a demilitarized zone, responded to demands from its own Druze to protect their coreligionists and launched airstrikes targeting the Damascus headquarters of the Syrian army and the presidential palace. It also struck forces in Sweida, forcing them to withdraw.

In the aftermath of those strikes, Al-Sharaa accused Israel of interfering in Syrian affairs and trying to keep the country weak. But on Thursday, the U.S. special envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, said he met with Syrian and Israeli officials in Paris to broker “dialogue and de-escalation” — the first high-level talks between the two countries since 2000.

“And we accomplished precisely that. All parties reiterated their commitment to continuing these efforts,” Barrack wrote on X on Thursday.

Around 1,500 people from Bedouin tribal families who had been held in Sweida governorate were evacuated earlier this week under a ceasefire agreement, following fierce clashes between tribal forces and Druze gunmen loyal to religious leader Hikmat al-Hijri. The confrontations in Sweida resulted in dozens of fatalities.

(Rami Alsayed / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Meanwhile, the mood in the city of Sweida remains tense. Standing near the fire-blackened husk of an Israeli-hit tank, Yamen Zughayer, a Druze faction commander, looked down a road leading out of Sweida.

“There are still bodies of our people we can’t get back. A sniper is waiting for us down there,” he said. He walked down a side street, pointing out the singed remains of houses that he said were torched by Bedouins and government-linked fighters.

“For 14 years of the war, nothing happened to Sweida. [For] three hours the government came in, and look what happened,” he said.

Zughayer, a 35-year-old who usually worked as a car dealer, said the tragedies inflicted on Sweida proved Druze suspicious of Al-Sharaa were correct.

“What do you think would have happened if we didn’t have our guns? We’re sitting here talking to you because of them,” Zughayer said, adding that he wouldn’t accept any solution that didn’t involve the militiamen retaining their arms.

Hashem Thabet, another fighter standing nearby, said although he did not want Israel controlling the territory, the actions of the Syrian government were driving Druze like him away.

“I don’t care who comes to protect me as long as they do it. If it’s Israel, then welcome Israel,” he said. The government, he added, is “pushing us into its arms.”

A powerful explosion struck an ammunition depot in the town of Maarat Misrin, north of Idlib city in Syria, on Thursday. The blast caused at least 10 deaths and injured more than 100 people. Civil Defense teams, known as the White Helmets, are continuing rescue operations amid widespread devastation.

(Omar Albaw / Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

A few miles away from where he stood vigil, on a bare mountain outside Sweida’s outskirts, Basel Abu Saab looked with grim satisfaction at the trench he had dug with his bulldozer — a mass grave for 149 people from the hospital who were either unidentified or whose families were unable to bury them.

“Initially, we wanted to bury them in the hospital’s backyard, but administrators worried we’d contaminate the water reservoir,” Abu Saab said.

“The bodies were decomposing too much in the sun, they were becoming unrecognizable. We just couldn’t wait anymore.”

Yes, the location chosen for the mass grave was far from the city, he added, but it also was far from the fighting.

Abu Saab trudged back to the nearby road, walking around a pit where he had buried the blood-soiled body bags, his nose wrinkling at the scent. From the pit’s edge, the edge of a hospital garment peeked out, fluttering erratically in the dusk breeze.