While Washington celebrates victory, the Islamic State is regrouping, and the Assad regime is letting it happen.
By Sarah Hunaidi
A truck carrying Islamic State fighters who surrendered to Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as they are transported out of Baghouz in Syria’s northern Deir Ezzor province on Feb. 20, 2019.
A truck carrying Islamic State fighters who surrendered to Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as they are transported out of Baghouz in Syria’s northern Deir Ezzor province on Feb. 20, 2019. (BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images)
The world has been celebrating the Islamic State’s defeat since the final battle of Baghouz on March 23. In February, President Donald Trump celebrated the United States’ alleged victory claiming that the group had been “100 percent” defeated. The United States and Britain have meanwhile moved on to debate stripping the citizenship of their nationals who joined the Islamic State. But contrary to Trump’s declaration, the terrorist group has not been vanquished, and it is currently regrouping near my hometown, Suwayda, in southern Syria—an area it has long terrorized while the government of Bashar al-Assad stood by in silent complicity.
On July 24, 2018, I hugged my mother goodbye before she left Chicago to return to Syria by way of Lebanon. Unlike many other Syrian mothers, mine was allowed to come visit her refugee daughter because of her Lebanese citizenship. My mother arrived home in Syria at midnight. Four hours later, the Islamic State attacked, and I lost contact with my family. I followed helplessly on social media as militants went on a door-to-door slaughtering rampage.
During the first three days of the merciless attack on Suwayda, the Syrian army watched silently. Civilians were left on their own to fight with kitchen knives, hunting rifles, and whatever else they had. Some 250 people were killed, 300 wounded, and dozens of women and children were kidnapped within a day. At least one Druze woman was executed in Islamic State custody.
I looked through the lists in horror trying to find family members and friends. In the following days, I learned that they had killed several of my cousins.
The attack on Suwayda was part of an Islamic State “scarecrow strategy,” originally adopted by the Syrian regime in order to make religious minorities submit out of fear of both the Islamic State and the Sunni majority. Before July, the Islamic State was present in three main areas in southern Syria: the Yarmouk Basin in Daraa province, the Lajat area in northeastern Daraa, and the eastern desert of Suwayda province. In July, Syrian troops defeated the group in Yarmouk Basin. Following its defeat, the Islamic State made a deal with the Assad regime and its Iranian allies to be relocated to Suwayda’s eastern desert. My family and friends saw fighters as they were transported by the regime’s green buses.
A month before the July attack, Assad’s troops had evacuated the eastern villages of Suwayda, one of which was Rami, where my aunt lives. Three days before the attack, the Assad regime stripped the people of Suwayda of their weapons, especially the people who resided in the east and northeast. Hours before the attack, the Assad regime cut off the electricity from those villages. These same villages were the first to be attacked before dawn.
Hours before the attack, the Assad regime cut off the electricity from those villages. These same villages were the first to be attacked before dawn.
This is how Assad enabled a massacre in Suwayda so he could claim that minorities needed his regime’s protection.
Suwayda is populated by religious minorities, including Syrian Druze, Christians, and a few Bedouin Sunni tribes. Since 2011, the mainly Druze population of Suwayda has remained on the margins of the war in Syria. They neither revolted when the uprising began nor completely supported Assad. Even though Suwayda remained under Assad’s control, tens of thousands of Druze men refused to join the Syrian army.
The Syrian regime tried and failed multiple times to enlist Druze men in the army. Some of my friends did everything they could to avoid joining Assad’s army; some had to flee, and others stayed under Druze authority, mainly Rijal al-Karama (“men of dignity”), a religious Druze movement that was founded in 2012 by Druze sheikhs to protect all sects in Suwayda from any outsider risk, whether the Islamic State, Assad and his allies, or Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah—as well as to protect them against Assad’s troops if they came to draft them.
The regime relied on the Islamic State to terrorize the men of Suwayda into joining the Syrian army.
The regime relied on the Islamic State to terrorize the men of Suwayda into joining the Syrian army.
As a result, many Druze felt forced to align themselves with the regime, allowing it to preserve its status as a protector of minorities. This was not the first time the Syrian regime used Islamic extremists to gain support. In 2011, after the uprising began, many extremists were released from the regime’s prisons, and they went on to start and lead multiple extremist groups, including the Islamic State and Jaish al-Islam, both of which kidnapped and killed opposition activists.
A few months after the Suwayda attack, the regime helped release a group of Druze women. In a meeting with the women’s families, Assad explicitly told the families that, because the Syrian army had helped free the women from the Islamic State, the least they could do was urge the men to join the regime’s troops. But the Druze men refused. A former classmate of mine told me that he didn’t want to join Assad’s army because he was not interested in killing another Syrian just so that the president could keep his seat.
After the July attack, the Assad regime claimed to have completely wiped out Islamic State fighters in the Safa hills, in the desert east of Suwayda. However, many locals today are confirming the return of the Islamic State. Local Druze factions in eastern Suwayda recently encountered Islamic State fighters while scouting the area last month.