By mid-morning, the tribe members had reached the municipal stadium on the city’s western edge. Inside Suwayda, Druze fighters hastily welded metal plates across side streets and posted snipers on minarets and water towers, determined to prevent a full-scale breach. However, the pressure on those inner defenses mounted from several directions simultaneously. Overnight, tribal columns rolling out of the Shahba plain captured Najran to the north, the twin villages of Lahatha and Kafr al-Lahf to the northwest—where field medics later counted more than sixty al-Hijri dead—and Majdal farther west. South of the city, other tribal groups filtered into Walgha, setting abandoned houses alight in what Druze residents branded an act of collective punishment.
The fighting has been shaped as much by perception as by firepower. Bedouin leaders insist their goal is the release of some two thousand tribe members whom they say Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri’s forces have been holding since last year. Druze commanders counter that Suwayda has merely armed itself in self-defense after years of government neglect and the steady encroachment of smuggling gangs allied with tribal clans. Outside actors have lately amplified those competing narratives: Damascus quietly facilitated three large convoys of fighters from Homs and a fourth from Deir Ezzor, some wearing fresh tribal robes over regulation army fatigues; Israel, citing concern for the Druze minority, has authorized a forty-eight-hour “limited entry” of Syrian internal-security troops into Suwayda; Washington and Paris have issued urgent appeals for a cease-fire, warning that stabilization “will take time.”
Inside the province, the situation is deteriorating by the hour. Since the first exchange of fire six days ago, at least 321 people have been killed, hundreds more wounded, and whole villages—including Walgha, al-Mazra’a, and clusters of farmsteads along the Damascus-Suwayda highway—have emptied as families flee on foot or in battered pickup trucks. Electricity is sporadic, water pumps are idle, bakeries are dark; a total internet and mobile blackout, ordered by the authorities, has severed most channels for aid coordination. “If we cannot open a corridor within the next two days,” a volunteer doctor warned by satellite phone, “we will start losing patients to dehydration before bullets.”
The battle has also been complicated by events far beyond the basalt hills of Suwayda. Two nights of Israeli air strikes across southern Syria—ostensibly aimed at Iranian logistics hubs—have kept Damascus’s regular army units hunkered in barracks, wary of presenting fixed targets. That vacuum has encouraged tribal militias, some of them openly brandishing government-issue weapons, to act as the regime’s deniable proxy. Yet the strategy risks turning a localized vendetta into a sectarian conflagration. Even Walid Jumblatt, Lebanon’s veteran Druze leader, admitted in a televised interview that Sheikh al-Hijri “still refuses dialogue,” a stance that leaves precious little space for mediation.
For the moment, the front line loops around Suwayda in a loose crescent. On its western arc, smoke drifts skyward from farm sheds torched in reprisal. To the north, the road through Shahba echoes with the rumble of fresh tribal convoys. And on Tal al-Hadid, Bedouin scouts peer through battered binoculars at the city below, gauging when—or whether—to launch the push that could decide the fight. Few doubt it will be costly. Urban warfare in the tight maze of Suwayda’s old quarter would threaten every remaining civilian and might draw in hard-pressed regional powers already trading blows in the skies overhead.
Yet neither camp appears willing to stand down. Tribal spokesmen say the only acceptable outcome is the liberation of their captured relatives. Druze commanders reply that outsiders must never again rule Suwayda, whether they wear tribal headdresses or army uniforms. Between those positions lies a slender possibility of negotiation—one that shrinks by the hour as shellfire echoes across the ridge and a city of one hundred and fifty thousand braces for whatever comes next.
Photo: Syria Tv