January 30, 2026
Jawad Al-Sayegh – Call of the Nation
The Syrian government was able to achieve clear progress in northern and eastern Syria this month, as it took control of the governorates of Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa, and parts of the countryside of Al-Hasakah governorate, while the influence of the “SDF” declined in areas with a Kurdish majority after it controlled about a third of the country’s area. Damascus’s success in expanding its control over Syrian geography and its resources, and the Kurds’ retreat to their regions, made the authority and its supporters turn their sights towards the south, where Suwayda Governorate remains outside their control since the fall of the Assad regime. As is known, the conditions of the northeast are completely different from the conditions of the southern region, where Turkish influence fades in favor of Israeli influence.
After the month of July 2025, which witnessed the entry of President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s forces into Suwayda and then their withdrawal after the confrontations that took place, the massacres that were committed, and the Israeli air strikes that went so far as to target the Syrian leadership in Damascus, many demanded the spiritual head of the Druze community in Syria, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, for the necessity of reopening channels of communication and negotiation with Damascus, similar to what the Kurds are doing. Those calling for negotiation relied on a common saying in political science that stagnation creates a vacuum, and that this vacuum must be filled by someone. In order to sit down to the negotiations, they said: “Negotiate, even for the sake of negotiating.” This group based its demands on the necessity of doing what the Kurds do, and not closing the doors, and some of them went so far as to express their grief by saying: “I wish we had an oppressed person,” in reference to the leader of the SDF, Mazloum Abdi, considering that the presence of such a strong negotiating figure would have changed the equation. At that time, they saw that Sheikh Al-Hijri was able to impose the conditions he wanted whenever he sat at the negotiating table.
On the other hand, Sheikh Al-Hijri and his team had a completely different reading of the facts. Until July 13, the Druze spiritual leader did not provide a path without taking it for negotiation, and did not close a door that could open a window for a solution. In the first meeting that brought together a delegation sent to meet Al-Sharaa less than 10 days after his arrival at the People’s Palace, the current president’s answer was clear and shocking, saying that no one has privacy with me. Although “Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham” attempted to sneak into Suwayda on New Year’s Eve at that time without coordination with the governorate’s leaders, communication was not interrupted for a day. All the demands that were put forward were a true national dialogue, a civil constitution, and a democratic state, but the response came with a folkloric dialogue that ended before it began, and a dictatorial constitution, and these policies were accompanied by massacres on the coast.
Even after the Sahnaya events in late April 2025, it was agreed that the youth of Suwayda would join the Public Security Service within their areas, and according to the admission of one of the Sharia men in the south, Suleiman Abdel Baqi, no one actually volunteered, as the person responsible for the security file in the governorate at the time, Ahmed Al Dalati, did not respond to Abdel Baqi’s calls, according to what the latter said in a television interview and ignored him several times. In June, a delegation representing As-Suwayda went to Damascus to negotiate, and the demands were minimal: opening an economic crossing for the governorate like the rest of the border governorates, and for the city’s people to be responsible for maintaining the security of their governorate within the Syrian administration, and to introduce investment projects. The people of the governorate even abandoned the demand to name a governor from among its people. However, this delegation fell on deaf ears. During that period, the administration did not pay any attention to the repeated complaints about the behavior of some Bedouins on the Suwayda-Damascus road, including robbery, looting, and repeated attacks, as if the security of the road and people’s lives was a secondary issue.
On the first day of the clashes with the Bedouins, on July 13, the local decision was clear to stop the fighting and exchange the kidnapped people. However, the government had a different opinion, thinking that it had a green light to subjugate Suwayda by force. So it was, and things were pushed to a bloody path with known results. Since July, after the violations and massacres, the discussion about negotiating or not is no longer based on presenting demands or formulating conditions. There is blood, kidnappings, and tragedy. The equation has changed radically, and negotiation is no longer an abstract political act, but rather an ethical and humanitarian question. Even the September agreement signed by Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Al-Shaibani with American envoy Tom Barrack and Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Al-Safadi was not adhered to by the authorities. The forces are still present in the villages in the western and northern countryside, and citizens have not been released, nor has there been a confession of kidnapped men and women, which has made the agreement a dead letter, like previous agreements.
The most important question is: How can Sheikh Al-Hijri and Suwayda negotiate, when we saw with our own eyes what the end of the Kurdish negotiation series was? The Sharaa government retreated at the moment of signing with the SDF after the latter’s leaders were in Damascus, and prepared a military campaign instead of adhering to what was agreed upon. The experience is clear, and the message is clearer. Damascus, and this authority in particular, does not negotiate for solutions, nor to end bad conditions, but rather negotiates only the surrender of the other party. Whoever reads the facts in chronological order realizes that the problem was never the absence of a desire for dialogue on the part of Suwayda, but rather the absence of a serious partner capable of turning the negotiation into a path of salvation, not a new trap.
