Name: Syrian leader says army deploying to Sweida following ceasefire collapse | DW News
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Now to the sectarian conflict in southern Syria and reports that the Syrian army could redeploy to Suwayda after the collapse of a ceasefire deal there.

Friday saw a fresh outbreak of violence between Sunni Bedouin militia and Druze fighters.

Under a U.S.-brokered deal, Syrian government forces withdrew from the area on Thursday after coming under heavy bombardment from Israel, which supports the Druze religious minority.

The violence of recent days has left almost 600 people dead.

The UN's human rights agency, the OHCHR, is calling for the killing to stop and for those responsible to be held to account.

Steps need to be taken to ensure protection of people in Suwayda and across Syria.

The bloodshed and the violence must stop.

Credible reports that our office has received indicate widespread violations and abuses, including summary executions and arbitrary killings, kidnappings, destruction of private property and looting of homes in the southern city of Suwayda.

Syria's interim authorities must ensure independent, prompt and transparent investigations into all violations.

All those responsible must be held to account.

Caroline Rose is Director of Crime Conflict Nexus and Military Withdrawals at the New

Lines Institute, which has a particular focus on the Middle East.

If southern Syria seems to be locked in a longstanding cycle of attacks and reprisals which seem to flare up every so often, is it inevitable that this cycle will continue?

I think that even when the regime controlled Syria, the south was always a contested area where we would see constant kidnappings, contestation, violent clashes and killings between different community members, including Bedouin tribes, different prominent families,

Druze community members, and then, of course, the regime in Hezbollah.

We now have the regime kicked out of Syria.

And it's very clear that Druze communities in Sueda have opposed and have expressed hesitation regarding HGS and their ideological origins and their nature of rule over a new Syria.

So I do think that this has been inevitable.

That being said, I think that this is a conflict that could be certainly better managed by the new administration.

I think that there were many ways to prevent the scale and scope of the outbreak that we saw occur in Sueda between different communities, as well as, of course, the response that we saw towards many Druze community leaders from forces that were affiliated with HGS and the new administration in Syria.

The best we can hope for is that this interim government, or whoever succeeds it, contains this and tries to keep the number of casualties down.

I think that this is an area that absolutely needs a better preventative strategy.

With any country that would be coming out of nearly two decades of civil war, you are bound to have tensions between different communities, revenge killings, acts of vengeance, clashes, violence.

And so this, I think, was well-anticipated amongst every Syria analyst that has been following the war and its aftermath after the regime has fallen.

But that being said, I think that there's another element that additionally needs to be accounted for, which is the role that Israel wants to play in the South.

When the regime was in power in the South, there was a de-confliction mechanism.

But it was a mechanism that was primarily maintained by Russia and in collaboration with Druze communities.

Israel sees southern Syria as a buffer zone of sorts.

It really wants to ensure that Israel can project some degree of influence into the

And right now, it has lost that with the absence of the regime.

So that is why we're seeing Israel co-opt many of these Druze community members to try and contest and push for further influence in Syria's southern region.

And that, I think, calls even more so for preventative measures, a long-term strategy from the new interim government that seeks to build bridges rather than exacerbate this divide between local communities and the new administration.

Let's pick out one of the strands of that in terms of the relationship with Israel.

Because it sounds like you're saying that whoever rules Syria, whether it be this interim government or, again, whoever comes after it, whoever rules Syria has to accept Israel's demand for a seat at the table in the south of the country.

I think that it'll be important for any new administration, any ruler of Syria, not to accept Israeli territorial acquisition of the south.

And I think that that's something that Israel has pushed for in the past.

But I do think that they have to come to terms that Israel wants a degree of monitoring.

It wants a degree of transparency and clarity into what is happening in the south of Syria.

And that's where a potential deconfliction agreement can come into place.

We saw that before, and it was brokered by Russia.

And they managed a lot of these tensions between different communities in the regime.

They also prevented the regime from being able to consolidate large amounts of control in both Daraa and Suwayda provinces.

And I think that it's going to look different for the new administration.

There has to be control by the Syrian army in the south.

They've not been able to do this because they know there are local tensions and the potential for violence.

But I think it's going to be very important to set up a mechanism to communicate with

Israel and to try and prevent Israeli direct attacks, both into southern Syria as well as into the capital in Damascus and elsewhere in the country.

So how dangerous is this current situation then for Syria's interim government?

Are we looking at the transition to democracy potentially unravelling as a result of all this?

And I think that we've seen violent outbreaks before in Syria.

But this is one of the few where the scale and the scope, just the amount of clashes, the amount of dead community members and dead Syrian army members, it indicates of what is to potentially come.

And that is widespread intercommunal clashes, tensions, kidnappings, revenge killings that transcends beyond southern Syria.

This could revive tensions between Alawite communities and Sunni communities along the

Mediterranean coast in hotspots like Latakia and Tartus.

It could also revive tensions between the new administration and Kurdish communities.

What we've seen in the south, the treatment on both sides between Druze community members and those that have aligned themselves with the new administration, this has sparked new fears amongst minority communities about how the interim government is handling intercommunal tensions.

And it's undermined a lot of the hope and the trust in these new governmental institutions.

This could become a much more widespread bloody conflict.

That's a sobering analysis and we thank you for it.

Caroline Rose, policy analyst from the Newland Institute.

He's director of the International Crisis Group's Middle East and North Africa program.

So let's start with those unconfirmed reports that Syrian government forces are to return to Suwayda province to try and quell this latest violence.

Well, we have to be clear as to what government forces we're talking about, because there is the Syrian army and there is the general security, which is the internal security force.

And I think because the army was present in Suwayda for a while, but Israel has clearly warned the Syrian leadership that it doesn't want the army deployed in the south.

So I think what we're talking about is the internal security force, the general security, which was deployed also in Suwayda, which then withdrew and which should be able to go back if there is a deal in place between the Druze spiritual leadership and political leadership on the one hand and the Syrian government on the other.

And why is this force likely to be more successful than the Syrian army?

It's not whether they can be more successful.

The reality is that Israel will not allow the Syrian army to deploy in that area in Suwayda.

But in any case, whenever there is a domestic dispute or conflict in any country, it should be the internal security force that steps in, not the army, which is there to protect the borders of the country.

So in any case, it should be general security that ought to take on this task and has in fact tried to take on this task but has not been particularly successful until this moment.

What is it about the combatants in this or perhaps about the country itself that means that these ceasefires, and there have been a number, why haven't they held?

So the real problem in Syria until now is that it's a fresh regime, a new regime that overthrew the previous one.

I call it regime, but I mean the political system that is now in charge under President

And it is still building up the security forces, which is basically an assembly of armed groups that operated against the Syrian regime before toppling it in December of last year.

And so to unify these forces, to professionalize them, is going to take time.

And so far it has not achieved that point.

And of course Syria is a mosaic, an ethnic and religious mosaic of groups that all are clamoring for protection and are all afraid of the central government, that it will harm them or that other groups will harm them.

And so if the central government cannot bring the security that they need, then these local conflicts are bound to get out of hand, as they did the last few days in Sweden.