Syria’s Druze minority is shifting its support to the opposition

BEIRUT — Members of Syria’s Druze community, a small but significant religious minority, are joining the opposition in bigger numbers, ramping up pressure on the beleaguered government of President Bashar al-Assad, according to opposition activists and rebel military commanders.

As the Syrian conflict has devolved into a bloody sectarian war, with many Sunni Muslims backing the opposition, some of the country’s minorities, including the Druze and Christians, have largely sat on the sidelines.

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A look at the Syrian uprising one year later. Thousands of Syrians have died and President Bashar al-Assad remains in power.

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Timeline: Major events in the country’s tumultuous uprising that began in March 2011.

Assad has managed to maintain the support of many of his fellow Alawites, who adhere to an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and keeping the support of the minority groups has been a key goal of his government, which has tried to portray the conflict as a foreign plot rather than a homegrown challenge to its authority.

“The Assad government is trying to keep the Druze and other minority communities at bay to make sure they don’t side with the opposition,” said Farid Khazen, a Lebanese parliamentarian and professor of Middle East politics at the American University of Beirut.

The Druze community in Syria numbers only around 700,000, out of a total population of some 21 million, and has a history of rebelling under authoritarian leaders, rising up during the rule of the Ottomans as well as the French. Although there are communities scattered across the country, the bulk of the Druze, whose secretive religion is an offshoot of Islam, live in the mountainous region of southeast Syria.

In the past couple of months, according to opposition activists, there have been more than a half-dozen anti-government protests in Sweida province, the ancestral homeland of the Druze in the southeast that had remained relatively quiet since the uprising began nearly two years ago. And in mid-December, rebel fighters announced the formation of the first revolutionary military council for Sweida province. The council coordinated the most significant battle in the Druze region since the conflict began.

In that mid-January clash, dozens of Druze fighters joined a rebel assault on a radar base on a mountaintop in Sweida province. The fighters killed several government soldiers but were ultimately routed by troops that outgunned them; the fighters retreated down the mountainside, suffering many casualties as they pulled back, according to rebel fighters who participated in the battle.

Still, some of the rebels considered the operation to be a victory. “The symbolic meaning of the Druze participating in this operation was just as important as destroying the radar tower,” said a 36-year-old Druze fighter who goes by the name Tamer and participated in the battle after joining the Sweida rebels a few months ago.

The rebel fighting force paid a high price in the battle: Among those killed was Khaldoun Zeineddine, one of the first Druze officers to defect from the Syrian army, who was seen as a folk hero among the Druze who have joined the opposition.

A video posted online shows the aftermath of the battle with the bodies of several rebel fighters lying in snow, some of them with arms frozen in the air.