Suweida: Forced Displacement as Property and Infrastructure Plundered

In July, military operations carried out in the Suweida governorate by the Ministries of Defence and Interior along with allied Salafist and tribal militias, took on a systematic violent character targeting the Druze minority. The campaign entailed a complete overrunning and destruction of towns and villages. Widespread forced displacement was accompanied by indiscriminate shelling, home invasions, summary executions, and arbitrary arrests, alongside systematic looting of homes and shops, followed by setting them on fire or demolishing them. The sabotage also targeted hospitals and healthcare facilities, vital infrastructure such as water and electricity networks, as well as the deliberate destruction of farms, irrigation wells, storage facilities, and mills. This violence reflects an attempt to impose collective punishment, creating major crises — demographic, water-related, and energy-related — in a governorate already suffering from dire economic and climatic conditions.

Accurate information remains difficult to obtain at this stage. The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement on July 22 denouncing that journalists had been “blocked from entering Sweida.” In this article, The Syria Report relies on testimonies and local estimates provided by activists, journalists, NGO workers, and officials from public service institutions in the Suweida governorate, as well as accounts from survivors of the displacement. 

Ghinwa, a displaced woman from the village of Jareen in the western countryside, told The Syria Report that she was sheltering with her disabled mother in one of the inner rooms of their house when rocket shells began falling on the village. The sound of explosions quickly approached, and a shell landed in the neighbouring room. In shock, Ghinwa was forced to drag her mother out as she was unable to reach her wheelchair. Minutes after leaving, a second rocket hit the house. Ghinwa, her mother, and the rest of the villagers fled to Suweida city before the government forces arrived. She added that two days after they left, a group from government-affiliated forces burned down their house after looting all its contents.

Ghinwa’s story is not unique. The testimonies of displaced people all tell the same details: looting of household contents, furniture, electrical appliances, money, gold jewellery, personal documents, property deeds, and even family photo albums – followed by setting the houses on fire or demolishing them using heavy machinery.

Samar, displaced with her family from Mazraa to Suweida city, said that burning the houses amounts to destroying collective memory and severing all ties between the displaced and their history, daily lives, customs, traditions, and material and social heritage.

Talal, a resident of the 7 April neighbourhood in Suweida city, told The Syria Report that the residential area was suddenly bombarded with Grad rockets, mortar shells, and Shaheen drones on July 15 and 16. One drone dropped two 60mm mortar rounds on the public square surrounded by residential buildings. The explosion burned and damaged 14 private cars and multiple house facades. Talal said he and his family were forced to flee on foot after their house was severely damaged and their car destroyed by fire.

Between July 13 and 24, local sources said that more than 100,000 people were forcibly displaced from villages in the northern and western countryside of Suweida, fleeing a large-scale military campaign targeting the governorate. This campaign unfolded in two main waves: the first, carried out between July 13 and 16, was led by the Ministries of Defence and Interior under the Transitional Administration, along with tribal militias from the Bedouin communities of al-Suwayda. The second wave, between July 16 and 24, was launched by Arab tribes that had mobilised from across Syria. Meanwhile, OCHA estimated that as of July 24, the total displacement toll in the governorate stood at 176,000.

The violence resulted in the deaths of around 2,000 people, the majority of them civilians, including many women and children, according to local sources. Most were killed by rocket and artillery shelling, and in house-to-house summary executions. There were also many cases of disappearance and arbitrary arrest, affecting civilians unable to flee, as well as those abducted on roads or from their homes. The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) has documented 814 killings so far, including 20 children and 34 women. SNHR said this is a preliminary toll, and will be updated accordingly.

The violence morphed into a systematic pillaging of urban areas: looting of homes and shops, stripping everything that could be removed, in all areas taken over by the ministries’ forces or tribal militias. This included 35 villages in the western and northern countryside, most notably Dour, Najran, Doueira, Taara, Mazraa, Lagha, Thaala, Umm Al-Zeitoun, Al-Soura Al-Saghira, Al-Soura Al-Kabira, Kanaker, and Al-Majaymer. After the killing and looting, fighters set houses ablaze, often using grenades and strips of highly flammable explosives.

In a strange pattern, after the invading forces stole modern cars from every town, village, and neighbourhood they entered in Suweida, tanks from the Ministry of Defence deliberately crushed the remaining parked vehicles along the roads they passed. This appears to have aimed at disabling residents’ ability to flee, thereby keeping them in areas under government and tribal forces control to maximise civilian casualties.

On July 16, government-affiliated forces attacked the National Hospital in Suweida city, besieging it and storming it with tanks. After entering the hospital, they summarily executed eight patients and detained medical staff and some patients, subjecting them to abuse and sectarian insults. Private hospitals were not spared. Nurse Nisreen from Mazraa Private Hospital said the medical team had to evacuate all patients before the attacking forces reached the Kanawat Road area, where the hospital is located. At the last moment, the team locked the main door and escaped through the back. The forces smashed the main door, stormed the hospital, looted its medical equipment and supplies, and destroyed what they couldn’t carry.

On another front, systematic destruction directly targeted farms, the primary livelihood of Suweida residents. The attacking forces burned fields planted with wheat, barley, and other grains — mostly rain-fed crops — on a large scale in the western countryside. Vegetable farms reliant on irrigation were also attacked, with irrigation networks, wells, pumps, and solar energy systems sabotaged. Fighters also looted stored crops from warehouses. This will deprive farmers of their only source of income and also threaten local food security in a governorate already suffering under a military and financial siege.

Documented cases of livestock theft include cattle from farms and poultry from coops, before those were vandalised and set ablaze. Muhannad, a cattle and sheep breeder who relies on a well for his farm in the Maamal area west of Suweida, said that the “government forces” stole all the livestock and solar-powered equipment operating the well and vandalised all the farm’s infrastructure.

A particularly notable tactic has been the systematic targeting of groundwater wells and the detonation of elevated village water tanks, aimed at worsening the water crisis in a region suffering from severe drought. Wells in Thaala village, which supply 70 percent of Suweida city’s drinking water needs, were destroyed using landmines and explosives, rendering them completely out of service. This comes amid an unprecedented drought that has dried up the reservoirs at Jawaleen and Rumm dams in the Dhahr Al-Jabal area. Wells in the Deyatha area in the eastern countryside were also sabotaged, despite no clashes occurring there. Some villages in the northeastern countryside rely on those wells for drinking water.

Fighters also targeted grain silos and mills, apparently to starve the population under the military siege. The silos in Umm Al-Zeitoun village are the largest in Suweida, and its mill supplies flour to the governorate and part of Damascus. After looting a large share of the stored wheat, tribal forces that took over the village set fire to what remained by firing heavy machine guns at the silos, sparking a blaze. The mill was then vandalised. A similar fate befell the privately owned Saraya mill on the Thaala road west of Suweida city.

On another front, the Bedouin tribes of Suweida, based in the neighborhoods of Al-Hroubi, Al-Mashourib, and Al-Maqous, whose fighters took part in the attacks against the Druze as part of the pro-transitional administration militia Southern Tribes Gathering, withdrew voluntarily as government and allied forces retreated on July 16. This was followed by retaliatory abuses committed by Druze armed factions against Bedouin civilians from the city of Shahba, leaving 20 dead. The Druze spiritual leadership immediately condemned these violations and issued a statement prohibiting any assault on civilians, which helped contain the violence. Nevertheless, the incidents were used as a pretext for renewed escalation, as thousands of Bedouin fighters poured again into Suweida.

On July 16, U.S. envoy Thomas Barrack reached an agreement—brokered by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Jordan—that called for the evacuation of Bedouin tribes from crossing points between Suweida and Daraa. The implementation began with the departure of tribes from Shahba, followed by the exit of 400 individuals from the town of Al-Kafr on July 24.

Arab tribal forces continued the offensive where government troops had stopped, committing again significant human rights violations. Until today, most villages in the northern countryside remain under tribal militia control, while those in the western countryside are held by the Ministry of Interior forces and tribal militias.

The collective punishment extended beyond homes and farms to the deliberate targeting of electricity stations and distribution transformers. Most transformers in the western and northern countryside, and in the city centre, were destroyed, cutting power to tens of thousands of homes and plunging the area into complete darkness for more than 10 days. Combined with a fuel shortage, this prevented operation of water pumps connected to wells in the southern and eastern countryside — areas that have received most of the displaced from the north and west — resulting in a major drinking water crisis amid an extreme heatwave.

What happened in Suweida in July 2025 was not merely a military-security operation in which crimes against humanity were committed. It was a deliberate destruction of livelihoods and essential life systems in a stable urban area. The violence did not only target combatants, but also civilians, homes, farms, hospitals, and water wells.