Damascus - Almost two years on from the fall of Assad’s regime in 2024, continued violence targeting Syria’s ethnic minorities is placing the country’s post-war recovery under strain as the government struggles to manage persistent sectarian tensions.
Earlier this month, pro-government demonstrators gathered in Kurdish areas of Hasakeh and Raqqa, vandalising Kurdish symbols and calling for the government to take full control of the region.
This comes amid the ongoing integration of the Kurdish-led SDF into the Syrian state.
The unrest followed a series of mob attacks and acts of vandalism targeting Christian homes, vehicles and shops in Al-Suqaylabiyah, a predominantly Greek Orthodox town in Hama province.
These are not isolated incidents. Post-Assad Syria has seen “several minority communities that have feared systemic discrimination and unfair treatment - particularly the Kurdish, Druze and Alawite communities,” Caroline Rose, a senior director at the Soufan Center, tells The New Arab.
Al-Suqaylabiyah has already experienced a previous spate of mob violence over the past year, while Syria continues to witness sectarian killings on an almost daily basis.
The country’s post-war recovery was also blighted by a series of massacres targeting Syria’s Alawite and Druze minorities in 2025.
Syria’s decade-long civil war deepened sectarian hostility. Assad sought to frame the conflict as a sectarian war between Syria’s minority communities and Sunni “Islamists” and “terrorists”.
As the revolution progressed, opposition to Assad became increasingly Islamist and sectarian in nature. During the conflict, communities on all sides were targeted, with many villages and neighbourhoods suffering killings and displacement.
The collapse of the regime saw many displaced communities return to their destroyed homes, in many cases living alongside those they believed had destroyed them in the first place.
While the government has repeatedly moved to clamp down on outbreaks of violence, two years into Syria’s “transitional period”, it has struggled to address many of the underlying grievances that allow disputes to escalate into communal violence.
Rebuilding trust in the security services
It is this legacy of civil war grievances that allows disputes, often rooted in personal conflicts or criminal activity, to escalate into communal violence. The recent violence in Al-Suqaylabiyah began with a fight between two men, one of whom returned to his village to rally a mob.
Although Damascus has made efforts to deploy its security services to quell unrest, in many parts of Syria this does not necessarily create a greater sense of security among local communities.
“Local officials and security chiefs come mainly from the networks that toppled Assad, often recruited for their loyalty. Minority recruitment into the security forces remains limited,” explains Dr Nanar Hawach, an independent expert specialising in Syria, to The New Arab.
“The already few minority recruits mostly hold desk or traffic jobs, and the armed patrols in their areas are often drawn from elsewhere,” he adds.
“As a result, many ethnic minority residents hesitate to report threats to the officers who patrol their streets, who they may not trust.”
Over the past two years, although the government has made significant strides in filling the security vacuum that emerged after the collapse of the regime, the Interior Ministry remains understaffed according to analysts.
One way to address this, alongside the communal sense of distrust, would be to encourage the recruitment and active deployment of security personnel from minority backgrounds, particularly in areas where minorities make up a substantial proportion of the local population.
However, Gregory Waters, an independent researcher and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, cautions against establishing a system of local communal policing on ethnic or religious lines which he believes in the long run may serve to “solidify sectarian divisions” by clearly demarcating that “this is a Christian town with Christian police, and that is a Sunni town with Sunni police”.
He argues that alongside more personnel, the local security services need to improve their coordination with local communities, in order to be quickly made aware of and pre-emptively halt sectarian mobilisations before they become violent.
However, analysts agree that establishing civil peace requires more than simply securitising the issue.
Achieving a sense of justice
Local disputes have long been common in many of these communities, although they have taken on a more sectarian character in post-Assad Syria because of grievances that emerged during the civil war.
“For many of those people returning home, seeing their hometowns destroyed has a very visceral impact,” says Waters.
He suggests that this sense of grievance manifests as anger stemming from the perception that “the people responsible were let off the hook”. Those affected perceive a lack of genuine transitional justice.
The Syrian government has begun the long and complicated process of trying those responsible for crimes committed during the civil war. In August, Bashar Al-Assad and several senior regime figures were sentenced to death in absentia.
Despite this, many lower-level figures have not yet been arrested. According to Waters, this gives aggrieved communities “an excuse to cause problems”, even when those targeted by retaliatory violence were not actually responsible for the original crimes.
However, many within minority communities are sensitive to perceived state overreach. Genuine arrests linked to transitional justice can also be misrepresented, with such actions “often get[ting] blown up and distorted through misinformation and fake news”, explains Waters.
The arrests “become construed as the government targeting ethnic minorities – which can aggravate these communities further”.
Waters suggests that building genuine civil peace requires more than simply imposing justice. Instead, he argues, there needs to be “a systemic whole-of-sector approach, that brings together local leadership, revolutionary figures, security chiefs, and most importantly, those who are causing the civil disturbances”.
Local governance and the economy
Governance disputes appear to be a driving force behind much of the recent violence in northeast Syria.
The integration of the SDF into the government is “sparking fears amongst Kurdish communities about the loss of Kurdish political autonomy, Kurdish language rights and security control in the region,” says Rose.
“These fears have been exacerbated by increasing fuel prices and the general cost of living, which have also contributed to public demonstrations.”
Meanwhile, Arab communities in the northeast are frustrated by the slow pace of integration. Reflecting long-standing grievances over what they perceive as corruption and discrimination under SDF rule, some want Damascus to take a more direct role in governing the region.
There is an economic dimension to this issue. The risk of violence erupting is heightened by the lack of real livelihoods for young men, and the sense that material support remains scant.
“You have unemployed young men, angry that their homes and workplaces are destroyed with nowhere else to channel their frustration,” says Waters. “These are the types that are sparking incidents.”
Alongside economics, part of the frustration is rooted in the sense that “communities have limited influence over how their areas are governed,” Hawach explains to The New Arab.
“Alongside security officials, local civilian leaders are often recruited from opposition networks. Minority candidates may be viewed with a degree of distrust, particularly Alawites, given their association with the former regime.”
Hawach suggests that the authorities could address these concerns by giving local communities more meaningful decision-making powers. He points to the Ismaili Council in the town of Salamiyah as a key example.
The Ismaili Council, which represents Syria’s Ismaili community, established contact with HTS before the fall of the regime and helped facilitate the city’s handover to advancing opposition forces.
Since then, the council has worked closely with local security chiefs and community leaders to ensure that occasional incidents of violence do not spiral into broader communal conflict.
“Syria could develop these local bodies with genuine authority over local services, public employment and disputes,” suggests Hawach.
Ultimately, ensuring civil peace in Syria will require the Syrian government to not only develop its security architecture but also address the grievances that cause local disputes to escalate.
Without meaningful accountability, economic development and greater local representation, efforts to restore stability risk leaving the underlying causes of communal tension unresolved.
Cian Ward is a journalist based in Damascus, covering conflict, migration, and humanitarian issues
Follow him on X: @CP__Ward
Edited by Charlie Hoyle
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