The Druze Massacre in Syria and the True Face of the New Regime

The rise to power of a new regime in Syria last December marked the end of a brutal 14-year-long civil war. In the past months since the fall of the autocratic Assad regime, which had ruled Syria for more than half a century, new hope had awoken. The newly appointed president, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, has received wide international recognition—so far meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron, UN chief Antonio Guterres, and US president Donald Trump. Those meetings reflected a swift transformation of a man that only, a short time earlier, was known under his nom de guerre of Muhammad Al-Jolani, a wanted Al-Qaeda commander with a $10 million USD bounty on his head, due to his role in terror attacks against American forces in Iraq. Nevertheless, recent violent events against minority communities in Syria raise the suspicion that this international rapid rehabilitation is misguided, and that the new leader of Syria has not abandoned his radical Jihadist past.