Shortages of water, food and medicine have reached critical levels in Sweida in southern Syria after three weeks of fighting, residents told The National.
Supplies have been severely limited by the conflict between government forces seeking to deploy in the city and local powerbrokers resisting control by the newly established central authorities.
Residents fear attacks by Bedouin tribes if they leave the city. Authorities have also heavily restricted access to the area, requiring prior co-ordination for entry and exit. Journalists are banned from entering the city.
Suhail Thebian, a civil figure in Sweida, told The National that, in addition to the almost complete absence of electricity, there has been no water for days, accusing armed men of blowing up water wells in the nearby area of Thaala, on which Sweida city depends.
“Remaining wells are not functioning because there is no diesel to operate them. There is no flour either,” he said. He pointed to the destruction of a major mill north of Sweida, an area where attacks have not stopped, and the near halting of supplies from Damascus, although the Syrian Red Crescent has sent three aid convoys from Damascus.
Meanwhile, Syria's Information Minister Hamza Mustafa said that “humanitarian aid heading to Sweida has not stopped”, and pinned the blame for the shortage of supplies on “an outlaw group who wants to exploit the suffering of people for its separatist goals”. He was referring to the Druze spiritual leadership, which has coalesced in recent weeks under Sheikh Hikmat Al Hijri.
A Syrian Red Crescent official said a convoy with 1,000 food baskets as well as 200 tonnes of food was entering Sweida on Monday, the third such convoy since clashes subsided last week. On Thursday, a convoy with 30,000 litres of fuel arrived in the city.
“The priority is to keep the main hospital (Sweida National) in service,” he explained.
The official said 4,000 baskets for use by the displaced, containing household disinfectants, nylon separation barriers and other items to cope with minimal shelter, were also sent to Sweida on Monday. The aid also included a consignment of medicine.
The conflict in Sweida is the latest pitting the government against Syria's minorities since Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, formerly allied with Al Qaeda, ousted Bashar Al Assad in December. In March, hundreds of civilians were killed in a campaign against the coastal Alawite heartland. Tensions with Kurds in northern and eastern Syria are also high.
The clashes erupted in Sweida in early July between Bedouin and Druze factions, following the kidnapping of a Druze trader on a government-controlled road north of the city, and escalated into widespread violence, killing more than 1,000 people.
Syrian government forces were deployed to contain the unrest, but Druze militias, who deeply distrust the new Syrian authorities and viewed them as siding with the Bedouin, mobilised to push them back. Forces allied with the central authorities attempted to enter Sweida days after talks between the central authorities and Mr Al Hijri failed to secure the admission of security forces into the city.
The government has sent in tanks and troops, but Israeli strikes and US diplomatic efforts curbed the offensive on the heartland of the Druze minority, particularly Sweida city, the provincial capital, located near Jordan.
A source in Jordan said that Syrian government forces had entered more than a dozen strategically important villages in the west and north of the city. This has deprived hundreds of thousands of Sweida residents of access to Damascus, and to the nearby province of Deraa, birthplace of the 2011 Syrian revolt. East of Sweida lies the Syriac desert, leading effectively to nowhere.
At Sweida National Hospital, a doctor who gave his name as Khaldoun said that “serums, painkillers, surgical thread, antibiotics, are critically low. We need all this to operate. There is nothing left to treat bone wounds, my speciality".
