The rebels who overthrew the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in December have vowed to unify their country. But persistent outbreaks of sectarian violence have stoked fears among Syria’s many minority groups that the country’s new government, which mostly belongs to the Sunni Arab majority, will not or cannot protect them from extremist groups in Syria.
Dozens of people were killed in late April when Islamist fighters attacked neighborhoods around Damascus, the capital, which are home to many in the country’s Druse minority. On Wednesday, Israel launched airstrikes and threatened to strike Syrian government forces in defense of the Druse.
The attacks came two months after thousands of extremist fighters killed around 1,600 people mostly from the country’s Alawite minority on the Syrian coast, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war-monitoring group based in Britain.
Some of those fighters appeared to be among the more extremist factions of the rebel coalition that toppled the Assad regime, according to war monitors. Despite the new authorities’ promises to integrate all rebel factions into a new national army, many of the more extremist armed groups remain outside the government’s control.
Several prominent Syrian minorities — including the Druse, the Alawites and the Kurds — have also formed armed groups of their own. Both the Druse and the Kurds established militias during the country’s nearly-14-year civil war and have not laid down their arms since the war ended. Some Alawite former members of the Assad regime have also taken up arms against the new government.
Here’s what to know about Syria’s diverse minority communities.
Druse
The Druse, who are a significant minority in Syria and in several neighboring countries, practice a centuries-old offshoot of Islam.
Several powerful Druse militias with tens of thousands of fighters effectively control the rugged province of Sweida, southwest of the capital. Sweida is the heartland of the Druse and a strategically important region bordering Jordan and near Israel.
Many Druse also live in towns on the outskirts of Damascus. The outbreak of violence this week in two of those areas, Jaramana and Sahnaya, erupted after an audio clip circulated on social media purporting to be of a Druse cleric insulting the Prophet Muhammad. The cleric denied the accusation, and Syria’s Interior Ministry said its initial findings showed that he was not the person in the clip.
Israel’s government has close relations with the Druse community in Israel and has offered to protect the Druse in Syria should they come under attack. Many prominent Syrian Druse leaders have rejected Israel’s offer.
Alawites
About 10 percent of Syrians belong to the Alawite sect, which is an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
The Assad family is Alawite, and during its five decades ruling Syria, it often prioritized members of the Alawite community in security and military jobs. Many Sunnis associate the Alawites with the old regime and its brutal attacks on their communities during the country’s civil war. Some Sunni extremists and foreign jihadists, who fought alongside the rebels during the war, also consider Alawites to be heretics.
The Alawites are predominately concentrated on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.
A bout of sectarian violence on the coast broke out in March, after armed groups affiliated with the ousted Assad regime launched a coordinated attack on the new government’s forces in the area. The government then sent reinforcements to the region.
In the chaos, thousands of other extremist fighters and armed civilians flooded to the coast and carried out a killing spree targeting Alawites. It was the deadliest outbreak of sectarian violence since the rebels seized power and highlighted how tenuous the government’s control is over the country.
The Kurds, who make up about 10 percent of Syria’s population, are one of Syria’s largest ethnic minorities. With U.S. support, they have for years run an autonomous region in northeastern Syria, an area with a mixed population of Arabs and Kurds. There are also large Kurdish populations in Turkey, Iraq and Iran, but there is no country with a Kurdish majority.
The Kurdish-led militia that governs much of northeastern Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces, agreed in March to integrate its military and other institutions, including its prized oil and gas fields, under the central government’s control by year’s end. It was a major breakthrough for the new Syrian president, Ahmed al-Shara.
But among Syria’s Kurds, suspicion of the country’s new leadership runs deep. Mr. al-Shara and other former rebels were once affiliated with Al Qaeda, which fought against the Kurds in Syria and Iraq. Some Kurds are also wary because the new government is aligned with its powerful neighbor, Turkey, which considers Syria’s Kurds to be allied with Kurdish militants inside Turkey.
For the past several years, Turkey has been launching air attacks on Syrian Kurdish-led forces across the border and has also supported Syrian proxy forces against the Kurds. The Turkish military kept up some airstrikes even after Mr. al-Shara and the S.D.F. leader, Mazloum Abdi, signed the merger accord, though it has since suspended the attacks.
Members of the Kurdish-led regional government have described the agreement as merely a first step.
Christians
The Christian population of Syria dates back thousands of years. The Bible says that after the apostle Paul was struck blind on the road to Damascus, God directed him to “the Street Called Straight,” which still exists.
Christians were about 10 percent of Syria’s population of 21 million before the war began in 2011. As of 2022, they accounted for about 5 percent, with fewer than 700,000 left, according to groups that track the persecution of Christians around the world.
In some small towns with mixed populations, like Maaloula in western Syria, many of the Muslims backed the rebels in the civil war, while the Christians largely stood by Mr. al-Assad, whom they considered the protector of Syria’s minorities in a Sunni-majority country.
This year, Easter passed without incident in the ancient heart of Damascus, where a historically Christian quarter known as Bab Touma houses churches of at least a half-dozen different denominations.