Mustafa al-Bakour in Suwayda: Ethnic Cleansing That Goes Unspoken
Originally published on AL-JUMHURIYA:
Four months after Assad’s fall, the Military Operations Command of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham sent one of its envoys to the predominantly Druze province of Suwayda. Mustafa al-Bakour, until then an obscure official of the Syrian Salvation Government in the Harem district of Idlib, arrived in Suwayda on January 6, 2025, and was tasked with governing the province. In the absence of a democratically elected parliament or provincial council, he has spent the last eighteen months governing Suwayda on Damascus’ behalf: erasing the Central Authority’s fingerprints from two waves of sectarian violence, and after the July 2025 massacres, overseeing a systematic campaign to renovate, repaint, and repopulate the very crime scenes his government had helped create.
