The death toll from this week’s outbreak of sectarian violence in Syria has surpassed 100, a war monitoring group said on Thursday after the unrest spread to new areas.
The violence erupted on Tuesday in the city of Jaramana after an audio clip circulated on social media purporting to be of a cleric from the Druse minority insulting the Prophet Muhammad. The cleric denied the accusation, and Syria’s Interior Ministry said that its initial findings showed that he was not the person in the clip.
Nevertheless, armed Sunni Muslim extremist groups began attacking areas including Jaramana with large Druse populations on the outskirts of the capital, Damascus. Druse militias responded in force to protect their neighborhoods and the government sent in its own forces to quell the unrest.
On Wednesday, the clashes spread to another town on the southern outskirts of the capital, Ashrafieh Sahnaya. Early on Thursday, violence spilled from the outskirts of Damascus to Sweida, a Druse-controlled region of southern Syria.
The bloodshed has raised fears that a country where religious minorities had already felt deeply vulnerable since the overthrow of the Assad dictatorship in December will fracture further.
This was the second major outbreak of sectarian violence since a rebel coalition toppled President Bashar al-Assad and seized power.
That coalition was led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which was once linked to Al Qaeda, and it included other Islamist armed groups with more extreme ideologies. Many of those groups have not been brought under the new government’s control and Syria’s new authorities have shown little capacity to rein them in.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said the death toll from three days of clashes rose to 101 by Thursday.
The Observatory reported for the first time on Thursday that extremist militants had killed 35 Druse on the road that connects Sweida to Damascus, and five Druse fighters in a village in the Sweida region.
Those killed in Ashrafieh Sahnaya on Wednesday included a former mayor from the area, Hassan Warwar, and his son, the Observatory said.
The Observatory said 20 from the government’s security forces have also been killed in this week’s unrest and 10 from allied groups.
The Druse, who practice a religion that is an offshoot of Islam, have well-organized militias, based in Sweida, that have been reluctant to integrate into the new government’s military.
Israel, which has a close relationship with Israeli Druse, also entered the fray on Wednesday, launching airstrikes against what it characterized as “operatives” who had attacked Syrian Druse civilians.
Syria’s new Islamist leaders have struggled to absorb the complex web of armed groups operating across the country into a national military. Besides the Druse militias, there are armed factions that support the government, who Druse activists and militants interviewed this week said appeared to be involved in the clashes with the Druse.
Abu Hassan, a Druse militia commander in Sweida who goes by a nom de guerre, said thousands of fighters had battled in several places on Wednesday between Sweida and Daraa, another southwestern city. He said Druse militants were fighting Bedouin militants allied with the government, among others.
The governor of the area that includes Jaramana and Ashrafieh Sahnaya, Amr al-Sheikh, blamed “outlawed groups” for starting the initial violence in a news conference on Wednesday, but did not identify the groups. Mr. al-Sheikh did not acknowledge the presence of pro-government armed factions, saying only that official government forces had deployed to protect the two towns.
Other security officials, however, have privately acknowledged that the government is unable to control all armed groups that support it.
“We have the right to keep our weapons to protect ourselves from these random factions,” said Loubna Baset, a Druse activist in Sweida, who said attacks were continuing on Thursday in villages in the Sweida countryside including al-Sawara.
The government “is claiming that they are sending all these military reinforcements to protect us, but we don’t trust them,” she added.
Despite the sectarian battle lines, the government’s general security forces include Druse and other minorities as well as fighters from the country’s Sunni Muslim majority. Druse were among the general security forces killed this week.
But despite promises of inclusivity from the government, Syrian minorities remain on edge, an anxiety that deepened after a March wave of sectarian killings hit Syria’s coastal region, home of the country’s Alawites, the minority group that the Assad family belongs to.
Reham Mourshed contributed reporting.