[LegalInsurrection] “Sectarian festivities escalated in Syria’s predominantly Druze region of Sweida on Saturday, with machinegun fire and mortar shelling ringing out after days of bloodshed," Rooters reported Sunday.
"Rooters news hounds heard gunfire from inside the city of Sweida and saw shells land in nearby villages," the news agency added.
After a week of attacks by Syrian regime forces and affiliated jihadist groups on Syria’s non-Moslem Druze population, the corpse count has risen to nearly 1000. On Sunday, the London-based Telegraph reported that "Syrian regime forces wearing Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
badges [carried] out bloody rampage," based on eyewitness accounts.
The killing continues after Secretary of State Marco Rubio
...The diminutive 13-year-old Republican U.S. Senator from Florida, Secretary of State in the second Trump administration...
on Saturday urged the Syrian leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, to rein in the regime forces and jihadist fighters, who have been killing, raping, and displacing the Druze community in the south of the country.
"The rape and slaughter of innocent people which has and is still occurring must end," Secretary Rubio wrote on X.
"If authorities in Damascus want to preserve any chance of achieving a unified, inclusive and peaceful Syria free of ISIS and of Iranian control they must help end this calamity by using their security forces to prevent ISIS and any other violent mostly peaceful jihadists from entering the area and carrying out massacres," he cautioned.
For our Arabic readers: here and at the headline link there are tweets — and then more tweets in the threads attached to those tweets. Are the men indeed ISIS or, as one of the tweets in one of the threads claims, Syrian National Army (Turkey’s proxies) from Homs? My thanks.
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