Lebanon Druze leader accuses Israel of exploiting minority in Syria

Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt sits next to a framed An-Nahar newspaper front page covering his father’s assassination in 1977, at his residence in Beirut on March 26, 2025. (AFP)
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Updated 27 March 2025
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Lebanon Druze leader accuses Israel of exploiting minority in Syria

  • Walid Jumblatt: Israel wants ‘to implement the plan it has always had... which is to break up the region into confessional entities and extend the chaos’
  • Jumblatt: ‘They want to annihilate Gaza, then it will be the West Bank’s turn... they are trying to destabilize Syria, through the Druze but also others’

BEIRUT: Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt has accused Israel of exploiting followers of his minority faith in Syria as part of a broader plan to divide the Middle East along sectarian lines.
Israel wants “to implement the plan it has always had... which is to break up the region into confessional entities and extend the chaos,” said Jumblatt, a key figure in Lebanese politics for more than four decades.
“They want to annihilate Gaza, then it will be the West Bank’s turn... they are trying to destabilize Syria, through the Druze but also others,” he told AFP in an interview Wednesday.
“It’s a dangerous game.”
Israel has been making overtures toward Syria’s Druze community since Islamist-led rebels ousted longtime ruler Bashar Assad in December after more than 13 years of war.
Since then, Israel has sent troops into the UN-patrolled buffer zone along the armistice line on the Golan Heights, and war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has reported regular Israeli incursions deeper into southern Syria.
The Druze faith has followers in Israel, Lebanon and Syria, including the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.
They account for about three percent of Syria’s population and are concentrated in the southern province of Sweida.
This month, Israeli government spokesman David Mencer said 10,000 humanitarian aid packages had been sent to “the Druze community in battle areas of Syria” over the past few weeks.
“Israel has a bold alliance with our Druze brothers and sisters,” he told journalists.

Israel also authorized the first pilgrimage in decades by Syrian Druze clerics to a revered shrine in Israel.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said Israel would not allow Syria’s new rulers “to harm the Druze,” following a deadly clash between government-linked forces and Druze fighters in the suburbs of Damascus.
Druze leaders rejected Katz’s warning and declared their loyalty to a united Syria.
Druze representatives have been negotiating with Syria’s new authorities on an agreement that would see their armed groups integrated into the new national army.
The talks had almost reached completion but “Israeli pressure” on some parties prevented the accord from being finalized, a source close to the negotiations told AFP, requesting anonymity as the matter is sensitive.
Jumblatt noted that during the French mandate in the 1920s and 1930s, “Syria was divided into four entities: an Alawite state, a Druze state, the state of Damascus and the state of Aleppo,” the latter two being Sunni Muslim.
“The Druze, with the other Syrian nationalists, were able to prevent the division of Syria” by launching a revolt and the plan later collapsed, he said.
He expressed hope that any new division of Syria could be avoided, appealing to Arab leaders to support interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa.

Jumblatt in December was the first Lebanese official to meet Sharaa after his Islamist group spearheaded the offensive that ousted Assad.
Sharaa told Jumblatt that Syria would no longer exert “negative interference” in Lebanon, after Assad’s dynasty was accused of destabilising Lebanon for years and assassinating numerous Lebanese officials, including Jumblatt’s father.
Kamal Jumblatt, who founded the Progressive Socialist Party and opposed Assad’s father Hafez over his troops’ intervention in the Lebanese civil war, was killed near the Syrian border in 1977.
This month, Syrian security forces arrested former intelligence officer Ibrahim Huweija, suspected of numerous killings including that of Jumblatt’s father.
“He’s a big criminal, he also committed crimes against the Syrian people and should be tried in Syria,” Jumblatt said.
Lebanon’s new authorities have been under pressure since a devastating war between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah group, an Assad ally, Jumblatt said.
“The Americans want Lebanon to normalize ties with Israel,” he said.
Under a November ceasefire, Hezbollah was to withdraw fighters from the border area and dismantle its military infrastructure there.
The Israeli army was also to withdraw but troops are still deployed in five positions inside Lebanon that it deems strategic.


UN urges more support to speed up Syria refugee returns

Updated 56 min 34 sec ago
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UN urges more support to speed up Syria refugee returns

  • According to UNHCR, some 13.5 million Syrians remain displaced internally or abroad
  • Wide scale destruction, including to basic infrastructure, remains a major barrier to returns

DAMASCUS: UN refugee agency chief Filippo Grandi has urged more international support for Syria to speed up reconstruction and enable further refugee returns after some 14 years of civil war.
“I am here also to really make an appeal to the international community to provide more help, more assistance to the Syrian government in this big challenge of recovery of the country,” Grandi told reporters on Friday on the sidelines of a visit to Damascus.
Syrians who had been displaced internally or fled abroad have begun gradually returning home since the December overthrow of longtime ruler Bashar Assad, whose brutal repression of peaceful anti-government protests in 2011 triggered war.
But the wide-scale destruction, including to basic infrastructure, remains a major barrier to returns.
Grandi said over two million people had returned to their areas of origin, including around 1.5 million internally displaced people, while some 600,000 others have come back from neighboring countries including Lebanon, Jordan and Turkiye.
“Two million of course is only a fraction of the very big number of Syrian refugees and displaced, but it is a very big figure,” he said.
According to UNHCR, some 13.5 million Syrians remain displaced internally or abroad.
Syria’s conflict displaced around half the pre-war population, with many internally displaced people seeking refuge in camps in the northwest.
Grandi said that after Assad’s toppling, the main obstacle to returns was “a lack of services, lack of housing, lack of work,” adding that his agency was working with Syrian authorities and governments in the region “to help people go back.”
He said he discussed the importance of the sustainability of returns with Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Al-Shaibani, including ensuring “that people don’t move again because they don’t have a house or they don’t have a job or they don’t have electricity” or other services such as health.
Sustainable returns “can only happen if there is recovery, reconstruction in Syria, not just for the returnees, for all Syrians,” he said.
He added that he also discussed with Shaibani how to “encourage donors to give more resources for this sustainability.”
With the recent lifting of Western sanctions, the new Syrian authorities hope for international support to launch reconstruction, which the UN estimates could cost more than $400 billion.


Water levels plummet at drought-hit Iraqi reservoir

Updated 21 June 2025
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Water levels plummet at drought-hit Iraqi reservoir

  • Visible cracks have emerged in the retreating shoreline of the artificial lake, which lies in northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region and was created in the 1950s

DUKAN: Water levels at Iraq’s vast Dukan Dam reservoir have plummeted as a result of dwindling rains and further damming upstream, hitting millions of inhabitants already impacted by drought with stricter water rationing.
Amid these conditions, visible cracks have emerged in the retreating shoreline of the artificial lake, which lies in northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region and was created in the 1950s.
Dukan Lake has been left three quarters empty, with its director Kochar Jamal Tawfeeq explaining its reserves currently stand at around 1.6 billion cubic meters of water out of a possible seven billion.
That is “about 24 percent” of its capacity, the official said, adding that the level of water in the lake had not been so low in roughly 20 years.
Satellite imagery analyzed by AFP shows the lake’s surface area shrank by 56 percent between the end of May 2019, the last year it was completely full, and the beginning of June 2025.
Tawfeeq blamed climate change and a “shortage of rainfall” explaining that the timing of the rains had also become irregular.
Over the winter season, Tawfeeq said the Dukan region received 220 millimeters (8.7 inches) of rain, compared to a typical 600 millimeters.


Upstream damming of the Little Zab River, which flows through Iran and feeds Dukan, was a secondary cause of the falling water levels, Tawfeeq explained.
Also buffeted by drought, Iran has built dozens of structures on the river to increase its own water reserves.
Baghdad has criticized these kinds of dams, built both by Iran and neighboring Turkiye, accusing them of significantly restricting water flow into Iraq via the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Iraq, and its 46 million inhabitants, have been intensely impacted by the effects of climate change, experiencing rising temperatures, year-on-year droughts and rampant desertification.
At the end of May, the country’s total water reserves were at their lowest level in 80 years.
On the slopes above Dukan lies the village of Sarsian, where Hussein Khader Sheikhah, 57, was planting a summer crop on a hectare of land.
The farmer said he hoped a short-term summer crop of the kind typically planted in the area for an autumn harvest — cucumbers, melons, chickpeas, sunflower seeds and beans — would help him offset some of the losses over the winter caused by drought.
In winter, in another area near the village, he planted 13 hectares mainly of wheat.
“The harvest failed because of the lack of rain,” he explained, adding that he lost an equivalent of almost $5,700 to the poor yield.
“I can’t make up for the loss of 13 hectares with just one hectare near the river,” he added.


The water shortage at Dukan has affected around four million people downstream in the neighboring Sulaimaniyah and Kirkuk governorates, including their access to drinking water.
For more than a month, water treatment plants in Kirkuk have been trying to mitigate a sudden, 40 percent drop in the supplies reaching them, according to local water resource official Zaki Karim.
In a country ravaged by decades of conflict, with crumbling infrastructure and floundering public policies, residents already receive water intermittently.
The latest shortages are forcing even “stricter rationing” and more infrequent water distributions, Karim said.
In addition to going door-to-door to raise awareness about water waste, the authorities were also cracking down on illegal access to the water network.
In the province of roughly two million inhabitants, the aim is to minimize the impact on the provincial capital of Kirkuk.
“If some treatment plants experience supply difficulties, we will ensure that there are no total interruptions, so everyone can receive their share,” Karim said.


Israel military says hit Hezbollah site in south Lebanon

Updated 21 June 2025
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Israel military says hit Hezbollah site in south Lebanon

  • The military said the site was used by Hezbollah “to advance terror attacks against Israeli civilians”

JERUSALEM: Israel’s military said Saturday its navy hit a Hezbollah “infrastructure site” near the southern Lebanese city of Naqoura, a day after Israel’s foreign minister warned the Lebanese armed group against entering the Iran-Israel war.
“Overnight, an Israeli Navy vessel struck a Hezbollah ‘Radwan Force’ terrorist infrastructure site in the area of Naqoura in southern Lebanon,” the military said in a statement.
The military said the site was used by Hezbollah “to advance terror attacks against Israeli civilians.”
In a separate statement on Saturday, the military said it had “struck and eliminated” a Hezbollah militant in south Lebanon the previous day, despite an ongoing ceasefire between both sides.
In a statement carried by the official National News Agency, Lebanon’s health ministry said late on Friday that one person was killed in a “strike carried out by an Israeli enemy drone on a motorcycle” in the same south Lebanon village.
The November ceasefire aimed to end hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, which sparked months of deadly hostilities by launching cross-border attacks on northern Israel in solidarity with Palestinian ally Hamas following its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Lebanon’s army, which has been dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure as part of the truce, said earlier in June that the Israeli military’s ongoing violations and “refusal to cooperate” with the ceasefire monitoring mechanism “could prompt the (Lebanese) military to freeze cooperation” on site inspections.


Israeli military kill head of Palestine corps in IRGC’s overseas arm – defense minister

Updated 21 June 2025
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Israeli military kill head of Palestine corps in IRGC’s overseas arm – defense minister

  • Veteran commander, Saeed Izadi, led the Palestine Corps of the Quds Force
  • The Quds Force built up a network of Arab allies known as the Axis of Resistance

Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Saturday that the military had killed a veteran commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ overseas arm, in a strike in an apartment in Iran’s Qom.

The veteran commander, Saeed Izadi, led the Palestine Corps of the Quds Force, Katz said in a statement.

There was no confirmation from the IRGC.

The Quds Force built up a network of Arab allies known as the Axis of Resistance, establishing Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1982 and supporting the Palestinian militant Islamist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

But Iran-aligned network has suffered major blows over the last two years, as Israeli offensives since Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel have weakened both the Palestinian group and Hezbollah.

Katz said Izadi financed and armed Hamas during the initial attacks, describing the commander’s killing as a “major achievement for Israeli intelligence and the Air Force.”

Izadi was sanctioned by the US and Britain over what they said were his ties to Hamas and Palestinian militant faction Islamic Jihad, which also took part in the October 7 attacks.


Iran’s FM arrives in Istanbul for Arab League meeting

Updated 21 June 2025
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Iran’s FM arrives in Istanbul for Arab League meeting

  • Around 40 diplomats are slated to join the weekend gathering of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation

ISTANBUL: Iran’s foreign minister arrived in Istanbul on Saturday, Tasnim news agency reported, for a meeting with Arab League diplomats to discuss Tehran’s escalating conflict with Israel.

Around 40 diplomats are slated to join the weekend gathering of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), as Israel and Iran continue to exchange missile strikes.

“The Foreign Minister arrived in Istanbul this morning to participate in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation Foreign Ministers’ meeting,” Tasnim reported.

It comes after Araghchi met with his counterparts from Britain, France and Germany in Geneva on Friday.

“At this meeting, at the suggestion of Iran, the issue of the Zionist regime’s attack on our country will be specifically addressed,” said Iranian foreign Abbas Araghchi, according to the news agency.

Israel began its assault in the early hours of June 13, saying Iran was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons, triggering an immediate retaliation from Tehran in the worst-ever confrontation between the two arch-rivals.

Earlier on Friday, Araghchi said Tehran was ready to “consider diplomacy” again only if Israel’s “aggression is stopped.”

The Arab League ministers are expected to release a statement following their meeting, the Turkish state news agency Anadolu said.