Greece (Brussels Morning) Nearly a year after Bashar al-Assad’s departure, Syria remains less a country than a mosaic of power vacuums stitched together by foreign patrons and local militias. The nominal centre of the country is held by Sunni Islamist factions; the north is carved up between Turkish and American forces. Russia, true to form, continues to guard the naval facilities it has always treated as sovereign territory. Christians, long embedded in Syria’s social fabric, now face the slow grind of ethnic cleansing with neither protection nor political sponsor.
The Security Vacuum
But it is in the south, far from the diplomatic attention given to Idlib or the oilfields of the east, where the collapse of Syria as a functioning state is most starkly visible. The violence between Bedouin and Druze communities is no longer simply a sectarian dispute. It has metastasized into something more dangerous: a cycle of expulsions, retribution, and fear that echoes the early stages of some of the world’s darkest communal collapses.
In towns that only months ago spoke of coexistence, families have fled under fire, leaving behind homes they no longer expect to reclaim. Bedouin residents speak of being cast out overnight, of seeing familiar neighborhoods transformed into hostile terrain. Druze leaders, for their part, recount attacks on their own communities and insist that the security vacuum left after the regime’s retreat made such violence inevitable.
That vacuum is the real story here. With Damascus absent, communities have been forced to build their own survival architecture. The Druze, unwilling to trust a government that has repeatedly failed to defend them, are turning outward, toward Israel and sympathetic minority networks, to seek guarantees the Syrian state once claimed to provide.
They are signalling a willingness to shift their political alignment away from the capital in exchange for something far more basic: the ability to live without the threat of annihilation. Christians in the same region have no such leverage and are left exposed, a reminder that some communities still lack even the minimal backing required to negotiate new allegiances.
The south’s turmoil is not an aberration, it is a microcosm of a national reality. Syria is no longer a state that protects its people; it is a patchwork of territorial fiefdoms where security emerges only from affiliation, not citizenship. Loyalty has become transactional. Survival depends on alliances, not the law. And where the government remains, it does so as an administrator of decay rather than a guarantor of order.
The Void left behind
Foreign powers have learned to operate comfortably within this fragmentation. Turkey and the United States maintain their presence in the north with little expectation that Damascus will ever reassert meaningful control. Russia is content to preserve the strategic assets it values and leave the rest of the country to its own disintegration. Israel’s growing role in the south, once unthinkable in Syrian political discourse, is now a pragmatic response to the void left behind.
The tragedy is not merely that Syria is collapsing; it is that its collapse is now self-reinforcing. Displaced families know they may never return. Local militias have replaced national institutions. Communities that once trusted the state for protection now seek it anywhere else. The social contract has been broken, and nothing has emerged to replace it.
What is unfolding in the south should alarm anyone still invested in the idea of a unified Syria. When a state fails to protect its minorities, its peripheries, and ultimately its own citizens, the road to irreversible fragmentation is not theoretical—it’s already underfoot.
The violence between Bedouins and Druze is not simply another chapter in Syria’s long war; it is a sign that the country is drifting toward a future where the concept of “Syria” may exist only on maps, not in the lives of the people still struggling to survive within its borders.
What Future Holds
Christian, Druze and other minority communities in Syria are increasingly convinced they have been left to fend for themselves — casualties of an international order more focused on engineering a Sunni-led, Damascus-centred government than on safeguarding the plural society that Syria once was.
While global powers push for “stability” in the capital and the formation of a new majority regime, these minorities watch churches burn, homes emptied and protective institutions vanish, with little sign of meaningful external intervention. Their anxiety is justified: purporting support for unity, the international community instead appears to treat them as secondary variables in a deal that privileges state reconstruction over real protection for vulnerable ethnic and religious groups.
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