Hi, I'm Ruby Jones, and you're listening to seven am when an Israeli air strike hit the gate of Syria's Defense Ministry in central Damascus. The blast echoed far beyond the capital. It was a warning shot in a growing fight over who controls Syria's fractured south, where sectary intensions have reignited between minority populations and the Syrian government. Today, Damascus based journalist Heidi pet on the latest in this conflict and how it could redraw the map of Syria.
It's Thursday, July twenty fourth, So Heidi, thank you for talking with me.
Last week.
You were in Damascus when Israel launched air strikes on the city. Tell me where you were when that happened and what you saw.
So, in the midst of this violence that we've seen in the south of the country, Israel began a series of what we'd call warning strikes on Damascus.
Months after liberation from decades of tyranny. Syrians now have this to worry about. He's read, the air strikes in the heart of their capital.
And so in the middle of the morning they hit the gate of the Defense Ministry, which is in central Damascus. You know It's in this place called Amayad Square where Syrians gather, you know, for huge celebrations when the regime fell, for protests. You get families going down there in the
evening to kind of picnic and hang out. And I'd gone down there because I wanted to take some photographs of the damage so far, and so I was kind of getting out of my car and then I heard this scream of jets overhead, and then a series of three or four enormous air strikes.
Mid afternoon in Damascus. It's the most famous square violated and bombarded by Israeli.
Air power, and you know, just the immense kind of sound wave and dust and debris flying through the air as about one hundred and fifty meters away from where I was standing. And when that smoke cleared, what you could see is that the Ministry of Defense building, which is a four or five story building in downtown Damascus, had just been cleaved into.
And so why did Israel launch this offensive in the middle of Damascus? What was that message?
So Syria is still not a unified country. In the northeast, the Kurds still maintained a lot of territorial control and in the south, there's an ethnic minority, religious minority called the Drus. There's about seven hundred thousand of them. But there's also Druze communities in Lebanon, and a significant Druze community inside Israel, mostly though that's in the north of the Gollen Heights, which is actually Syrian territory that's been
occupied by Israel since nineteen sixty seven. Many of the Drews inside Syria, they're quite suspicious of Ahmad al Shara's government, and they control a lot of the southern province of Sweda and the city that takes the same name. And for a long time there's been this simmering conflict between the Drus and Bedouin tribes and communities, and then over the weekend really exploded into quite serious violence.
Localized dispute between Bedouin tribes and some Druz fighters escalated into a battle over whether the region should integrate into the new Syria.
The Syrian government basically saw that as an opportunity, you know, they intervened, they say, to restore calm, but it was also a pretext or a reason for them to go in with quite a lot of force and take control of a province that up until now had remained outside of their authority.
The Arab fighters repeatedly insist to us they want a unified Syria, but the Druze faction in Sweda, led by cleric hekmat Alhadjari, does not. His group refuses to be led by a government they accused of perpetrating killings against Drus and.
He is the one who called for Israeli intervention, and so Israel then obliged. They launched this, you know, a series of airstrikes on the Syrian government troops had had gone into Sweda, killing hundreds of them apparently. So then there was a sort of agreement for a ceasefire and a withdrawal, and you know, various of these agreements inside the city of Swedar.
This was meant to be a cease fi but the warring factions clearly weren't part of it. There's no electricity in the city, Internet is cut, food and water is scarce, and there are thousands of families still bunkered down in their homes. Amongst all of this, the.
Israelis that's when they decided to bomb central Damascus, sending a very very strong message to the Syrian regime, which is basically, don't even think about sending your military back into Sweden.
Tell me more about how the Syrian government has been reacting.
Yeah.
So it's interesting because up until now, the President Ahmedolshara has been pretty conciliatory towards Israel, and as part of the kind of agreement that has been made between ahmados Shara and the US to get these crippling sanctions lifted on Syria, it looks like there was a real path towards normalizing relations with the Israel which would be historic.
You know, he when he talks about Israel, he even refers to it as the Israeli state, rather than using the language of a lot of people and leaders here in this region, which is they would never say the Israeli state. They call it the Israeli entity because they don't recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli State. Ahmedolshara, you know, he looks like he was on that path, but in the last week, in the statements that he has made saying,
you know, this is a violation of our sovereignty. It's unacceptable, it's you know, you're seeking to undermine and sow division. He has now begun referring to it again as the Israeli entity, which I think gives you some indication of the direction of travel there.
So in that case, why do you think Israel is seeking to undermine someone who could be in la.
I mean that is that is really a question for Benjamin Nettan now, who who it seems has really gone off the rails in the last week. You know, the Americans are reportedly very very displeased.
Donald Trump is getting fed up. One White House of visual described net Yahoo is quote a madman the Axis, claiming he bombs everything all the time and that it could undermine the Trump White House's efforts in the region.
But on a larger level, it sort of suits them to have a weakened neighbor in Syria. You know, they're not interested in having a strong military of any kind on their borders. And to that end, you know, in December when the regimes fell, they spent a lot of time launching hundreds of air strikes and destroying Syrian military capabilities. And what that's done is it's put the Syrian president
Offmanol Shara in a really really difficult position. You know, Israel just saying that the Syrian government isn't allowed to have a presence in the south of its own country. Is not tolerable for a lot of Syrians, and it's also not really tolerable for a lot of the armed groups and fighters that Shara relies upon to maintain security and stability inside Syria. He already has quite a tenuous hold on some parts of the country, and Israel risks
really inflaming these sectarian divisions. They're risk tipping Syria back into serious violence or another civil war.
After the break Hardi takes us to the edge of Sweda and the center of the violence. So, Haidi, you've spent the last few days traveling throughout the south of Syria. You've been trained to get into Sweden, which is the place at the center of this violence. Tell me about what life is like there and what's been happening since Israel attacked Tumscus.
So Sweda has essentially been under siege since then. So you know, we had these Bedouin armed groups and also elements of the Syrian military kind of rampaging through the city and engaging in this really you know, serious fighting with Drew's militias, but also violence against civilians, and after the Israeli strikes, the Syrian military, you know, they did withdraw and various agreements have been made for these Bedouin fighters to also leave the city.
To Syria now where residents in the southern city of Sueda have told the BBC there is a tense calm in the city following seven days of violent sectarian clashes, but despite some reports of attacks, a ceasefire enforced by the Syrian government largely appears to be holding.
But what has happened is it's meant there's this kind of ring of Syrian government forces and Bedouin tribes around the city of Sweda. People inside their running out of food, they're running out of water, there's no electricity, the internet keeps getting cut off. It's you know, it's essentially a humanitarian disaster inside the city. And then in some of these villages that ring the city, which were majority Bedouin.
What we've also seen is because of this fighting and what has turned into this kind of sectarian revenge, some of the Druze militias have been killing Bedouins civilians, They've taken a large number of them hostage, and other ones they've been displaced from their land and their villages. So it's you know, it's an incredibly difficult situation in that province for civilians right now.
Yeah, it sounds like a dire situation in Sweda and incredibly difficult to actually get in and witness at firsthand. Tell me about what that's been like trying to enter and what you've seen on the outskirts of the city.
Yeah, So I've spent the last couple of days negotiating with you know, armed men of various stripes trying to get access to the city of Sweda. The Syrian government has set up a checkpoint and they've told all of these Bedouin fighters that they can go no further. And so you've got hundreds of fighters who've come from all over Syria massing at this point because they also don't trust the Syrian government.
This here is the last government checkpoint before Sawada. But all afternoon Bedwin government have been massive on this road.
Now.
They say that they have stuck to the ceasfide ideal, but they say they don't get their hostages out, get the sick they injured out, then they're gonna go back in.
You've got men in cars that are covered in mud in order to kind of disguise them from the air from you know, from Israeli drone and air strikes. Masked men on motorbikes. They're all incredibly heavily armed with Klashnikov's heavy weaponry.
You know.
I saw one guy go past on the back of a motorbike with a sort of portable anti aircraft weapons strapped to his back. And when you talk to these guys, you really get a sense that this is not a group that the Syrian government has a great deal of control over it all.
You know.
I spoke to one of the field leaders for one of the tribes and he said, you know, we're Bedouins, We're independent, We're not taking our orders from the government. And if we don't see these Bedouin civilians in these surrounding villages released, we're going to go back in and nobody can stop us.
Jadha and this Bedwin leader told me it wasn't over and Adola. If the Drews don't commit to the deal, we will re enter Sawaiter again, he said.
So it's quite a tense scene there, and some of these Druze villages on the outskirts you can see that really really serious violence has happened. You know, every single building had been burned. We also saw some of the looting, you know, washing machines and household belongings sort of left by the side of the road. And then I met this woman. She was, you know, an elderly Drew's civilian
who'd been displaced from that neighborhood. She'd been hiding in her house because she didn't want to leave actually, but you know, her house had been burned, her hands were covered in soot. You know, they've got nothing to go back to, and it's incredibly sad.
You know.
There was one family that I spoke to and they were saying, you know, we have no problem with the Drew civilians. We only have a problem with the militia.
You know.
We had to leave my mother in law inside Sweden because she's injured. She couldn't move, and she's you know, she's in there. She's being taken care of by Drew's family. And so even though they have these these sort of personal connections that you know that many Syrians have with their neighbors, you know, I asked him, you know, what would it take for you to go back? And he said, even if the government gave me all of Sweden, I wouldn't go back. You know what I've seen in there.
You know, I've never seen anything like it in my whole life. And as far as he's concerned, it's you know, his home's gone. He'll never go back.
And so this violence, the shooting, the burning, the looting, people push to the point where they don't think they can ever go back to their homes. What does all of it say to you, Hardie about the challenge for the Syrian government right now?
I mean, it shows you how how easily fractured this society is after the you know, years and years of
dictatorship and then war. It shows you the challenges for the Syrian government, I think, in maintaining control over their own troops and over the various other armed groups which are you know, nominally on their side, these sunny Vedouin tribes, you know, they say that they're on the side of or allied to the government, but it looks like when push comes to shove, they don't necessarily respect their authority.
But the bigger picture is that it shows other groups across Syria, and most notably the Kurds who in the
northeast still have about twenty percent of Syrian territory. That this, you know, this kind of experiment or this opportunity that the Syrian government sought to take to go in and establish control over a whole province, so they you know, that they didn't have any authority over it shows them that that failed, and so we've got this kind of looming deadline in these negotiations between the Kurds, who've traditionally been backed by the US and France and you know
a lot of Western governments in their fight against not just the assid regime but also against Isis. You know, there's a lot of pressure being put on them to unify, to fold in, to come under the authority of the Syrian state. And I think the message that they've taken from this is that actually, you know, they are in quite a strong negotiating position because this attempt by the
Syrian government, this show of force, it hasn't worked. I think what it means is that there's a possibility for continued violence on a larger scale and fracturing, you know, and potentially the tipping into another civil war.
Heidi, thank you so much for your time.
Thanks for having me.
Also in the news today, Labor has introduced legislation in federal Parliament to cut existing student debt by twenty percent. The legislation, which is likely to pass with the support of the Coalition and the Greens, will see three million Australians receive an automatic reduction to loans offered under the Higher Education Loan Program or Help. And legendary singer of
Black Sabbath Ozzy Osborne, has died aged seventy six. Diagnosed with Parkinson's in twenty nineteen, Osborne was a pioneering figure in heavy metal. In a statement, his family said he was surrounded by loved ones in his final moments. I'm Ruby Jones. Thanks for listening.