Four Druze fighters were killed on Friday in a drone strike targeting Syria’s southern province of Sweida, a stronghold of the Druze minority, according to a rights group, which did not specify who carried out the attack.
“Four Druze fighters were killed on a farm in Kanaker in an explosion that coincided with the overflight of a drone,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).
The UK-based NGO, which has a wide network of sources inside Syria, said it was unclear whether the drone was a Chahine-type used by the authorities during their lightning offensive that toppled former president Bashar al-Assad, or an Israeli drone.
Syria’s official news agency SANA, quoting the Telegram page of the Sweida province, claimed that “four people were killed in an Israeli strike.”
No one has claimed responsibility for the strike.
Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in early December, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes on military sites in Syria and deployed troops in a demilitarized zone of the Golan Heights.
Israel has also voiced strong support for Syria’s Druze community—an esoteric religious group stemming from a branch of Shia Islam—mainly located in southern Syria, but also present in Israel and Lebanon.
On Friday morning, the Israeli army announced it had carried out a strike near the presidential palace in Damascus as a warning against any threat to the Druze minority.
AFP
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