Blood in the Concrete: Alawites, Druze, Kurds and the Fight for Syria’s Future
How Dr. Sam Azkul links massacres against Alawites and Druze with new attacks on Kurds—and argues that rebuilding Syria’s economy on the Suez route is now a core American security interest
Syrian Americans gather for a press conference at the U.S. House Longworth Building in Washington, D.C., Sept. 10, 2025, advocating for legislative intervention following attacks against Syrian minority Alawites, Druze, and Kurds. Political advocacy on Capitol Hill has increased sharply in 2025 in response to violence targeting these communities. (Photo by Alec Schreck/Capitol Hill Media LLC for ZiaTruth)
Syria’s revolution looks, from a distance, like a clean break: the old dictator gone, a new flag over Damascus, hopeful speeches about transition and reform. Up close, as Dr. Sam Azkul tells it, it feels more like watching a house finally shake off a cruel landlord, only to see the new contractor pour blood into the foundation—first Alawite, then Druze, and now Kurdish.
After Assad fell
On December 8, 2024, Bashar al‑Assad’s regime collapsed under a fast HTS‑led offensive that rolled down from the north into Damascus, ending more than half a century of family rule. Within weeks, HTS leader Ahmed al‑Sharaa—known to the world for years as Abu Mohammed al‑Jolani—was blessed by the Syrian General Command as president for a “transitional period,” tasked with steering the country from revolution into something like a normal state.
Dr. Azkul readily admits that toppling Assad opened space for change, but he worries about who rushed into that space. “You can change uniforms faster than you can change an ideology,” he says, and Syria’s new order is still full of men shaped by jihadi worldviews forged in Iraq, Idlib, and the old underground war.
The blood in the concrete
He doesn’t re‑litigate every atrocity; he uses a few key ones as warning flares. In March 2025, massacres in Alawite‑majority coastal areas killed more than a thousand people, many of them Alawite civilians and demobilized men, in a wave of retaliatory violence and lawless revenge. Human‑rights investigators documented executions, abductions, torture, looting, and gender‑based attacks, and noted that the new authorities failed to protect Alawite communities that had surrendered and laid down their arms.
Four months later, southern Syria caught fire. In mid‑July 2025, local disputes between Druze militias and pro‑government Bedouin fighters in and around Suwayda erupted into full‑blown sectarian clashes. UN experts and rights groups describe killings, house and shop burnings, looting, sectarian slurs, and summary executions—including of women and children—followed by retaliatory attacks and mass displacement, with entire Druze villages emptied as residents fled and numerous homes and businesses looted or burned.
For a year, the worst of the bloodshed fell on communities once seen as pillars of the old order: Alawites along the coast and Druze in the south. Now, as Dr. Azkul notes with real alarm, the pattern has expanded: Kurdish districts around Aleppo and parts of the northeast have increasingly come under pressure, with Kurdish fighters and civilians targeted in clashes over security control, land, and the dismantling of Kurdish self‑rule structures. “It’s like watching a storm crawl across the map,” he says. “First Alawites, then Druze, now Kurds—it tells every minority that once one community’s turn is over, another’s begins.”
The jihadi shadow and American leverage
Behind these local tragedies, he sees a deeper structural problem: an unfinished divorce from Syria’s jihadi past. The movement that overthrew Assad was fronted by HTS, a group the UN, US, and EU still list as a terrorist organization for its al‑Qaeda roots, even as its leaders now talk about governance, police, and constitutional declarations. Foreign fighters—Chechens, Uzbeks, Uyghurs—did not vanish when the last flag over Damascus changed; many were folded into new brigades under the transitional state’s banner.
What makes this conversation urgent, in his mind, is not only the ideology but the calendar. One year after Assad’s fall, Syria has a transitional president, a constitutional framework, and the outlines of national institutions—but nothing is truly settled. The map of who controls which province, which units get formalized into the army, how justice is handled for massacres from Latakia to Suwayda to Kurdish towns—all of that is still wet concrete.
Dr. Azkul echoes Ambassador Sam Brownback’s language about “changing things before the concrete sets,” and he pushes that metaphor directly toward Washington. In his view, U.S. engagement should come with clear strings: real decentralization so Alawite, Druze, Kurdish, and Christian regions keep meaningful control over local security; credible investigations into sectarian massacres; and firm limits on the power of explicitly jihadist formations inside state structures. “If America writes the checks with no conditions today,” he warns, “we’ll read the bill in ten years—when the same men we normalized are pointing their rifles at our embassies.”
From exporting fighters to exporting goods
What keeps the interview from sinking under the weight of atrocity is the way he steers, deliberately, into economics. After talking about family and friends killed, he pivots to what Syria still has: a young labor force, years of underused industrial capacity in cities like Aleppo and Homs, and a geography that sits right under the main sea lanes connecting Asian manufacturing to Europe via the Suez Canal. The same shipping lanes that now carry containers from Chinese ports through the Red Sea and Suez could support Syrian logistics hubs, light manufacturing, and processing zones that plug into those flows instead of watching them sail past.
He talks about Syria as a land bridge—north to Turkey and Europe, south to Jordan and the Gulf, west to the Mediterranean—and insists that stabilizing its roads, rails, and ports is not charity; it is strategy. Used wisely, relatively cheap Syrian labor and reopened corridors like the M4 from Iraq to Latakia could anchor industrial parks and logistics centers that create jobs at home while serving the same ships that rely on the Suez route.
In that sense, he makes economics the heart of national security. “If you want a Syria that doesn’t export fighters,” he argues, “you build a Syria that exports goods.” Every factory job and every legitimate trucking route is one less young man available to a militia or a smuggler, and a Syria tied into lawful trade between Asia and Europe is far less likely to become a recurring U.S. military problem.
The bookend: why Americans should care
Through all of this, his compass stays local. Dr. Azkul grew up in the Druze community, and the stories he carries are cousins, neighbors, school friends who have fled, buried family, or now live under men they once fought. He is not alone: Alawite civil groups, Kurdish activists, and Christian leaders have all warned that without built‑in protections, Syria’s so‑called “new dawn” will just be a different shape of night for minorities.
But he also speaks in a language any American can recognize. The same Syria that today sends desperate people toward borders could, if its concrete sets right, become a workshop on the Asia–Suez–Europe route whose cheap, legal labor and reopened factories help steady the global economy the United States lives on. “You don’t have to care about Syria out of pity,” he says. “You can care because a productive Syria on that shipping lane makes America stronger.”
That is the real bookend to his message: stop Syria’s Alawites, Druze, Kurds, and other minorities from being ground into the foundations of a brittle state, and then build an economy sturdy enough that neither they nor their children are ever tempted to pick up a rifle again.