It all started with a somewhat mysterious audio clip. In it, a member of Syria's Druze minority was purportedly heard to be insulting Islam and the Prophet Mohammed.

But the person who supposedy made it, cleric Marwan Kiwan, insisted he had nothing to do with it. "Whoever made it is evil and wants to incite strife between components of the Syrian people," he said in a post on social media.

Various Druze leaders and community members also said they rejected the insults heard in the audio, which many Syrian Muslims considered blasphemous.

But by then it was too late, British-Iraqi researcher Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, who knows Kiwan, wrote on his Substack page. "The circulation of the clip led to calls for mobilization to 'defend the Prophet Muhammad's honor,' and accompanying those calls were sentiments directed against the broader Druze community."

Unidentified armed groups began attacking the Druze-majority town of Jaramana near the Syrian capital Damascus. Observers say some attackers may well have been connected to the new, interim Syrian government's security forces, but there were likely also angry, armed civilians. They note that this underlines again how Syria's new government doesn't yet have complete control over security.

As a result, armed men inside Druze communities got involved. Between Tuesday and Thursday, the violence spread into several Druze-majority areas, including the towns of Jaramana and Sahnaya, both near Damascus, and into the Druze-majority province of Sweida.

"In the past few days there was a kind of siege, no exit or entry," Mohammed Shobak, who lives in Sahnaya, told DW: "We were just sitting at home, afraid."

The armed men in the town had cars and machine guns, Shobak continued. He believes they got them from military barracks when Bashar Assad's authoritarian regime fell in December 2024. The men said........

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