The participation of Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri—one of the most prominent figures of the Druze community—and Sheikh Ghazal Ghazal—one of the elders of the Alawite community—in a conference organized by the SDF (Qasd) cannot be seen as a mere symbolic presence or casual social interaction.

Rather, we are facing advanced indicators of the re-production of the “minorities alliance,” which has long been used in Syria and the wider region as a tool to infiltrate the state and fragment the collective national identity under the cover of civil slogans and “component rights,” paving the way for turning these components into political and security warheads against the state project.

If we recall the infiltration of the Syrian military institution in the 1960s through a minorities alliance within the army—which paved the way for the Baath coup in 1963, skillfully managed by international powers until the Assad family took power and plunged Syria into half a century of authoritarianism and dependency—then today we are witnessing a scene being rewritten in a more insidious language. This time it relies on soft federalization, empowerment of select components, and disguised decentralization, under a clear American–Israeli umbrella that treats the SDF file as a functional pressure card to manage the conflict rather than resolve it.

More dangerously, the route taken by Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri’s delegation toward SDF areas—known locally as the “Dawood Corridor”—was not merely a geographic choice, but a clear security–geopolitical message pointing to the activation of this corridor within Israel’s map inside Syria. It is known that this corridor, stretching from the south toward the east of the Euphrates, falls within Israel’s undeclared lines of communication used for coordinating minority affairs, border matters, and informal normalization.

Accordingly, there are urgent steps that cannot be delayed:

1. Reject legitimizing packaged sectarian leaders: No one, no matter how high their religious or social standing, has the right to hijack the decision of an entire community to place it on the table of state fragmentation. The duality between “religious leader” and “political proxy” must be broken, and genuine national representatives from within these components must be sought.
2. Open effective communication channels with dissenting elites within both communities who recognize the danger of turning a community into a weapon for the separatist project or the Israeli occupation.
3. Activate security and strategic partnerships with Turkey, as it is the primary party concerned alongside Syria in the SDF file, which represents not only an internal threat but also a long-term project to ignite the region from within, starting from northern Syria.
4. Raise the readiness of security and military agencies, focusing on intelligence analysis of long-term plans, not just immediate reactions.
5. Accelerate the launch of the transitional justice program, not as a mere symbolic reconciliation, but as a mechanism to dismantle the deep structures of separatism and violence, and to block the path of international powers seeking to reintroduce their proxies inside Syria.

As for talk about “calm and appeasement” or “removing pretexts,” time has surpassed it. The parties today are not waiting for pretexts to push their projects; they are trying to create them—relying on weakening and eroding the popular base of the new era, magnifying mistakes, and dragging the state into repeated military confrontations aimed at attrition and breaking its prestige. Thus, the project of “soft chaos” has entered its hardened phase.

Here, we Syrians find ourselves at a decisive moment: either we stand for a strong, unified state, or our decision will once again fall into the hands of the cross-border minorities project. Therefore, we must close the gaps, accelerate reconciliation processes, define terms clearly, and remove the minorities’ pretext by opening the door to genuine partnerships.