In Daraa, Ex-Jihadists Besiege Jihadists
Three Syrian security officers were killed on September 17 in Daraa, cradle of the 2011 uprising, during a raid on an ISIS cell. The forces hunting the jihadists answer to a president who once led Al-Qaeda's Syrian branch and had a $10 million American bounty on his head. Syria's war on terror has an unusual résumé.
Siege in Al-Sanamayn
On Thursday, September 17, Syria's Internal Security Forces went to arrest a wanted man in Al-Sanamayn, in the Daraa countryside. His armed group opened fire: three officers were killed and several wounded. A curfew was imposed, the town was sealed off, and the group was given a deadline to surrender, which it ignored. The forces then stormed the site where its members were holed up, and confirmed that the group was affiliated with ISIS. Since Bashar al-Assad's fall in December 2024, the organisation has urged its fighters to take up arms against the new authorities. Its cells are concentrated in the north, the northeast and the desert, but it keeps a foothold in the south: in 2022, one of its self-proclaimed caliphs, Abu al-Hassan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, was killed in fighting in Daraa.
The convert
The forces besieging ISIS answer to an unusual president. Ahmed al-Sharaa once led Al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, refused in 2013 to merge it into ISIS, and long had a $10 million American bounty on his head. In November 2025, he was received at the White House, and Syria became the 90th member of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, though Damascus specified that it was joining the political coalition, not the military operation.
"His astonishing transformation from militant leader to global statesman."— Michael Hanna, International Crisis Group, November 2025
For ISIS, which brands the new rulers apostates, the battle of Daraa is a jihadist family feud that ended badly. For Washington, it is counterterrorism. For the three officers killed on Thursday, it was simply a patrol.
Fewer attacks, other victims
Results do exist: US Central Command counted 311 ISIS attacks in Syria in the first ten months of 2025, down from 878 in 2024. Protecting minorities has proven harder. In March 2025, violence on the coast killed at least 1,426 Alawites, mostly civilians, according to the government's own inquiry, and UN investigators found that war crimes were likely committed by interim government forces as well as by fighters loyal to the old regime. In July, clashes in Sweida between Druze fighters, Bedouin tribes and government forces left more than 1,200 dead, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
"The scale and brutality of the violence documented in our report is deeply disturbing."— Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, August 2025
Syria has traded a dictator who branded his opponents terrorists for a former jihadist who really does fight them. Its Alawites and Druze would settle for a state that also protects them.
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