Excessive within the mountains of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, Majdal Shams is residence to members of one of many Center East’s most insular spiritual communities: the Druze.
With its roots in tenth century Ismailism, a department of Shia Islam, the roughly one million-strong minority is unfold throughout Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Golan Heights.
Though Israeli citizenship is open for the Druze of the Golan Heights, most have opted to not take it as they navigate their Syrian Druze identification underneath Israeli occupation. Many households in Majdal Shams have kinfolk in Syria, saved aside by the Alpha Line, which separates the occupied Golan from Syria, and a buffer zone.
About 25,000 stay within the Golan Heights, a rocky Syrian plateau, components of which Israel occupied within the 1967 struggle and nearly instantly began to construct settlements on. These settlements are unlawful underneath worldwide legislation.
There at the moment are about 25,000 Israeli settlers there, and the Israeli authorities not too long ago introduced plans to take a position thousands and thousands in doubling that quantity.
When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was toppled per week and a half in the past, folks took to the streets in Majdal Shams to rejoice.
Nonetheless, his ouster was taken as a possibility by Israel, which has been closely bombing Syria – claiming self-defence – and has launched incursions past the Alpha Line and into the United Nations-monitored buffer zone.
Proof of the 1967 struggle stays in Majdal Shams with trenches and deserted tanks. A safety fence topped by coils of barbed wire now runs alongside the outskirts of city and throughout a area from the close by Alpha Line.
