Jumblat Calls for Confronting Plots after Deadly Syria Raid on Druze

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat stressed on Saturday that the Druze sect would confront “plots,” urging his community to overcome the current “ordeal.”

“We will confront the ordeal for the sake of national unity,” Jumblat said following talks with al-Mustaqbal parliamentary bloc leader MP Fouad Saniora and an accompanying delegation.

“We will confront plots that are shredding the Arab and Islamic world,” he said at his residence in Beirut's Clemenceau area.

On Friday, Jumblat tried to calm members of Syria's minority sect after a deadly raid there killed as many as 20 Druze villagers.

He said the attack earlier this week on Qalb al-Lawzah village in Syria's northwestern Idlib province was an "individual" incident. Syria's al-Qaida branch, al-Nusra Front, killed at least 20 Druze members there on Wednesday.

The Idlib killings were the deadliest since Syria's civil war started in March 2011 against the minority Druze sect, which has been split between supporters and opponents of President Bashar Assad — but has largely stayed out of the fighting.

Saniora, who visited Jumblat on Saturday to extend his condolences to the PSP chief on behalf of al-Mustaqbal movement leader ex-PM Saad Hariri said: “We should stand side by side.”

He called for an end to “behaviors that expand the fires of strife.”

“We are seeking to avoid them,” the MP stressed.

On Thursday, Wiam Wahab, a former minister and Druze politician close to Assad, called on all the Druze in the southern Syrian province of Sweida to carry arms and defend their villages, as opposition fighters reached the region that has been spared Syria's four-year civil war.

Wahab urged Assad's government to supply the residents with weapons. He also warned of retaliatory attacks against al-Nusra Front members in Lebanon in retaliation for the killings in Qalb al-Lawzah.