Hundreds Rally in Rare Southern Syria Protest

Hundreds took to the streets of a southern Syrian city on Friday to demand democracy and better living conditions in a rare protest inside regime-held areas, a war monitor said.

Protesters gathering for the fifth consecutive day in Sweida after authorities cut off 600,000 families from its subsidies program, staged their biggest rally yet, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

"We want a civil, just, democratic state," a young man told a cheering crowd of protesters in video footage broadcast by local media network Suwayda24.

The footage shows protesters raising the flag of the Druze, a religious minority whose heartland is Sweida.

In one video an elderly man in traditional Druze clothing lamented price hikes. 

"We cannot live or get our rights, we don't have any gas or diesel," he told the crowd. "We want to live in a homeland that guarantees our dignity and our rights."

Earlier this month, the Syrian government excluded a large number of people from its subsidies program in a country where 90 percent of the population is poor.

Those who were cut off lost access to subsidized food and oil, a move that triggered rare protests and criticism from within government-held areas of Syria.

Most protesters took to the streets for the first time in their lives to demand better living conditions, while others demanded democracy, Nour Radwan of Suwayda24 told AFP.

Smaller protests over similar issues were held in Sweida in 2020.

Syria has grappled with an economic crisis compounded by Western sanctions, the Covid-19 pandemic and a rapid devaluation of the local currency.

Sweida has been mostly spared by the fighting in the decade-old Syrian conflict, and only faced sporadic jihadist attacks which were repelled.