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Israeli Druze sitting in the Knesset (Flash90)
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| By Israel Insider staff October 24, 2007 |
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Syrian President Bashar Assad reportedly ordered Syrian authorities on Tuesday to distribute Syrian ID cards to Druze residents in the Golan Heights who have refused to accept Israeli citizenship, the Syria's news agency, Sama, reported. The report said the move was an effort to "emphasize the belonging of the Syrian residents of the Golan Heights to the Syrian motherland," according to Ynet.
The news source added that Assad issued the order to "ease the suffering" of the Druze people living on the Golan, caused by "harassment and Israeli human rights violations."
More than 18,000 Syrians -- most of them Druze -- live in the Golan and have refuse to take Israeli nationality.
Syria has long demanded that Israel return the strategically significant Golan Heights, which the Jewish state won in the 1967 war. Israel has so far refused to relinquish the region that has become an integral part of the country's borders, stating that Syria must stop financing and smuggling weapons to the terrorist group Hezbollah before Israel would consider ceding territory.
Assad's order was likely an effort to return "all Arab lands occupied in Palestine and Lebanon" and "the occupied Syrian Golan according to the June 4, 1967 borders," as Deputy Foreign Minister Fayssal el Mekdad said, according to the Jerusalem Post.
Although tensions have begun to dissipate recently after talks this summer of a possible war, Mekdad warned "the situation in the region is difficult; all the options are still open."
Along those lines, Syria's chief of staff, Ali Habib, stressed at a graduation ceremony of newly trained pilots that Syria must keep up with scientific developments. "This to ensure that our aerial forces are always at the height of readiness to strike back against any traitorous aggression that violates the motherland's airspace," alluding to the IAF's air strike on Syria's nascent nuclear facilities on September 6.
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