The protests against the Syrian government and its policies in Syria's southern province of al-Suwayda' have been ongoing for around two weeks, and are unprecedented in terms of the number of demonstrators, how widespread they are in the province, and the openness of the calls for political change. Yet the demonstrations still raise questions about their future direction and what they can achieve.
To talk more about the protests, I conducted an interview on 30 August 2023 with Ashraf Jamul, who is the coordinator of the local al-Suwayda' faction Faz'at Shabab al-Jabal ("Aid of the Youth of the Mountain"), which coordinates with the Faz'at Fakhr faction and has come out in support of the demands of the protests in a broad sense. This interview is slightly edited for clarity and any parenthetical insertions in square brackets are my own.
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