Five months after its liberation from the police state of Bashar al-Assad, Syria sometimes looks like a country in civil war. Sectarian clashes have turned into street battles with rockets and mortars.

Israel has used attacks on religious minority by forces loyal to Syria's new government to justify strikes across the border

Last December, after more than a decade of fighting, forces opposing President Bashar al-Assad ousted him from power. Some people in Maaloula, long a center for Christianity in Syria, shared their concerns and hopes for the future under the new government,

Nawaf Nasr, 78, sits at home in Syria's Sweida district and recalls details of what he says was his past life before he died and was later reincarnated. Nasr says in his previous life, he was a university student, the son of a landowner, when he was thrown from a horse and died at the age of 25 in the 1940s.

In December, a consortium of rebel factions led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham unexpectedly toppled the dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose family had ruled Syria for five decades. The new regime in Damascus inherited a country ruined by a 13-year civil war.

The clashes are the worst between forces loyal to the government and Druze fighters since the fall of President Bashar Assad in early December whose family ruled Syria with an iron grip for more ...

In Syria’s large Druze minority, a belief in reincarnation binds the community together. NPR’s Jane Arraf reports. This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

For the 150,000-strong member Druze community, attacks against their brethren across the border cause concern and a commitment to strengthen their rights as Israeli citizens The post ‘Maybe God put Druze in Israel to save the Druze there’: Minority fights for Syrian cousins appeared first on The Times of Israel.