There is an oral tale passed down among the people ofvSuwayda:
In the early 1950s, a merchant from Damascus came as a guest to stay with Abu Hasan Yahya Saraya, the well-known merchant of Suwayda. On the morning of the second day, the guest had breakfast in the guesthouse and prepared to go to the market. He paused for a moment and said to Abu Hassan: “I may have forgotten a pouch of money in the room where I slept, there was 25,000 Syrian lira in it.”
That was a large sum in those days. Abu Hassan asked for a moment, went into the room, and returned to give him the pouch: “Here you go. Your sister, Umm Hasan, found it under the bed.” After hosting him for a week, the Damascus merchant returned home with his goods. His wife greeted him in surprise: “How did you bring back the goods while you left that pouch of money right here in the house?!”
The Damascene merchant gathered the senior merchants of Damascus and told them the story, and then decided to travel with them to Abu Hassan’s house in As‑Suwayda, bringing a sacrifice to return his money, apologize to him, and thank him for his generosity. Abu Hassan welcomed his guests, slaughtered several sacrifices in their honor, and invited the notables of Suwayda.
In response to the Damascus merchant’s question, “Why did you do that and give me money from your own?,” Abu Hasan replied: “Trust is a pledge, and pledges are mutual; the host must be worthy of trust and therefore of hosting… That is what our people and forefathers taught us.”
A fresh reality once told: On the morning of Wednesday, July 16, 2025, groups that were not raised on mutual trust, nor were their leaders, returned the pledge of trust to the descendants of Yahya Saraya with a massacre. Eight men—civilians—from this household were executed by gunfire in Khaldoun Zain al‑Din Square (formerly Tishreen Square): Ghassan Yahya Saraya and his two sons, Hussam and Kareem; his three cousins—Ali, Waleed, and Yahya; their nephew, Ismail Janbieh; and their neighbor, Amer al‑Faqih.
That square, the site of the massacre, was Tishreen Square. Since the beginning of the recent wave of the peaceful Syrian revolution, as in its early days in 2011, revived only in Suwayda against Bashar al‑Assad, from August 2023 until Assad fled on December 8 last year, activists using the name “Square of Dignity” in Suwayda decided to rename it after Khaldoun Zain al‑Din, the officer who defected from Assad’s regime in 2011 and fell as a martyr of the revolution in Suwayda when he and his fellow revolutionaries infiltrated the back side of Jabal al‑Arab in December 2012 to liberate Suwayda from Assad’s regime. Khaldoun Zain al‑Din lost both the battle and his life; he drew his last breath, wounded, uttering his final will: “Dignity, oh people of the mountain, dignity!”
The snow of Jabal al‑Arab recorded Khaldoun Zain al‑Din’s blood on its whiteness—while the killers of the square bearing his name recorded the massacre on video and circulated it themselves.
The video leaked at around 10 p.m. the same day. It was shared with them by an activist involved in documentation. Even though the victims’ families were known, there was absolutely no possibility of covering the mere one hundred meters separating their house from Khaldoun Zain al‑Din Square, now occupied by security forces and their snipers.
The corpses remained exposed until the morning of July 17, when Dr. Bassam Janbieh—a relative of the victims—conducted a swift burial, exploiting the brief hours of safety between the withdrawal of security forces and the assault of tribal fighters sent by Ahmed al‑Sharaa and led by Ahmed al‑Dalati.
The martyr Hussam also happened to be Syrian (Druze) holding American citizenship—so the US media covered just one of the massacres perpetrated by members of the Ministries of Defense and Interior in the Syrian Interim Government, in Suwayda Governorate at the southern extreme of Syria, home to around 500,000 people, the majority Druze.
The women of the family, residing near the square that had been the childhood playground of the massacre’s victims, did not receive the news until the next morning—twenty‑four hours later—while bodies lay under the scorching sun of Suwayda and the silenced night, broken only by the sound of shelling and the stench of death stalking an entire Syrian community accused of a crime simply for being Druze. Although these groups entered Suwayda under the pretext of “ceasefire enforcement and restoring security,” in reality they enforced neither—nor did they spare the horror of killing, humiliation, looting, and burning of all traces of civility.
In a video call with the women of the household, Mrs. Ghaziya—the mother of the three martyrs Ali, Waleed, and Yahya (all her sons), and grandmother of Ismail Janbieh (son of her daughter)—appeared sunk and withdrawn from our world, her eyes teary before refocusing and returning to read from the Book of Wisdom…
In disbelief, Dima, Ali’s wife, said: “Around 6 a.m., we were sleeping when I heard a great commotion in front of our house. From the window I saw them—there were many of them. I heard one with an Idlibi accent asking: ‘How many men are in this house?’ Someone else with a Bedouin accent replied: ‘Six men, I know them.’ Then there were shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’ from all sides, the house was surrounded, and two mortar shells hit the house, striking the kitchen, the stairs, and one of the bedrooms. A concrete chunk fell on us from the ceiling. Then there were bullets at the gate of the ground‑floor guest reception. They stormed in like beasts, wearing clothing stamped with ‘There is no god but God.’ Meanwhile, our men, having just come to, stood at the head of the stairs on the second floor, and immediately one of them fired at them, he hit my husband Ali. Then someone shouted: ‘Surrender, you’ll be safe.’ Our men came down, they were in pajamas, Ali had a slipper on one foot, and Hussam was barefoot. They lined them up in a row and marched them out of the house.”
Dima’s voice trembled as she continued: “Some soldiers stayed with us women. They shouted at us: ‘Go inside, that’s better than being taken out.’ We fell back into the corridor and huddled together. After a while, one of their groups returned. Our daughters started crying and shouting: ‘Where are you taking our fathers?’ The men had been dressed in black—security uniforms. They locked us in a room and shut the door on us. I said: ‘For God’s sake please don’t harm our men.’ The reply: ‘You are traitors from the Hijri gangs. Give us all the keys to the cars and the safe, and your men will go unharmed.’ After they took the keys, one of them identified himself: ‘I’m Abu Ja‘far from Deir ez‑Zor, we’re only looking for weapons. You’ve broken my heart—just from these mustaches, I’ll return your fathers. Two hours interrogation, and then they’ll be back.’
We didn’t know that they had lined up our men and came back to loot.”
Helen, wife of Yahya, recounted: “The groups entered as if they were separate from one another. After that, two of them came in claiming to be from the Republican Guard. One of them said: ‘I want to guarantee your safety; I will take you to my family in Daraa—my mother loves guests and treats them well—and when things calm down, I’ll bring your men back.’ We were terrified. We said: ‘Let us stay here with our family.’ He said: ‘What gold and money do you have?’ We told them: ‘Those before you already took everything. Take whatever you want from the house, just give us back our men.’ They locked us in without food or water. All day and night they looted and piled everything into cars and drove them off.”
Magida, Ghassan’s wife and mother of Hussam and Kareem, added: “They took the men and locked us in a room. We were modestly dressed, our heads covered. We even put thick scarves on the girls’ heads and wrapped them in thin blankets. Every now and then, a new group came in; one of them revealed himself: ‘I’m Abu Qutayba. What gold do you have?’ We replied: ‘The Abu Ja‘far group already took everything.’ He said: ‘We can benefit from you in other ways. You have sweet young girls here, and we’re scared and silent.’ One of them threw himself across the stairs and started smoking, saying: ‘Who here feels like a cigarette?’ Our young girls were crying, and I shushed them. I saw how he looked at them, not in a clean way. I put my hand on my heart. One of them said: ‘Relax—no worries.’ He grabbed one of the girls, kissed her on the head, and said to my sister Ghaziya, the mother of those young men: ‘You are like a mother,’ and he’d stay staring at my necklace. I removed it and told him: ‘Take it.’ And he also took Dima’s necklace. There was another one among them, dark-skinned with a strange accent. He said: ‘You are safe, just give us your mobile phones.’”
Samira, Ghassan’s sister and the aunt of Hussam and Kareem, spoke with deep grief: “The mourners told us, ‘We wish you had left at least one of them alive.’ We said to them, ‘My heart aches for them, they inherited love and unity from their father and grandfather. Perhaps if one of them had survived, he would have died of grief; he couldn’t live without them. Just as they loved each other in life, they held each other’s hands and went to death together, so that none would mourn or reproach the other.’”
Dima says: “From all our men, only one son remains; he studies at the American University in the UAE.”
Magida, Ghassan’s wife and the mother of Hussam and Kareem, tears up as she explains: “I said to my husband’s cousin, Dr. Bassam Janbieh: ‘Why did you bury them so quickly? I wish you had let us say goodbye.’ He replied: ‘I honored them with a swift burial. I didn’t want you to see what happened to them—exposed under the sun and the night for 24 hours—or to see devastated Suwayda after the siege of savages. Remember them as they were, in their beauty.’”
And she says: “Oh, if only my grief could be shared across the mountains, they wouldn’t bear it. But I pity other women whose minds were shattered while gathering their children’s remains. I pray they find beautiful patience, as we are resigned and accepting.”
Samira lets out a long sigh and continues: “Our tragedy is the tragedy of all Jabal al-Arab. Our men died in their destined time. They were doing good, and by their good deeds God spared us—their wives—from defilement, and kept us safe from these monsters. We—the women of the family and others who took refuge in our house—there were around ten of us, and they preserved our honor from these barbarians, thieves, devils. Our tragedy is immense, and the tragedy of our family even greater. Yet, the suffering of others eased our hearts, because our men were buried all together in one grave. Our parents raised us on acceptance, submission, and belief in divine decree, life and death, reincarnation—they fed us that with a spoon. Faith supports. May God plant beautiful patience in our hearts…”
Samira recalls something: “Strangely, when our house was looted, one trustworthy bag containing valuables—gold and money, which the people of Jabal al-Arab entrusted to our home, as was custom from my father’s and grandfather’s time—remained unspoiled by their brutality. My brother Ghassan hid it in a safe place where thieves wouldn’t find it. All praise be to God for the safety of that trust—which we will return to its rightful owners.”
These are the Saraya family—men and women.
To describe them and understand their essence, one must grasp a vital aspect of Suwayda’s social fabric, what we might today call the Druze ethos, which the invaders could never grasp. The Sarayas exemplify this sentiment: a family of care, morality, generosity, learning, understanding, nobility, friendship, and kindness. A family that has never harmed anyone, embraces those who differ from them, supports countless poor families with quiet solidarity.
They are a complete institution, sharing responsibilities among themselves. Their food stores were common to all, beginning with the patriarch, Salman Saraya. a wheat merchant in the first half of the 20th century, when Suwayda’s economy was agricultural and trade remained local. Salman opened trade routes to Damascus and Jerusalem.
Salman’s three sons: Yusuf—the eldest—emigrated to Mexico via Beirut. From there, once travel agencies in Damascus were arranging migration to Latin America, he encouraged his brothers, Yahya (the subject of the earlier anecdote) and Muhanna, both based in Suwayda, to establish the city’s first travel agency to liaise with the Damascus office, saving people repeated trips to the capital. It succeeded, becoming a trusted gateway for emigration requests until migrants reached their destinations across Latin America.
Meanwhile, Yusuf founded “Banco Mexica” in Mexico, where Suwayda residents could deposit their savings. Yusuf would transfer funds to a bank in Beirut, from which his brothers Yahya and Muhanna retrieved them and delivered to families in Suwayda. Later, before banking culture took root locally, people would entrust cash or jewelry to Yahya and Muhanna; many still do today.
In Suwayda, Yahya and Muhanna shared family duties and civic responsibilities, functioning as a unified institution. Yahya, a noted wheat trader, mediated tribal affairs across the governorate and served as a bridge between civil courts and tribal arbitration, traveling widely across the governorate. His brother, Abu Ali Muhanna, raised his own children and his nephews—whom he was loved, respected, and revered by as if they were his own sons.
Since the days of Yahya and Muhanna—who never lived outside Suwayda—their families’ bond was most close and practical. Together they established the Saraya gas station, a wheat mill, and planted apple and grape orchards on the mountain’s slopes. In the mid-1960s, their cousin Asaad founded “Cinema Saraya”—the first cinema landmark in modern-day Suwayda, now part of its enduring memory.
When Yahya Saraya died in 1979, Sultan al-Atrash remarked: “Today my right arm is gone”—a statement not only of sorrow but also “a eulogy for a pillar of the homeland,” as his grandson, lawyer Alaa Simoua, expressed.
Their children followed in their footsteps. Their home became a repository of trust, an unofficial—but deeply real—educational support center, assisting charities, lending to the needy without asking for anything, giving long-term loans without interest, distributing over 100 flour sacks each season. Ghassan and his cousins personally delivered them, along with fuel, apple crates, and olive oil cans.
Hussam and his brother Kareem (aged 35 and 33) were the latest heirs of the family legacy. Hussam, a handsome, gentle, and kind soul, studied accounting at Damascus University and then went to America for further study. He earned a Master’s in Accounting and Legal Auditing, acquired U.S. citizenship, and returned to Suwayda to establish Saraya School, an online school offering the American curriculum from grades 1 through 4. It was run by him and Kareem, an EU Business Administration graduate. The school expanded to several branches with a growing student body, including 350 free seats, and they were planning a branch in Saudi Arabia.
But both were murdered. The killers rampaged through the olive groves west of the city, uprooting all Saraya olive trees, burning fields, orchards, homes, and even blowing up water wells.
Their brother-in-law, Haitham Rafeh, recalls: “On the day we buried our martyrs, after the public security forces withdrew, while Suwayda was still besieged and without water, electricity, fuel, or internet, and fighting raged in the western villages, my brother-in-law told me he had filled our fuel tanks because, after what happened on the coast and in Jaramana and Sahnaya, he felt the same was being planned for Suwayda, and that we had to prepare. I came with friends to my mother-in-law, Umm Ali—mother of the martyrs—to ask if we should open the gas station to supply fuel, especially for the fighters defending Suwayda. I watched this woman—who hid her grief from us—look up from the Book of Wisdom. The wisdom it taught her kept her composed and silent; her voice barely emerged, like a wise man’s. Our grandmothers, aunts, and great-aunts had wisdom beyond men.
My mother-in-law, Umm Ali, told me they had filled the gas station’s tanks, and her heart sensed that we were heading toward an ordeal. She said: “Yes, my support, open the gas station and distribute diesel and gasoline to the people who are defending Suwayda, a charitable deed for the souls of our children.”
And because the electricity was cut, we took out an old, semi-primitive pump from the storeroom that runs on gasoline, and we spent the night pumping fuel to the people.”
Magida, Ghassan’s wife and the mother of Hussam and Kareem, says: “Since we returned to the house, I’ve been waiting for the mourners to leave so I can begin to live with my tragedy. I go into our bedroom and my sons’ rooms, I rearrange their wardrobes, the ones the devils ransacked and looted. The women ask to help, and I say: no one knows how to help a mother organize her sons’ closet. I smell every piece of clothing, kiss it, fold it, and cry over every thread of it. I miss them terribly, terribly… I wish I had died before them—or with them. They were so close, they weren’t just my sons, they were my friends. Every morning, before they went to work, we had to sit together—me, my husband, and my sons—we’d talk about everything, we’d vent to each other. And in the evening, the same gathering after work. I used to leave whatever I had—work or commitments—so I wouldn’t miss that time. What sin did we commit for these criminals to kill my husband and sons? Our only crime was that we loved this country and couldn’t bear to live anywhere else, even though we had a thousand opportunities, and all of God’s blessings. But my sons loved to work, they were self-made. Hussam used to say to me: ‘Mama, let me build myself up first, then I’ll get married. I don’t want to live off Dad’s hard work. The bride I’m going to marry, I have to open a home for her, not Dad. I have to preserve her dignity.’ They respected the young before the old. A child selling biscuits would pass by, and every time, Hussam would buy from him, give him extra, and bring the biscuits home, even though we don’t eat biscuits. He’d say: ‘Let him keep earning his living from God, better than begging or going astray.’”
Magida breaks down again: “I don’t know who I grieve more for—my husband or my sons. They say grieving for a child is worse. My grief for each one of them could bring down a mountain. My husband Ghassan never leaves my thoughts, it cut deeply into me. Oh, the regret. He hasn’t gotten to truly enjoy his sons. He deserved to live and enjoy life. He loved life, family, and giving to others. I have a void in my heart, a great absence. I wished we could grow old together, be happy together with our children. I used to say to him: ‘I hope I die while you’re still alive.’ Not for a moment did I think they’d die before me. The blow was that all three died together. They didn’t leave me space to grieve each one separately, or to cry with someone over the one who’s gone, or to find any of them beside me to cry with me and pat my back. But I’m comforted knowing they went together to death. My sons were with their father, they felt safe in his presence before they died, they helped each other even through the agony of death.”
Lawyer Alaa Simoua, their nephew, mourned his uncles on Facebook: “Ghassan, Ali, Waleed, Yahya, Hussam, Kareem, Ismail Janbieh— the Saraya of Suwayda—are not just men, but pillars of pride and guardians of honor, nobles of the path, and torches of truth in a long night where morals were the banner raised. Syria came first. Suwayda was its beating heart, and Suwayda’s Suwayda its deep conscience.
In a time when a word was sacred and the guest was a sultan, Yahya stood like a judge from the era of lost justice. He paid from his own pocket so that it wouldn’t be said a trust was lost in his home. And that Damascene man who came back from Damascus, knocking on my grandfather’s guesthouse in tears, because the hand that asked him about the money was too pure to be accused, and too noble to be shamed.
Those were my grandfather and his brother. They were the safekeepers of the migrants’ trusts to Latin America—trust walking on two feet—a guesthouse that never closed except to reopen again. Their house, Dar al-Saraya, was a fortress of generosity, a hall of pride, and a host to those without hosts. A home that gave birth to my uncles, the martyrs, who defended the land and protected Suwayda when the shadows of savagery descended. In two days of fire, they stood as a bulwark. They did not fear death, because death in the embrace of the land is honor.
Their home is a mark of dignity on Suwayda’s brow, a mark of revolution in the face of this current ruler. When a ruler betrays, and the ruled are humiliated, these are my uncles, these are my honor, these are my qibla. May the qibla of their assassins be damned.
They left this world with radiant faces turned to their Lord, and white hands. They have gone before us, and we are still in the opening line of their book.”
