The Battle of al-Kafr Memorial

A memorial in the village of al-Kafr, south-east of Suwayda, to the clash fought here on the morning of 22 July 1925. Druze and Bedouin horsemen under Sultan al-Atrash broke a French column within half an hour. Before the month was out the whole Jabal was under his control, and the fight came to be seen as the start of the nationwide Great Syrian Revolt. No source records when the memorial was put up; the substance of this page is the event itself.

Getting there

Al-Kafr lies about 12 kilometres from Suwayda, set among four hills between 1360 and 1650 metres. The best known of them is Tell Qulayb. Some 271 hectares of the village land are oak woodland, and there are springs such as Ain Musa, Ain al-Ulayqa and Ain al-Rasfa. The village of Hibran is a few kilometres to the south.

How it came to a fight

On 12 July 1925 the French authorities invited five leading sheikhs of the al-Atrash clan to talks, on the pretext of discussing complaints about Captain Carbillet, the French military governor of the Jabal. They arrested the three who came: Abd al-Ghaffar, Nasib and Hamad. The invitation was a trap. Mit’ib and Sultan al-Atrash had stayed away; when Sultan heard his kinsmen had been seized, he began raising volunteers in the villages of the Jabal. On 18 July his men brought down a French reconnaissance plane near the village of Mitin and captured its two airmen. Two days later they took Salkhad.

The morning of 22 July

Captain Gabriel Normand set out from Suwayda with a column of 166 men, Algerian and Syrian sipahis and Syrian Legion troops, to rescue the airmen. On the evening of 21 July he camped outside al-Kafr, on the road to Salkhad. Sultan’s envoys offered talks on freeing the arrested sheikhs and sending the column back to Suwayda; Normand refused. At dawn the next day, Druze from al-Kafr and Bedouin horsemen of the Sardiyah and Sulut tribes came down from the surrounding hills and a nearby valley and broke the column’s defensive square. The fighting lasted about thirty minutes. Estimates of the attackers range from 150, the figure of the Syrian journalist Munir al-Rayyis, to the thousands claimed by the French. The historian Philip Khoury writes that more than half the soldiers were killed; according to Kais Firro and Daniel Neep, only a few survived to carry the news back.

What followed

The same day Sultan marched on Suwayda, drove the French garrison into the citadel and laid siege to it. For Firro, the fight at al-Kafr and the siege of Suwayda were the moment both sides understood a general uprising had begun. The victory brought over even the sheikhs who had been on good terms with the French. By the end of July the force, swollen with volunteers, numbered between 8000 and 10000 men.

What not to miss

The slope of Tell Qulayb. Every account of the clash says the attack came from the hills around the village; from the best known of the four you can see how that ring closed. Al-Kafr had resisted in these mountains before. In 1910 one of the fights against the Ottoman expedition of Sami Pasha al-Faruqi took place around the village, led by Sultan’s father, Dhuqan al-Atrash.

The village’s older layers

Traces of dwellings and walls going back to the Chalcolithic are recorded at Tell al-Zuhayr, and Nabataean remains at Tell Qulayb. A church dated 391 and a Church of Saint George dated 692 are recorded in the village. The present village was resettled in 1862; until then it was considered a ruin too hard to live in.

Where it stands now

Al-Kafr is in Suwayda governorate, which has been inside an armed conflict since July 2025. The present condition of the memorial and the village cannot be confirmed from independent sources, and access to the region is not regular. This page tells you what happened at al-Kafr; it does not tell you that you can go there today.