Comments by the father of Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa about people from the eastern Syrian province of Deir al-Zour have sparked outrage across Syria, prompting Sharaa to later issue an apology on behalf of his father.
Hussein al-Sharaa said in an interview that the people of Deir al-Zour were "a group of savages with loud voices", adding that "Shawaya [a Euphrates community historically associated with sheep-herding] were far better and more civilised than Deiris [people from Deir al-Zour]."
The remarks triggered widespread anger, with politicians and activists saying they reflected an elitist and discriminatory urban view of rural communities and amounted to a direct insult to the people of Deir al-Zour.
After clips of the interview went viral, protests broke out in Deir al-Zour, while local tribes issued statements condemning regional discrimination and inflammatory rhetoric and calling for respect for the province’s identity.
President Sharaa later contacted the governor of Deir al-Zour and local dignitaries to personally apologise.
He said his father's remarks "hurt him before they hurt the people of Deir al-Zour", while suggesting that "what happened may have been a slip of the tongue or the result of some statements being taken out of context during the interview." The New Arab's international editor Yazan al-Saadi, who has roots in both Damascus and Deir al-Zour, said the comments reflected long-standing issues of regional discrimination within Syria.
"There's quite a long history of intra-regional discrimination and competition within Syria. Sometimes it can appear in humorous forms, like the notorious jokes about people from Homs, while at other times it manifests in discrimination, violence and xenophobic statements like those made by Sharaa's father," he said.
"In the case of Deir al-Zour and Damascus, there has long been a wide cultural, geographic, social and economic gap between the two regions that successive central governments have struggled to bridge," he added.
The president's father later attempted to defend himself in a Facebook post, claiming the circulated clip had been cut from a much longer interview and deliberately taken out of context.
He said his comments were intended to discuss divisions between rural and urban communities and exclusionary policies entrenched by previous governments, and were not meant as an insult to the people of Deir al-Zour.
The Sharaa family traces its roots to the town of Fiq in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in southwestern Syria . Hussein al-Sharaa fled to Damascus after Israel occupied the Golan Heights in 1967, along with tens of thousands of displaced Syrians from the area.
He worked at the Syrian oil ministry until 1979 before emigrating to Saudi Arabia, where Ahmed al-Sharaa was born in 1982. The family returned to Syria in 1989.
Ahmed al-Sharaa's nom de guerre, "Abu Mohammed al-Jolani", which he used during the Syrian conflict, derives from the family's origins in the occupied Golan Heights.