Sharjah24 – AFP: Hundreds took to the streets of a southern Syrian city on Friday to demand better living conditions and democracy in a rare protest inside regime-held areas, a war monitor said.

More than 300 protesters, gathering for a fifth consecutive day in Sweida after authorities cut off 600,000 families from its subsidies programme, staged their biggest rally yet, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The footage shows protesters raising the flag of the Druze, a religious minority whose heartland is Sweida.

The rally went ahead despite a heavy deployment of security forces, who sealed off main roads.

Earlier this month, the government excluded a large number of people from its subsidies programme, in a country where 90 percent of the population is poor.

Those who were cut off lost access to lower-priced food and oil, a move that triggered rare protests and criticism from within government-held areas of Syria.

Smaller protests over similar issues were held in Sweida in 2020.

But the Druze, who made up less than three percent of Syria's pre-war population, largely kept out of the country's conflict.

Sweida has been mostly spared by the fighting in the decade-old war, and only faced sporadic jihadist attacks which were repelled.

Syria has grappled with an economic crisis compounded by Western sanctions, the Covid-19 pandemic and a rapid devaluation of the local currency.