President Trump’s special envoy for Syria on Monday criticized Israeli strikes against the country last week as poorly timed and complicating efforts to stabilize the region, in an interview with The Associated Press.

The Druze, an ethnoreligious minority in the Levant region, began as a 10th-century offshoot of Ismailism, a branch of Shiite Islam. The religion is roughly 1 million strong, and more than half of that population is estimated to live in Syria, typically in the south, near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Sectarian clashes continue to bedevil Syria, more than six months on from the toppling of Bashar al-Assad’s regime at the hands of Sunni Islamists in December.