Next Mideast Flashpoint? ISIS Threatens Druze

GOLAN HEIGHTS, Israel -- The Israeli Defense Force declared part of the country's northern border a closed military zone, following significant movement in Syria by ISIS and other Islamic extremists.

The crisis began when Syrian President Bashar Assad moved his troops back to the capital. These changes pose a direct threat to Israel and the Druze, one of the region's largest ethnic groups.

On the Golan Heights, the IDF is preparing for the possibility of thousands of Syrian Druze pouring across the border into Israel.

The Druze nation is one of many ethnic minorities spread throughout Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. A recent demonstration by the Druze is one more sign of a growing crisis on Israel's northern border.

They are calling on Assad to protect thousands of their fellow Druze left vulnerable after government troops left them exposed to ISIS and a potential genocide.

Druze families, separated from one another after the 1967 Six-Day War, would come to the "shouting hill," just a few feet away from the border with Syria, and literally shout to each other before the age of the Internet.

Today, the Druze are shouting to the world that ISIS is right across the border and their families are in danger.

"We are close to ISIS, as I told you -- 4 kilometers -- and to the first village of the Druze that they are threatening by ISIS, something like 2 kilometers," journalist Hamad Aiwat told CBN News. "Here we can see the first home. You can see the white home."

Aiwat said the situation is desperate.

"We are getting updates from different sources that this kind of fight and this kind of fight can be in the field in the next few days or next few hours so we are preparing ourselves in different sides to help them and to support them," he said.

That help includes raising a million dollars to buy weapons. They are waiting for permission from Israel and Jordan to send those arms inside Syria. Israel has also asked the United States to help.

"America and all the West side must understand that the fighting of the Druze nation -- and the Christian and the Kurdish and the Yazidi and the other -- is the fighting of the West side," Israeli Deputy Minister for Regional Affairs Ayoub Kara, a Druze, told CBN News.

Karra warns ISIS won't stop with his people.

"This is a problem of all the world because they [Islamic State] say in Arabic every day that they want to move to Europe and after Europe to the United States and everywhere," Kara explained. "This could be the third war of the world, so we must stop it there, and how can we stop it -- to support the Druze nation and other nation."

Aiwat said the Druze, unlike the region's other minorities, such as the Yazidis, know how to fight.

"All of us, we're very professional with fighting," he said. "We're born for fighting. We weren't born to be doctors."

With the situation in the north increasingly tense, the IDF declared part of the border a closed military zone.

And with ISIS so close, it's possible the Israeli-Syrian border could become the next flash point of the Middle East.