Can Syria’s dwindling Christian community survive under jihadi rebel rule?
Once loyal to the regime, Syrian Christians have ostensibly joined the national celebration after the ouster of Bashar al-Assad. But can they trust the new Islamist rulers’ pledges?
By Gianluca Pacchiani
The lightning power grab by the Sunni jihadi group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria has raised concerns about the fate of the Christian minority in the country.
Numbering 1.5 million before the outbreak of the civil war in 2011, Christians made up about 10 percent of the Syrian population. Within the span of a decade, their numbers dwindled dramatically, and in 2022, there were only 300,000 left, or about 2% of the current population of Syria, according to a report by the US-based NGO “Aid to Church in Need.”
Traditionally wealthier and more educated than the average Syrian population, Christians emigrated en masse to escape persecution by ISIS, but also to flee Syria’s spiraling economic situation.
The new HTS leaders have repeatedly reassured Syrians and the international community that it will protect all minorities – which also include Shiites, Alawites, Druze, Kurds and others – and the new Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir has urged millions of Syrian refugees abroad to return home, vowing “the rights of all people and all sects in Syria” will be guaranteed.
However, it remains to be seen whether the country will once again become a tolerant, pluralistic place as its new leaders claim. Concern for the fate of Syria’s millennia-long Christian presence has been recently expressed by the Washington DC-based NGO In Defense of Christians.
In a statement issued after the rebels’ capture of Aleppo two weeks ago, IDC quoted sources in Aleppo saying that Christians were “living in fear” and had been the “target of widespread crime and vandalism.”
However, Christian residents of Aleppo were recently interviewed by the Center for Peace Communications, a New York nonprofit, on the occasion of the Festival of Saint Barbara, a celebration observed by Middle East Christians. They said that they were afraid for the first two or three days after the HTS takeover, but now feel they do not have any reason to be concerned, and churches are operating normally.
How are the Christians of Aleppo faring as Syria’s Assad regime falls to a coalition of rebel forces? On St. Barbara’s Day (Dec. 4), we asked them directly.
During the 13 years of the civil war, Christians largely remained loyal to the Assad regime, which portrayed itself as a secular defender of religious minorities. Christians didn’t actively take action to support the regime, such as organizing armed militias to defend it, said Syrian analyst Hazem Alghabra, a former Senior Advisor to the US Department of State who runs a Washington DC-based Middle East security consultancy.
“For the most part, [Christians] were afraid. They were concerned about the Islamist elements of the Syrian uprising – and that is hard to ignore. But also, they repeated the regime messaging that anybody who stood up against the regime was an Islamist terrorist,” Damascus-born Alghabra told The Times of Israel. He noted that describing them as regime supporters today, after the ousting of Bashar al-Assad, would “amount to an insult.”
Rebels return confiscated Christian property
Like most other Syrians, Christians appeared elated at the fall of the brutal dictatorship. Bahjat Karakach, a Franciscan friar who serves as Aleppo’s Latin-rite parish priest, told Vatican News this week that Christians had been “completely exhausted by living under the regime” due to the economic hardships.
The cleric also noted that over the past years, rebels had shown increased tolerance to Christians, and returned confiscated property. In the Idlib area, controlled by HTS for the past decade, Christians had reportedly been allowed to continue practicing their faith.
Archbishop Hanna Jallouf, Apostolic Vicar of Aleppo, told Vatican News that he had met with HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, who had given him “assurances that Christians and their possessions will not be touched, and that [the militants] will meet all our legitimate requests.”
However, in 2015, al-Sharaa, back then known only by his nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Julani, said in a prescient interview with Al Jazeera that once the group took control of all of Syria, it would impose shari’a law over the country.
Christians, as “people of the book,” would enjoy a privileged status and be allowed to practice their faith, the jihadi leader said, but per Islamic law, they would be obligated to pay the per capita jizya tax – even though HTS at the time was not imposing it in the areas it controlled.
At the time, al-Julani said that a different fate awaited other religious minorities in Syria, such as Alawites and Druze, whose doctrines originated from Islam centuries ago but then departed from Muslim Orthodoxy. Those two groups would have to “correct their doctrinal mistakes and embrace Islam,” Julani said.
In 2013, two years prior to the interview, the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch that al-Julani led at the time, abducted 13 nuns amid fighting with regime forces. They were freed three months later after Qatar agreed to pay the kidnappers $16 million.
Today, al-Julani appears to eschew those fundamentalist positions. He renounced ties to al-Qaeda in 2016 and now depicts himself as a champion of pluralism and tolerance.
In recent days, the insurgency leader dropped his nom de guerre and began referring to him by his real name, Ahmad al-Sharaa. He shed his garb as a hardline Islamist guerrilla and put on suits for press interviews, talking of building state institutions and decentralizing power to reflect Syria’s diversity.
Salvation in the eye of the beholder?
The transitional government appointed on Tuesday only includes members from the HTS administration of Idlib, known as the “Salvation Government,” and no representatives from secular rebel factions or religious groups other than Sunni Muslims.
“The concerns are not exclusive to Christians. They are also shared by the average moderate Sunni population,” Alghabra told The Times of Israel. “If we end up with a Taliban-style governance in Syria, then Christians will be targeted first, but down the line, moderate Sunnis will be targeted as well.”
HTS’s experience ruling the Idlib area over the past years could provide an indicator for its future behavior governing the country.
Aaron Zelin, Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said in a recent interview with France 24 that HTS’s rule in Idlib was “an authoritarian governance model, not quite as bad as the totalitarianism of the Assad regime. It wasn’t a liberal democracy by any stretch of the imagination.” But the Islamist group had apparently abandoned any aspirations for “global jihad,” Zelin noted.
In a recent article, Zelin said that Christians in those areas were treated as second-class citizens, as they were not represented in the local government, the General Shura Council, and their interests were dealt with by a “Directorate of Minority Affairs.”
France24 journalist Wassim Nasr visited Idlib in 2023 and reported that the few hundred Christians who remained in the region were allowed to hold masses, but not to display crosses or ring church bells.
Syrian analyst Alghabra remained optimistic that once HTS becomes the internationally recognized government of Syria, it will have to make compromises and show more openness.
“In Idlib, HTS did not have to deal with the concerns of the international community,” Alghabra said. “It will need technical support, aid, fuel, a lot of things. So the international community’s approach will need to be transactional. HTS will have to allow every religious group to practice unobstructedly in order to get outside help.
