WHEN President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s interim government took power in Syria after the sudden overthrow of Bashar Assad last year, Christians expressed cautious hope (News, 13 December 2024).
“We all gave him the benefit of the doubt,” the Revd Dr Nadim Nassar, a Syrian priest in the Church of England, recalled this week. Seven months on, in the wake of the massacre of Arab-minority Alawites, a suicide bombing at a Damascus church, and the recent killing of Israel-aligned Druze civilians in Suweida province, trust is being lost “rapidly”, he warns.
Christians in Syria have anticipated a “huge attack” on them at “any time”, Dr Nassar said on Tuesday. “What is there to give us security or a good feeling that nothing will happen to us? What are the signals?”
On Monday, the UN special envoy for Syria, Geir Pederson, told the Security Council that a ceasefire in Suweida was “largely holding” but that the violence had left Syrians “reeling”.
Fighting between Druze and Bedouin factions in the majority-Druze, semi-autonomous province in the south of the country erupted on 12 July after mutual kidnappings. The government dispatched forces to the province that were attacked by air strikes from Israel, which claimed to protect the Druze, who form a minority religious and ethnic group within their own territory. Hundreds of people have been killed in the clashes, and one third of the population — 175,000 people — are now displaced. Israel continues to occupy the southwestern buffer zone that it invaded when the Assad regime fell.
Last week, Aid to the Church in Need reported that more than 250 people had taken shelter in the Capuchin Church of Jesus the King in Suweida. “The situation is one of dehumanisation beyond belief, with dead bodies lying in the streets,” a religious Sister told the charity.
Crisis Group, an organisation founded in the 1990s to “alert the world to potential conflicts before they spiral out of control”, reports that some government units have been “credibly accused of mass abuses”, “many more showing contempt for the local population, thus aggravating rather than containing tensions”. It has diagnosed “a sense of alienation and existential dread among many Syrians — especially members of minority groups who had felt vulnerable since the Assad regime’s ousting”.
As the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East, John X, commented online last week: “What is happening in Suwayda disgraces humanity.”
After an agreement was reached for government troops to withdraw from the region, President al-Sharaa said that his interim administration had “put the interests of the Syrians before chaos and destruction”, and was “keen on holding accountable those who transgressed and abused our Druze people”.
This week, Dr Nassar suggested that a form of “schizophrenia” was marring Syria. The Government presented one face to the international community — suggesting that the country would soon be “paradise” — but internally there was “brutality, violence, marginalisation, persecution, and total religious domination. . . In practical terms we are little by little entering into a theocracy . . . a masked theocracy,” he said. “The real authority in the [government] department is the Imam.”
Dr Nassar grew up in Latakia on Syria’s Mediterranean coast alongside Alawites, a religious minority in Syria which originates from Shia Islam. He condemned the massacres that took place in March in coastal regions where Alawites are concentrated as “a stain of shame on the history of Syria” (News, 12 March).
Last month, a fact-finding committee set up by the Syrian government reported that 1426 people and 238 members of the government security forces had been killed during the violence, which had been caused by attacks by former “regime remnants”.
It acknowledged that some of those who had committed violations were members of interim armed forces who had “no official authority and acted individually” and had acted “out of fear for their country and families of the return of the Assad regime”. Assad is an Alawite who family had ruled Syria since 1971 until his exile to Russia last year.
“You cannot punish a whole component of the society for the crimes of the regime,” Dr Nassar said this week. “Nobody disagrees that the regime was criminal, was brutal, destroyed Syria . . . But still this is not the way to build a country. . . If you feel this is ‘our’ country, if you feel you own the country, how are you different from the previous regime that you erupted against? You are repeating the same thing.”
Last Friday, a memorial service was held at St Elias’s Church in the Dweilaa district of Damascus, marking 40 days since 25 Christians were killed in a shooting by an attacker who then blew himself up (News, 27 June). A Jihadist group, Saraya Ansar al-Sunna (SAS), claimed responsibility. Crisis Group reports that the group cited the transitional government’s decision in March to prohibit proselytising to convert Christians to Islam, and its failure to promulgate Islamic law.
The overthrow of Assad’s government in July marked the end of more than 50 years of rule by his family. It was achieved by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Islamist militant group, led by al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda commander known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani who has said that HTS will be dissolved. His interim cabinet includes ministers from Alawite, Druze, Christian and Kurdish communities. Elections are not planned for three to four years. More than two million Syrians have returned home since December, from neighbouring countries and within Syria itself, but seven million remain displaced.
Last week, the state news agency reported that the Syriac Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, Mor Ignatius Aphrem II, had met members of the Supreme Committee for the People’s Assembly Elections to “exchange perspectives on the electoral process and present mechanisms for forming the upcoming parliament”.
Western governments have expressed a desire to support the new government, which has vowed to combat terrorism and protect minorities. In May, the US President Donald Trump met with President al-Sharaa in Riyadh, the first such meeting between the two countries’ heads of state in 25 years. Trump describd the Syrian as a “young attractive tough guy”, and announced that the US would lift all sanctions. It was a volte-face that baffled Dr Nassar, who fears that the West see the al-Sharaa as “their boy”.
In May, the interim government established both the National Transitional Justice Authority and the National Authority for Missing Persons. More than 100,000 Syrians are estimated to have forcibly disappeared or gone missing during the conflict; hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. The government is also tasked with the demobilization of armed groups and integration into a new national army. Dr Nassar has listed the “brutal violence” meted out by foreign mercenaries as among the major challenges facing the country.
Last month, the chair of the independent international commission of inquiry on Syria, Paulo Sérgio, told the UN Security Council: “The security vacuum left after the dismissal of the armed forces and security services, coupled with a lack of clarity on the new framework for justice, contributed to an atmosphere where victims of past crimes and violations attempted to take the law into their own hands and settle scores.” Security forces had “appeared unable to protect” people targeted in revenge attacks. Survivors of the March attacks had described assaults by “large groups of armed men, many of them members of factions now affiliated with the State”.
He called on the international community to support the government’s “encouraging” commitments to “protect the rights of everyone and all communities in Syria without discrimination of any kind”.
Since 2003, Dr Nassar has led the Awareness Foundation, which aims to build bridges between the West and the Middle East and promote interfaith dialogue and peace. This week he described how it had conducted four online consultations with young people about their hopes for the future, in the months since the fall of the Assad government. They identified ten points including “the rule of law”, “women’s and children’s rights”, and “freedom of speech”. They seemed “basic” to many in the West, he said. “But for them they are very important steps”.
He did believe in “optimism” and “pessimism”, he said. “I would rather use the theological language of hope, and my hope that we can cross that bridge of sectarianism and violence and hate to emerge as one people, because the Syrian people are one whether the sectarian people like it or not. The minorities belong to the very fabric of the society. No one has the merit to say ‘I am more Syrian than you’”.
