Since even before Syria’s longtime former leader Bashar al-Assad fled the country in December 2024, violent clashes between Druze factions and forces tied to the new government of President Ahmad al-Sharaa have killed as many as 2,000 people in the southern province of Sweida. Human rights activists have also reported widespread torture, rape, abductions and other abuses. Druze leaders—representing some 700,000 Syrians whose monotheistic practices derive from Shia Islam but who don’t consider themselves Muslim—have accused the authorities of creating an Islamic State-style government hostile to minorities.
Meanwhile, Syria’s estimated 500,000 Christians—most notably the 30,000 also living in the Sweida region—in a country of an estimated 26 million people, have largely escaped being targeted, and remain mostly silent about the bloodshed.
The authorities appear to be sparing Christians not because of their faith, or sectarian reasons, says Roger Asfar—a Christian from Aleppo who studies Syrian Christians’ historical relationship with state authority—but for political motives. Unlike other minorities, Christian leaders have not yet demanded a say in the country’s future governance.
But with concern about possible restrictions on minority religious freedoms always present, he says Christians are uncertain about their future. They “do not know whether betting on the new system will prove a winning or a losing wager,” he said. Either way, their leaders’ decisions about how to participate in post-Assad society could seriously affect the future for the entire country as the government consolidates power after many decades of one-family rule.
More than 75 percent of Syrian Christians emigrated from the country following the start of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s regime during the Arab Spring in March 2011 and the country’s descent into civil war. They had previously enjoyed certain “privileges”—essentially basic rights—under an implicit arrangement that exchanged their political rights for religious freedom: Practicing a calculated neutrality, most Christians did not openly oppose Assad’s rule in return for being allowed to practice their faith.
The regime meanwhile portrayed itself as a protector of minorities, beginning in 1970 when Bashar’s father Hafez al-Assad, an army officer, seized power in a coup. Inheriting the presidency in 2000, Bashar continued the policy until his regime collapsed.
The Assads are Alawites—a minority Shia sect in the overwhelmingly Sunni majority country—that systematically marginalized the Sunnis during their five-decade rule. Other religious minorities—the Druze, Christians and Ismailis, as well as ethnic minorities including the Kurds in the north—also experienced periods of repression despite their relative stability. Still, they never breached the arrangement that protected them as long as they posed the regime no political or security threat.
Now under President al-Sharaa, a former jihadist leader, a new contract must be forged, and due to the West’s interest in their fate, Christians may play a singular role. Fear of Western retaliation has so far helped prevent a bloody confrontation, Asfar says, and may enable them to help the new government burnish its stated commitment to inclusion, however illusory.
What’s clear is that with the Sunni majority reclaiming its power under an Islamist president, documented massacres have already been carried out against Alawites and Druze. Government forces have also clashed with Kurds in the northeast and even sporadic attacks targeting Christians and their churches in Sweida and elsewhere have taken place.
Meanwhile Christians are reverting to their traditional status of subjects under authoritarian rule, which stretches back to the Ottoman Empire that ruled Syrian territory until World War I. Sharaa appears to be reproducing the same kind of relationship, treating Christians as a flock to be managed through their religious leaders, enabling his government to project a relatively pluralist image while ensuring they in fact remain politically inert.
Not all Christian leaders have been silent about the anti-Druze violence. In a rare case, Father Tony al-Batrous, a priest of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church in the Sweida town of Shahba, has been outspoken in his condemnation, and his church has sheltered Druze civilians seeking refuge from shelling. “For generations, we have lived alongside the Druze in harmony, mutual respect and peace, founded on shared citizenship and respect for religious diversity,” he told SyriacPress.com.
Other Syrian Christians’ silence may be prompted by motives of self-preservation, he says. “Perhaps they believe there is wisdom in not saying anything so that Christians are not harmed,” he told Alhurra, a media platform of the US-funded Middle East Broadcasting Networks. But any such “wise” silence is an implicit acknowledgment of their lack of agency under the new government and a continuation of the old model depending on the mediation of their clergy as their main protection.
Many senior Christian clergy are actively promoting that relationship, Asfar says, “because it consolidates their role and renews their monopoly over speaking for Christians instead of allowing other civilian voices to emerge.” In that, Christians’ current reality increasingly resembles the concept of dhimma—prevalent during earlier periods of Islamic rule, under which Christians and Jews were granted protection in exchange for submission to the authorities and laws of the Islamic state, with their freedom of worship granted in return for paying a tax called the jizya.
The government’s clashes with other communities, including the Druze in the south and Kurds in the northeast, largely stem from those groups’ fundamental rejection of such a contract. They are refusing to be mere subjects, demanding the right to participate in political decision-making as citizens instead.
Although Syria’s Christians risk betraying the fundamental moral teachings of their own faith by accepting dhimma status, it remains to be seen whether the government’s hoped-for model provides a sustainable path for the new Syrian authorities or merely a fragile, temporary truce.
This article is also available on the Compass website.
Rami Al Amine
A Lebanese writer and journalist living in the United States. He holds a master’s degree in Islamic-Christian Relations from the Faculty of Religious Sciences at Saint Joseph University in Beirut. He is the author of the poetry collection “I Am a Great Poet” (Dar Al-Nahda Al-Arabiya, 2007); the political pamphlet “Ya Ali, We Are No Longer the People of the South” (Lebanese Plans, 2008); a book on social media titled “The Facebookers” (Dar Al-Jadeed, 2012); and “The Pakistanis: A Statue’s Biography” (Dar Al-Nahda Al-Arabiya, 2024).
