The devil you don’t know

When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime collapsed earlier this month, many saw reason to rejoice. The dictator who had dared to use chemical weapons against his people was no longer in power. Syria had a chance to create a whole new kind of government—one more representative of its people.

While some rejoiced, others saw troubling signs about what Assad’s downfall meant—especially for Syria’s Christian population. Assad was a known terror. Whoever comes next could be worse, some human rights workers worry.

“You're going to have to move past celebrating the fall of Assad and look with real eyes at the case of who is now in charge of Syria,” Global Christian Relief President and CEO David Curry told WORLD. The people who are in control aren’t who the media has made them out to be, he said.

Specifically, Curry points to the group Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS. Mainstream media have referred to the group's fighters as “rebels,” but they’re actually old al-Qaeda affiliates, Curry said. And their leader, Abu Muhammed al-Julani has had a troubling sign in his literal background.

“When Julani is making public statements—he's interviewing on 60 Minutes, or what have you—he has an ISIS-related flag in the back,” Curry said.

HTS and other rebel groups like ISIS, also known as the Islamic State group, would likely impose Shariah—a strict Islamic legal code—on Syria. That law would not look kindly on Christians, said Martin Parsons, the president and CEO of the Lindisfarne Centre for the Study of Christian Persecution.

“Christians are to be treated as dhimmis,” Parsons told WORLD. The historical term once referred to non-Islamic subjects of the Ottoman Empire. “Now, what that means is Christians are allowed to live… but with non-citizen status. They are literally just permitted to live through a strict set of conditions.”

Those conditions are analogous to the Nuremberg Race Laws that the Third Reich used to subjugate the Jewish people, Parsons said. Under Shariah, Christians are prohibited from building churches, repairing churches, worshiping in public, and making Christian symbols visible to the public, he said. The law also requires Christians to rise in the company of Muslims, taxes them for not being Muslim, and prevents them from defending themselves if attacked by Muslims.

Any Christian who breaks those rules becomes an enemy combatant in the eyes of Shariah, Parsons said. And that means Muslims can kill them with impunity.

The persecution of these Christians isn’t just a concept. For many Christians on the ground during Syria’s civil war, it’s already been a horrifying reality. The CIA has estimated about 10% of Syria’s nearly 24 million residents are Christian but it adds that Christians may be much fewer in number due to those who fled during the civil war. Before the civil war started, there were likely around 2 million Christians in Syria, according to Parsons. He estimated in many areas of the country there were only tens of thousands of Christians remaining.

Christians suffered every kind of atrocity throughout the civil war, Curry said. In territory controlled by the Islamic State group, militants were murdering, raping, and destroying the houses of Christians.

Groups like HTS have persecuted Christians as well, Parsons said. He recalled meeting years ago with a pastor from Aleppo while the city was under siege by jihadist forces. The pastor pulled out his phone and showed Parsons a photo he had just received from another church leader on the ground in the city. It showed a Christian woman and her child hanging from the same rope. Despite such persecution, tens of thousands of Christians remain at communities in Aleppo and Damascus, Parsons said.

Christians continue to suffer from persecution and violence in parts of Syria. In areas overtaken by the Syrian National Army—a coalition of smaller groups with ties to the Islamic State group and al Qaeda—blood has literally run in the streets, according to David Eubank, the founder and director of the Christian aid group Free Burma Rangers. Militants in the Syrian National Army have killed people on playgrounds and in hospitals, he said.

Some Christians have fled to eastern Syria, near the border with Iraq. That’s one of the last safe places in the country for Christians, Eubank told WORLD. Also, in parts of western Syria under the control of HTS, Christians are able to practice their faith for the time being, he said

Those allowances may not last long, Parsons said. He explained that the terrorist groups who took over from Assad have Western governments to seduce—and they want the aid packages those governments could provide. But once these groups solidify their grip on the country, conditions will likely start to change.

“What I would expect us to be seeing is something similar to what's happened in Afghanistan in a sense,” Parsons said. “We're not going to see an immediate massacre of Christians, but we are going to see that tightening noose.”