Syrian Christians after the fall of the regime: ‘We don’t want to be second-class citizens’

Monsignor Denys Antoine Shahda was watching the 2014 World Cup final in Brazil when a shell hit the archbishop’s residence in Aleppo. Lying on the ground, he began to scream, but no one was listening. The Aziziye neighborhood was plunged into darkness by fighting between various rebel militias and the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the streets blocked by concrete blocks to slow down the attacks. “No ambulance came. We were very scared,” he recalls.

Shortly beforehand, another shell had pierced one of the thick walls of the adjacent Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption. Restored, it is once again hosting services. Although it is Sunday — a working day in Syria — half the pews in the church are full and in his sermon Archbishop Shahda addresses the problems of the Christian community, which are the same as those of all the inhabitants of Aleppo: the lack of running water, electricity, services... “We have seen very important changes in recent weeks, things that make us optimistic. We hope that, like the birth of Jesus which is now approaching, it will bring us hope and good deeds,” he preaches to his parishioners.

The entry of the radical Islamist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) into Aleppo at the end of November frightened many Christians. Before the war, this group represented around 10% of the population, but it is estimated that the percentage has fallen to less than half of that number. “Some of them have left,” explains Lilian Kirdi as she leaves the church: “The people who are here will probably stay, because they have treated us well and have not done anything bad to us.” Another attendee at the service, Georges, says that his opinion of the Islamist rebels “has changed 180 degrees” since they took power: “They have made good changes. I am hopeful for the future. What we hope for is that there will be equality between all Syrians and no one will be marginalized because of their religion.”

An incident that has recently circulated on social media reflects both the fears of Christians and the efforts of the new authorities to allay them. A photo captured a car driving through Damascus with a slogan on its windscreen: “Your time has come, devotees of the cross.” The photo spread like wildfire on WhatsApp among Christians in the area. A video shows what happened next: the Islamist rebels-turned-authorities forced the occupants of the vehicle to erase the phrase.

Apparently more confident with the new provisional government in the north, where they have closely observed HTS’s management in the rebel stronghold of Idlib, things are not seen in the same way in the Christian communities in the central part of the territory. In Maaloula, one of the oldest sanctuaries in Syria, where the Aramaic spoken by Jesus Christ is still a living language, they still remember the attacks launched in 2013 by the Al-Nusra Front, an affiliate of Al Qaeda and predecessor of the current dominant Islamist force in Syria. Its strategic position, on the heights overlooking the central highway that links the large cities, made it a front line of combat with government troops.

The Al-Nusra Front came to control it, occupied monasteries and churches, killed a dozen people and took a group of Orthodox nuns hostage, whose release it negotiated. For half a year a battle was fought almost house by house. The government troops ended up regaining control with cannon fire, with the help of their allies, and the Christians — who, in general, supported Assad’s forces during the almost 14 years of war, largely out of fear of the more fundamentalist sectors of the other side — have not forgotten those days. They remembered them two weeks ago, in the hours before the fall of the regime, when the rebels from Idlib entered the town. One of the inhabitants claims, without wanting to give his name, that they killed three locals, one of them after refusing to be forcibly converted to Islam.

“Of course we are afraid,” admits the Melkite Greek Catholic priest Fadi Barki in the ancient monastery of St. Sergius and St. Bacchus (whose church dates back to the 3rd century), better known as Mar Sarkis. “The same people who attacked us 11 years ago are the ones who rule Syria now,” says the priest, who has just returned to the monastery after participating in a meeting of Christian communities in the capital. “We have asked the UN envoy for Syria to clearly guarantee our presence in the institutions,” he explains.

Perched on the slopes of the mountains on the border with Lebanon, some 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of Damascus, Maaloula is the town with the highest percentage of Christians (90%) in the country, although of its 4,000 inhabitants counted in 2011, only about 1,500 remain. Another large monastery, that of the Orthodox nuns of St. Thecla, built in the 4th century, was attacked and the six remaining churches were also damaged.

“Since the fall of the regime, no one has been guarding the streets of Maaloula, although there are armed gangs of criminals in the mountains,” warns Barki. At the entrance to the village, one can see one of the checkpoints set up by the army after the 2013 attacks. Today it is unmanned. “This abandonment and the absence of the new authorities, who have visited all the villages in the area except this one, worries us Christians,” concludes the Catholic priest, pointing to a fresco of the archangels Michael and Gabriel that was badly damaged in the jihadist attack in 2013.

The nine archbishops of Aleppo

Aleppo has six Catholic archbishops (one for each rite: Syriac Catholic, Melkite, Armenian Catholic, Chaldean, Maronite, and Latin), and three Orthodox archbishops (Syrian Orthodox, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox), as well as two evangelical churches. But the city’s Christian community has been severely decimated by the war: of the more than 200,000 who lived in Syria’s economic capital, there are now barely 25,000 left.

Georges Sabe, superior of the Marist Brothers who has lived through the entire conflict in the city (he runs solidarity projects for Christian and Muslim families), explains that it is not only the violence of the war that has led many Christians, especially young people, to leave the country, but also the sanctions, which have destroyed the economy, the lack of job opportunities, and the harsh military service imposed by the regime: “They were sent for a year and could spend nine in the army, losing their entire youth.”

“In the times of Assad and his father [Hafez], there was religious freedom,” concedes Monsignor Shahda, who worked in Venezuela for more than two decades. “What there wasn’t,” he points out, “was freedom to express our thoughts.” Now he is optimistic: “People are starting to talk. Before, they couldn’t because there was fear that someone would come in and listen for the government.”

In recent weeks, HTS members have met with representatives of all faiths. “They have reassured us that we will be able to continue carrying out our religious practices as before, that our women will not have to wear veils, and they have even promised to return our Catholic schools [nationalized in 1967] to us,” he says.

As for alcohol, a taboo subject for Islamist groups, Shahda says he has spoken to the Armenian community — which runs several restaurants in the center of Aleppo — and has received assurances that they can continue to sell alcoholic drinks as long as they are not visible from the outside. On Monday, in one of these restaurants, several tables were presided over by bottles of whisky and arak (an aniseed liqueur). Several nightclubs remain closed, however, since the entry of the Islamists into the city.

Druze and other religious minorities

The Greek Orthodox priest Georges Tesjosh is in charge of the Church of the Annunciation in Daraa, one of three churches (along with the Catholic and Anglican ones) that remain open in the southern capital, the cradle of the revolution against the regime in March 2011. “We are part of this country, we have historically lived in this city and we will continue to be here,” he says, dressed in religious rigor in the parish office, among icons and photos of Orthodox patriarchs. Today, only about 200 Christians remain in Daraa, half as many as at the start of the Syrian conflict, says the priest attached to the Patriarchate of Antioch, in south-east Turkey.

Like smaller religious minorities such as the Druze, Syria’s Orthodox and Catholics have had to adapt over the centuries to constant shifts in power in order to survive. “We are in coordination with the new authorities and have received assurances that our religion will be respected,” says Father Tesjosh, not wanting to answer a question about threats against his parishioners. Over the past 13 years, Daraa has repeatedly passed from the hands of the regime to those of the insurgency, amid uprisings, repression, massacres, and devastating urban battles.

These are not the only things that concern the Christian community. The new rulers are preparing legislative changes, and there is talk of an Islamic system in which religious minorities will have a place. “We have had a very open dialogue with them,” says Marist Sabe in Aleppo: “What we do not want, as a Christian community, is to be a minority. We do not want a system like the Ottoman one, in which there is power of only one [religious] color and we are allowed to exist or are treated well to have a good image in the West, but we are second-class citizens,” he warns.

The deadline given to the new interim government, dominated by leaders linked to HTS and its Salvation Government, until March is crucial for Christians, says the priest: “We have an important mission in these months. To demonstrate our willingness to stay in the country, to participate, to say what we think, and to show that we want to be citizens on the same level as everyone else. Syria is the cradle of Christianity and we are as much from here as the rest.” In the words of Archbishop Shahda: “They promised us many good things, now we hope that they will become reality.”

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