The recent murders of Alawite civilians in Syria’s coastal region has caused concern among the country’s other religious minorities too.

On March 6, loyalists who support Syria’s ousted President Bashar Assad attacked security forces belonging to the new, interrim government. The resulting violence, which saw more security forces and armed civilians rushing to the coast, resulted in unwarranted attacks on members of the Alawite minority. Scores of civilians were killed.

While Christians were not openly targeted in the violence, false reports and the inability of the new government to intervene to protect communities have been fueling local Christians’ fears ever since.

Before the Syrian civil war, which went from 2011 to December 2024, Christians made up around 10% of the Syrian population. After 14 years of war, there is no official data on how many still live in the country today.

There are more than 11 different denominations. The Greek Orthodox and Melkite Greek Catholic churches are among the largest. The latter has connections to the Vatican in Rome. However there is also a smaller Protestant church, whose members numbered around 300,000 before 2011.

Uncertain future

Since the overthrow of Assad on December 8 after an offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, many Christians have been “afraid of Islamization,” Assaad Elias Kattan, a Syrian Orthodox theologian from Lebanon who teaches at the German University of Münster, told DW.

Despite signals by the new administration under Ahmad al-Sharaa that it respects Syria’s diversity, there is also a “certain vagueness” to its political program, he said. “We are dealing with a chaotic transitional situation. Outside Damascus, the security situation is not always stable and it will take some time before the police and army can guarantee public order again.”

And there have been isolated incidents that seem to target Christians. In December, a video showed an armed man destroying a Christmas tree in Aleppo. An armed group also attacked the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in Hama, damaging a cross and shooting at the building.

Later on, forces from the HTS-led interim government condemned the acts and blamed “unknown individuals” for the attacks. 

Questionable role

In the midst of this sort of insecurity, Syria’s Christians are also asking questions about the attitude of their own church leaders during the Assad dictatorship, with Christians both inside and outside the country debating this. 

In 2011, when the protests against former Syrian dictator Bashar Assad broke out, many Christians joined demonstrations calling for civil rights. They are also represented among the victims and prisoners of the regime’s torture chambers and jails.

Over the course of the war, Christians continued to be able to practise their religion. But if they spoke out against the Assad regime, they too were persecuted by the authorities, just like all other Syrians.

In contrast, most of their church leaders sided with the regime. The heads of all Christian churches supported the Assad regime’s narrative. The latter represented itself as the protector of the country’s minorities, including Christians. The Assad regime regularly argued that that if anti-government groups were to takepower, then minorities would be in danger.

Barrel bombs on Aleppo, poison gas attacks and the starvation of entire districts of people as well as tens of thousands in torture chambers: You can search in vain for criticism of any of those things coming from Syrian church leaders.

Some Syrian church leaders also spread this propaganda outsde the country. Assad was a “victim of targeted defamation,” the patriarch of the Greek Melkite Catholic church, Gregory III Laham, told German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in 2015.

Anger and disappointment

“From today’s perspective, this is more than embarrassing.” Kattan wrote in an article for the Lebanese online newspaper Almodon. “So when will the church leaders actually apologize to the Syrian people for their attitude? It is now their task to critically reappraise this period. They should publicly admit, ‘yes, we made mistakes’.”

Nobody expected the bishops to directly oppose the Assad regime, Kattan argued, but a little more distance from such a repressive regime would have been welcome.

“Many Syrian Christians in the country and in exile are deeply disappointed and angry at the attitude of their church leaders,” Najib George Awad, a Syrian academic who researches theology at the University of Bonn, told DW. “Church leaders allowed themselves to be used as a PR tool by the Assad regime, helping it to build a positive image in the eyes of the international public,” says Awad, who has supported the anti-government protests in Syria since the demonstrations began. 

“There were also active opposition activists among the priests,” Hind Kabawat told DW. She was the only Christian member of the commission that prepared Syria’s recent National Dialog Conference and is also the director of the Toronto, Canada-based Syrian Centre for Dialogue, Peace and Reconciliation.

“But there were also the others. There were priests who reported on Christian activists to the secret service,” she said, adding that “they are responsible for many deaths.”

They should be held accountable, just like all other Syrians who are accused of crimes during the Assad dictatorship, she argued.

This article was originally published in German.