Syria: Muslims Kidnapping, Possibly Torturing, Christians
After forces from the al-Qaeda affiliated Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terrorist group conquered Damascus and overthrew Syria's Assad regime in December 2024, they urged the residents of the Valley of the Christians to surrender any weapons they kept for self-defense, telling them that civilians would not be harmed. Since the jihadists' takeover of Syria, however, around 500,000 Christians in the country have been faced with increased persecution and abductions
On February 16, more Christians... were abducted from another village in the area. Their kidnappers, according to sources on the ground, are torturing them.
"HTS's successive renamings and 'rebrandings' appear to echo al-Qaeda's own strategy in Syria of establishing branches and presenting them as locally-grown organizations arising in response to Syrians' needs..." — US Commission on International Religious Freedom, November 2022.
Al-Sharaa recently started dressing in a suit and tie, and is now presenting himself to the West as a "moderate." He has spoken of plans to form an inclusive transitional government representing diverse communities that will build institutions and run the country until it can hold free and fair elections. In schoolbooks, however, his government has been replacing the word "law" with "sharia," and has been using Islamic teaching to recruit the country's new army.
"Under HTS-control in Idlib, Christian clergy are not allowed to walk outside in any clothing that makes them recognisable as priests or pastors. Crosses have been removed from church buildings." — Open Doors, December 2024.
"Islam does not tolerate other cultures." — "Christina," a Greek Christian in Syria, to Gatestone, January 2025.
"The new Syria should not be established without parties that represent the minority groups in the country, such as Christians, Kurds, Druze, and Alawites. The official recognition and acceptance of the jihadists by Western governments is like placing swords on the necks of Christians in particular and everyone who disagrees with them in general." – "Christina," a Greek Christian in Syria, to Gatestone, January 2025.
Sadly, the persecution of Christians in Syria's "Valley of the Christians" (Wadi al-Nasara), overwhelmingly inhabited by Greeks originally from Antioch, has been escalating.
After forces from the al-Qaeda affiliated Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terrorist group conquered Damascus and overthrew Syria's Assad regime in December 2024, they urged the residents of the Valley of the Christians to surrender any weapons they kept for self-defense, telling them that civilians would not be harmed. Since the jihadists' takeover of Syria, however, around 500,000 Christians in the country have been faced with increased persecution and abductions
On February 14, 2025, approximately 10 Christian men were abducted by Muslims from a village in the Valley, although reportedly later released. On February 16, more Christians -- three of whom identified as Majd Shahoud, Tony Salloum and Bahjat Shehab -- were abducted from another village in the area. Their kidnappers, according to sources on the ground, are torturing them.
Within a few days, armed Islamists violated a cemetery in the Christian town of Zaydal, east of the city of Homs, where they toppled and broke a stone cross and desecrated graves. On February 17, smoke bombs were thrown by masked men at the Church of Our Lady of the Annunciation in the Christian village al-Masmiyah, in Daraa.
HTS is a terrorist group formed in 2017 from a merger of five Islamist militias. Since then, HTS ruled Idlib in northwest Syria. In 2018, it was designated by the US State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
In late November 2024, an offensive was launched by jihadist forces, spearheaded by HTS. In December, in less than two weeks, in a march through Syria, HTS toppled Bashar al-Assad, ending his family's six-decade Baathist regime.
HTS founder Ahmed Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, then became Syria's president and de facto ruler. Before that, he had served as a "graduate" of the Jabhat Al-Nusra (Nusrah Front), another designated Foreign Terrorist Organization and Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda. A $10 million bounty for his arrest was removed by the Biden administration on December 20, 2024, presumably in the hope of his not running Syria into an extremist ditch.
Islamic State (ISIS) leaders have used HTS-controlled territory in Syria as a safe haven. Two significant US military operations targeted ISIS leaders within HTS-controlled areas: Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in 2019 and Abu Ibrahim Al-Hashimi Al-Quraishi in 2022.
HTS, due to its affiliation with al-Qaeda and ISIS, was also blacklisted as a terrorist organization by the UN Security Council. The designation has been transposed to European Union law and is followed by all 27 EU member states.
As reported by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2022, in "Religious Freedom in Syria Under Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)":
"[HTS] remains a potent source of a Salafi-jihadism that restricts the religious freedom of non-conforming Sunni Muslims and threatens the property, safety, and existence of religious minority groups such as Alawites, Christians, and Druze. Further, HTS's cultivation of a mutually and politically expedient relationship with Turkey—which itself represents a distinct threat to vulnerable religious minority groups via its military incursions in northern Syria—compounds the perilous religious freedom conditions in and near Idlib.
"HTS, or Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, has undergone several name and purported identity changes since its origins in 2011 as Jabhat al-Nusra, originally a Syrian front for the Islamic State in Iraq, which at the time was itself an Iraqi affiliate of al-Qaeda. HTS's successive renamings and 'rebrandings' appear to echo al-Qaeda's own strategy in Syria of establishing branches and presenting them as locally-grown organizations arising in response to Syrians' needs...
"In 2021 and 2022, HTS has continued to perpetrate some of the same human rights abuses—including torture, forced disappearance, rape and other sexual violence, and killing in detention—that the United Nations' Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria documented for the organization and its predecessors through 2020. Having taken over government prisons and established additional jails, HTS has used sectarian-motivated detention and related abduction and demands for ransom against members of minority groups. Religious minorities, including non-Sunni Muslims and Druze—both longstanding targets of Sunni rebel groups' discrimination, harassment, and compelled Sunnism— have converted to Sunni Islam or fled HTS territories, and those who remain are not represented in the official bodies governing the area."
In 2023, the US State Department reported:
"Armed terrorist groups such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham committed a wide range of abuses, including killings, kidnappings, physical abuse, and recruitment or use of child soldiers."
Al-Sharaa recently started dressing in a suit and tie, and is now presenting himself to the West as a "moderate." He has spoken of plans to form an inclusive transitional government representing diverse communities that will build institutions and run the country until it can hold free and fair elections. In schoolbooks, however, his government has been replacing the word "law" with "sharia," and has been using Islamic teaching to recruit the country's new army.
HTS has a fundamentalist Islamic agenda and has long aimed to install sharia rule in Syria. In December 2024, the human rights organization Open Doors reported:
"Under HTS-control in Idlib, Christian clergy are not allowed to walk outside in any clothing that makes them recognisable as priests or pastors. Crosses have been removed from church buildings."
Al-Sharaa said last month that organizing national elections in Syria could take up to five years.
"Christina," a Greek Christian who lives in a town that is home to a Christian majority in Syria, told Gatestone on condition of anonymity that the main reason why there is not yet systematic Christian persecution across Syria is "the wide and multiple media eyes directed at Christian-populated areas."
"This attention means that fewer monitoring eyes might enable the jihadists to go too far -- they already have some Christian areas and where media coverage been restricted at the local or state level.
"For example, in Damascus and its countryside, and the rural areas where no one can document the violations [committed by] jihadist forces, Islamic symbols such as hijab are imposed even on Christian women. It is a violation of our freedoms. In other areas, Christians are subjected to harassment by Muslims, such as encroachment on Christian lands and homes, abductions, and demands for ransom to release the kidnapped.
"The Christians' biggest fear is the regime's possible application of Islamic law and the imposition of the jizya – a tax demanded of non-Muslims as 'protection' -- or even the imposition of Islam on us in the future. What I personally fear most is the outbreak of armed conflicts again and the possibility that the jihadists will commit massacres against us."
Christina mentioned that she had not left Syria even during the years of civil war, but that now the economic burden on the Christian community had become unbearable.
"We hope for an improvement in the economy because the situation is excruciating. Many Christians now, especially after the state stopped paying salaries to employees, are trying to survive below the poverty line. Even the situation in the labor market is dire. We suffer from many challenges -- from the economic point of view as well as in terms of security."
The foreign ministers of France and Germany, Jean-Noël Barrot and Annalena Baerbock, travelled to Damascus on January 3 to send what Baerbock described as a clear signal that a "new political beginning between Europe and Syria is possible," according to Euronews.
Christina said she disagrees:
"I do not believe that recognizing an al Qaeda affiliated group as an official government, especially after its leaders, headed by its president, have previously proved they are terrorists and the blood of so many has been shed because of them.
"The West's recognition of such a terror group would represent a lack of justice towards the innocents who were murdered by them, and we know they are the same terror group no matter what they claim to be now.
"Syria must be a secular and democratic country. There must also be political parties representing Christians. The new Syria should not be established without parties that represent the minority groups in the country, such as Christians, Kurds, Druze, and Alawites.
"The official recognition and acceptance of the jihadists by Western governments is like placing swords on the necks of Christians in particular and everyone who disagrees with them in general."
Christina said that most Christians in Syria are of Greek descent, but for centuries have been exposed to forced Arabization:
"Today, our Greek people in Syria speak Arabic because the Arab Muslims, since they invaded the Levant in the seventh century, have refused to leave any room for other languages. In other words, everything was Arabized by imposing the Arabic language and persecuting everyone who spoke Greek, except for what Arabic could not Arabize from Greek terms that we use in our colloquial language to this day. Islam does not tolerate other cultures, so the Greek language was gradually abolished to the point of disappearing among the people and its existence being limited to the field of theological study.
"I hope that Greece will do something to help us, the Greek Christian people here, such as sending aid or securing protection for our regions from any future attack we may be exposed to, or helping to get us out of here, especially those who have always suffered from their areas being conflict zones. I think that the Greek government now has a responsibility towards our people here."
Eiad Herera, spokesman of Antiochian Greek Organization, told Gatestone:
"Syrian Christians, including Greek Antiochians, have long been a peaceful and tolerant community in Syria and the Levant. Unlike other groups, they did not form militias or take part in the civil war. They only kept small arms for self-defense. All the same, they have been facing repeated kidnappings, attacks on their churches and cemeteries, and growing sectarian violence, while the new government has failed to protect them. The U.S., U.N., Greece, and the international community need take urgent action to safeguard these vulnerable communities. This is their ancestral homeland, but their numbers are rapidly declining."
Uzay Bulut, a Turkish journalist, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.
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