Syria

KEY

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) (‘Organisation for the Liberation of Greater Syria’)

The ceasefire which ended the siege of Aleppo in 2016 allowed the al-Qaeda linked al-Nusra Front and other jihadists to be bussed to Idlib province. Other jihadist groups joined al-Nusra forming Tahrir Hayat al-Sham, which since then has controlled Idlib. There they have instituted shari’a courts which now try criminal offences – including apostasy from Islam, which carries a penalty of execution They have also seized all houses belonging Christians who have fled the area, claiming that this is authorised by shari’a as war booty.

In late November 2024 HTS launched a rapid advance from its stronghold in Idlib province, seizing Aleppo – then Damascus. The major cities in the west of Syria of Aleppo, Homs and Damascus in the west of Syria are now controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) which in the past has targeted Christians. It is also a proscribed terrorist organisation in multiple western countries including the UK. [1]

When the Syrian civil war first started Christians were not specifically targeted. However, the opposition quickly became dominated by jihadist groups – many of which were in practice little different from Islamic State (IS), which had expanded its operations into Syria in 2013. The origins of HTS lie in the al Nusra Front which was set up as a local branch of al-Qaeda in Syria. Although a number of other jihadist groups merged with it to form HTS, al-Nusra appears to have been the core group. Officially it claims to be no longer part of al-Qaeda, although some analysts doubt this. [2]

HTS are widely regarded as having been implicated in the April 2013 abduction of Bishop Yohanna Ibrahim, head of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Aleppo, and Bishop Boulos Yaziji, head of the Greek Orthodox Church.[3]  This was the event which kick-started the widespread targeting of Christians in Syria by jihadist groups, including Islamic State, which in 2017 the US State Department recognised as “genocide”.

HTS are one of the most media savvy jihadist groups. Their leadership knows that their own political survival depends on getting major western aid to rebuild Syria. Since their capture of Damascus in December 2024 the leadership of HTS has been making public statements to western media, which to western audiences appear to imply that they are now a moderate force who will respect minorities. However, a careful reading of these statements shows they are entirely compatible with the imposition of dhimmi status on Christians and other minorities. [4] 

Genocide

In 2013 it was clear Christians were being specifically targeted with the kidnapping of Christian leaders including the heads of the Syrian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox Churches in Aleppo – in which the al Nusra Front (now HTS) were widely regarded as having been implicated.

In February 2015 IS religiously cleansed 34 Christian villages along the Khabour River in Eastern Syria. 1,200 families fled to the nearby cities of Hassake and Qamishli, but 280 Christians were captured and pressured to convert to Islam. IS later released a video of three identifying themselves as Christians before being executed and demanded large ransoms for the release of other Christians. The church buildings in 11 villages were subsequently blown up.

In August 2015 IS targeted the town of Qaryatain abducting around 260 Christians, some were taken to Raqqa, the IS capital where they were used as human shields. Others were given 48 hours to convert to Islam, leave or submit to dhimmitude symbolised by payment of jizya. IS subsequently released a video showing men signing a dhimma contract.[5]

The houses of Christians who had fled were painted with the Arabic letter nun (signifying Nasrani i.e. Christian) and ‘property of Islamic State’, with houses subsequently being sold.

Other groups such as Al Nusra Front (now HTS) also targeted Christians in other parts of Syria.

By October 2015 the number of Christians in Aleppo who had been murdered or abducted was sufficiently high for the city’s Greek Melkite Catholic Archbishop to warn the actual existence of Christianity in Syria was at risk:

“There is a fundamental threat to Christianity from ISIS. They have killed plenty of us. There is an existential crisis.”[6]

At the time Aleppo was then under siege by jihadist groups including al Nusra Front (now HTS), with Christians liv8ng in the historic Christian quarter being under attack.

In 2014 IS followed Nigeria’s Boko Haram in reimplementing the shari’a provisions allowing the enslavement of captured non-Muslims. They also issued a slave price list which only listed prices for Christian and Yazidi women, with the highest prices being for young girls. Zainab Bangura, the U.N.'s Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Sexual Violence in Conflict who confirmed the authenticity of the document stated:

“One girl can be sold and bought by five or six different men. Sometimes these fighters sell the girls back to their families for thousands of dollars of ransom.” [7]

A number of governments and parliaments formally recognised that Christians, Yazidis and Shi’a Muslims were suffering genocide, including the US State Department.

Current issues

Christians continue to be targeted by jihadist groups. Churches continue to be attacked and both Christian leaders and ordinary Christians murdered and abducted. Kidnappings of Christians happen across all areas of Syria.

In areas controlled by jihadists no visible manifestation of Christianity is possible with damaged church buildings not permitted to be repaired, in accordance with teaching of Classical Islam on dhimmitude.

Turkey sent its armed forces into Northern Syria in 2019 as part of its wider fight against Kurdish Separatists. The Turkish military now uses a number of Sunni Arab jihadist groups to control a swathe of mainly Christian and Kurdish Northern Syria. There have been repeated reports of attacks there on Assyrian, Armenian and Chaldean villages. 

Evidence presented to a 2020 USCIRF hearing stated that Christians and Yazidis in areas under Turkish military control

“have been killed, disappeared, kidnapped, raped, detained, subjected to forced religious conversion, and held for ransom until their families pay exorbitant sums of money to secure their release. Their places of worship have been destroyed, defaced, and looted.”[8]

Although there is a significant degree of religious freedom in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), this has been significantly diminished in the areas now subject to Turkish control.

Under the Assad regime Evangelicals also faced pressure from historic churches, including attempts to block registration of their churches and the instigation of a 2020 government ban on any activity outside the churches. They are now fearful of what life will hold under HTS and some have fled the country.

Christians who have converted from Muslim family backgrounds may be subject attempts to forcibly re-convert them back to Islam including being physically beaten and imprisoned and female converts may be forcibly married to Muslim men. Those who maintain their faith often risk being killed either by their families or militants in the wider community.

Except in the AANES, Christians who have converted from a Muslim background cannot legally change the region on their national ID cards. This means that their children are then also registered as Muslims and as such required to attend Islamic education in schools.

Legal situation

HTS have promised a new constitution for Syria – and indicated that this will be based on shari’a.  The statements made by HTS leadership suggest that they intend to treat Syrian Christians as dhimmis - a status which Islamic State earlier imposed on Christians in the parts of Syria it controlled.

For the previous 60 years Syria was formally governed by constitutional law which allowed shari’a based family law courts, as well as separate family law codes for Christians, Druze and Jews. However, any matters not specifically covered in these were determined on the basis of the Hanafi shari’a. In practice, tribal customary law (urf) and shari’a also operate in other areas of law less formally and in areas controlled by jihadist groups shari’a courts enforce strict compliance, including for apostasy.

The previous Assad regime emphasised national unity, so although Christians had a significant degree of freedom in some respects, Christians, this  came at the price of state surveillance and limitation of Christian activity, such as literature distribution or evangelism so that it was not perceived to risk national unity.

This freedom is likely to diminish significantly.

Ideologies linked to persecution

Dhimmitude: This theological concept occurs in the shar’ia textbooks of Classical Islam and is based on the treatment of non-Muslim minorities in early Islam. This allowed Christians and Jews as conquered peoples to live, subject to keeping significant restrictions. These included a specific prohibition on building or even repairing churches, only allowed them to worship in private behind closed doors and forbade them from having crosses or Christian books where Muslims could see them, as well as requiring Christians to show total subservience to Muslims. Any claimed breach of these conditions allowed the dhimmi to be killed by any Muslim with impunity.

Jihadist Islamism The initially al Qaeda linked al Nusra Front (now Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) emerged as a key player following anti-government protests in 2011. In 2013 Islamic State of Iraq rebranded itself as Islamic State of Iraq and Levant/Syria (ISIS/ISIL) and expanded its operations across the border to Syria.  In June 2014 ISIL’s leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi announced the reinstitution of the caliphate (i.e. leadership of the global Islamic community, which had last been claimed by the Ottoman Empire prior to its abolition in 1924) and renamed the group Islamic State (IS). It then began accepting oaths of allegiance (bay’ah) from jihadist groups around the world, with the territory each operated in then designated as IS provinces.

Expansionist Islamic nationalism: i) Iran has actively supported a number of Shi'a militias. The Iranian constitution gives the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a duty to promote the Iranian revolution overseas; ii) Since 2016 the Turkish government has openly criticised the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne which dismembered the Ottoman Empire, including removing Syria from Turkish control. The treaty is viewed by many people in Turkey as a national humiliation. During the battle against IS Turkish military forces intervened in Syria to prevent the Kurdish forces controlling part of Syria bordering Turkey in the North, which is populated by Kurds and Christians. Turkey continues to control this area using Sunni Arab jihadist groups from other parts of Syria.

Future risk

HTS are making statements which imply that non-Muslim minorities will be treated as dhimmis – a status in which they are allowed to live, but without citizenship rights.

The Syrian civil war has left a patchwork of different parts of Syria controlled by either the Syrian government or various non-state actors. Of these some of the greatest risks to Syrian Christians are in the areas controlled Christians Turkish backed Arab jihadist groups. There is a risk of ‘religious cleansing’ of Christians in these areas.

Church History

The Church existed in Syria from the first decades of Christianity (Acts 9:10), with Antioch and Edessa (both now just over the border in modern Turkey) being major centres for the spread of Christianity to the West and East respectively. It also became a major centre of Christian theology producing important early theologians such as John Chrysostom (c.347-407).

The church also suffered periodic persecution from its earliest years. This was initially from Jewish zealots such as the (later) Apostle Paul (Acts 9), then under the Roman Empire including the martyrdom of the early church father, Ignatius, then bishop of Antioch, who according to Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History (completed in 314 AD) was condemned to the wild beasts of the Roman arena during the reign of the Emperor Trajan (98-117 AD). The Arab Islamic invasion of 634 also led to periodic persecution with churches destroyed during the time of the Abbasid Caliphs Harun al Rashid (786-809) and his son al Mamun (813-33). Islamic rule more indirectly destroyed the church by playing off one Christian group against another and selling off ecclesiastical offices to the highest bidder. Those appointed church leaders were then required to ensure the compliance of the Christian community with Islamic rule.[9] Whilst this allowed small numbers of Christians to hold high office, any perceived breach of the terms of dhimmitude risked massacres of the entire Christian community.

This formed part of the context for the subsequent massacres during the time of the Ottoman Empire including the Hamidan massacres (1894-96) and included the burning of the Armenian cathedral of Urfa (ancient Edessa) within whose walls some 3,000 Armenians had taken refuge. During the later Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides of the early twentieth century large numbers of Christians were forced on a death march to concentration camps in the Syrian desert. It is widely accepted that at least 1.5 million Christians and possibly twice that number were killed. A significant number of Syrian Christians are direct descendants of those who survived. Some of the older people are the sons and daughters of those who survived the genocide as children.

These events led to the first clearly recorded use of the term “Crimes against humanity” in a 1915 joint declaration by the governments of the UK, France and Russia condemning the massacres.[10] Subsequent reflection on these events stimulated Dr Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer in 1944 to develop the legal concept of “genocide” in relation to the Nazi holocaust.[11]

© Material in this analysis may be freely reproduced or quoted in context provided i) the source is explicitly acknowledged as The Lindisfarne Centre for the Study of Christian Persecution and ii) the date of download is stated.

[1] For specific details cf our ‘New threat to Syrian Christians as jihadist group seize Aleppo’ Lindisfarne Analysis 30 November 2024  .

[2] Center for Strategic and International Studies ‘Hay’at Tahrir al Sham’ [accessed 21 January 2025].

[3] ‘Syria’s beleaguered Christians’ BBC 25 February 2015 [accessed 21 January 2025].

[4] 'Syria's Christians' Dr Martin Parsons, The Lindisfarne Centre for the Study of Christian Persecution, Letter in the Times 10 December 2024; 'Lindisfarne Centre Commentary on BBC's Jeremy Bowen interview with leader of HTS Ahmed al-Sharaa' Lindisfarne Analysis 1 January 2025 [accessed 24 January 2025].

[5] ‘ISIS issues Dhimma contract for Christians to sign, orders them to pay Jizyah’ Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) 2 September 2015 [accessed 10 May 2022].

[6] Archbishop Jean-Clement Jeanbart, Greek Melkite Catholic Archbishop of Aleppo, Interview with Daily Express: ‘Christians almost completely destroyed by ISIS fanatics in Syria, says Aleppo archbishop’ Daily Express 24 October 2015 [accessed 10 May 2022].

[7] ‘ISIS sex slaves: UN official says jihadi group peddles girls “like barrels of petrol”’ International Business Times 5 August 2015 [accessed 9 May 2022].

[8] USCIRF ‘Safeguarding religious freedom in Northeast Syria’ 10 June 2020 Hearing Transcript [accessed 27 April 2020].

[9] Bat Ye’or Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilisations Collide (Cranbury,NJ: Associated University Press, 2002) 110.

[10] International crimes database, ‘Crimes Against humanity’ > [accessed 29 April 2022].

[11] Whilst Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation: Analysis of Government Proposals for Redress (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,1944) solely deals with Nazi actions as Alan Whitehorn ‘Consequences’ 9-11 in in Alan Whitehorn (ed) The Armenian Genocide (Santa Barbara,CA:ABC-Clio,2015) observes it was the Armenian massacres which initially stimulated his reflection.