During his New Year homily in Damascus, Syria, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch John X Yazigi personally addressed “Mr. Ahmad al-Sharaa” with wishes of health and strength in his pursuit of a new Syria. In the same breath, the church leader made it known that his office had received no invitation from the interim government regarding the national dialogue conference, originally set to occur during the first week of this year. It would seem that despite cries of liberation and assurances from Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) that the rights of Christians would remain protected, the political silencing of our voices may have already begun.

Since the new year homily, Syria’s interim government has delayed the national dialogue, with the date yet to be determined, citing a need for a longer preparatory period to organize an agenda and participants. Regardless, certain opposition loyalists have seized the opportunity to antagonize the Church leader, suggesting the Patriarch signaled his loyalty to the former regime by failing to display the 1930 flag in his recent meetings with various foreign diplomats. This complaint falls flat under the reality that the Patriarch never displayed the flag of the state nor any other political symbolism, even in his meetings with the former president himself. 

This backlash comes as Christian communities across the country reckon with the existential discomfort of daily life: harassment to conform to Islamic standards and customs, broad disarmament, and escalating incidents of violence targeting religious minorities. From rural to urban areas, women continue to report regular demands from HTS-affiliated individuals to “cover up” or dress by Islamic modesty standards. On several occasions in recent weeks, HTS officials have stopped public buses traveling to and from the Valley of the Christians, apprehending the vehicle until the passengers were segregated by gender. As I write this, the ancient community of Maaloula faces an active existential threat as efforts continue to displace locals and resettle the land.

Most egregious are the daily reports from contacts on the ground and from public actors of abductions, retaliatory violence, and extrajudicial killing across Homs, Hama, and Lattakia, with incidents almost exclusively targeting religious minorities. Troublingly, reliable reports suggest that former SAA, either retired or unengaged in hostilities, reporting to settle their military service with the interim government are being specifically targeted for abductions, with little known about their whereabouts or charges. This is not even speaking of the countless retaliatory killings filmed and dispersed online in the past month. Far from the relief of liberation, Syrian Christians are facing economic, social, and cultural strangulation, and they face it in the silence of a media blackout too concerned with celebrations in the capital.

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Despite attempts in recent years to position the group as more ideologically moderate than its counterparts, HTS remains a radical Salafist group, with its goals revolving around principles of Islamic law and governance. Under the de-facto authority of HTS, Christians in Idlib have faced restrictions on their ability to practice their faith and regular violations of their rights to property, and life under Islamic law. As a non-state actor more broadly, HTS behavior has been characterized as authoritative governance, including, but not limited to, violent repression of political dissenters and journalists, morality police, practices of torture, false imprisonment, and extrajudicial killings. 

While HTS positions itself as the closest thing to a legal authority across the country, the reports from Syrians on the ground indicate, at minimum, a variety of violations of the provisions spelled out in the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, in particular articles 3, 13, 17, 18, 70, 71, 72, and 118, related to the unlawful detention of individuals deemed hors de combat, torture and retaliatory violence, illegal seizure of property, the general treatment of prisoners of war at the cease of hostilities. Notably, even if reported incidents of violence have been, as HTS alleges, isolated actions of radicalized individuals, the Convention explicitly pins the responsibility for upholding these provisions on the Detaining Power, or in this context, the interim government. 

Rooted in the ideologies of ISIS, al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra, and other radical Salafist groups, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham does not represent an effort toward revolution and agency for the Syrian people nor a restoration of a school of thought traditionally home in Syria. Rather, it is a deliberate ideological infiltration intended to distort the social, cultural, and theological foundation of Syria, away from the diversity, tolerance, and unity that defined its past and toward a new age of repression, theocracy, and social acculturation. 

Article 3 of the Convention explicitly requires that persons taking no part in hostilities be treated humanely and without any distinction according to race, sex, or religion. The governance of HTS historically in Idlib and now across Syria demonstrates a constant, gross disrespect for the religious minorities that make up its populace. Coupled with troubling proposed changes to the national curriculum, ambiguous timelines or national dialogues and elections, and sectarian violence escalating, seemingly by the day, it is hard to discount the ways in which the ideology and militant arm of the interim government continues to pose a genuine threat to the Christian voice of Syria. 

In the new year, Patriarch John X has met with delegations from the Syrian Democratic Front, Syrian National Bloc, and several diaspora and foreign delegations in the hope of promoting dialogue and religious freedom in the first strides toward a new Syria. Several religious leaders have publicly voiced their support for his stance, declaring the Christians of Syria will not accept a constitution based solely on Islamic law. Christian, and in particular Orthodox, congregations across Homs and the Valley remain firm in their support of the Patriarch. The olive branch remains extended; the Christians of Syria will have to wait to see whether the new leadership will be ready to embrace us equally.