Protection or intervention? Focus on Syria’s minorities sparks controversy, fuels hate speech
Since the Assad regime fell, repeated local and international calls for the new government in Damascus to provide guarantees for Syria’s ethnic and religious minorities have sparked controversy and fueled hate speech.
29 January 2025
PARIS — Calls for Syria’s new authorities to guarantee equality and safety for Syria’s ethnic and religious minorities have been loud, locally and internationally, since the start of Operation Deterring Aggression last November and the fall of the Assad regime 11 days later.
Concerns for Syria’s minorities are largely rooted in a history of violations by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in northwestern Syria before the group shifted its behavior in recent years. The head of HTS, Ahmad al-Sharaa (Abu Muhammad al-Jolani), is now Syria’s de facto leader.
The caretaker government in Damascus, tasked by al-Sharaa, represents Syria’s Sunni majority for the first time in more than 45 years of rule dominated by the Alawite majority to which Hafez al-Assad—who rose to power in a coup in 1970—belonged, as well as his son Bashar. Father and son long characterized themselves as protectors of minorities, painting their opponents as an existential threat.
For its part, the new administration in Damascus has issued many statements aimed at reassuring Syrian minorities, pledging not to harm them and describing them as an integral part of a country characterized by its religious and ethnic diversity: the “Syrian mosaic.”
Still, the “minority issue” has remained a means of putting pressure on the caretaker government. Political statements by Western countries expressing concern for minorities have, contrary to their stated intention, sharpened divisions and coincided with a rise in hate speech on social media.
Inside Syria, some believe emphasizing the protection of minorities is crucial at the current stage, while others say it incites hate speech or opens the door to foreign interference.
Remembering al-Jolani
Thirteen years after fleeing his home in al-Yaqoubiya, a Christian village in western Idlib province, Nader (a pseudonym) was finally able to return for a visit in mid-January.
“The face of the village has changed a lot. I didn’t know anyone in it, and felt that the fear is still there,” Nader told Syria Direct from Aleppo city, where he has lived since he was first displaced. The visit went smoothly, with no harassment, but he “wasn’t comfortable,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “I still don’t trust the new government because of what we went through in the past,” he explained.
For years, HTS—formerly Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra—committed many violations against Christian and Druze communities in parts of northwestern Syria it controlled, from confiscating properties to preventing them from practicing their religious rituals.
Starting in 2020, the group adopted a new policy towards minorities in its areas. HTS shifted its behavior, began to return seized properties and sought to open up to the West in order to remove its name from international terror lists.
Since the HTS-led Military Operations Department (MOD) took control of Aleppo city on November 29, Nader has not experienced any harassment from its forces, and described “good treatment and discipline.” But while “they presented an ideal image,” he noted some “individual actions” in the streets of Aleppo, such as “women roaming the streets, calling on women who are not veiled to wear the hijab.”
In its first month, Syria’s new administration “was able to manage things well, surpassing all expectations with minimal losses,” Jamil Diarbakerli, the head of the Sweden-based Assyrian Monitor for Human Rights (AMHR), said. Still, “you cannot remove from Syrians’ minds the idea that Ahmad al-Sharaa is Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, and that the new leaders were part of al-Nusra and Al Qaeda,” he added.
The same memory is alive for many in southern Syria’s Druze-majority Suwayda province. There, residents cannot ignore that “the new government is the same as al-Nusra, which the province’s factions fought three battles against in the past,” Samer Salloum, a member of the executive committee of the province’s nonviolent protest movement, said. “Some in Suwayda say these are Islamists and extremists, and are afraid of them,” he told Syria Direct.
The future state
The form of the new Syrian state preoccupies many Syrians today, of all faiths and sects. In Aleppo city, although HTS has given assurances and made good on its promises so far, there is still “an obsession with the form of the state” among Armenians and Christians, Armenak Tokmajyan, a researcher at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said.
“The Armenian community in Aleppo has not been targeted,” Tokmajyan, who is from the community, added. “From this, the concerns can be explained as not being security concerns, or concerns that whoever rules Syria will target Armenians as a community,” but rather about “the form of the state, ways of life and culture,” he explained. “Will hijab become mandatory? Will males and females be separated in Armenian schools?”
While the Assad regime was “unjust and cruel,” at the same time “it was a source of safety for most minorities,” Nader said. He fears the “Islamization of the state.”
Alongside concerns over the shape of the state, Syria has seen an increase in hate speech, particularly on social media. There have been reprisals too, though limited and mainly targeting people accused of committing war crimes under the Assad regime rather than exclusively for their ethnic or religious backgrounds. Still, such attacks reinforce fears among minorities, particularly members of the Alawite sect to which the Assad family belongs.
To offer a glimpse at the shifting level of hate speech on social media, Syria Direct analyzed the comments under two Facebook posts by a local media organization in Syria’s Druze-majority Suwayda province.
The first included a press statement by Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, the spiritual leader of Suwayda’s Druze and a leading figure in the province, posted on December 1, 2024. In it, al-Hijri commented on recent developments in Operation Deterring Aggression and the opposition capture of Aleppo city. The post received 214 comments.The second post, published on January 11—weeks after the regime fell—included a portion of statements al-Hijri made to the BBC in a televised interview, and received 196 comments.
An analysis of the comments on the two posts—conducted initially using artificial intelligence tools, followed by a human review—showed an increase in levels of hate speech from 18.7 percent in the first post to 27.5 percent in the second. The use of the words “minority” and “majority” increased from five times in comments on the first post to 25 times in comments on the second, even though it received fewer comments in total.
“The Alawite community is the top target [of hate speech], followed by Kurds and Druze, and Christians are the least,” researcher Tokmajyan said. This discourse is based in “Syrians’ conception of these groups’ relationship with the regime,” he explained. While “not all Alawites or Christians support the regime, the idea that they are tied to it and support it has been deeply rooted for some.”
Kamal Shahin, a journalist in Latakia city, attributed the spread of hate speech to “reasons related to the nature of the new regime and the forces that rule it,” referring to the new administration led by al-Sharaa.
“There are two conflicting trends,” he added. “There is the discourse that civil peace is what is needed, which many are working for, and then there is hate speech from others, including countries that created the new reality such as Israel,” Shahin added. Targeting Alawites “is a game to disrupt the possibility of Syria emerging from its long quagmire. This rhetoric is consistent with their desires, and can be exploited to continue destroying the country,” he said.
This has resulted, Shahin said, in some currents that “want to leave the framework of a modern state and head towards sectarian and ethnic statelets,” in contrast to a more prominent trend that “wants Syria to be a modern, democratic state of law and institutions.” The former poses a threat “as it includes local forces tied to regional projects, such as the Iranian project or even the Western project,” he added.
‘Fuel on the fire’
In mid-December 2024, days after the regime fell, then-US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said senior diplomats from the US, EU, Arab countries and Turkey had agreed that the new Syrian government must respect the rights of minorities.
The foreign ministers of France and Germany emphasized the same during visits to Syria at the start of January. France’s Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot began his visit by meeting with leaders of Syrian Christian churches before meeting al-Sharaa, the country’s de facto leader.
The level of “focus on minorities—specially Christians—by HTS or the West is not justified,” Tokmajyan said. “HTS understood how the West thinks, and signaled to it that it has no problem with Christians,” he added. Assurances towards minorities “served their purpose to varying degrees: effective among Christians and Armenians, and to some extent the Druze, but they did not work with the Kurds.”
Reassurances “were necessary,” AMHR director Diarbakerli said, since many Syrians saw HTS’ rise as “the majority taking over the government.” After 14 years of war, Syrians have lost trust in one another,” so “these assurances from HTS—as well as the political statements from some Arab and Western countries—were needed to prevent any abuses,” he added. “HTS’ appointments and decisions after the regime fell did not necessarily represent the majority,” in his view.
Diarbakerli credited the West’s focus on Christians as another reason the community did not experience sectarian reprisals, in addition to the “awareness of the political administration and those behind it, HTS, of the need to maintain the Christian presence in Syrian society and not touch it, which is what has emerged so far in actions, visits and assurances.”
“The Western statements are an international commitment, in line with the United Nations (UN) declaration on the rights of minorities,” Farouq Haji Mustafa, the executive director of Bercav, a civil society organization working in northeastern Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan. Though “the declaration is not binding, states work to implement it with the help of the UN,” he added. It also “gives members of minorities the right to manage themselves and determine the appropriate way for them to be part of the state and enjoy their national rights.”
Security Council Resolution 2254 “takes into account the political transition process and the rights of all components of the Syrian people, and the new government should take it into consideration,” Mustafa added.
Alex Simon, head of the Syria program at the Beirut-based Synaps research center, is critical of the international focus on minority groups in Syria. “Shallow public statements about minority rights are pointless at best, because for now they are divorced from an actual strategy to shape authorities’ behavior,” he said.
“At worst, they may actually harm the groups they claim to defend by casting minorities as separate groups in need of protection, rather than Syrians to be included in a state based on equal citizenship,” Simon told Syria Direct.
These statements “also happen to be reverberating the Assad regime’s own narrative that a rebel victory would spell disaster for religious minorities although the regime itself actively sought to sow sectarian tensions,” Simon added. “These are states, after all, that have long preferred secular tyrants to Islamists of all stripes, and which long ago reconciled themselves to the mass slaughter of Syrians from across the social spectrum.”
If the US and EU seek “to actually support minorities, rather than just using them as a photo op, they should move urgently to support Syria in shoring up inclusive institutions and an economy in which all Syrians can feed themselves,” he said.
“Historically, there has been no protection of minorities, in the religious sense,” Shahin said. “This protection has been a doorway for political and economic interference, and fragmenting the country and its people.” Pointing to history, he noted “France previously claimed to protect Christians in Lebanon, and the result is a Lebanon that is sectarian par excellence. The US brought Iraq to the same result.” Today’s “statements pour fuel on the fire,” he added, asserting “the concept of protecting minorities is a colonial one.”
In the same context, Fateh Jamous, a leader in the Path of Peaceful Change—a communist political party that was part of the internal opposition during Assad’s rule—said Western calls to protect minorities would be “solely in the interest of the future of the Zionist entity [Israel].” Such calls “will make Syria easy prey for external forces, and will stir up national hatred and acceptance of interventions or occupations,” he added from his home in Latakia. “This is similar to what happened at the beginning of the formation of the Syrian national state.”
However, Western statements may be useful in “deterring the de facto powers from encroaching on Syrians of all stripes,” Latakia-based journalist Shahin said. They could also push the country towards “a participatory system that the new ruling structure may not accept, given its exclusionary nature that became evident in the month after the regime fell,” he added, pointing to “its reliance on a single geographic component [Idlib] in managing the state.”
‘Rights are not postponed’
Since the regime fell, clerics and social and political figures have raised their voices calling for certain rights and demands for their ethnicities and sects, including self-rule or local administration of areas apart from the Damascus government. Other voices have emerged stressing the need to focus on a shared Syrian identity, far from ethnicity or religion.
“In an ideal world, we should stop speaking as minorities. But in the transition period, it is necessary until practical steps are taken to build real citizenship,” Tokmajyan said. “If the new administration follows the policy of the former regime—a ruling class and the masses—minority rhetoric will increase,” he added. In such a scenario, people “will find an alternative way to express their problems, through their sects and communities,” while “if we move to a state of citizenship with equal rights and obligations, this rhetoric will stop.”
Reassuring statements are not enough. “The new government should give real assurances about minorities,” Haji Mustafa stressed. “Rights are not postponed, not during a transitional period or otherwise. They must be addressed to block the path to any revolution or conflict.”
For Kurds, “it is difficult to return to the state’s embrace without reassurances about the roadmap of work to build the state, that they will be a fundamental part of building the state,” he warned. “There is an entire generation of young Kurds who grew up during the revolution, and they will not go back without getting their rights.”
“There should be an aspiration from the new administration, not a demand from members of minorities, for the new administration to express all of Syria and its components,” he added.
As Diarbakerli sees it, “the basic problem is that there is no inclusive Syrian national identity. Today, we must work to create this identity.” Once found, “no Syrian will accept minority rhetoric,” he added. “Then the majority becomes the political majority, and the minority the political minority.”
Similarly, Salloum in Suwayda hopes for a “Syrian discourse, not a regional or religious one.” If not, “the country will be dragged into further ruin,” he added. “We must stop saying ‘I’m Druze, I’m Christian, I’m Sunni.’”
For Jamous, what is most urgent now is not “legal or constitutional guarantees to protect minorities,” but rather focusing on “Syrian-Syrian dialogue and preparing for a national dialogue conference through which we can agree on a unified project and a transition that strengthens civil peace.”
Full citizenship
To avoid Syria being dragged into bad scenarios, work on “inclusive solutions, and promoting the idea of citizenship, that everyone is equal in rights and duties,” is necessary, Tokmajyan said.
Diarbakerli echoed the same, noting “the solution is a social contract and inclusive identity that reflects Syria’s diversity; full, equal citizenship through which a person is free to practice their religion, belief and mother tongue, everything within the law. Then it becomes unimportant who rules Syria. Even if al-Zawahiri himself came and wanted to rule, on the basis of this constitution there would be no problem.”
Building a social contract and involving everyone in drafting an inclusive constitution, “not presenting it ready-made, and removing vocabulary like the word ‘Arab’ from the name of the state, would ensure a political solution,” Haji Mustafa said.
For Shahin, the solution is “a national dialogue conference, in which representatives of all political forces, parties and intellectuals are chosen, including those who are religious.” The conference would “pave the way for the transition process, form committees to draft a new constitution for the country and discuss many pressing issues,” he added. Shahin also stressed the need to adopt Resolution 2254 as the basis for a transition.
“Strengthening the balance is only possible in Syria by focusing on inclusive national identity and promoting national and cultural rights with absolute protection for the equal right to worship,” Jamous said. “Syria faces a very dangerous and complex transition, and any foreign networking and reliance would be a national mistake, even if it brings results in favor of any minority.”
“Syrian society faces a difficult and dangerous stage, characterized by pressure from opportunistic elites and their harmful incitement of sects, rather than leaving them to coexist peacefully,” Jamous said. “These elites encourage political sectarianism, and national elites encourage national fanaticism, instead of advocating for dialogue and reconciliation.”
Before anything else, “we must work to urgently improve the economic situation,” Diarbakerli noted. “Talking about coexistence, for Syrians, amid the economic collapse, is a matter of luxury and indulgence. Coexistence cannot be built without a good economic situation. Before discussing transitional justice, we must work on food justice.”
Syria’s new administration “should be more open to Syrian society,” Diarbakerli added. Salloum agreed. With no direct address to the Syrian people in more than a month and a half since al-Sharaa rose to power, Salloum called on the de facto leader to “tell Syrians directly that personal freedoms are protected, that nobody will interfere with their lives, clothing, food and drink.”
Direct communication would be “the greatest reassurance, cutting off the spread of rumors on social media” that undermine civil peace, Salloum concluded.
This report was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson.